TAR 3 Month Dev Update news - The Arcane Relics™

Hello everyone! We've been working away despite our lack of updates. Here's what we've been up to these past 3 months or so:

This is the next creature, to spawn in the Water Cave and elsewhere (possibly during some rain storms). They can be any color, allowing for varying types (or elements) down the road.

This is where players will be able to adjust their appearance in Terradim. It even comes with a preliminary sign design. Currently, it contains mirrors, to adjust appearance.

Jon has worked on moving data to external XML files (more below). Added effects/elements are now loaded from XML files. As a result, we’ve added some more new potions!

These new potions include:

• Haste – speeds you up.
• Slow – self-explanatory, opposite of haste.
• Rouse – counteracts/protects against sleep.

Upon profiling the game recently, we have found that the CPU time for calculating physics has been quite a problem. Scenes with lots of objects/items such as the Town are especially troublesome. Consequently, we have decided to make some changes.

• New weapon hit detection: we are moving away from using rigidbody/triggers to a custom hit detection (Boxcasting). Collisions actually seem better after swapping to this setup! It’s easier to hit small items on a surface such as gems on a table.
• New item physics: Previously, most items were rigidbodies (using dynamic physics), but now we are using a custom system for emulating physics. Jon calls it “cheap” physics. This is a WIP, but looks promising. There will probably be some issues with this in the next release, but seems to be a step in the right direction.

• Widening building walls, Apothecary & Smithy buildings:

• (The Apothecary's walls have widened just a bit.)

I've worked on polishing the Smithy and Apothecary buildings, including widening their walls, or adding more depth. This should help with weapons, character heads (when leaning over), and horses from peaking through walls. It also seems to make it easier to jump up into windows, since the colliders have more depth, therefore you don't get caught in them or bumped out. Once this is complete, I plan to move on and do the same with the other previously made buildings.

• The torso lean when attacking up/down will persist throughout an entire attack (no matter the weapon). Previously it was a set duration, so with larger weapons the torso lean would end before the swing would even begin. This allows you to properly attack things above or below you, eg. power-attacking a chest with a battle axe should be a lot less frustrating. Also, the torso lean now uses interpolation, thus should no longer pop into rotation.
• Sleep Improvements:
  • Characters snort instead of playing standard hurt/attack vocalizations when asleep.
  • Sleep effect, from a potion, will recover health and fatigue now too.
• Jon has continued moving a lot of game data to external XML files. Notably, magic spells, added effects, and certain color sets.
• Setup a note item to load in place of an item that fails to load, probably due to an incorrect tag/missing in item database. Displays information when read on what item tag failed to load.
• Music tracks now load in background. This should reduce hitches when a new clip is loading.
• Saved ColorData now stores float values, not bytes, allowing for HDR colors to be saved. Alpha has also been added.
• Improved clouds and water splash particles, adjusting shaders/etc.
• Experimenting with some new UI textures:

• I’ve also been continuing work on newer areas in the game, including: the Lava Cave & the outer town Castle Way. Now the Castle Way can now be seen from the Upper Town:

Since upgrading to the new Unity (v2018...) some of our shaders didn't work quite the same (some with errors). This is possibly because we’re new to shaders and don’t know all what we’re doing as of yet… Suffice to say, we've fixed some shaders and adapted others to work (in other words, some may not look exactly the same, but now work/render correctly). Water has an edge still but doesn't look quite the same (as shown in previous articles/images), and the lava shader also looks a bit different (although I've since revamped/created new texture/specular/normal maps too).

There’s been other odd occurrences of collider gaps — that I’ve discovered since upgrading — as if holes go right through the geometry in certain locations… This seems to span across multiple model files, not just tied to any one in particular. The town scene is notably the worse scene experiencing this, if not the only, which makes it even more odd. This might be related to the issues some players have reported, where you’d fall through the ground.

And we leave you with a preview: