TAR 1st Update of 2017 news - The Arcane Relics™

Hello to you all,

We've been working away this past month. Here's what we have to show you:

NEW HERBS & INGREDIENTS

(First pass of these herbs and seeds. Includes: parsley, sage,

Destroying pumpkins or sunflowers, will drop their corresponding seeds.

Other ingredients:

With these items, all ingredients are now completed for the public demo.

• NPC detection is back in (which hasn’t been in since the start of the GOAP system). Also – the farther you are away, the easier you can remain unnoticed.
• Wandering is also back in, NPCs now wander around, rather than just standing idle, as before, but using the new system.
• NPCs now move up & down in water when swimming again.
• NPCs will now only select potions with negative effects (e.g. poisons) as valid weapons. They no longer heal you by throwing health potions – unintentionally generous.

There’s now a quicker way to resuscitate your friends, the revive potion! Simply whip one at the cadaver or, if you’re the corpse, open up your inventory and guzzle it down. They are quite expensive at the moment, but can be found as treasures throughout Terradim.

The loin cloth belt item received a much needed texturing, since it basically had no texture (only a simple AO & solid color). WIP.

Clothes items are now folded up, instead of being solid upright sitting t-poses or standing pants, like the following:

There's also been improvements to the in-game console and messages. Previously, the console used a single string and Text component to display its contents, which proved to be a problem. In Unity, there’s a cap of ~65k vertices per mesh and if that single Text component exceeds that, which isn’t that hard to reach with a long string like a command list, a spam of errors will litter your Unity console window and the text will fail to be displayed. Jon has now addressed this.

Now, each console entry is a separate Text component and, rather than instancing a new one for each entry, we are using a Text component pool. What’s that you say? That’s beyond the scope of this post. Now each console entry can show more information! Jon also added the real time (not Terradim time) as a prefix of console entries as well.

After the console, Jon figured he’d setup the in-game messages similarly as well. Now since they are not a single string and Text component, they can be accessed individually! What does that mean? Well, it means he can do the following:

• Certain messages now stack, such as acquiring items. The tally amount of the item will increase and the message will be moved to the bottom, becoming the last message to disappear. Previously, each item pickup would result in a new message even if the item matches one that’s in the list of messages.
• Added a delay per message so even if the messages are triggered at the exact same time, they will still pop away one by one with a delay. A bit easier on the eyes, I’d say.

• New checkered floor tiles now grace the bottom 2 floors of Inns.
• Added a countdown in the player setup scene if all players are ready. Game will begin after countdown if no player cancels their ready status.
• You can now only place apparel, and a few other miscellaneous items, onto Armor Stands – not just any item.
• Items placed on an Armor Stand are now automatically equipped.
• Chickens now emit feathers when startled.
• Liquid splat decal shader changed. They will no longer glow in shadows on a sunny day.
• Fixed bug where your cursor would no longer function after being ejected from an incapacitated horse.
• Fixed animation bug when entering water while riding a horse. Sitting/mounting animations now supersede swim animations.
• Fixed bug where you’d pop into walls when dismounting, especially from horseback.
• Fixed NPCs not attacking after being revived with a Revive Potion.
• You can now zoom in & out your camera view while incapacitated or in dialog.
• Mouse scroll wheel input for zooming is now restricted when in ‘response mode’ in dialog.
• Fixed some issues with the player input assigning HUD in the setup scene.
• Ragdolling in water improvements:
  • Ragdolls now update their drag, in addition to gravity when entering water.
  • Ragdolls can now repeatedly enter and exit water. Previously being blown out of the water, a ragdolling character would retain the “space-like gravity event” through the air, until the failsafe timer was met (as you could never be grounded).
  • Ragdolls are no longer sucked to the ground when recovering in water.

• UI inventory spotlight & reflection probe: you can now see your inventory items when in the dark and/or at nighttime.
• Cutlery utensils (fork, spoon, & knife) are new equip-able items.
• Fixed female chainmail shirt from not applying any armor.
• Merchant Chicken now uses dialog options too!
• Fixed a crash that could occur when destroying a weapon rack after a weapon was removed/taken (having an empty slot).
• More optimization of items: adding more LOD.

• GOAP Progress: Shields no longer count as a valid weapon for NPCs when they are deciding to arm themselves.
• Optimization: Andrew continues to setup LODs, now on small edibles. Mmmm, delectable.
• Added some pickup sounds on items that were overlooked.
• Moonlight now interpolates per day towards next moon phase instead of a jarring change per phase.
• Added a realtime shadows toggle in graphics settings.
• Fixed bug that would result when 2 players talk to the same NPC. The result would be an incorrect camera target until talking again.
• Dialog now cleans up/closes before a scene transition.
• Shifted NPC spawn point for arena matches, as they’d sometimes get pushed behind the entrance door.

Our roadmap list - until the public demo release - is becoming more green (or closer to completion). Once all tasks on the list are highlighted green/yellow, it'll be time for the demo's release!