Hey everyone!

Here comes another update with changes and fixes based on feedback. In many cases, a great game gets all the small things right, which is just one of the reasons why your feedback is so invaluable!

This one contains a bit more than the last one, and will likely be the last smaller update before the bigger changes and additions start again.

Even though I did in the last update post, I want to give another huge welcome to all the new players. The game just hit 200 reviews, and thank you all so much for that! ❤

Recently, the Discord channel also hit 500 members. If you still haven't joined, that is where I am most active and is the best place to talk about Necesse with other players and of course, me. You can join by using this link.

Of course, I also read all feedback given from inside the game, and on the Steam boards.

Another thing I wanted to mention, is that we have an official wiki at https://necessewiki.com/Main_Page. It has some basic information on it already, but is still missing a ton. Anyone can help add to it, so don't hold back!

Thanks so much,
Fair



Added a tip about teams when a friend joins your world.
Added work range tooltip and visualization when hovering a workers priority button.

Increased settler work range significantly.
Settlers and raiders will now be able to find much more complex paths.
Crafting simple bullets now no longer requires you to have a gun.
Moved a few crafting recipes around to make more sense.
Items now sink much slower in lava.
Settlers that are angry at you now forget you if you die.
Summons will now attack cave moles while they are moving.
Elder will now hunt targets slightly further away if defend zone allows it.
Your elder and guard settlers will now help you fight Evils Protector, if close enough to their house.
Increased Void Boomerang damage slightly.
Increased Razor Blade boomerang damage slightly.
Torches and consumable food will no longer drop as material death penalty.
Rope now stacks in items of 5.
Enchanting weapons with curses is now much cheaper.
Roasting station now only takes logs to craft.
Increased time it takes for Ancient Vulture eggs to hatch.
Settlers leaving will now stop up if being talked to.
There is now a small cooldown before you can pick up items dropped by yourself.
All players on a settlement team will now get village helper achievement instead of just the one handing it in.
The game will now back up your save to a different file every now and then.
Dungeon entrance now has Void Apprentice defending it instead of Vampires.

Fixed a few issues with mounts causing invisible players.
Fixed possible crash when trying to move a settler that just died.
Fixed rare crash when trying to respawn.
Fixed sometimes being teleported to the wrong location when using recall.
Fixed settlers getting stuck to sides of open fence gates (by temporary removing their collision).

-Added a new boss: Dunkina
-Added a new level in the Hoopin N Lootin chapter: Dunkina
-Keybindings have been re-enabled
-The player can now melee attack, the default keybind is 'F'
-The player can hit multiple enemies with a melee attack
-If an enemy get hit by a melee attack they get stunned
-Sliding now preserves momentum a little better
-The player can now see how many bullets are left in their pistol and how long before dropping it
-Once a player spawns in multiplayer they are granted with 5 seconds of protection from damage
-Added skydiving trail VFX
-Added basketball trail VFX
-Added smooth grappling hook and pistol animation turning tilt

-Adjusted and improved the animation system for all enemies
-Increased the level bounds on the City map
-A few maps have been adjusted for easier navigation
-Adjusted the Hospital's level layout
-Adjusted the City's level layout
-Adjusted the Station's level layout
-Adjusted the multiplayer lobby's level layout
-Reduced animation leaning that caused a lot of clipping
-Reduced clipping when looking down
-Improved first person animations

-Fixed a bug that caused the grappling gun of lobby characters to disappear
-Fixed a bug that caused the player to clip into themselves while sliding
-Fixed a bug that caused most jump pad animations not to stop while aiming
-Fixed a bug that caused shooter enemy hands to look weird while reloading

-Achievements don't seem to trigger for some reason, I'm working hard on fixing this

• Made some modifications to weapon balancing and damage frames for certain attacks.
  
• Fixed issue where weapon trails would persist after using weapon abilities with multiple damage boxes.
  
• Lightning performance improvements.
  
