Apr 14, 2024

The Beginnings of Gameplay and Some Niceties

Community Announcements - Auxiar Molkhun

Wow is there a lot in this update. It won't really feel like it while playing around, however there's been a lot going on behind the hood (under the scene?) that you'll only really be able to see with the few extra frames a second I saved you. But then I immediately snatched them back to add some new features!

I'm going to go ahead and say that most of these are relatively minor changes as far as expected changes go. Lots of little tweaks here or there that ultimately you can't see, but have helped me give you back some much needed (and unnecessarily lost) performance. I know the game isn't exactly the toughest thing in the world to run right now, but every frame saved is another that can go to something else, something probably prettier. Anyways, enough of my rambling, here's the list of stuff that's been changed, added, and fixed. The additions are really fun to mess with so I suggest hopping in and checking them out ;)

Changes:

Made a few more tweaks to the hotfix revolving around the broken weather fix that helps increase performance ever so slightly.
Optimized the grass shader a tad by switching from a procedural, calculated mask of how close the plant is to the ground (based on origin point) to using Vertex color instead (where supported).
Increased the distance that the taller seedy grass stalks appear to be blowing in the wind at. It was a little awkward seeing them go from being still to blowing at their old distance.
Increased the density of the taller seedy grass in the normal grass areas.
Slightly adjusted the minimum size of the taller seedy grass to provide more variety in the size of them around the world.
Exponentially decreased the density of the normal grass amount without sacrificing on looks (aka. it was too dense).
Slightly decreased the minimum possible size of the normal grass so it's overall a little shorter.
Changed the weedy plant's scatter texture to try and give it a more even but still random distribution.
Increased the amount of water that appears on the ground as puddles during rainy weather.
Removed the odd tribal white paint from the player character until I can sit down and actually mess with all their stuff or add customization.
Added weather effects (snow/dust accumulation, rain wetness, etc...) to the human character's material.
Changed the Mip Gen Settings from Sharpen4 to Sharpen2 to make the ground textures in the distance not appear so sharp.
The Dynamic objects blocking wind on the foliage has had the material quality at which it disables set to high and lower. It's actually a bit more computationally expensive than I thought, so you'll need to have material quality settings at Epic in order for it to occur.
Optimized the color variation function for grass materials (they're all slightly different colors to break apart the monotony, but the built-in method is slightly more expensive than my custom method which does the same thing)
The direction the wind can now blow has been changed from only about 60 degrees from where it starts to now being able to blow from any direction. The change is gradual/slow and the wind can't suddenly shift to blowing a different direction, it "rotates" to get there.
Increased the saturation of accumulated dust during dusty weather.
Decreased the amount of debris that appear when the wind is blowing at the storm level.
Swapped the texture that determined where dirt was defined on the grass layer. It's now a bit less evenly distributed and appears to be more random.

Additions:

