These last two weeks there has been much fixing and finishing of various content. For some levels, detailing and gameplay configuring are ongoing, but others have received their final polish and are complete.

Supporting elements - like sound effects, interface graphics, decoration and environment effects - are being added to fill out the experience of the levels.


One of the places that can make a visual impact outside of the actual world of Wrath is the loading screens for each level. Two more of these are now finished, and give some idea of the atmosphere and grandeur waiting to be discovered in Episode 2.






We’ve been adding some set dressing pieces, especially to Episode 3. Here is a feature added to the start of E3M5 - The Red Throne. Like something out of a dark fairytale, thorned tendrils are spreading across the basalt facade of this imposing installation.

Now that most of the levels are near completion, decor like this is an important way for us to add visual impact to Wrath, and finalize the character of a level.






Aside from new loading screens, E3 set dressing, and other fixes, tweaks, and polish, here is a look at some of the things we’ve worked on the last two weeks:

LEVELS

• E3M3 - The Rending Chambers - has been receiving a texture pass
  
• E3M4 - Crucible of Souls - an industrial area referred to as “The Header” is in progress with texturing, detailing, and gameplay

ENEMIES

• Boss2 - a new movement behavior has been prototyped
  
• Boss3 - has received additional animating, and playtesting

PROPS & TEXTURES

• Added new slime and blood fall textures
  
• Trim textures, with runes, created for Episode 3

That’s it for today’s update! We hope you enjoyed these progress images, and we’ll see you in two weeks!

Stay tuned for more dev updates.



Don't forget to follow us on social media:
3D Realms' Official Discord
3D Realms' twitter
3D Realms on Facebook
WRATH on twitter
WRATH on Facebook

As you know we are know actively working on the update that will add mod support to our game! At the same time we do not forget about updating the main gaming content. And today we would like to announce that the new Update 1.19 will see the light already at the very beginning of the next week!

Great news lies in the fact that already 2 new weapon categories will appear in this update - Throwing Weapons and Polearms! Show your ninja skills by defeating the enemy with accurate throws or press the undeads with powerful strikes of sharp spears and heavy halberd!



You will be able to try the new weapon in action very soon, in the meantime join our Discord to follow our latest news!

• Added new modifier - Battle Royale
  
• Added new ghost - Wendigo
  
• Added ability to switch voice chat input mode
  
• Updated UI
  
• Fixed errors in locations
  
• Made minor game optimization
  
• Updated money spawn points
  
• Fixed navigation errors for ghosts

The Battle Royal modifier gives you the opportunity to compete with other players in catching ghosts. In this mode, items are scattered around the location and, if desired, you can order additional delivery of items that appear in a random place on the map. Each player must independently identify the ghost and materialize it so that there is an opportunity to see the ghost catcher. The winner is the one who catches the ghost first

• Fixed a bug with ectoplasm collection
  
• Fixed a bug with the collection of ghost orbs
  
• Fixed some network bugs
  
• Fixed some bugs with UI

Hi Rugby Fans

Small update

1) Short passes are now a bit more manageable to catch.
2) Player offload no correctly keep the cpu engaged in the tackle.

The second ExileCon Qualifier event begins in 30 minutes and you are now able to join the event. The winner of this event will join the winner of last week's qualifier, imexile, in the finale race at ExileCon!! If you aren't able to compete in today's event, there are still two more ExileCon Qualifiers after this one which we'll host every Thursday at 2PM PDT. For more information about Qualifier events and their prizepool, check out this announcement.

We'd also like to mention that while the event is fixed seed, when Einhar spawns by chance in an area, he can slightly affect parts of the layout of the zone but the rest of the area will be the same.

If you're keen to watch another close race packed with Path of Exile action, join our official livestream at http://twitch.tv/pathofexile now! The event will be shoutcasted by ZiggyD and RaizQT, so lots of fun is guaranteed.

If you missed the last one and want to watch imexile take first place by a close 25 seconds after recovering from a slight misstep, you can check out the VOD here!

Good luck everyone!

"With every subsequent addition to the Super Mega Baseball™ series, we've expanded with new Super Mega Superstars, Teams, and Ballparks. But some in the community have asked that we find a way to bring real-world baseball players into the game. In SMB4, we found the opportunity to expand the Super Mega universe with the addition of actual baseball Legends.

Having these former pros lets us bring that real-world integration into the game while holding onto the timelessness of Super Mega Baseball. With these Legends we honor the heritage of baseball and the players that have defined the sport from the beginning.

