Firstly, Following the poll we shared on Thursday, it seems that you tend to wish for the game to last around 24 minutes. We updated our beta, for you to try that out. You will have 3 acts of 8 min all ending in a boss battle (at the moment, you will fight Denzel a second time at the end but it will soon change). We're curious of your opinion regarding enemies balance and the overall feel with this duration. To switch over to the beta version, go on the Bounty of One page in your library and go the settings (the gear icon on the right) before launching the game and click on property. In properties, go to the beta tab and select the beta branch in the drop down menu. Exit the settings and you should have a small update, you're now playing the beta.
To go back to the main branch, take the same steps and select none in the dropdown menu.
⏳Secondly, the horde survivor bundle with Spellbook Demonslayer and Nomad Survival will come to an end on December the 14th, hurry up if you want to pick it up!⏳
It was an honor to cooperate with Xendra, the maker of Spellbook Demonslayer, and with The Fox Knocks, the maker of Nomad Survival. They are amazing and we are really happy we could use this opportunity to work with them on the collaborative bundle.
👉Horde Killer Bundle will end on December 14th. Hurry up!"
“Where do you go, Ma’am?” “Hope!” “Never heard!” “It’s a 14-day ride from the last train station.” “Ok, middle of nowhere.” “But it’s beautiful there!”
Hello cowboys and cowgirls!
In 10 weeks the Early Access will begin and the engineer on the Hype Train will be throwing a few more coals into the fire.
Today we have the first part of our DevBlog series for you, which we have subtitled "Visuals of the Wild West".
There's a bit of game-world to visit, the corners where you bump your feet on rocks and the places where the juiciest cattle feed can be found.
But take a look for yourself!
Tell us here or on our social media channels where you think the grass is always green?
- Improved AI on helicopter bots. For example, they shouldn’t get stuck that much in trees - Added health bars to custom vehicles in mods - Added smoke grenade to engineer (need level 20) - Avatar arms were stretched a bit to avoid floating weapons when real arms were fully stretched.
Finally the project is converted to Unreal Engine 5. This has been a monumental task and we are super happy it's done and over with :) Moving forward we can now focus on new features and content with shiny new tools.
Most things should be the same, while everything has changed under the hood. The physics and collision system is completely new, static meshes are converted to Nanite meshes, completely new destruction system etc (check UE5 if interested in all cool stuff).
However Lumen is currently not enabled due to targeting more like 30fps, but we will eventually enable it due to UE improving this for games.
Collision, Physics and Destruction
This is a completely new system in UE5 which has a major impact on Birthright's combat. The melee weapon collision is rewritten using the new system.
Basically for Birthright this is just goodness compared to the previous Nvidia PhysX system we used. It's also built with Multiplayer in mind, so Dedicated Servers will now run a fixed update rate on physics, making it possible to sync clients much easier compared to variable update rate.
The new destruction system (Chaos) is incredible much better than the Nvidia system previously used. We already made simple tests using Catapults and destructible Walls and dynamic NavMesh etc seems to work fine. So a future Siege Patch will be planned now.
Optimizations
After conversion was done we did some deep analyzing and monitoring performance. And for combat the biggest bottleneck is Animations. Therefore we started remaking Animation logic according to the new Multi Threaded model that UE5 supports. This enables using a Proxy object to copy data between threads and run necessary update logic on a thread rather than the main thread. We will continuously make improvements around Animations coming patches due to this. But already there is a good improvement in performance.
Nanite Meshes & Virtual Textures
Most Static Meshes are converted to Nanite for performance and removing the need for LODs. And UE5.1 already released support for Foilage being Nanite Meshes too. This will be updated in coming patches.
And all Textures are now UE5's Virtual Textures making things more video memory optimized while even and crisp over longer distances.
Big thanks to Amarum for testing during development!
Regardless of our position in life, one thing that remains a constant is time.
There is never enough time....
I unfortunately have not found enough time to make this project into what I had envisioned (at least in it's current form). The Playtest has ended (removed from the store and will be removed completely at a later date).
Thank you to everyone that took the time to download it and play (even for a few minutes).
While I've had fun developing and learning when creating these projects, I have forgotten the main goal is to make a fun and unique experience for the player/s.
I will be going back to basics for the initial release of SlimeTime. No soccer, just slime.
Regardless of our position in life, one thing that remains a constant is time.
There is never enough time....
I unfortunately have not found enough time to make this project into what I had envisioned (at least in it's current form). The Playtest has ended (removed from the store and will be removed completely at a later date).
Thank you to everyone that took the time to download it and play (even for a few minutes).
While I've had fun developing and learning when creating these projects, I have forgotten the main goal is to make a fun and unique experience for the player/s.
I will be going back to basics for the initial release of SlimeTime. No soccer, just slime.
I'm just one guy making a game and while I did test the game on multiple systems, I need to test the game on many more. I promise I will fix all the baby bugs within the first week.
That's all!
The first major bug fix update will probably happen on Sunday.