Development Update news - Beasts of Prey

Hello everyone,

I got the new game-world today and started optimizing it for performance and post-effects. Also, i finished the UI on the client plus the Stegosaurus animations have been finished. So now i'm in the process of updating the server to work flawlessly with the new UI, once that is done i'll be merging the old Beasts of Prey built with the new Game-World. I changed quite a lot of code on the client and rewritten some of the network code as well. While I'm doing that I'll be also cleaning up the network code as a whole because since release we have quite some "dead code" in there that is no longer used.

Last step will be building the AI pathing for the new world. Schedule is a bit tight, I'm not sure if i can do all of this in the next 7 days but i will try. At this point i'd feel more comfortable with an ETA of 14 days but as i said I'll give it a try. One thing i want to avoid is rushing things. I noticed the building and construction system does not work as well as i thought so i want to give it an overhaul as well.

One big change :

I'm separating the flag system from the building system. That means that structures can be build/placed by everyone, it doesn't matter anymore who built it and when. Doors/Chests/Stations can be used/opened by everyone.

Now here comes the change : If you place down a flag basically ALL structures/doors/stations belong to you and you can setup the "behavior" of the claimed area, e.g. (only tribe members can use structures in your area, or only you, or let it be public.

Now, for game-play the flag becomes more important because it basically controls the access level of everything. Since this change is pretty hard we will get rid of flag maintenance and the flag can be placed everywhere just like a station or any other structure. The trade-off will be that you can have only 1 flag per character per server.

So my to-do right now is :
- Implement the new game-world.
- Make it fast again.
- Change flag/construction behavior as described above.
- Change server to work with new UI mechanics.
- Add Stegosaurus to the game.
- Update AI Pathing to work with the new game-world.

ETA 7-14 days (I personally fear it'll be rather 14)