Jul 7, 2023

Unturned - SDGNelson

A large island of small mountain towns, secrets, and spooks. The Turned are tough and certain animals don't like it when you get too close. A mix of Russia, PEI, and Arid, but with its own unique twist on many aspects of gameplay. The island contains multiple forest biomes, no military presence, and rare to find guns and supplies. Buak is heavily aimed towards singleplayer, co-op, and PVE playstyles and contains over 2,000 items to discover and use. Some of these are items that redefine the conventional vanilla systems of building with extra room to decorate, and much more. There’s a blueprint system, learn item recipes permanently to be able to craft them in the future!

Buak takes inspiration from Unturned Classic (2.0), the many scrapped ideas and designs of 3.0, as well as the concepts of Unturned II (4.0).

A lot of conventional things in Vanilla Unturned may have been abandoned on Buak, from freeform buildables to building on vehicles; You'll have to seek out the alternatives provided. All items, animals, resources, and objects are also entirely custom and may not work as intended when mixed with other mods/maps.

Some suggestions for gameplay: The map is best played without any other mods and in Normal mode or above, as Easy mode removes many mechanics.

Watch the Buak Trailer Here

Note: Buak is significantly more dense with detail than prior curated maps. Instead of compromising on this detail level, the Level Batching Update earlier this year was originally developed to help optimize Buak. That being said, lowering the max draw distance and landmarks when playing Buak will raise the performance quite a bit because the game can then cull more details.

To host a server running the map add its workshop file ID (3000549606) to the File_IDs list in WorkshopDownloadConfig.json, and set the map to "Buak" (without quotes) in Commands.dat.

For the first time rather than playtime drops, you can craft a random new limited item from Menu > Survivors > Inventory > Crafting. The items are permanent, but the ability to craft them will only be available for two weeks during the release event.

This project was created by Toothy Deerryte, staswalle, Paulfest, and Witness Protection. If you enjoy the map and would like to support them, consider checking out the box or bundles on the Stockpile:

Buak Map Mystery Box
Buak Map Bundle
Buak Friendship Bundle

Other links:

Starter Guide
ID List
Cosmetics Showcase Video

9th Anniversary on Steam

Today marks nine years since Unturned 2.0 first launched into Early Access on Steam. Thank you to everyone in the Unturned community for your support and creativity through another great year! With each individual update it can be hard to see how the game is changing and improving, but looking back over the years it's wild to realize how much has happened.

Firefighter Zombie Plush

We reached the minimum order quantity, many thanks to the early backers! Makeship has extended the campaign to the 15th, so if you're interested there is still time to pick one up.

View Unturned Firefighter Zombie Plush on Makeship
View Makeship FAQ

Vanilla Changelog

Changed

Improved how zombies with multiple special attacks randomize their choices.

Fixed

Germany civilian ammo spawning 1911 magazines rather than Ace magazines. [Thanks Naamell8!]
Reloading vanilla assets with /reload command failing due to legacy IDs in reserved range.

Jul 7, 2023

Entropic Float's One Year Anniversary!

Entropic Float: This World Will Decay And Disappear - Nhitori

One year ago today- On July 7th, 2022- I released the 300k+ word long visual novel Entropic Float: This World Will Decay and Disappear, at no cost on itch and steam.

(Madeline by unluckyerror404 on Artfight)

It was a labor of love- I worked on it for just over a year and a half, and my life changed a lot during that time. I got a job related to my degree, then proceeded to crash and burn when it turned out that I couldn't actually manage that job alongside my chronic conditions. Working on Entropic Float was the only thing during that time that really made me happy at all, so it's no surprise I ended up quitting for my health shortly after release...

Since I released Entropic Float, lots of things have happened. I've seen it referred to on reddit as 'the queerest game I've ever played'. I've received wonderful fanart. People have come to me saying that the game helped them realize they were physically disabled. My good friend, the vtuber FreyaFukunaga, played through the entire game on stream. There have of course been bad reviews too, negative feedback- No game can be for everyone, and Entropic Float is a game for some rather specific people. I've taken into account critiques made in good faith, and made efforts to improve these things where possible in updates to the game, and even moreso in the way they will be structured in Entropic Float 2: Land Of The Witch.

