Nov 10, 2023

Halo Infinite - misplacedyank

Combined Arms, Halo Infinite’s first Operation, arrives tomorrow!

From November 14 to December 19, Operation: COMBINED ARMS will be active, bringing a free 20-tier Operation Pass with new customization rewards. The iconic Mjolnir Mark V armor from Halo: Combat Evolved and a playlist of beloved classic maps from Halo 3 have also come to Halo Infinite.

Combined Arms Operation Pass

The Combined Arms Operation Pass features 20 tiers of free customization rewards, along with new armor and vehicle coatings, emblems, and visors.

For those who need a quick refresher: Operations are the new evolution of Events in Halo Infinite, and Combined Arms is the first of more Operations to come. For a full breakdown, check out our Operations blog.

Player feedback around Events was that their short two-week window felt too limiting, and that once they’re gone there’s no way to obtain those rewards again. Enter Operations, which will run for approximately four-to-six weeks with a free 20-tier Operation Pass that is progressed with Match XP. An Operation can be purchased at any point via Halo Infinite’s in-game Switcher or Shop.

The Operations Pass comes with additional premium upgrade options:

500 credits instantly unlocks an exclusive bonus customization item, makes the Operation Pass durable (it will not expire), and – when equipped – offers bonus XP and an extra Challenge slot during the Operation’s live window
2,000 credits instantly unlocks all 20 tiers of the Operation Pass at purchase and includes the exclusive bonus customization item

Purchase either of the Combined Arms Operation Pass options above and you will additionally acquire the Grey Hunter armor coating.

Halo 3 Refueled

2007 has arrived in 2023, as seven Halo 3 maps recreated in Forge in partnership with the community are coming to a new matchmaking playlist in Halo Infinite alongside the Combined Arms Operation tomorrow.

Claim the High Ground and revisit the vertical heights of Construct, the lush jungles of Guardian, a Banished-themed take on Narrows, and other beloved classics recreated in Halo Infinite’s Forge mode. Alongside these is also Critical Dewpoint, a map created by ArturBloodshot, based around our nostalgia-fueled partnership with Mountain Dew.

For more details, be sure to check out our Halo 3 Refueled blog when it lands tomorrow.

New Waypoint Chronicle Inbound

Also accompanying the release of Combined Arms is a new Waypoint Chronicle which will release later this month!

2560. The Banished have come to Suban, the blood-moon of Sanghelios, seeking to claim the unique natural resource within its vast mines: the beautiful but volatile Subanese crystals.

The Swords of Sanghelios and their Spartan allies face an overwhelming force on the ground, while a Sangheili shipmistress in the skies above seeks to find a weakness in the enemy’s armor that might turn the tide against these invaders.

Stay tuned for the release of this short story (which will be available here and on Halo Waypoint, as a free PDF, and in audiobook format on YouTube) on November 27.

"Look, A Mark V!"

Bred for combat, built for war, you are the master of any weapon, pilot of any vehicle, and fear no enemy.

In celebration of Halo’s upcoming birthday, the CE Mark V armor kit became available for purchase in the Shop on November 7. The Combat Evolved Mark V bundle contains:

Combat Evolved Mark V armor kit
Cinder Ring multi-use armor coating
Viridescent Ring multi-use armor coating
Aurum Evolved visor

Unseal the hushed casket and awaken the flawless cowboy within. Prevail through nerves of steel and a quick trigger finger.

And be sure to complete all of your Challenges this week to unlock the latest Ultimate Reward: AAP/Ordnance Pack Oscar for your Mark V armor.

That concludes this overview of Halo Infinite’s debut Operation, which runs for the next five weeks (after which, the Winter Contingency III Operation will begin).

Go forth and start working your way through that free Operation Pass to claim your customization rewards, check out the new Halo 3 Refueled playlist, secure the CE Mark V armor kit to indulge in some classic nostalgia that has never looked so snazzy, and stay tuned for the upcoming Waypoint Chronicle!

See you on Suban.

Press Kit

Download the official Combined Arms Press Kit here!