There are over 240 Legends available to play at launch, including:

David Ortiz
Vladimir Guerrero
Billy Wagner
Bartolo Colon
Jose Bautista

Play with Legends in classic Super Mega League, along with a new league organized into two Conferences of iconic former pros: New School and Old School. Pick a team and battle it out to see which era of baseball reigns supreme.

Another new feature that integrates Legends is Shuffle Draft, a deckbuilding-inspired system that lets you craft a team from both Legends and Super Mega All-Stars. Shuffle Draft can be utilized in a variety of modes including Franchise, Season, and Online Leagues.

Pennant Race also incorporates Legends in a unique way: each week, 4 players on each Super Mega League team are replaced by 4 Legends, called “Pennant Race Ringers.” These will fluctuate each week based on a variety of factors.

Check out our Deep Dive video for more on all the new legends heading to Super Mega Baseball 4!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1487210/Super_Mega_Baseball_4/

Hello all!

This week we’ll be checking in with three of the main four pillars of Build 42 – work on the fourth, the server-side player inventories and general MP improvement, has been fairly ‘business as usual’ the past month or so and there’s not much to talk about that’d be juicy for enough for public consumption.

Steady your loins, then, as first of all we jump into…

RJ has been taking a holiday (American translation: vacation) from his work on domestic animals and husbandry, and has taken to the woodland and forests of the Knox Event.

Wild animals will be important to B42 for both reasons of ambiance and necessity – it will make your experience feel no end more engaging to see deer skittering through the treeline, but also will make hunting a viable survival technique – and one required for some of our advanced crafting recipes when society is long-gone.

 


What RJ has been working on, in particular, this week is the movement of animals over the map – their migration if you will. So if you could all also have a looksee at the following video too, then we can run into it in some more depth afterwards.

Also clearly: USUAL WIP CAVEATS APPLY. Things can and will change through development and testing.



So what are we seeing here?

Well basically throughout the day our deer will follow paths that our designers (and modders) can map out in our WorldEd tool – and in the vid you can see a virtual animal following a path.

Right now, one virtual animal is a group of animals that’s been defined in a lua file. Our current group, for example, consists of one buck, several doe and some fawns. Though clearly once they are fully implemented the variation will be greater, and also dependent on stuff like the time of year.

Once players get close to this coded ‘virtual animal’ these deer will then spawn into the world as real animals – and once you retreat away they’ll revert to their virtual status so the game can take over their movement and activities once more. If the group has become separated meanwhile, they’ll team back up again when their paths next cross.

In their virtual form the animals will move over the map, doing potential set activities at set different places. They are timetabled to have several ‘sleeping’ and ‘eating’ periods – currently sleeping for a period of half an hour at some point between 12pm and 4pm, eating at some point between 5am and 7am, and eating again for an hour at some point before 4pm and 6pm.

(Clearly, all this is easily changed at the dev-end – and can also be adjusted for whatever different animals we choose to add in future)  

To aid players who want to be hunters, deer will leave evidence and tracks of where they’ve been and what they’re doing. So there’ll be footprints (with a direction suggested), poop, and broken twigs and undergrowth – while flattened plants will indicate a sleeping spot, and grazed areas an eating spot.

The way in which we represent these visibly in-game is currently being worked out, but for now (and perhaps later on too) we will be providing for it in a dual use for eris’ super foraging mode that was introduced in B41.

A goal for the player, then, might be to follow tracks and work out the deer’s possible sleep or eating spot, mark them on their map, and then wait near those spots at the correct hours and hope that animals will stop by.

We’re also working out on ways for a Tracking skill to be integrated into this, though seeing as the design is still under discussion we’ll probably talk about that at a later date. Something else that we’re aware should be factored in is human smell and wind direction potentially spooking animals, as it would in real life, but we plan to add that layer in a bit further down the line.

RJ would also like to give out a call of Special Thanks to Inrictus for the time he’s spent teaching him how to be a proper huntsman!

Finally, here’s another quick video of a survivor setting up camp with our new tents and whatnot (no deer this time) to give a little flavour of what the surrounding gameplay will feel like too.

 



Operation Optimization is going very well, easily obtaining several hundred FPS on our dev hardware when zoomed out.

However at the moment we still need to look into optimizations for how our current fog and puddles work – both of these are intensive graphical operations that need updating frame by frame. Thus, at the moment, they invalidate our cached chunks and diminish some of the gains from the optimizations.