But before we talk about Entropic Float 2, which I'm sure you've all been waiting for information on, let me put some concerns to rest. I have, by no means, been doing nothing all this time. EF2 is coming along, though not in ways that are easy to share. Still, have a look-

Admittedly, it's a bit ugly without all the extra buttons, text, and more that will accompany this frame- It's just one small piece of the GUI I've been building. Entropic Float 2 is a big shift in style from the first game- For one, I'm no longer using Koikatsu for talksprites or environments. For another, it's going to be a point and click adventure game (Though the final release will include a 'kinetic novel version' option for those who prefer to play VNs on auto-advance!). You can see it, right? The menu buttons along the right edge, an inventory with tabs you can cycle in the bottom right corner, some information about the current state of the game in the empty space on the left...However, besides EF2, there have been other things I'm working on, and I'll admit to having some trouble finding a good workflow. During EF's development, it was simple enough- In my free time, I did those things which made me money (commissions, convention prep) and when those were done I worked on Entropic Float and did very little else. This workflow can no longer apply, because in the interim year, I've been building my small business, Nico's Fan Niche, on etsy. There are some pieces of Entropic Float merch available there! But the point is, now it seems there is always 'something to do which can make me money', as designing new products has a direct impact on my life now.

Besides the store, I'm also involved in other gamedev projects- I continue to be support staff on Heart Fragment, and am the primary artist of an RPG with a few friends of mine, yet to be formally announced. To top it all off, I do still have a day job. I work 30 hours a week (sometimes up to 39) with a studio called Small Victories. It's a wonderful and fulfilling position that gives me the space I need for personal projects, but that's still 30+ hours of the week not spent on those projects.

(Sharma by Quartoch on Artfight)
Finally- Entropic Float 2 is a loftier game than Entropic Float was. When I started EF, it was just for fun, to play with ren'py, and was never supposed to be as long as it ended up being. EF2 is a followup game. It needs to be bigger, better, and the pressure is on. For this reason, I decided to postpone making the game's art until after July- After Artfight 2023. My username there is nhitori if you want an attack from me! Each year, Artfight represents a huge burst of improvement for me and my artistic abilities. A talksprite drawn in June and a talksprite drawn in August would by nature be very obviously different in quality. I've been writing, outlining, working on GUI, but there hasn't been anything worth sharing on here yet.

Even so, I am very happy to announce- You should be able to expect the Entropic Float 2 Demo, and its Kickstarter, in November 2023!
Enter the Pine Creek Anomaly to discover exactly what happened in the small, Appalachian town several years ago- And why, so suddenly, the Anomaly started to invite outsiders in, after flying under the radar all this time. Kanatsune Ame returns to be guided by the player as he searches for the answers within a new cast of characters; Some familiar faces, some made more familiar after a mention in the Anomalous Clocktower, and some he's never met before at all.

And following shortly after the EF2 Demo and Kickstarter- There's one backer reward that will be fulfilled right away. Releasing in December 2023, right away for backers, just in time for the holidays if you just want to purchase it on its own (For only 5 USD- But if you played Entropic Float because it was free, and you really can't spare the money for any reason, do reach out to me.)

">It's been such a long time... But I've finally found You." (Box by Vanitasium on Artfight)

Quite a while after the stabilization of the Anomalous Clocktower, but not yet when you join Ame in the Pine Creek Anomaly- A voice calls out to you. A voice that is familiar, the voice which spoke directly to you throughout the first game. Informing you of the endings you've acquired. Warning you of what's ahead. Asking if you'd like to bring about the miracle. You never would have imagined that voice belonged to somebody. But it seems... She's gathered a new collection of stories for you. Fragments of those you've met before. Histories you couldn't see at the time, updates from the year since you left them behind. If you can read these stories and become more powerful again, like you did in the Clocktower, then maybe, just maybe... You and Her can meet face to face.

The Letters To A Beloved Ghost DLC for the first game will be arriving in December 2023! Along with the DLC, you'll also be able to install the 'Anachrono Mode' for Entropic Float. This mode replaces koikatsu talksprites with drawn talksprites in any cases where those have been added for DLC content. As the characters may be dressed in different clothing in these talksprites, and there may not be exact analogues for every expression, and the environments will remain koikatsu-style in most if not all places- It promises to be a bit anachronistic. But if the talksprites exist, may as well give you the option to use them!