Nov 10, 2023

November Dev Diary

The Long Dark - hinterland_community

Hello Survivors,

We’re nearly finished with Part Four of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, the paid Expansion Pass DLC for Survival Mode, so I thought you might be curious to know a bit more about what’s being added in this new part, launching early December.

As outlined in my September Dev Diary, Part Four — which will be called BURIED ECHOES — includes the next new region in the Far Territory: the Zone of Contamination.

The old Langston Mine lies at the heart of the Zone of Contamination, industrial pollution from decades-old mining operations leaving it a poisoned wasteland patrolled by toxic wolves, featuring large industrial remnants and hiding many hazards, and mysteries! At its heart, an open-pit mine scars the landscape, and deep inside its twisting tunnels — if you survive the poisoned gas — sits a room that holds many secrets. The Zone of Contamination is the second of three large regions that make up the Far Territory, and we’re excited to see how you find it pairs up with the Forsaken Airfield, which we launched in Part One.

The Zone of Contamination, coming in TALES, Part Four.

To go along with the Mine theme, we’ve included a variety of new and useful gameplay tools: a Respirator, which when worn will protect you from poisoned gas you might find in the Zone of Contamination, and eventually, other parts of the Far Territory and Great Bear Island at large. The Respirator relies on consumable Canisters to provide its protection, so keep an eye open for those as you explore the Far Territory. We’re also adding Chemical Boots, which can protect you from the toxic pools that pollute the Zone of Contamination (these pools are really hard on regular footwear!), and a Hardhat that offers strong physical protection against head damage. There’s also a Miner’s Coat and Miner’s Pants, which make up a whole set of protective gear, if you manage to find them all.

And while exploring the Zone of Contamination, make sure you keep an eye out for the Poisoned Wolves that patrol the area. They are leaner than regular wolves, and more desperate. Living around the toxic pools have left them poisoned themselves, and without much to eat, so they are more dangerous than usual. Their bite can leave you with the new Poisoned affliction, so be extra careful when exploring the Zone of Contamination.

The Langston Mine sits at the heart of the Zone of Contamination, and hides many secrets.

Within the Zone of Contamination, you’ll also be able to start the second Tale: Buried Echoes. A continuation of Signal Void which we introduced in Part Two, Buried Echoes adds another layer of mystery to the story of the mine workers, the Security Chief, and the enigmatic Rüdiger. Buried Echoes presents a story that goes in a somewhat unusual direction for THE LONG DARK, and we’re excited to see what you think. The Tale and the new region also feature new music, which all add to the atmosphere of Part Four. And, as with Signal Void, there’s a special gameplay reward to be gained for completing Buried Echoes. You’ll first have to get there to see what it is. (And don’t worry, the Tale will be available in Interloper experience mode.)

The Travois, coming in TALES, Part Four.

Beyond the Zone of Contamination and Buried Echoes, Part Four also adds a significant new gameplay tool: the Travois. A craftable, movable container, the Travois is constructed from Saplings and other materials, and allows you to drag a large amount of extra gear around with you. But keep in mind, you will make some compromises to movement speed while dragging the Travois, and you can’t take it everywhere! And depending on what you choose to load it up with, it can be a very effective wildlife attractant, so be careful to stop and look around once in a while, lest a pack of hungry wolves or a bear sneaks up on you. It’s the perfect tool for moving large amounts of gear and items from one location to another, when stocking up a new safehouse or supply cache, or moving your main base of operations to a new region.

As always, we don’t want players who opted not to purchase TALES to feel left out, so we’ve also included some meaningful free updates to the “base” Survival game, which will be available to everyone who owns THE LONG DARK or SURVIVAL EDITION.

As we shared in the September Dev Diary, we’ve finally managed to find a good way to add hand coverings in the game. Now, what you see on your hands will reflect what you have equipped in your hand slots in the Clothing Menu. Same for the lower sleeves of whatever you are wearing on your arms. We’ve updated some animations so that they work better with things like Mittens. We’re very happy with how this has turned out, and we feel it brings a whole new level of immersion to THE LONG DARK. We hope you agree when you get the chance to try them out.

