Greetings Exiles,

2021 has been an incredibly exciting and challenging year for us here on the Conan Exiles team. We started off the year preparing for the final release of our first expansion map, Isle of Siptah. The team was able to improve the Siptah map with your feedback during Early Access by adding NPC camps, Points of Interest, and activities. The team also added two amazing biomes in preparation for the final release on all platforms. We really enjoyed working on Siptah, despite the challenges that working from home during the pandemic presented.



Ultimately, we feel the final result is something we can be proud of, and your feedback and support made this journey feel all the more rewarding. The official launch on all platforms was met with an overwhelming amount of support from you all, as we achieved the highest concurrent player count since the game’s release. The launch campaigns we ran along with Siptah, such as the Twitch Drops and the Community Challenge, were also incredibly well received, paving the way for other possible future promotions.

In 2021 we also hit two important milestones as we released on two additional storefronts. First, on the Microsoft Store as part of the PC and Xbox Gamepass subscription. Getting to this point took a colossal amount of work from our teams, to who I want to wholeheartedly thank for their efforts, as well as to the Microsoft and Xbox teams who made this possible. We also drastically improved performance of the Xbox One client and received the Optimized for Series X|S badge resulting in Conan Exiles looking better than ever on consoles! Later in the year we released on the Epic Game Store and were able to bring Conan Exiles to another audience with full cross platform support for all PC stores. Once again, this was made possible thanks to the support of our friends at Epic Games.



With an eye on the future, we’ve also spent a good portion of the year planning and figuring out the best way to support our game for the long run. We are committed to Conan Exiles, it’s one of the greatest successes we have had at Funcom and we want it to become the best it can be. For that purpose, we have been growing our staff over the year and created a new Live team that is dedicated to the maintenance, support, and daily operations of the game. Thanks to this, we’ve been able to focus on addressing your feedback regarding critical bugs and Quality of Life additions that had been not possible in the past. We have also dedicated a team to provide support to our amazing modders, creating direct lines of communication with them so we can keep improving the devkit to better suit our community of creators. And this is just the beginning. We are committed to keep growing and adapting to support Conan Exiles on what will be one of its most exciting years.

I can’t wait to spill the beans on what is coming in the future, but for now let’s celebrate this past year with some facts and statistics about last year for Conan Exiles: We can confidently say that 2020 and 2021 were the most successful years for Exiles based on player counts and player activity. The development and launch of Isle of Siptah revitalized interest for veterans, and also gathered the attention of new players. And it didn’t stop there! The last quarter of 2021 also showed a surge in activity thanks in great part to the release of our in-game event “Grave Matters”. We’ve been keeping close attention to its reception and what you had to say about it. Thanks in great part to all your positive feedback, we’re planning for more events in the future so keep an eye out!



Another front we have seen positive growth with the game has been with streaming. Thanks to the new content added to the game and our campaigns, especially the Twitch Drops campaign, we’ve seen the viewership numbers hit an all-time high, even surpassing early access and the official launch period! We’re happy to say that we’ve improved our active player base and presence on streaming platforms and 2021 has been our strongest year to date. It’s been a year of experimentation on our end and we’re incredibly thankful to all of you for rewarding us back with your support which we are using to shape our plans to make 2022 even better!

As a final note, we have been celebrating the past year with a series of videos covering the {LINK REMOVED}new features and content added to the game, a {LINK REMOVED}showcase of a selection of our content creators -both veterans and newcomers alike- and a {LINK REMOVED}shoutout to some of the player-made mods that made an impact for our community in 2021. Make sure to give them a watch! And if you like numbers, we also published {LINK REMOVED}a series of infographics about statistics collected during Isle of Siptah’s launch week. You barbarians.



Thank you all for being part of our community and for having made 2021 one of the best years in Conan Exiles’ life. Here’s to 2022 and beyond!

Feb 03, 2022 - We hear people like stories...

Ok so the truth is, we’ve been secretly developing an epic solar system-spanning singleplayer story campaign for Vox Machinae for over 2 years now. What a relief to finally get that out there, such a load to get off of the ol’ chest. What’s that? You want to know all the details of what you can expect to see from this new chapter of Vox Machinae and how we came to this point? Well you came to the right place, here’s the lowdown.




The scale of Vox was always meant to be massive. Massive mining grinders that were housed in massive hangars, and serviced by multiple crews. Massive operations, possible only due to oversized conglomerates whose reach spans galaxies. Unreasonably massive resources for undertaking such efforts; measured in gigatons — of fuel, of steel, munitions and manpower. They’re not just big, folks! … they’re WAY too big. With the campaign, we're taking this sense of scale to the next logical extreme with new content you simply have to see in VR to believe.



To give feeling to this universe, we focused on creating a wide cast of endearing and quirky characters. A crew of local inhabitants to this corner of space, who made this hostile industry their home. As the new recruit, you look to them to assess the appropriate response to events and vistas: sure, that sensibly oversized walking citadel is unusual in our world — but what about the day-to-day mining ops in the Serus System? Come on!



The campaign had to span an entire star system. To ground the experience, we needed to create an appropriate environment that would serve as a homebase to come back to after each mission. No matter whether we return from mining on Topaz or venture into the darkness of the distant obits of Serus’ secluded planets; A little carrier by the name of ‘The Competence’ will take you there. During those journeys between planets you'll be able to fully explore this new space while geting to know your new crew.



Fresh locales along with the battle-tested maps from multiplayer make their appearances, now host to a gripping new story. The environments have character of their own. Beyond standard inhospitality, their morphology presents different challenges — both in traversal as well as complications in combat. Sometimes standing to your advantage, sometimes exposing you to the enemy. It’s best to keep your awareness of surroundings about you in this alien scenery.


No cinematic ride would be complete without a custom music score for all the action taking place between hitting start, and the final flash of the credits. Vox Machinae continues to receive tremendous love and attention from the original composer since the project began.


Growing up in the 90s, we too were gamers who fondly explored the adventures that populated the entertainment space from a burgeoning artform. PC gaming seemingly exploded out of nowhere and offered an interactive way to experience a narrative. The environments and characters not only stirred our imaginations, but asked us to directly advance the action. Whether it was the text briefings of Warcraft, live action cutscenes in Wing Commander or the non-stop immersion of Half Life, they put player agency at the center of it all. All this to say that stories hold a special place in our hearts, because they’ve always been the catalyst for being in this industry in the first place.

Although we planned for Vox to have a campaign when setting out to make it all the way back in 2013, the size of Space Bullet even at early access launch was only two artists and a programmer. Ultimately our limited time and resources dictated a narrow path forward so that the work we put in could generate the biggest impact in the product. I mean just take a look at our aging early access trello roadmap! Not even the ‘Pie in the Sky’ tasks were all that ambitious.



With the support of an early fanbase we pressed through the other end of our Early Access release and found our production pace. Through it we could see a welcoming and respectful community of fierce-yet-friendly pilots populating our Discord Server, Reddit, even across various news outlets. So we started hiring more talent onto the team, and began dreaming BIG once again.

The coding ranks were bolstered first, a designer was brought on board, and although the visual arts department stayed at two members, we expanded the sound department and added a dedicated writer to the team. And so began the trek that saw us through two years of quietly working on a campaign while adding content.


In conclusion, it is our great joy [among a salad of other emotions] to be able to answer the call from all who saw great potential in the game from this tiny, but enthusiastic Canadian team. Now … for the folks that have been asking —the answer remains— as it has for the past two years: “a campaign is certainly something that interests us greatly.”

Only today, with gratitude for your patience and support; We officially announce Vox Machinae's singleplayer campaign.

Hey all, here’s a general update from TIS Towers on various things. We do hope this finds y’all well.

First off a quick heads-up on the forthcoming 41.66 patch. It’s now content locked, and is now receiving required fixes reported by our internal testers. We will look to put it out into a new unstable beta branch as soon as we can.