One last thing- I'll be tabling in the Artist's Colony at Connecticon 2023, though I haven't got a table number yet. I also may be tabling at FANEXPO Boston 2023 (Unconfirmed), and Otakuthon 2023 (Waitlisted, but I'll still be attending as a guest if I don't get a table.) So if any fans reading this wanted to come say hello- There's a few opportunities. I might even have something for you, if you come by my table.

With that, the anniversary update is finished. That's all I've got for you right now- But there's a lot to look forward to! Thank you, as always, for reading, for playing, for being here with me on my gamedev journey.

Jul 7, 2023

PC Version Features and Behind the Scenes

The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie - Durante

Hi everyone,

Trails into Reverie is releasing soon, so we want to provide some more information about the specific features of our PC port, and also a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour regarding its development -- for those who are interested in that kind of thing, and in hearing why Reverie's PC port was quite a bit more challenging than we initially expected.

PC Feature Overview

Since Trails into Reverie is, at a game systems level, a clear descendant of the Trails of Cold Steel series, I think it makes sense to start with a list of PC features returning from our ports of those games. I'll try to keep this one short since it's nothing new, and you can read up on our ports of these games elsewhere:

Arbitrary resolution support, including all secondary render targets
Unlocked framerate support up to 360 FPS
Support for MSAA, and optional transparency supersampling
Ultrawide aspect ratio support
Additional and improved shadow filtering and quality options
Extended draw distance options (including an option for unlimited draw distance)
A FoV adjustment slider
Various smaller graphics settings, to e.g. toggle individual post-processing effects, increase their quality, or enable anisotropic filtering

In addition to these returning features, we have made the following major improvements compared to the Trails of Cold Steel ports:

Fully action-based input rebinding: for our port of Trails into Reverie, we completely replaced the input system, moving from a controller-focused underlying system to a semantic-action-based system. What this means in practice is that you can e.g. have different contextual mouse/keyboard bindings in many different contexts, which do not always have to follow the controller layout in a uniform fashion. It also means that you can bind additional direct actions not available on controllers due to lack of space (e.g. directly using S-breaks in battle). Of course, all menus and help/tutorial screens will still show the correct button prompts for whatever binding you chose.
An in-game settings menu, with all options applying immediately. This also includes some other new options that you might recognize from our recent Crossbell releases, for example the ability to customize the behavior of the game when it loses focus (e.g. when you alt-tab out).
Greatly improved arbitrary aspect ratio support, now also supporting aspect ratios narrower than 16:9. The latter primarily targets 16:10 as found on some monitors and notably the Steam Deck, but even 4:3 should generally work, so knock yourself out with that CRT! (Take care not to do so literally, given the weight of those things.) More about the trials and tribulations of actually making this happen later.
Further improved graphics options, including higher quality and more appropriate HBAO+ integration than any of the previous titles, and a specific setting for minimap multisampling. The latter might sound a bit silly, but it is basically free in terms of performance, and a substantial enhancement given that the minimap renders a lot of thin high-contrast lines).
Some other features with more niche applications, such as Steam dynamic cloud sync, and a hack which enables Steam Deck and WINE players on Linux to directly import their saves from previous games without any manual work.

I probably missed a few things, but this should cover most of it. If you were just looking for information about the port, then you can stop reading here -- we'll now dive into a bit of behind-the-scenes information on the port development.

Behind the Scenes

As I mentioned earlier, Trails into Reverie is built on the same technical basis as the Cold Steel games (especially 3 and 4), and as such, we were pretty confident in being able to add even more features to the port, including some that are actually more labor-intensive than they might at first appear. That is especially true for features that might seem obvious, but which neither the game nor the engine were ever really built for -- and three of the headline features I mentioned above fall squarely into that category: action-based rebinding, immediate in-game settings, and above all arbitrary aspect ratio support. Arbitrary framerate support is somewhat similar, but to me, that is non-negotiable, so unlike the other three the complications arising from supporting high and variable framerates are not extra work that we freely choose to make for ourselves.

The biggest problem we ran into, and that we didn't fully account for when starting the project, is just how absolutely massive Trails into Reverie is. Most people reading this are probably aware that all the Trails games are pretty long, but when it comes to the effort involved in porting and especially the features I mentioned previously, we have to distinguish between what I'll call "content size" and "system size". The former is basically length of the game based on content, but which uses the same underlying systems, i.e. basic map traversal, battles, and events. This type of size does increase QA overhead, and obviously relates directly to e.g. localization and asset adjustments, but doesn't really affect the core port engineering effort much.