• Lastly a new version of the demo will be released today which should resolve the not starting issue.

code cleanup old visit system

refactored spawning in pvp maps

updated chain lightning logic

added lightning chain observer to be deactivated on teleport

refactored chain lightning

#5102 - empty tooltips will not be displayed

[5087] The land battle background music is now the same we used before

updated brush tool to have scaler

fixed performance issue triggered when generating multiple tiles using new brush scaler

Pulled all the ?Sea? music from Unity and added to Fmod

#4623 - Tougher penalty for dying to boss? (Added tooltip to indicator) /

#5075 - Make "/e off" not mandatory for emotes, and make "/e greet" not loop /

#5085 - silver coins effect is not visible anymore during land battles /

#5096 - Can just allow movement keys to get up from chair /

Removed debugging line from NubisWebServer to prevent spamming the logs

updated flock logic to flip when target is towards left side of map / minor updates to brush tool

integrated remaining poison art assets for melee and sea combat

Adjusted open world map names

Notes in task list. Fmod changes.

fixed Sea_Forest loop, tweaks

Using FMOD events instead of audio files for Sea music

Fmod Tweaks



- New SoundEffectManager.ProjectileType enum

- sfxType variable for ProjectileStatData

New background music for PvP arenas

Using sfxType variable from ProjectileStatData to play a SFX when firing a cannonball

- Farming SFX changes

- Sea enemy hit SFX improvements

updated melee and sea poisons ability status

Layer changes to some sea tiles

Fixed missing layers in minimap presets



Using new music for Sea Leagues - Voyages

fixed animator bug causing poison animator effect not to trigger

Howdy survivors! Another crazy week for us, we’re still in a bit of a daze!

Just a few more days until the entire team are back together after the various international holiday periods have all come to an end, and we’re looking exceedingly forward to fixing up a few of the big issues that have come out in the wash since the MP launch. You can read more about them in last week’s blog here.

So the big question, now 41 is out there, and after the remaining MP issues have been fixed up, is what comes next?

Two Team Release Schedule

Going forward, now the behemoth that is Build 41 is increasingly looking to be in our rear-view mirror, we are going to structure the internal game’s development into two distinct teams (With General Arcade continuing in the meantime on improving MP, optimizing the server, increasing the player count and other MP related tech)

First, a little bit of a teaser!



(This is a fairly old internal video, created as a working proof-of-concept of various aspects of our NPC tech. It’s also not necessarily canonically accurate anymore. It was built to echo our earliest tech demo, but this might not be the start point we take with narrative in future, even if the characters would still be familiar.)

It’ll have been no surprise to anyone who read the interview in which Lemmy dropped some major Thursdoid spoilers that one of those teams is going to be focusing exclusively on NPC development from this point on. We’ll also be able to talk about it (not necessarily every Thursdoid, but certainly no longer in a vacuum), rather than work away in secret due to our ‘only discuss what’s coming next’ rule we instigated after a few instances of talking far too early about stuff.

Long ago we stated (informally on a forum post) our planned features for future builds, starting with hunting for build 42, and then numerous NPC builds for build 43 and onward.

However, many changed circumstances and much ponderings later, we’ve decided that this is not the best approach to take. First of all, its very clear that human NPCs have long been the most requested feature that is still outstanding, and the source of most of the frustration and bad feeling from those who consider the game to still be incomplete.

Not only this, but in slightly more selfish reasons, a big reason for not being comfortable with hunting and pets being first, is they are still NPCs and would necessarily leverage all the technology we’ve being working on for years at this point.

We have such amazing and peskily talented modders out there, we know fine well that as soon as we released this tech within their grasps, we would end up seeing extremely powerful NPC mods appearing, using our NPC tech heavily, before we had the pleasure of seeing this hard work paid off with our own NPCs.

It may be the initial build still contains hunting and wild animals, they ARE NPCs after all. It may be they drop into a subsequent build or later on in the unstable beta cycle, its not clear yet for reasons we’ll discuss in a bit. But the next BIG thing will be NPCs and we’ll have a dedicated team working toward this goal going forward.

However, NPCs will still, technically, be build 43. This is because we’ll be running a second dev team exclusively on a quicker, less risky yet still super cool content patch before the NPC work is complete, and then ongoing alternately between the other NPC patches to keep the content train going.

Behold this fancy graphic we cooked up! Now that we’ve blown up a bit we need some fancy graphical charts in our Thursdoids!



Hopefully the chart shows that, in very real terms, NPCs will be coming out as quickly as they can, uninterrupted, and the other builds are there to help bridge the gap. No build will ever take as long as Build 41 did, it was a practical rewrite of large portions of the game, but non-the-less NPCs will take time to emerge, and we don’t want to leave the community without new content in those waits.

Build 42

There is still a lot of polish and fix work to do on 41, primarily for the MP team but also with a side-salad of bug-fixing issues in both online and solo.

Beyond this, however, is a much ‘smaller’ but still extremely cool update that’ll drop before NPCs, that will release during the push toward an NPC release.

I say ‘smaller’ only because no major functionality or new fundamental systems, and it will be more a balancing and content patch while NPC team’s work is underway. However it will still be pretty beefy in terms of what it brings to the game.