The full current changelist can be found here for those interested.

Next up, a few details on our Build 42 work.

As previously mentioned the core MP team will be sticking with Build 41 patches to improve life out on the servers for the immediate future, but work on the next big build has nevertheless now begun/continued in earnest.

Already announced for Build 42 was a major expansion of late game crafting and a major focus on game balance – details on which can be found here.

There are a few other irons in the fire for this build too though. As ever, no ETAs on any of this.

We are very much still in the early versions of this build, and indeed much of the late game crafting update is currently in the ‘pen and paper’ planning stage. More on this in future blogs.

We have recently taken some time to get rid of a bunch of our longest standing issues with the game’s engine.

Whilst this is definitely not a b41-style level of disruption, we’re digging deep inside our renderer and looking for ways to get rid of the quite severe problems that have been baked into our engine for a long time in terms of both capabilities and performance.

Of course, the biggest issue our engine struggles with daily is the extreme CPU and GPU heavy requirements of having a map composed of so many unique tiles, shaders and other stuff without the ability to use a z-buffer to let us render in an optimized way like most 3D games.

Ironically the fact that its ‘a simpler looking 2D game’ is what works against using a lot of the power of the GPU to render the map fast. This results in large FPS drops, particularly when zooming out due to the mind meltingly inefficient draw method that the ISO perspective forces on us.

We’ve had a few rather bold ideas on how to solve this, using the caching of chunks that have already been rendered, which we hope will vastly increase the FPS in B42.

It’s early days, but looks promising. This tech requires heavier use of the GPU memory, however, so it may be that this optimization will only be able to benefit cards with a few gigs of free VRAM. We’ll have to see which generations of GPUs will be best able to leverage it when its dev time is a little further down the line.

Speaking of not being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way: in actual fact, we’ve also been working towards being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way.



This essentially frees us from having to slot the draws of zombies, vehicles or players in between the appropriate tile draws in ‘back to front’ order.

We’ll be able to simply draw all the characters and vehicles on-screen at the end, their pixels then discarded if they are deeper into the scene than an existing building object’s pixel.

This should massively optimize the rendering speed of zombies, and allow us to sort them by materials. It will free us to use cached chunks indefinitely, until the lighting or cutaways demand a change, rather than rendering all the tiles individually.

We have had some surprising FPS results in 4k on max zoom, however we also expect this will likely fall a lot in practice – once the work is complete and everything is drawing. Please excuse any visual glitches at the moment!



Due to all this, in B42 it currently feels safe to assume that zooming out will have significantly lower performance penalty – and that higher resolutions will become more feasible for at least mid-range GPUs, and possibly lower end GPUs too.
 
In the game, since our very earliest builds, we’ve been limited to 8 storey buildings. This was primarily because the height was global, and increasing this would incur a penalty to performance across the entire map even if that extra space was not used.

The other issue was simply performance when drawing those extra floors. If we’re struggling to render the amount of tiles we already have, adding extra tall buildings would be a big mistake.


Thirdly, there’s something to be said about less being more in terms of gameplay. However, this hard limit of 8 has long been a thorn in our mappers’ sides, as well as for our mod community.

Seeing as it looks like we’ll be able to solve the performance issues discussed above, we’ve now added a variable chunk height system which will allow each chunk of the map to define its own max height.

This means that in Build 42 it’s looking like a particular area could have floors up to 32 in height, should the mapper desire it.

Currently, due to certain tech limitations, we only have stairs that rise in north or west directions.

This is annoying, and we’d like to get rid of this limitation for numerous reasons. We’ve done some mock-ups of how stairs would look in the other two directions, and think we’ve found a way to make it work.

They look a little odd, however functionally being able to have stairs in any of the four directions would give mappers and ourselves much more freedom in building design.

Another limitation that has been very longstanding is the fact that negative map coords (expanding out the map in the negative X and Y directions) is not possible in PZ – due primarily to some TIS naivety early on in development.