When the weather forecasts higher temperatures, you'll now see heat waves in the distance. Pretty cool! - Disclaimer: this is part of the weather system's update, I did not manually implement this, I simply flipped a switch to enable it.
Grass is now trampled when you walk over it! It's not wholly realistic to how grass and other ground plants act when stepped on, but it's a nice little feature in my opinion. This is a local area affect, meaning that whenever you leave the area and come back it'll reset, however it really does help you and your fellow gamers feel more grounded in the world. Once trampled, it will slowly begin to raise to its original position, however it'll never quite get back to where it was, meaning if you decide to home up in an area you'll be able to tell you've been there a while based on all the trampled plants. If the ground and grass is wet though (during rain and such) then it'll be compressed even further and raise back up less. As a bonus, it's (mostly) mesh accurate! Meaning that no matter the odd shape, it should deform the grass just the same as a simpler object. This means ragdolls (wink wink) would affect it completely accurately as well with no extra setup needed. - Disclaimer: This system is based on the one explained by PrismaticaDev on YouTube, however my implementation is a fair bit different from the original at this point. I will eventually add a setting to disable this locally as it does cost some performance in the CPU to calculate and the GPU to actually render, however until I can discover a method that does so efficiently it'll be defaulted to enabled.
Added high-frequency noise back to the grass foliage to give it some extra chaos when blowing in the wind. Before, it was mostly low-frequency noise and made the grass act less like grass and more like blobs. This helps give the grass some of its individuality back. To save some performance, this higher-frequency motion is disabled at material quality low (since it's not that expensive to compute).
Pass 1 of scent particles! It looks more or less how I wanted them to, but they're still a little bit bland for the time being, and I need to test how gameplay effective they actually are still. They're more like a trail of smoke than what I imagine real physical scent particles are, but they work how I want them to. The wind decides where the particles go, so being down-wind from someone is actually a way to sneak up on them (until the wind shifts the other way), and they begin rising into the air after a distance to make them easier to spot. They currently have collision in an attempt to prevent them from clipping through the landscape, though this will need performance testing and tweaking in the future for sure. Each particle of scent that makes up the ribbon currently lives for 150 seconds before dying. Longer lives mean longer trails, however it also means worse performance, so this value will need to be benchmarked with actual gameplay before it can be really dialed in.
The above scent particles and all new particle systems will be using a new custom and much more performant particle shader in place of the transparency-heavy default. This new material is completely unreactive to lighting, meaning that it will always look the same, making colors easily identifiable regardless of time of day or weather (provided it's meant to be seen in certain weathers of course). It does have a slight transparent effect that's very optimized, but to save a few possible frames this transparency can be disabled with material quality setting of low.
Pass 1 of the Scent mechanic! To go with the new particles, you have a way to activate it with default Q (rebindable in Controls). Currently, it desaturates everything except the scent particles so you can more easily make them out in the distance and against various backgrounds (and because you're sacrificing some of your other senses to focus on smelling, muffled audio will eventually be introduced while sniffing in the future). It's currently a fade into grey, fade out of grey by holding and releasing the scent button. You can smell the scent particles regardless of distance, provided that there are particles available to be smelled. Scent particles are not scentable when things are considered "wet" by the weather system. So when it starts raining you might still be able to smell some stuff for a minute, but once the rain clears it'll take a minute for the scents to become smellable again. When your character is considered wet, you'll quit emitting a followable trail of scent. This means that if you decided to run through a river, you'd quit leaving a followable scent trail for as long as you are considered "wet". After reaching a certain level of dryness you'll begin emitting a followable trail again, disconnected from your original trail.
Ground foliage now changes color depending on the in-game season. This means nothing for now as the seasons don't currently change in any meaningful way (or at any noticeable speed), but it is still an addition I'll forget about if I don't put it in the patch notes now.

Fixes:

Fixed grass having obvious lines from incorrect texture mapping when snow was accumulating on it (and very slightly improved the shader's performance at the same time :D)
Fixed an issue where grass occasionally had a very sharp and unnatural movement that could really only be observed up close due to how small in scale it was.
(Technically this was part of a hotfix that didn't have a patch note, but) Fixed if you flew too far away from your character's position while in Observer mode, your pawn would become irrelevant and more or less delete itself, preventing you from repossessing it.
Fixed the new man being constantly in shock/mouth open, now his mouth is closed like it should be.

Known Issues:

Hey finally have an excuse to use this section again! The new scent trails sometimes cast a glow on objects as they go by when using Lumen global illumination. This is unfortunately just a side-effect of Lumen and there's not much that I can do about it. I think it looks kind of neat though, so I'm just going to leave it for now.
Scent trails can be seen through the landscape due to how the desaturation works. Basically, while you're scenting, if the scent is behind the landscape (behind a hill), then you'll see the scent trail as color. You won't see the scent trail itself, you'll see the silhouette of it saturating the landscape. Since theoretically you should be able to smell scent particles regardless of whether you can actually see them, I'm debating keeping this and naming it a feature. I know how to fix it, but unfortunately enabling the fix creates issues with the grass interaction system that makes it basically unusable. As mentioned though, I kind of like it so I'll be taking feedback for how it looks if you know how to reach me.

And that's the wrap! I know it's not really as exciting as it could be, I could probably have already implemented actual survival mechanics or playable classes or something actually engaging already, but I'm trying really hard to make sure I have a good foundation to build the gameplay on top of before I really dive too deeply into the "Get your hands dirty" type of gameplay. I'll get there eventually, I just want to make the place a little nicer before we get there.

Thanks for making it and reading this far, I had both fun and hell working on this update, and I'm hoping you'll try it out for yourself just to mess around. That's all, have fun and live kindly.