New week, new progress report :)

Level:
We worked on some feedback regarding Apoc and also added more details to the blockout. We also cleaned up parts of the world map during the material rework and switched all the different blockout master materials to a single one

Code:
Continuing to make progress on the processing range.

Character:
The model and textures for Rad are pretty much finished. Next week we will probably make a version with fur, although this fur-less one looks pretty cool too. We are also working on a very nice Maya sandbox outfit that will fit perfectly with Agon ;)




Animations:
The animations for the Maya x Shiva minigame and especially the emotional dialogue preceding it are well underway. We finished the last few Maya x Kral (Agon) sandbox animations early this week. Now with the addition of Rad we are doing a similar set for Maya x Djablo (Rad) too.

Design:
This week our design team worked on the combat AI system and editing workflow as well as item and character progression, including levelling curve, character attributes and stats, unlockable perks, itemization and build variety.
We also designed the special attack logic for the planned weapon classes.
Continued progress on several cutscene blockouts.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team

I am pleased to announce our latest update to the “Luminous Skies: A Short Adventure DLC”. Geir, the first new party member, has arrived. He can be found at the tavern in Winterholme.



Geir's class is the Defender, one of the Guardian's subclasses, though he has a few extra tricks up his sleeve that he learned before joining the 75th.

Already feel like you have too many front line fighters to pick up Geir? Don't forget that you can visit Citra's estate to swap out Briar's character class as needed to better suite the party and your own play style.



Patch Notes:
Enemy encounter rates decreased in certain areas, allowing for more exploration [This applies to all versions of Luminous Skies: A Short Adventure].

New dungeon sub map added. I'm not telling where, that would ruin the surprise [This applies to all versions of Luminous Skies: A Short Adventure].

Geir Recruitment added to the “Short Adventure DLC”.

As always, we hope you have been enjoying the game and have a great day.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the UPSAHL VR concert!

Take a trip with UPSAHL as she ignites the virtual stage for an empowering and personal live VR concert that’s truly lit.

This VR concert features the widely praised single “Drugs,” which has been used in nearly two million TikTok videos, reaching #6 on the Viral Chart and the #1 Sound on the Trends Chart. It also includes several songs off her star-sign inspired EP Sagittarius. The EP provides an introspective glimpse into her fiery persona and pays homage to her sign.

Don't just stream music – step into it. See you at the UPSAHL VR concert! 🎶🤘

- Adds tank images to the pairs game.
- Adds additional flowers to the pairs game.

At the heart of our development philosophy lies the strong belief that the best games are created in collaboration with the community that plays them. As such, we are incredibly grateful for the dedicated and passionate community that has formed around ΔV. To ensure that the changes and updates to the game align with your expectations, we have been conducting player votes on our Discord server. Your votes have been invaluable in shaping the future of our asteroid mining simulator, and we are excited to present the top priorities that came up as a result of the first post-1.0 vote:



Here is the list of areas that caught most of your attention. These will be prioritized with updates:

• Gameplay and Mechanics (223 votes): Refining the core mechanics and introducing exciting new features to ensure your asteroid-mining adventures are more engaging than ever.
  
• New Ships (177 votes): Both completely new ship hulls and some new variants of already existing ships are coming to supplement your fleet.
  
• More Hardware (156 votes): Expanded catalog of mining hardware choices, ranging from advanced point defense mining lasers to resource scanners, new heads-up displays, and brand-new equipment categories, empowering you to extract resources like never before.

Issues on this list were still popular but didn’t make it to the top three of the most wanted. We will work on these as time allows:

• Mod Support (149 votes): Support for modding and Steam Workshop, giving you the freedom to craft your unique mining experiences and share them with the community.
  
• More Events (132 votes): New story events you can encounter while you explore and excavate the Rings. Thrilling challenges, rare phenomena, and unexpected discoveries that will keep your mining ventures full of surprises.

These things caught the least votes and are probably better suited as expansions for another time, later down the line:

• Quality of Life (97 votes): Enhancements that streamline your operations and make your mining endeavors more rewarding.
  
• Immersion Features (96 votes): Expanding the game lore, additional interaction options, and dialogue choices that make the game world a living and breathing place.
  
• Story Arc 2.0 (83 votes): Following the next big narrative after the anarchist conflict.
  
• NPC AI (72 votes): Enhancing the behavior of NPC ships you encounter and wingmen, both when mining and when fighting.
  
