Weekly Dev Update: 2017 August 11th to September 29th - 2 Months of Toil
Below is a big backlog of 8 weekly updates. As of today there is only 1 outstanding for October 6th. Hopefully you’ll still enjoy reading about everything we’ve been working on. Some of the feature have already been released, but there is plenty of stuff still in development.
During this period we’ve released a decent number of Testing, Live and hot fixes updates. (Not bad given many members of the team have taken holidays.)
Code - August 11th The chisel rework continues, with all the slope shapes complete this is now working through the new chiseled sub-cube square chisel shapes.
The Threat+Aggro mechanic continues its overhaul. That’s just as well since the creatures have been learning how to navigate around the world more effectively.
The multiple character GUI is being worked through, adding switching character support. The compass system update is been working though, especially how to efficiently show other player positions at long distances. The on screen debug information is being reworked with graphs for latency and frame times to help spot glitches.
On the backend we’ve continued on the compressed chunk work. Smaller chunks means faster loading and less bandwidth.
Code - August 18th The compass system received further polishing up, showing portals and creature threat states. We completed a range of smart stack improvements and are now working on the beacon GUI to support different permission types for other users. The GUI audio is also being updated with material sounds and further click events.
We are continuing with the advanced block shapes, adding the chiseled beveled shapes.
The threat system rework has a been completed. The elemental creatures are now coloured correctly. A player stamina system implementation is underway.
We are working on the backend to support the backer tier features this will allow us to invite the Trailblazers. Without this, all Trailblazers would automatically get the status of Explorer in the game and we’d not be able to differentiate between them.
Code - August 25th We’ve spent quite a bit of time on the latest Release 172, addressing various bugs the testing version showed up and a few that slipped through.
The beacon permission system and GUI continues to be added while the compass system continued to be polished, adding farther off portals. More audio events are being added to the GUI.
For creatures we have developed a herding mechanic, initially for the wildstock, to keep them grouped together. The spitter targeting has been fixed so again they won’t shoot into walls and will also climb out of smaller holes.
The chiselled blocks update work is nearly complete. We also changed it so that most placed blocks won’t remove grass, removing the patches of soil under machines, etc. We’re continuing to optimise the Boundless server, focusing on reducing memory use, to help increase the number of users per server.
Code - September 1st A new Stamina system has been implemented and all the GUI bars have been improved to highlight how much they have changed (by use of a trailing and animated bar.) The Combat Log has been improved to show more detailed events and help explain what is happening when elemental creatures interact with elemental weapons.
Various bugs with Objectives have been fixed, as well as bugs for portals, lighting and character management.
The ability to colour Beacon Plots to help distinguish between different beacons has had a first pass ready for design review. Any gleam block inserted into the Beacon Control will change the colour of the beacon visualisation.
The new block shape and chiseling system has finally been merged into master ready for further development, evaluation and testing.
The Live deployed version of the game has been updated twice for a range of bug fixes.
Code - September 8th A first pass of the new Knowledge GUI screen was finished - this helps players understand recipes and ingredients. The aim is to make sure that players understand the crafting hierarchy. In the future it will be expanded to include details able status effects, creatures and more.
There were quite a few bug fixes in preparation for a new game update sometime next week.
A few more optimisations of the server have been done, so that they can better support more players on worlds.
The Stamina update made it into the master branch of the game so that it could get more testing throughout the development team.
There’s also been some work improving creature projectiles. The aim is to create a wider variety of shots to increase the variation of ranged combat.
Code - September 15th We’ve started the implementation of in game signs, with a grey box test and skeleton GUI to enter the text. The system allows for large size greater that 1m x 1m. The Beacons are being polished up with new visualisation of plots and the boarders to make them more easily understood.
The GUI is adding menu filters for recipes and the knowledge screens. This will make it easier to filter the large list of craftable items into groups: tools, weapons, etc.
For Creature the herding behaviour has been improve and will now keep groups of creatures, currently wildstock, together. This will be used to make the creature distribution more uneven, and increase the challenge of attacking wildstock - as they look after each other when your threat level increases!