We’ve also added a whole new series of first-person Harvesting Animations. Now, when you choose to Harvest a carcass for meat or other resources, you will see your hands involved with the harvesting action, as well as the tool you have chosen to harvest with. It’s another way that we’re trying to always enhance the sense of immersion in THE LONG DARK for our players.

You will also have the opportunity to use the new Insulated Flasks, which let you store and keep liquids warm for longer. Perfect for when you want to stack some Warmth buffs for those long treks across the frozen wilderness. The Flasks come in a variety of colours and patterns, so keep your eyes open for them as you move through the world.

And finally, we’ve added a new Scurvy affliction to the game. Certain foods will now provide you with Vitamin-C, and if you don’t consume enough of them over time, you can develop Scurvy Risk and then eventually Scurvy. It’s a horrible thing to contend with. Definitely something to keep an eye on for those longer-running games.

That mainly sums up the focus of Part Four of TALES, and we think it’s a great way to end the year for THE LONG DARK.

The last note I want to make is about the recent Hinterland Pop-Up Merch Store. As many of you know, we closed our store in 2021 because of COVID, and due to overwhelming requests from the community, we decided to open it up just to clear out our “old” inventory in time for the holidays. We didn’t really anticipate the demand, and the Pop-Up shop -- which we had planned to run for 3 weeks -- sold out over 1300 items in less than three hours!

Our original plan was to use this to clear our stock to make room for a whole new line of merch items in the new year, but we know many of you didn’t get the opportunity to purchase a Hinterland mug, or a Jackrabbit hoodie, or one of the fantastic Granted x Hinterland sweaters. So we’re looking at restocking as much as we can for the new year, and our current plan is to sell many of these items along with the new items we’ll be launching in the new year. So if you missed out this time, you’ll have at least one more opportunity to purchase some of this classic Hinterland or THE LONG DARK merch. If you want to be kept up to date on these sales, we recommend signing up for the Hinterland newsletter.

That about wraps up the November dev diary. Keep your eyes open for the release of BURIED ECHOES and the free Survival Update that comes at the same time, early in December. You can expect a full narrated update video to launch with Part Four, which will go into more detail about each of the new additions to the game.

Stay warm out there.

Raphael

Nov 10, 2023

Optimizatino and terrain

Kaiju Fishing - MutantEntertainment

Optimization and terrain

Hey everyone, since it's been a minute since my last update, buckle up for a longer than normal update on KF.

So as most of the main features are in playable states our next main task is to start putting all the pieces together to build the MVP (minimum viable product). This means we need to build out the starting HUB and first playable zone. I started with a simple block out in order to start gauging size/playtime/layout concepts. A block out is exactly as it sounds: gray boxes that serve as placeholders for art that will come later. When I dropped our current boat into the scene to start checking things out I noticed that our framerates were much lower than I anticipated. It wasn’t that it was super low (I was getting around 70-75 fps) but with so little geometry in the scene it was obvious that something wasn’t right. So that started a round of testing, basically looking into what could be the cause. Obviously it shouldn’t have been the boxes since they’re literally boxes with a default material. I quickly ruled that out, so that left me with only 2 other options. It was either our ocean shader (unlikely) or something on our boat was totally unoptimized. A quick check on the ocean confirmed that there was something wrong with the boat, which made sense.

The breakdown of boat checking was pretty straightforward but time consuming. Basically we had to turn off each individual component in the boat one by one to try and track down the culprit. Luckily Unity added a statistics checker to the Editor at some point in the last few years (I'm not sure when this was included, but boy did it turn out to be a time saver here). Previously we would have had an extra step of compiling and running the game then checking the profiler as we turned things off/on to look for large changes in frame rates.

The big offender turned out to be our tacklebox. The original plan for the bait crafting system was to allow players to use individual pieces of the bait in order to do some fancy component based crafting. This meant that our modeler needed to leave each small component of each bait object as a separate mesh/rig. Any of you that know anything about how a game engine draws things onto a screen can probably tell where things went wrong. In order to save some development time we had simplified the crafting system down to just set recipes, so the individual component pieces of a bait were no longer needed, but we neglected to combine the mesh components back up into single objects. So the tacklebox held a copy of each bait, which have many many individual meshes which was costing us many many more draw calls than were necessary.