• Performance (48 votes): Improving performance is an endless task, each steep moving the range of playable systems additional few months back, allowing the game to be played on older hardware.

Stay tuned for more updates and sneak peeks as we fly towards ΔV: Rings of Saturn 2.0!
Happy mining!

Progress is steady, but significant. We are exploring with new variations of existing enemies, big and small, new mechanics and also experimenting with new creatures, introducing them to the island...organically and intrusively. The virus may not be part of the island's ecosystem, but it will make sure to do its best to fit in, to consume and grow.

Reminder that it is less than a month until Gamescom, so make sure you tune in and if you are in the area, drop by to say hi!

We've discovered yet another specimen. This form of life is unmistakably the result of the virus' rapid mutation and adaptive capabilities. In order to proliferate, the virus gave birth to yet another dangerous atrocity, one that adopts and replicates the look of inanimate objects.



While we've seen in the past mutagenic variants that imitates human beings or animals, or others that consumes entire buildings, this is new on our radar. From small household objects to entire houses, with everything inside of it, the virus replicates it.

Why such a variant exists is still being investigated, however, it is being hypothesized that the behavior could be similar to the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) carnivorous plant. It attempts to lure unsuspecting victims in its clutches, just to entrap and consume them. Extreme caution is advised.



This variant of the virus uses meat-like tissue as its main brick and mortar. Its spread is rapid, despite being made out of living tissue, its sturdiness is astonishing.

If further studied, analyzed and brought under control, it may prove to be a valuable resource to be used in the future. Having potentially unlimited building materials, created organically, could potentially fix the housing problem and even aid future war efforts.

A genetic mutation is a change to a gene's DNA sequence to produce something divergent. It creates a permanent change to that specimen. Genetic variations are important for humans to evolve, which is the process of change over generations...and genetic variations are also important to the virus.



Viruses usually create new strains. New strains get created when viruses replicate themselves. When copying, sometimes mistakes get made. Those mistakes create a slightly different versions of the virus and its biochemical spawn.



Variants of the similar type of specimens get created, with small mutations, some significant, some minor. Some have functional purpose, adaptive to new surroundings or circumstances, while others are only remnants of the evolution phase of the mutagenic virus.



For our French fans, we have a special treat from STAF_52. Je vous en prie.



Look forward for some major reveals and some animated wonders.

Wishlist now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1874190/Vorax/

Phase one of localization added (WIP)
Menu improvements
Water improvements
New fire system
Fall and land animations added
Attack interruption glitch fixed
General bug fixes
Added infinite Stamina to God Mode

Hey hey everyone, EA27 is finally here! Holy smokes this took a long time...

So what's new? Basically I have been working on getting story missions to work with the game. On top of creating a story mission I have spent a lot of time refactoring the underlying game tech so that it works with both the original instant action style sandbox gameplay and the new designed style of the story campaign. You can see the results of this in the new story mission available in the instant action menu. This mission is a part of the story campaign I announced a while back, and while it is still a work in progress (this is Ravenfield after all...) it is still playable from start to finish. In this mission, you're tasked with assaulting the Citadel and sabotaging the enemy air capabilities. It even opens with a cutscene featuring shiny new fully-animated characters :O



The idea behind this mission is to bring together parts of both Spec Ops and Battle gameplay, so you will play as both Talon and your standard Eagle grunt in the same mission. All game logic that drives this mission has been designed using the new Trigger System - a set of logic components that can be connected together using signals in the RF Mod Tools for Unity. The point of this system is to make story mission map design much more approachable for modders. One of the primary goals for the Citadel mission was to design the Trigger System itself along with the mission, making sure that similar missions can be created using only Triggers - zero coding required!

This Trigger System is not limited to story missions, however. You can attach Trigger System components to any modded GameObject, meaning it can be used to drive game logic on your modded maps, vehicles, weapons, projectiles, etc. While the Trigger System can be viewed as an alternative to Ravenscript, more complex logic are usually easier to design using Ravenscript, but the choice is left entirely to the modder. The two systems are completely interoperable as you can send and receive Trigger System signals from a Ravenscript ScriptedBehavior component. Along with the Trigger System, there are other mission-related components that can be used to manually set up AI paths, detect player entering triggers, trigger cutscenes and more.



On top of the new game systems, you will probably notice that the AI has been streamlined quite a bit, and that the game plays a lot better than it did in EA26. This is due to the numerous AI changes that had to be made in order to accomodate the new trigger system and custom game mode tech. You should see the AI using their weapons in a more sane way, and utilizing cover better. The game HUD has also received a much-needed makeover, and now has a more modern and clear style. Additionally, the new HUD is modular, so custom HUDs can override specific parts of the official HUD as needed.



Now that this update is out, what's next? Most of the very time-consuming task of redoing the game infrastructure to support story missions and the Trigger System is now done. This means that you can expect much more frequent updates in the future, mainly focused on adding more official story missions and eventually becoming the story campaign. These tools are also being made available to modders right away, so modders will be able to create playable custom game modes or story missions inside level files. Eventually, modders will be able to create fully fledged custom game modes playable on any map, but we are not quite there yet, maybe for EA28 :D!



Game changes
- Added WIP story mission that takes place on the Citadel map
- New HUD design!
- Added hangar area to the Citadel map
- Navmesh generator now fully support terrain holes
- Forced navmesh generator to use highest detail representation of terrain while generating.
- Optimized the germanic house models used on Citadel map, drastically reducing the drawcalls
- Fixed a bug where alt weapons would not animate correctly after getting up from ragdoll
- Added checks to prevent option menu values like mouse sensitivity and FOV from randomly changing while playing the game.
- Added support for moving platforms such as elevators!
- You can now stand on top of vehicles without being rammed (Basically allowing you to ride on top of tanks and stuff lol). This works up to a speed threshold of 20 m/s
- Added support for custom game modes bundled inside maps
- Fixed a bug where weapons using patched animations (due to them not being EA26+ compatible) would sometimes spam error messages.
- Made soldier animation culling more robust, should fix a rare bug where animations would sometimes be culled when they shouldn't.
- Improvement to player third person lean animation transitions.
- Improvements to soldier animation state machine transitions so animations between different stances flow better and faster.
- The capture state of the flag the player is capturing will now be updated every frame, meaning that the flag capture progress will look smoother.
- The kill cam will now move slightly when the direct path between the player and the killer bot is obscured.
- Fixed a bug where maps with multiple identical flag pairs in the neighbor manager would not start.
- Added slight spread to Rhino MG
- Cassowary missile tracking/lock sounds will now play in bomb sight.
- Fixed a bug where bots could sometimes shoot through walls
- At very short ranges (< 1m) Players cannot deal friendly fire, this mitigates the issue where friendly bots run in front of you just as you fire your weapon.
- Fixed a bug where flag capture volumes sometimes would not initialize correctly at the start of a map
- Added follower invisibility system to the citadel mission (Copying over the functionality from spec-ops where your squadmates will be invisible to enemy detection while following you). This system is now completely modular and is exposed to the trigger system and eventually to RS.
- Added Detection Groups, where multiple AI squads will alert each other whenever one of them spots the enemy. These components can also send trigger signals whenever a group is alerted.
- Doubled suppressed Patriot projectile falloff range so it's more effective at longer ranges.
- Fixed some spawns at the Coastline flag Cliff that were previously under the terrain
- Refactored the vehicle HUD system to be more robust when changing cameras
- Added support to compeltely disable the player's game input, which is useful for cutscenes etc.
- Fixed a bug where the player could sometimes end up on the wrong team in the scoreboard UI
- Improved suspension values on Jeep and Quadbike so they should be a little less bouncy
- Reduced friction on ground vehicle hitbox colliders so they don't get stuck quite as hard when running into stuff
- Refactored the audio system to make it easier to control audio mixing from Ravenscript/Trigger system
- Master AudioMixer is no longer affected by filtering on audio events such as deafening and being inside enclosed vehicles, so you can use this group to play unfiltered audio even when using filters on all other ingame audio.
- Ingame audio will now fade in when starting a match
- Updated lightmaps on Temple and Citadel maps.
- Updated to Unity engine 2020.3.48f1

Custom Game Modes
- Added support for custom game modes, at the moment custom game modes can only be bundled inside maps, but eventually it will be possible to also use custom game modes on any level.
- Added lots of new systems that allow for story missions to be played.
- Added support for freezing the game during cutscenes, etc.
- Added support for loading/saving data between level restarts. This is currently limited to checkpoint data, but will be expanded in future updates. It will also be possible to save this data between game sessions for persistent data loading and saving for mutators and custom campaigns.
- Added WIP Citadel story mission that can be played via the instant action menu. This mission is entirely designed using the new Trigger system!