It will serve several important purposes:

1) To balance a lot of the existing mechanics, particularly in relation to traits, professions, skills and other areas of the game that have been neglected or suffered some degradation during the years of development since they were introduced. Balancing traits and professions, medical system, and other stuff where it comes down to essentially tweaking numbers to make more builds viable or close up ‘free points’ exploits in character creation. Loot balancing and anything else that’s an easy balance but will help improve the game also fits in here.

2) To begin the expansion of the ‘tech tree’ of the game significantly to provide a more rich end-game experience. While until NPCs exist, some of this may be slightly less impactful on single player (though we’re sure will still add a lot of potential), it will significantly improve the MP experience by servers being less pressured to wipe or have loot respawning, providing players and communities ability to create more items that at present can only be obtained through looting.

While we may not hit this spot in our first build, our ultimate goal is to provide significantly extra crafting potential to allow players to effectively create a post-apocalypse nu medieval community, to provide plausable alternatives to any of the lootable items in the game that would logically be plausable with the correct skills and resources so players don’t feel pressured to restart the early game repeatedly to get long term fun out of the game. Want to be the person who makes clothes and sells them to a neighbouring settlement? Build brick walls and create something that resembles an actual house? Maybe even build a windmill? Who knows.

These are all examples of things we could do here, and may not all appear in Build 42, but hopefully our intended direction is clear. Ultimately to build up to the point that Alexandria / Hilltop / Kingdom style communities can form years after the apocalypse, giving more incentive to keep playing and building on existing worlds instead of intentionally replaying the early game because there is no real late game.

All this would be a time sink and require a group effort and wouldn’t be compulsory for those who prefer to just die repeatedly in the early apocalypse days, but the hope is to allow for a much greater level of community building, and facilitate trade and potentially years of stories and rich history from within a single world, be it NPC populated or an MP server, spanning numerous player lives (so it can still be the story of how you died).

These professions and expanded tech trees would be heavily gated and require specialization, often in case of the more complex crafting paths requiring pre-apocalypse skills that while it’s possible, are extremely difficult to attain to high levels after the apocalypse without a character specced toward them. We long ago ‘nerfed’ a metalworking system that was added to the game due to the implausibility of some random survivor crafting spoons and katanas in the apocalypse, however we’ll be expanding this again to include better items available through sufficient mastery and enough plausibility with the character build.

We’ll increase the amount of recipes that’ll be unlockable within the world through books, magazines or VHSs, and try and accurately model more advanced and multi-tier crafting professions to allow survivor communities to thrive and provide much more diverse activities for players who like to stay in the safehouses.

Finally, and vitally, we’ll be introducing the concept of ‘crafting surfaces’ to further restrict where some crafting recipes can be used. Some more complex recipes will require specific tables or equipment, some will just require a table or surface of any kind, while others can be carried out in your hands with no surface at all.

This will add an extra level to the crafting, as making a place suitable for crafting the more complex multi-stage recipes, and potentially upgrading your crafting station and equipment, would become a more fulfilling experience than standing in the field and being able to make a stir fry.

We have many and varied other things we want to inject into the game also – we’re currently working on seated / reclining characters for example, and also want to expand on in-game events and tie them to the map. We also need to do some work to improve guns, and PvP, at some point. It’s not clear when smaller features will start appearing, however, so will report on them in blogs as the year progresses.

Build 43

Worked on concurrently to the balancing and crafting update, as well as discussed and shown within our blogs going forward, will be the first version of NPCs. We’re still deciding what should, could and would be present in the first NPC build. It could include autonomous NPCs that the player can group with, it could primarily include the reintroduction of the story mode, it could have NPC animals, or that could come later.

We really need to look at what we have, and what’s feasible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time, as well as what we could release as a first build and not have people who’ve waited years for them to appear be disappointed. There’s a lot of plates to spin, decisions to make that require more brain power than we’ve had to spare during B41’s development, so we’re going to take some more time to discuss what would make the most satisfying and manageable first build, and take a stock check of what we have.

We’ve got a LOT of NPC code, lots of cool systems, from Rimworld style priority and jobs system, personality systems, procedural story event systems, combat systems, autonomous survival behaviours, advanced group behaviour systems, vehicle driving systems, and a whole bunch more. While nothing could be described as 100% complete, the vast majority of the hard work has been done, is functional and is extremely cool.