Once we figured that out, the solution proved to be pretty simple. We could have cracked open Maya (the modeling software we use) and combined each bait into a single object there, but with our recent studio restructure we don’t currently have a dedicated modeler (I haven't touched a modeling program in at least 15 years). I did know however that there were several tools available on the Unity asset store that allow us to combine meshes inside the editor. So rather than re-teach myself Maya I grabbed one of the tools and got to work combining meshes.

I’m happy to report that after the completion of that task our framerates for the blockout scene are very high (I’m getting +/- around 270 pretty consistently). With that out of the way it was then time to start looking at how we wanted to build out the world.

The original plan for the world was a big open ocean with lots of little islands with secrets and fishing coves for you to explore. That’s still the plan, but without a modeler we need to get creative on how we’re going to bring that to life. Before she left, our awesome modeler who’s now over at WizKids made some starter islands for us. Which is what you’ve played around with in the demo. While these are great, without her around to make more, we’d be kind of limited to the environments you’d get to experience and I personally think that the world would get kind of stale pretty quickly. After a bit of brainstorming I settled on what I hope is a solution. Unity has a terrain system, which with a bit of tweaking I thought might work for us to unique/interesting islands out of.

So off I jumped into the “fun” world of Unity terrain. Yes I put quotes around fun on purpose. It’s… an interesting system to say the least. But after overcoming a bit of a steep learning curve, specifically dealing with keeping our new found gains in frame rate, I’m also happy to report that this is a solution that is working. My first few test islands are looking good. I’ve got a LOD system in and working, so now all the beautiful art that our modeler provided doesn’t slow our frame rate down to a crawl (that was an initial problem I had to work out).
So yeah, that’s where we’re at. Things are coming together. It’s a bit slower than I had hoped, but our progress continues. Thanks for keeping the faith. I know KF has taken longer than you or we want, but I’m grinding hard to land this beast.

Until next time.

Nov 10, 2023

Hello, stalkers! We have an important update 1.00.41.

Z.O.N.A Project X VR - AGamingTeam

Hello, stalkers! We have an important update 1.00.41.

What's new:

☢️ Raid system added. Now you can choose the raid you want in the briefing room. Available after completing the first level. Attention: during the raid, you won't be able to save, and everything you collect will remain there if you die! Therefore, I recommend saving in the briefing room before going on a raid.
☢️ Added a raid location "Abandoned Village".
☢️ Added a raid location "Military Town".
☢️ Added a raid location "Tunnels".
☢️ Added a new anomaly "Slime".
☢️ Added a new anomaly "Star".
☢️ Added a new anomaly "Whirlwind".
☢️ Added a new monster "Hell Hound".
☢️ Added a new faction "Doomsday", currently only encounterable in raids.

Changes and improvements:

🔸 Now, when you use an injection, your hand is not tied to the syringe, and you can continue combat actions. This should eliminate the FPS drops that some players reported.
🔸 Injection slots in the pouch have been improved. Now it's easier to place or take an injection.
🔸 Added exit confirmation in the PDA when pressing the corresponding button.
🔸 Weapons now have a shooting range, depending on their technical characteristics.
🔸 Minor fixes and improvements.

Plans:

⚠️ Adding the "Sortie" mode. In this mode, the location will be chosen randomly and will offer higher difficulty, especially in fights with Zone factions. If in raids you can replenish supplies, in sorties it will be harder to do so. In sortie mode, you will be able to obtain new types of weapons, which are also in development.
⚠️ Trading.
⚠️ Repair and more detailed weapon customization.

Remember, stalkers: The Zone is constantly changing, and each of your ventures into it is a new challenge. Stay alert and cautious. Good luck! Many interesting things are still ahead of you!

p.s. With your permission, I'll take a couple of days off and finally get some sleep. Working 14-15 hours a day on the update is getting a bit tough.