Nov 21, 2020

Vault of the Void - SquishyB

Here we are! Nearly 24 hours since launch and it's been a busy time! There was a number of little hiccups along the way, but none quite as big as :

Releasing the game into "Full Release" instead of "Early Access".

I'm not even sure what went wrong there. All I can do is apologize to anyone who thought the game was a "Full Release", I'm so sorry - it wasn't intentional. Thankfully Steam had it fixed within an hour or so, so things are back on track.

I wanted to quickly update everyone here on a few things:

Discord Link! Click me
This is probably the best way to log bugs and reach out at all. There's a collection of over 1200 like minded Vault delvers around, sharing decks and talking strategy. There's also a bug reporting bot, and also an opportunity to log feedback.

Bugs!
This brings me to my next point - game crashing bugs! The big one that's out there right now may have an error message like this:

This is a hardware/performance issue, and a strange one. To recap the tale, we had a Beta tester who has been playing the game for around 12 months, close to 350hrs logged on one machine. As of yesterday, he started getting this error as well.

It’s usually on laptops or slightly older machines. The fact that it has only just happened makes me think it's solvable. However reverting back to older versions doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem for these people. I’m going to keep debugging this one and try to find a solution.

Roadmap
This is a big one and I need to spend some time putting it together. I’ll need the next week to just handle the small bugs showing up, but I’ve got some great stuff planned heading into December. Once I get a handle on all the bugs/minor issues, I’ll lay that out in a more public sense.

Thank you again to everyone who picked up the game, and especially to those who left positive reviews. I’m so glad to finally get to share Vault with the world, and I hope you all enjoy playing it as much as I did making it!

Nov 21, 2020

Devlog #2

Heretic's Lot: Prologue - goldencupgames

Hello friends!

Initially, in this devlog, we wanted to talk about our plans for skills and perks, but there was one happy event so we decided to dedicate this issue to it.

On Thursday, the finalists of the UNREAL ENGINE DEV CONTEST 2020 were awarded. This is an annual competition of indie teams. The competition is being held for the second time. You can learn more about this competition here.

This year, 290 (!) games participated, and only 30 made it to the final! The list of nominations is simply huge, the jury consists of the most famous and large companies. Honestly, we didn't think we could make it to the final. But it turned out that we not only reached, but also won in one of the nominations!
We were noted by the GAIJIN ENTERTAINMENT company - a huge THANKS to them. It is very easy to get lost among so many really cool games, especially for such a small project like ours. The winner in this category will receive feedback on the game and the potential for collaboration.

All the winners can be viewed here.

The first achievement earned!

And from the development news ːsteamhappyː - a new main menu scene.

Nov 21, 2020

Weekly Update 9 - Multiplayer Saving

Path to Prosperity - Essence Games

Hi everyone,

Last week has been interesting: We initially set out to work on the pirates, the tutorial, and to do some testing on the Fruit Gatherer. After a week of productive work, we have managed to fix some major bugs, create multiplayer saving and implement auto-saving. I think it is fair to say that we got a little derailed there.

When John and I set out to do our testing in the beginning of the week, we realised that there was a multiplayer bug that stopped us from even starting the game. This was caused by the update to the networking plug-in in the last patch, but since it doesn’t affect all games, we had not been able to catch it on initial testing. So we set out to fix this.

Once we had succeeded, we started the game again, and managed to play for about 2 hours before my internet disconnected and our game (which was getting really interesting), was officially over. We were understandably frustrated, and John was pushing hard for me to look into multiplayer saving. I had done a lot of foundational work for it when I implemented the save function for the singleplayer, so I decided to briefly investigate how much more work it would take to fully implement; Only two days later, we had a working multiplayer save function (with auto-saving) as well.

As a result, we were finally able to play on Thursday, and got some insight into the Fruit Gatherer. For one, I really enjoy seeing the villagers walk between banana trees to harvest them. As much as I don’t usually care about “cosmetic” parts of the game, I do always enjoy seeing how much they end up adding to the game. It was also great to see how much more I had to contemplate my food sources based on where I ended up finding banana trees, how many vegetable seeds John had already bought up, and based on the knowledge that there was going to be a limit to how much food I could get in total.

The most interesting part, however, was something I didn’t expect: During his exploration, John came across some of my banana trees. When he saw my people gathering from them, he quickly decided that I didn’t actually need to feed my people, and cut them down. About 10 minutes later, I was complaining to him about my lack of food, and how I couldn’t do the expansion I had wanted to do, which he was obviously very amused by, and so he told me what he had done. While I was understandably a little annoyed, I was also very pleased: When I think of strategy, using your Sawmill workers to cut down your opponents fruit trees to limit his expansion seems a lot more subtle and interesting than merely throwing increasing quantities of soldiers at him!

We’ll be very interested to hear what you think of the new dynamics, and maybe the multiplayer save will motivate some of you to give multiplayer a try, too!

John and I will finish revamping the tutorial (assuming we don’t go off on another tangent), and will upload a new patch on Monday or Tuesday.

Until next week!

Nov 21, 2020

Devlog #2

Heretic's Lot - goldencupgames

Nov 21, 2020

Sharkman Dungeon: Enter at your own risk!

Terra Randoma - Deniz_K

Hi everyone,
Another month passed with Beta testing and development, and we’d like to share with you what has been going on.

We changed the algorithm of dungeon generation. So now some dungeons are composed only with large halls. There are no corridors or tight spaces inside them. This gives advantages to range attacks, both yours and those of the enemies. This development increases variety of dungeons and adds character to each.

We changed the text design of the enemy rollovers. They are more informative and readable now.