AI Changes
- Squadmates following their leader will now try to move in a way so they can always have direct line of sight to the squad leader, meaning squads stick closer together in areas with lots of cover.
- Fixed a bug where the AI sometimes would pick really bad cover points while defending a flag
- The AI will now prefer to spread out more when picking a cover point.
- Fixed a bug where the AI would not fire mortar style weapons correctly
- Improved AI weapon switching, so now they should be way more consistent and not switch out their weapon all the time.
- Fixed AI crouching/leaning while using cover points.
- When using slow fire rate weapons like snipers, bots will now wait a little after taking a shot before crouching when behind cover.
- Bots with skill level veteran or higher will now lean while checking corners in close quarters areas.
- Fixed a bug where bots would sometimes walk through geometry when getting a new path while traversing a pathfinding link.
- Fixed multiple bugs where bots would get corrupted paths when walking to capture points after being ragdolled/strafing a target.
- When walking around a corner, bots that lean will now lean more or less depending on their look direction. This should result in smoother looking leans and prevent weird leaning behaviour when aiming backwards, etc.
- Bots will no longer play emote animations while targeting an enemy or reloading.
- Fixed a bug where bots would sometimes look at the ground when approaching the end of their current walking path.
- Bots now go to walkable navmesh nodes inside of the capture range/volume when attacking a flag, this should prevent edge cases where attacking squads think they are attacking a flag when in reality they are standing outside of the capture zone.
- AI can no longer deal friendly fire while using normal projectiles. They can still deal friendly fire by splash damage, however. Previously, AI could deal friendly fire damage when hitting a target 100 meters or futher away
- After firing their weapon, bots will not be able to look around for one second (unless they spot another target to fire at). This fixes an issue where bots would sometimes fire at an enemy, but then look in a completely other direction and continue holding their fire input for a split second, randomly firing projectiles across the level.
- Lots of other small tweaks and improvements to the AI

Ingame Map Editor
- Fixed some map editor props not generating navmesh correctly.
- Fixed skeleton hat missing mesh
- Fixed missing colliders on snowy arch and house stilts

Modding
- Added displayName field for weapons, this is the name that shows up in the new UI.
- Dropped support of the legacy animation component. This component will no longer load from mods. Please use the new animator controller component instead!
- Added component for animated vehicles to drive engine audio from their current speed, this is really useful for cutscenes where the vehicle movement is pre-animated such as the breaching APC in the citadel mission.

Trigger system
- Added ScriptedPathGroups which can be used to manually design paths for bots to follow.
- Added several dozens of logic components that can be used to contorol game flow

Ravenscript
- Added a killCredit property to weapons which is automatically set to whoever equips a weapon, but can be overridden through this value. This value can also be used to set whoever should get the kill from scripted weapons such as automatic turrets, etc.
- Renamed Projectile.source to Projectile.killCredit to match weapon naming convention. Accessing .source will still work, meaning mods using the older name will still work fine.
- Fixed a bug where weapons could not fire projectiles through the Shoot() function unless they were first equipped by an actor. This means that weapons can now be fired via scripts without having to be picked up.
- Exposed functions that can be used to hide individual elements of the new ingame UI. This is great if you're making a custom HUD and only want to replace parts of the vanilla UI.
- Exposed PlayerHud.playerOrderState to RS, which can be used to drive player squad status labels in your custom HUDs
- Added Actor functions to more easily access actor skinned mesh renderers
- Exposed fonts to Ravenscript and DataContainer component
- Various Ravenscript bugfixes


Coming up, I'm goin to finish up the citadel story mission and improve the support for custom game modes for EA28. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy this update!

/Johan (SteelRaven7)

• Bugfix: Crash in some circumstances when loading blueprints into an existing ship with under-construction parts.
  
• Bugfix: Stations could sometimes "steal" resources from the player when helping with the player's ship construction.

For the next 1-2 weeks, we're going to put all our efforts into completely redoing the UI and sorting out the skills and descriptions. We'll also be correcting some of the current unreasonable aspects, redoing some upgrades, adjusting difficulty, and adding some challenging content. Therefore, the fix for some minor bugs might be delayed, apologies for any inconvenience. We're doing our best with limited resources, thank you for your patience.