For the maths-minded out there: casting a player’s x, y, z location to an int to work out what tile they are standing on will return the wrong value if any of those coordinates are a negative value.

There were thousands of places where this occurred in the codebase, and they all needed changing from a static cast to a math.floor, so that they will work in negative dimensions.

Making negative map coordinates possible means that we, or modders, will feasibly be able to build northwards and westwards, and opens up a huge extra area of potential map area to expand to.

It likewise also puts other cool stuff (back) on the game dev table that we’ll discuss at a later date.

We have also been updating our lighting system.

In the current B41 we have an ambient light level that’s inherent to every tile within the map – though slightly reduced indoors. Light sources are only capable of lighting the room that they are in.

Locking yourself in a cupboard with the door shut currently results in the same light level as you’d get in the living room with open curtains.

For B42 we are rejigging how lighting is calculated, to make a much more interesting and realistic light propagation system.

Now being in a room with no windows, even in broad daylight, will leave you in the darkness. The evening sunset glow will encroach through the window and bathe your room in a red tint, creeping back toward the window and dimming as the sun goes down.

Interiors of buildings will lighten and darken with the daylight based on how much exposure to the bounced light they will feasibly receive. Opening a door to a lit room will bathe the outside corridor in light, and so on.

This is all still development in progress, and it maybe requires tweaking of light intensities, colours and fall-off ranges.

Please also excuse any glitches you see, this is all still very much in the oven!

 

• The map team continue their awesomeness, with lots of map polish currently going into the current Knox Event map – including electricity pylons and cool new locations like this.

• The Noiseworks gang continue with their improvements of the PZ soundscape, with their current mission being to provide background sounds that provide different ambiance for times when the electricity and water are on, for when they are off, and an audible change to signal the exact moment when the turn-off happens in-game.
• Currently awaiting integration are also 14 new music CDs, 14 movie VHS tapes, 20 new TV show tapes and 44 home recorded tapes too. You will be delighted to hear that these include several new sequels in the much-lauded Dog Goblin horror franchise. Our thanks to Brat Pen for these.
• The curator of the online PZ map project, Blindcoder, wants to let you know that he’s on the case with updates – and apologises for delays caused by Covid and irl fun/games. His blog here. Our thanks to him for all his amazing work also.

This week’s flamingo funfrom Cute Cappuccino. A changelist of all our pre-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here!
Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too! And you can always find our bi-weekly blogs over here.

After receiving some highly valuable feedback from our community during the closed beta last week, we are now opening up the beta for all players. In addition, we have made several quality of life improvements, fixed some bugs and added new languages to the beta as well.

We invite everyone to join the playtest and join our Discord to discuss the game!

• Animate objects high in the air, over large distances, or just be closer to the action than ever before. You can now change your own height & size ingame!
  
• Hold both trigger & grip buttons on one controller to adjust your height. Do the same with both controllers at the same time to change your scale.
  
• You can go from 0.4 - 6x the regular scale
  
• If your scale goes above 4x, you are no longer able to grab really small to prevent any accidental grabs. Like attached items & those small sticks, like the one used to control arms.

• Whether you need a thumbnail for your video or want to quickly save a fun moment, you can now make screenshots!
  
• These are taken from the camera's perspective
  
• They are stored in the game's directory, under: Puppet Play Data >> Captured_Screenshots
  
• Share your images on our Discord or in the Artwork-Section of our Community Hub!

– Louise Smith

• This is Trash Ken, a new companion that will take care of any toys you don't want to play with anymore!
  
• Makes it easier to try out different things in the gallery!