We are working on delivering chunk data via a CDN. This will lower the CPU cost of users joining and moving around the world on the servers and allow users to get the data from (typically) more local CDN servers that should be faster and more reliable. This will be a big saving on the servers and will hopefully result in much faster load times for players further away from the current world servers (South America, South Africa, Asia, etc.)
Further compression of the chunk data continues which will reduce the amount downloaded and RAM used in the Boundless servers. This will make the servers more efficient.
We are also working on the back end to allow Trailblazers to join the game.
Code - September 22nd The Signs implementation continues, with it rendering the text in world and progressing with the GUI with additional text input functionality.
The creatures spawning has been tweaked to give better per creatures ’score’ for the herd spawning and to allow higher numbers per world. Early work on creature spawn events has begun when many waves of creatures will be spawned in a small area for a period of time. We also been working on a lobbed projectile attack for the spitter to use to hit targets (you!) behind cover.
We’ve been polishing up some of the object locator implementation, this is used to place items in storage, the players hands, in the GUI and on plinths, as well a tweaking the block placement animation.
The CDN support for downloading chunk data is ready for a future Testing update. We worked on the backend to enabled Trailblazers to join the game. Further backend memory savings of the chunk data are being finalised that cut bandwidth as well as server and client RAM use.
Code - September 29th We’ve been adding a player resurrection mechanic that can be enabled with brews and character skills. This will allow players to be revived with dramatically reduced death penalty and by other users whilst in combat.
The HUD is reworking the damage indicators to show more useful information on what damage is being taken. The work on signs continues adding more of the GUI for editing them.
We are reworking the Windows full screen mode to support borderless windowed mode, so alt-tabbing between applications should be more user friendly.
We’ve been reworking the back end of the machine and pipes to be more robust and scale better for larger contraptions. The updated chunk data compression is in Master which reduces the chunk download size by ~40%.
Design - August 11th This week Matt has been updating all our queries to use BigQuery “Standard SQL” rather than “Legacy SQL” giving us more flexibility. He’s also been fixing the online and offline events which were being fired every time you went through a portal or warp, as well as re-working the player timeline queries which tell us how much experience, coin, etc you have after each hour of game time.
Luke has done the first pass of design for Brew and Bomb recipes, and worked out a plan for Creature and Plant drops. He’s also prepared for our first visibility round, and created some character skill templates which we can use to test different setups. In addition he’s worked with Ollie and Andy on the improved Aggro / Threat system.
Ollie has been integrating the Elemental Creatures, and making them do the right damage types including some funky status effects, as well as helping out on the Aggro / Threat design.
Design - August 18th This week has been mainly about polishing and preparing for the next Live release.
Ollie has been working on balancing the tools and weapons, including adding lots of variation to the slingbows including some which fire multiple shots, and making repeaters much more fun. (Although this will all be ripped out in the future and moved to the Forge.) He’s also worked on the balance of creature variation on each world to make the mixture of creatures more interesting.
Matt has been working on improving the analytics for Progression and Experience gaining, both from the code side and the query side. He’s also tested and fixed many other events and queries.
Luke has done more work on the new recipes, and been working with Andy on the Stamina system. He’s also done more balance on the Threat / Aggro system. (Not sure why it’s the Thread / Aggro system this week, when it was the Aggro / Threat system last week.)
Design - August 25th All the designers were on holiday - slackers.
Design - September 1st This week Luke has been working with Andy on the new Stamina system which is coming together well. We won’t be releasing it quite yet though, because his other ongoing piece of work has been working out recipes for food, brews, bombs and augments (weapon upgrades), as well as designing a collection of new drops to feed those recipes. There’s still more to work out, but the aim is to release a big collection of new creature, plant and block drops for you to harvest to make these new things. We’ll aim to release the new stamina work, with those new drops and recipes.
Matt has been bringing the analytics up to scratch after the addition of multiple characters, as well as looking at upgrading the “player timeline” query, which maps how much playtime it takes you to hit levels, gain coin and gain XP. This provides valuable balancing information.