We added some new enemies:

Giant Bees: You may bump into them on the overworld. They do not come up when it rains. They have poison and bleed attacks. They can fly over water tiles and drop precious loot like “Nectar”. There is a new chest-like associated to this new enemy, too: Beehive.
Scorpions: They lurk at the mountains and inside the Minotaur/Stone Golem Dungeon. They may have poison or fire attacks.
Sharkmen: You may fight with them during sea travelling. They also come out of pools. They can travel both on land and sea tiles. They are very strong and have bleed attack.

In addition to new enemies, we have a new dungeon type, full of Sharkmen and Aquathrians. They protect the precious Ancient Tablet Fragment. You need to have 100 reputation at a town to take this quest. With this update, our hero can complete all the quests for a town lord and find the fragments to piece together the whereabouts of the Final Boss.

DannyDSC wrote a great review on www.ilvideogioco.com (in Italian)

Also, there is a new video from Mr Delightful where he continues his adventure as the Mighty Highlander on hard mode.

Nov 21, 2020

2020.11.18.630 - Full cubemap support, Cubemap Creator, HP Reverb G2 bindings

Neos VR - Frooxius

Proper cubemap support is finally here! You can now create cubemaps in Neos using the Cubemap Creator and use them for skyboxes or point light cookies, with more to come soon (e.g. Reflection Probes).

I have generalized and extended Neos' texture system, spanning from the cloud asset metadata/variant system to the native GPU texture uploads to support for this. This means that Cubemaps are now loaded highly efficiently as standard 2D textures, using less CPU and memory and being uploaded using time-slicing, so even huge cubemaps won't stall the main thread.

Cubemaps are now also block compressed, heavily reducing their VRAM usage. E.g. for RGB skybox the memory usage goes down by factor of 8 (BC1, BC6H for HDR), in other cases by 4 (BC3, BC7) and are loaded progressively by mipmaps - you'll see lower resolution versions load as soon as they're downloaded/compressed, same as other textures.

There are a bunch of other related and unrelated additions and updates as usual. Notably this build adds initial support for HP Reverb G2 controllers, but it's untested as I don't have the headset yet. The upgraded Unity version might also fix some video-playback related crashes.

New Features:

- Implemented native sliced cubemap GPU upload through DirectX 11 and OpenGL API, significantly improving its performance and memory usage
-- This also reduces freezes when loading a large cubemap, as the GPU upload is sliced over several frames
- Asset variant system now fully supports Cubemap textures, with all the block compression formats and progressive mip map loading
-- Crunch compression isn't currently supported, variants will only us eLZMA
- Added "Cubemap Creator" wizard (can be spawned by Create New -> Editor -> Cubemap Creator) which allows creating cubemaps from 6 face textures
-- It's strongly recommended to use textures of same size (square and power of two) and type to get consistent results, but the creator will try to conform them
- StaticCubemap now exposes same properties as StaticTexture2D, except NormalMap, Crunch compression and Wrap models
-- This includes filtering options (point, billinear, trillinear and anisotropic) as well as variant/format selection
-- The shared properties have been unified under the hood, making the code simpler and easier to maintain, as well as fixing some issues
- Added system for procedural Cubemaps
- Added "CheckerboardCubemap" procedural cubemap, which features simple checkerboard pattern (configurable size) with adjustable colors for each face
- Added BooleanReferenceDriver<T> (requested by @Toxic_Cookie)
- Added CubemapLOD field to Projection360, which allows sampling specific LOD of the cubemap
- Added initial support for HP Reverb G2 (currently untested) (requested and models provided by @Cyro)

Tweaks:

- Memory/VRAM usage for textures in inspector and on Texture2DAssetMetadata now includes mipmaps if they're present
- Texture2DAssetMetadata now also reports if the texture has mipmaps and how many levels it has
- Optimized cloud asset variant computation to reduce frequency of computation queue extensions, reducing the load on the cloud server
- Upgraded to Unity 2019.4.15f1 (from 2019.4.14f1)
-- This might potentially fix some crashes with video playback, as this version fixes crash when video player is destroyed while still initializing
- Renamed "Full Body Calibrator" to "Full Body / Avatar Calibrator" (based on suggestion from @DeliriousJax)

- Merged Polish locale additions (including MTC 2.0 tutorial) by @art0007i
- Merged Japanese, Esperanto and Chinese locale additions by @Melnus
- Merged German locale addition by @Bluigi
- Merged Russian locale updates by @Shadow Panther [RU/EN, UTC+3]
- Merged Setup Guide imperial unit example fix by @ProbablePrime (reported by @Hayden (PolyLogiX Studio))

Bugfixes:

- Fixed cloud server exceptions when trying to extend asset variant computation task that has been removed in the meanwhile by another process
- Fixed bitmap metadata computation taking longer than necessary by not correctly breaking out early
- Fixed texture 90° CW and CCW rotations being swapped (reported by @Shadow Panther [RU/EN, UTC+3] and @H3BO3)
- Fixed asset removal events not always being sent properly, resulting in some assets lingering after their provider is removed
- Fixed reversed cubemap projection for Projection360 shader
- Fixed red grabbable laser showing up for grabbables with active GrabBlock in their parent hierarchy (reported by @Alex from Alaska)
- Fixed incorrect cubemap mipmap level conversion from Unity cubemaps to Neos in the Unity SDK (will be in the next SDK release)
- Fixed Neos not requesting cloud to compute metadata for assets if the metadata does not exist
- Fixed assets that fail to load not incrementing the loaded asset count, causing the loading indicator to stick around indefinitely (reported by @Enverex)
- Fixed desktop ignoring DuplicateBlock component (reported by @ChrisWarner103 (DelVR))
- Fixed GrabBlock not working when placed directly on the object with Grabbable (based on report by @ChrisWarner103 (DelVR))
- Fixed exceptions with certain configurations of PreferredFormat and other settings on StaticTexture2D