As such at a later date – either before a first public release, or very possibly in a follow up build to it – we in particular plan to revisit these systems to optimize them for our new rendering system. Particularly the fog system, in fact, since having a depth map will now provide opportunities to make our visual effects look much better since we will have a solid representation of surfaces and depth to allow us to much improve how it interacts with objects in the scene.


Now the crafting systems are all in place, we’re starting to fill out the tech tree of recipes and wanted to show what’s currently being implemented.

As a reminder to those who perhaps aren’t as interested in the long term crafting and survival systems we are implementing, these will be completely optional as to whether you want to engage with it.

If you’re more interested in evading zombie hordes in the centre of towns and cities then you’ll still be able to do that.

However, to address our game’s weaker late game, provide many roleplay opportunities, and provide depth of gameplay outside interactions with zombies – we’re going all out on making the crafting possibilities as exhaustive as possible. Likewise, we are building new and more powerful crafting systems that modders will really be able to get their teeth into.

Remember, our benchmark is that a group of players should be able to build a functioning village even if spawning on a wilderness map with no signs of civilization. We want to make sure every aspect of crafting is covered to give multiplayer communities the opportunity to build and thrive, and provide modders with the tools required to make cool as hell expansive tech mods as seen on Minecraft, allowing Zomboid to become a more diverse survival, crafting and automation game modding platform in future.

An example of this would be working with clay. Clay can be dug up near rivers, and will be used to make bricks, tiles, roofing, pottery, and a whole host of other items and tiles to place in the world.

Those living on a barren map wanting to build a secure home will be overjoyed to be able to use bricks and tiles to make a proper dwelling that’s sturdy enough to stop zombies from breaking in. Likewise even on a smaller-scale basis, this craft will prove vital when survivors don’t have access to modern cutlery or liquid storage.

So here’s a quick video (very WIP still, we have a lot of balance, UI and polish to apply yet) that will show off some of the crafting systems when working with clay.



In future Thursdoids we’ll try to demo different diverse parts of the tech tree and their related professions as they implemented, as well as UI and quality of life improvements as we make them


The Indie Stone would like to extend an excited hello to two new fine folks this week – Egor who will be joining the MP team as they move ahead with their upgrades, and community fan favourite DaddyDirkieDirk.

Dirk has joined our art team to pump out ever more delectable tiles to give our map more life, and its deepest parts some more intriguing objects to perceive in the darkness – and if you are interested in his fantastic work as a modder then we ran a Mod Spotlight on him only last week.

Thanks all!

A changelist of all our pre-release and post-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. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

Change assets in game.
Added barricade mode to game for alternate ending.
Added new boss character.
Changed weapons.
No more party system. Doug will fight alone.
Rescued NPC's return to house.

I will re-do animation in time.
I need to translate, please stand by.

Changes:
- Added support for resolutions greater than 16:9.
- Added drop down UI notification panel for when you can't purchase a character for some reason.
- Changed exit button visuals.
- Changed the draw order for projectile to make enemy attacks easier to spot.
- Lowered the volume for hit sound effect.
- Substantially increased the drop rates for high rarity items
- Reworked An Explosion in this Wonderful World achievement
- Nerfed Quick Cast++.
- Reduced the number of bounces from the Bounce mod across all tiers.
- Various UI tweaks.
- Minor performance improvements.

Fixes:
- Fixed a couple of broken achievements.
- Fixed multiplicative mods with values less than 1 giving you worse stats for having multiple of them (e.g. Duration)
- Fixed modal border bug.
- Fixed Achievements UI content bug.
- Various UI fixes.

Hey Everyone,

We have a very exciting weekend ahead as we are preparing to release the 41st update and launch a new DLC for Medieval Kingdom Wars - called Zombie Mode.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431010/Medieval_Kingdom_Wars__Zombie_Mode/

Zombie Mode completely transforms the combat gameplay of Medieval Kingdom Wars - both for online and multiplayer Skirmish and all the Campaign battle modes.

As a mysterious plague infects medieval Europe – the dead no longer stay dead. Every soldier who dies in battles by any reason will shortly rise as a gruesome Zombie - and will try to eat everyone around – friend or foe.

The only solutions are looting the fallen soldiers or burning their corpses with fire arrows. This expansion requires player to start new campaign to activate the Zombie Mode feature, or a new Skirmish game and comes complete with new screens, high-res Zombie units, sound effects and main menu changes.

In addition we have another major update 42 coming later this month - can`t wait to share the new DLC and update with our community.

As always - thanks for your support!