On the other hand, what I dubbed "system size" refers to the number of individual, distinct -- at an implementation level -- systems which comprise the game. And here Trails into Reverie is without peer in my experience. There is a cohort of mini-games, with some being sufficiently substantial to require an entirely separate action set. And not just that, there are unique battle systems, render paths, and even story sequence display schemes which might only be used once in the entire 100 hour game.

How does this affect the challenges I talked about previously? It increases them tremendously: regardless of whether a given system or graphical effect in the game is a core component or only used for 10 minutes and never seen again, it will still require roughly the same amount of work to e.g. make it display correctly across arbitrary aspect ratios. In essence, the system size of the game multiplies with the PC feature surface we want to provide -- which is also more substantial than anything we ever did on the ToCS line of games (and, if I can be allowed to say so, more substantial than many PC ports with much higher budgets).

To give you some final idea of how all of this comes together, here is some data directly from our bug tracker:

We tracked 138 tickets related to (ultrawide or narrow, mostly both) aspect ratio support. As of writing, a week before release, 125 of these are solved, and we'll probably get to a few more before the release. Of course we prioritized these according to severity, so what remains are mostly things like "one part of one effect of one spell is stretched/squished".
We tracked 36 tickets related to button prompts. All 36 are fixed as of now. 11 of them were related to mini-games or other non-core functionality.
We tracked 27 tickets related to arbitrary framerate support, which are often among the most time-intensive to fix. Of these, 22 are currently fixed, and most of the rest are miniscule to the extent that it's unlikely anyone who is not specifically looking out for them and comparing would notice (e.g. cards in the Vantage Masters minigame might be served slightly more quickly).

I should note that all of these are tickets, which can potentially aggregate several issues each. Even more importantly, this only captures problems found after the start of QA, at which point we had of course already fixed all the most severe problems with the core game.
Also, the counts in each category aren't really comparable in terms of how much effort fixing them is on average. Still, I hope this gives you an idea of how much effort needs to go into these seemingly innocuous features, if they have to be added after the fact to a massive game that was not built with them in mind.

VR Support

There's still one more thing to talk about: VR support. On PS4, Trails into Reverie included support for PSVR, and while it is only available in the model viewer and a single minigame, we are still happy to provide a complete port including both of these VR modes. This did involve a significant engineering effort that went into making VR work and perform well on PC -- without that work, it would e.g. have consumed 3 times as much VRAM for the eye framebuffer in VR than what is actually strictly necessary, and with high VR resolutions this can be a lot.
That said, there are a few key facts that anyone interested in trying these VR modes should be aware of:

There is a specific setting for VR subtitles. The default should work well on most HMDs, but if the subtitles are hard for you to read then please check out this setting.
The game offers a re-centering action which you can use in case you find yourself aligned or positioned strangely.
VR uses the resolution reported from SteamVR (and it immediately updates, so you can adjust scaling in the SteamVR overlay), but mostly relies on the normal game's graphics settings for the other features. If you experience performance issues in VR, you might have to adjust these settings, such as anti-aliasing level or shadow quality.
SteamVR is not really built for games which only have small, transient VR segments. Even though we did everything we can to streamline the process, this still means that there are potentially two manual steps involved:
- If the game starts SteamVR (since it is not already running) upon selecting a VR mode, Windows will switch the focus to the SteamVR window. You might need to manually return the focus to the game in order for it to receive inputs.
- When you exit VR in-game, SteamVR does not automatically shut down but keeps running. You have to close it manually to e.g. return your audio device assignment to normal in case it was changed by SteamVR.

Conclusion

Trails into Reverie was a challenging project not so much because of its target platform or underlying technology, but because of the large cross product between its huge number of systems and the volume of features we set out to support on PC.

I'm proud of the resulting product, and as always I want to note that it wouldn't have been possible without our excellent QA testers, all the people at PH3, and our partners. In that context I want to give a special shoutout to Peter Zangerl whose inexorable crusade against hundreds of small niggles is a large part of the polish of this release.

I hope you enjoy the game, and found this small look behind the scenes of the port interesting!

- Peter "Durante" Thoman, CTO, PH3