But B41 has taken a huge amount of our time and resources, and also taken some elements of the PZ workings in a different direction to things our NPCs were using, and so they need some time to be reintroduced to the most current build and made MP compatible. And when we do that, we’ll be moving stuff over in stages to release, rather than try and get everything functional and release ready at once.

A good analogy is we’ve got two rooms, one full to the ceiling of extremely cool and complex circuit boards and wires that we’ve spent years making, one room is empty.

Trying to tidy and assemble everything in the first room will be a nightmare. So we’ll start moving bits into a new room, setting them up, plugging them in together, and making something cool out of them to release. After release we’ll continue bringing in more pieces and attaching them, and so on for perhaps 2 or 3 builds until the first room is empty and our vision of NPCs is complete. It doesn’t mean that’s all we have, far from it, just sorting that entire packed room out would take too long and we want to finally start pushing NPC content out as soon as possible.

We also have some big plans for a gun mechanics rework at some point, to provide a more solid gunplay experience that will make guns not only more interesting to use, require more a player skill element, but also make PVP encounters a lot more interesting for those who enjoy that kind of thing, as our PVP component is still one of the more lacking elements of our multiplayer experience. But for now we are not committing to where this will thread into the release schedule.

The process of moving stuff over will take some time, and so we may be quiet for a couple of Thursdoids until we start getting stuff moving in the current build. As soon as we are though, we’ll be talking about the ongoing NPC development, alongside the concurrent crafting and balance patch, until they drop. Exciting times!

It shouldn’t go unsaid, however, that if a big new feature is not ready then it’s not in our DNA to push it out of the door uncooked. We’re confident that this will be a great year for PZ, and feel we can keep the content pipe flowing, but also won’t be abandoning our accustomed position as the tortoise in the ‘tortoise vs. hare’ race which appears to now be paying dividends for both game and community.

Much love,

TIS x

• Added a message when a new couple have married
• "Take from other granaries/warehouses" checkbox now avoids cyclic deliveries
• The list of resources now divides to columns if too long to fit on screen
• Added a help entry for seasonal hiring
• Slightly reduced orchard productivity

• Crash after moving resources to a cart parking
• Potentially fixed the "citizens stuck" problem on 2-core processors in early game
• Could relocate more than two animals to saltworks
• Crash after demolishing saltworks with livestock
• Non-rectangular orchard had incorrect outline when selected
• Some fulling mills and smelteries had incorrect outline when selected
• Water navigation problems after demolishing or cancelling a fulling mill (will stay in old saves if already happened)
• Suboptimal pathfinding where buildings were demolished
• Crash after demolishing a reforestation area being planted
• Crash on F1 in some cases
• Another case of buildings on top of each other

Hi!

I hope you had a fun and restful holiday and that 2022 is a great year for you!

I got some work in, mainly writing, over the holiday and enjoyed some time off. Though the emphasis for Prometheus Wept is on writing and scripting the encounters, today I'm working on improving how lethal and non-lethal damage will work in Prometheus Wept. In case you missed the dev log for December, it's up on the Steam page.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1208110/Prometheus_Wept/

Finally, if you've ever wanted to experience a hero playthrough of Vigilantes, but don't like the idea of dealing with the punishing difficulty, TheEdmon is battling his way through the Reiker Underworld. TheEdmon mainly covers strategy games at their most challenging settings - his channel's well worth checking out if you like the genre!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN3wJJICQp8&list=PLrGILJcqTblXwmh_tKRya62zvw7vzfDMu

All the best,
Daithi

- Optimization work
- Graphical improvements
- Fix bugs
- Adding new effects
- Recycling the economic system
- Balance rework
- UI edits

Greetings, mayors! I'm happy to report that Kapital is feature complete! Our team has implemented all gameplay mechanics we wanted to see in the game. Gang activities, hostage situations, emergencies, loyalists, clashes between different classes - it's all in the game build. And we still have a few months ahead before launch to tune and polish everything to a perfect shape. It's time to celebrate!

In case you haven't done already, don't forget to add the game to your Steam wishlist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1399700/Kapital_Sparks_of_Revolution/

1/7(Fri) 12:00 PM GMT+9 is the Toram Online Official Live Stream of Bemmo Channel



[In this program, foreign MC Sarah learns to Toram.]
[The data used in production is borrowed from the development team.]

• One Point Japanese!(Japanese +1pt) ※Japanese with Sarah
  
• Toram Quiz Time by Sarah
  
• "New Year" Otoshidama Battle
  
• Let's Visit Your Land

Featuring：Sarah(Bemmo Channel Toram English MC)

※Please note that schedule of live streams, content,
　and presenters may be subject to change without notice.