• Unable to grab clips in audio-menu
  
• head up animation clips (below timeline) were offset
  
• didn't remove animation clips & lines on delete
  
• improved distance grab in gallery
  
• several small changes

Currently there is a bug in the game that recorded sounds are offset. This happens if the soundclip doesn't start from the beginning, but somewhere in the middle. For example when not starting the animation from the start. This is unfortunately a more complicated bug to fix as it is a limitation from the unity engine we are using. We are still working on finding a good solution!
When replaying the animation from the start, everything is in sync. So don't worry about your exported videos! For now I disabled the ability to move clips before the first frame in the audio menu, to make sure that, when replaying the animation form the beginning, everything is correct!


Any questions or suggestions?
Join our discord!

Twitter


- Team Puppet Play!

Made deep water drawn more accuratly in the minimap

added special state to map editor data to determine POI status, random treasure site assignment for warps are now filtered depending on special state of map data

Our balls are now able to penetrate your force shields.

Updates
-Boot Jump has been fine tuned to be more consistent than ever!
-Updated the Headquarters cutscene with more to come!
-Increased camera clipping distance where appropriate, especially in the Space Station and Kur levels.
-HQ Approach rebalancing and polish.
-Dash can now be used more than once while swimming.
-Increased Tiny Tim ranged attack speed in level 1.
-Arachnobot now shoots rapid fire rather than a slow wave.
-Level 3 has a new secret.

Bug Fixes
-Fixed a number of bugs in the subway hub causing it to load incorrectly in some instances.
-Fixed a bug causing menu buttons not to work when returning to the main menu after death.
-Fixed a number of cutscene bugs including Space Station 1 and Tram Construction.
-Fixed a number of occlusion bugs in Security Bay and Living Quarters.
-Fixed a bug causing Dodge balls not to penetrate the force shield.
-Perfected Engineers now spawn properly.
-Enemies in the subway hub are able to open doors again.

Want to show off them classy kicks? Maybe you're the next John Woo and you need to procure some extra dope robot doves - come chill with us in our discord!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1621475/The_Sims_4_Carnaval_Streetwear_Kit/

Carnaval looks are all about freedom and fun. This kit includes vibrant clothing, makeup, and accessories inspired by Pabllo Vittar’s exuberant and fierce style. They’re perfect for parties, or for mixing into your Sim’s everyday looks.

Along with a UI overhaul to the level select screen, Painter's Pets latest update allows for players to control multiple slimes from the same device! This should allow both people hosting games and joining games to add a new players using additional controllers of keyboard inputs from their devices.

Once in a game room you can either use the Envelope button to invite a friend via steam, or the controller button to add a new player that will be controlled locally, at which point you will be able to select a profile and team as normal.

Next up in our Cosplay Kit series is Satele Shan! We recently announced that we are building out cosplay kits for our community members who want to bring SWTOR characters to life. There has always been a strong cosplay presence in the SWTOR community, and we wanted to take the opportunity in providing this part of our community with these kits prepared by our Art team. Whether you have been cosplaying for several years or just starting out, these kits will be helpful in building your creations. These kits will focus on several different details on the build of each character including close up high resolution images, a 360 turnaround, references for materials, and color palettes.

Special note: In this kit, Satele Shan is presented as she is currently in-game and not in her original outfit when she is initially introduced.

A little bit more about Satele Shan:

Grand Master of the Jedi Order and leader of the Jedi Council, Satele Shan was born on the Core World of Brentaal Four and is descended from legendary Jedi Bastila Shan. Both a gifted warrior and wise teacher, Satele was personally responsible for rediscovering Tython and its hyperspace route. Ever since, she has devoted herself to the Jedi resettlement of Tython and the revitalization of the order.

Satele has played a key role in recent galactic history in other ways, as well. She fought on the front lines of several major battles--including the battles of Alderaan and Rhen Var--and was present as a Padawan during the Imperial retaking of Korriban, the first modern contact between the Sith Empire and the Republic. She is greatly respected by certain members of the Republic military, and her advice is often sought by the Supreme Chancellor. In person, Satele's strength in the Force is matched with a keen intelligence and a subtle sense of humor.

Cosplayers and players alike can find the Satele Shan - KotET Cosplay Kit here. Stay tuned for more kits on the horizon!