Ollie has worked out how the augments will work, these were originally ammo upgrades which we’d called “Crystals”, but will now affect the weapons themselves. They will be particularly useful for customising bombs. He’s also been integrating new chisel types to go with Luca’s additional slope shapes, and building a plan for “rolling up” analytics data into more manageable chunks.
Design - September 8th Ollie has been working with Simon on delivering a series of updates, whilst drinking lots of tea. He’s been working with Rob to work out the presentation of damage given and received, and adjusted the resistance system to be based on chance to avoid damage rather than a straightforward reduction. He’s also re-worked mastery a little, and added skills for the new chisels.
Matt has been continuing to test, polish and improve the analytics, including preparing for updating a lot of data from our recent changes, and preparing for the data roll-up work.
Luke has been continuing to work out the new recipes, and polishing and testing Stamina.
Design - September 15th This week we’ve been continuing to focus on reworking the recipes in the game, and adding new things to craft such as food, brews, augments and bombs, as well as the stamina system and adjusted skills. This is building towards an upcoming release where you can play with all of that.
Ollie has been adjusting a few skills, and working with Matt on analytics for XP progression with a view to balancing that system.
Luke has been coming close to wrapping up the recipes and new drops.
Rob has been working on the new Signs GUI, tweaks to the Crafting GUI and rethinking how we present Locations on the HUD.
Matt has been writing a system to “rollup” our analytics data periodically so we are querying a manageable amount of data rather than all events from all time, as well as migrating the item analytics data after Luca’s changes to the blocks which came with the new chisel types. He’s also changed the way we log skill data, and fixed various analytics bugs.
Design - September 22nd All the designers were on holiday - slackers #2.
Design - September 29th Ollie was working on the new balance iteration for release 180 which included changes to how much XP you earn for completing actions, feats and objectives. As well as modifying how many skill points and plots are awarded for reaching certain levels, Ollie also made changes to the total number of experience points required for each level. The final part of the week was spent supporting the update and ensuring the hot fixes went out smoothly.
Luke has continued to design and outline new recipes, drops and resources to incorporate the new props, bombs, brews and other items in development. He also started to compile a list of tooltips which should show up in the game when the player performs a certain action.
This week Rob has been looking at completing the intro logic for PC and PS4 as well as looking at improving the feedback for completing objectives after he compiled a list tasks to improve the UI after a thorough playthrough.
Matt’s work with the analytics continues, he’s been working on various bugs with the current information due to the new multiple character system. He’s also worked on improving the tracking of objectives and feats for a more accurate and informative data.
Art - August 11th This week the art team has been busy on new progression blocks, sticker and door progression concepts.
Here’s Amanda’s door concepts for wood, stone, metal and gleam.
Jess has been concepting and prototyping wood progression blocks. We want to do a bit more exploration before sharing so expect a post on these soon.
Jim has been continuing looking at the world palettes and also corrected the scale of objects like the Crucible and Firepit when dropped.
Art - August 18th It’s been a quiet week for the art team as Jim is on holiday and Jess was ill at the start of the week. Nevertheless, work continues on Amanda’s concepts for the Sticker system and Jess’s new wood block designs. Jess also did another pass on creature colours to go with the elemental creature work.
Art - August 25th Jess and Amanda have continued their work on decorative props this week, with Amanda finishing up her set of concepts of Poles, Beams and Fences and Jess starting work on bringing those into the game. The initial exploratory set of concepts for Stickers has also been finished.
Art - September 1st This week the art team has been busy working on backer item and door concepts and decorative prop grey boxing and modelling.
Here’s Amanda’s post showing her door concepts following the progression we’re using for the decorative poles.
Jess has also created a full set of placeholder tints for the creatures which look more pleasing to play with until we implement procedural tinting.
Here’s a cool looking creature (ouch…)
That’s all for this week!
Art - September 8th This week the art team have been working on backer tool concepts and decorative poles assets.
Amanda has nearly finalised the decorative fences concepts.
Jess has grey boxed hanging assets and modelled the wooden set of poles: Raw, Refined and Decorative poles.
Jim has been polishing up the position, rotation and scales of all items in the game. That’s items when in the GUI, held in 1st and 3rd person, dropped, on plinths, baskets and in storage.
Art - September 15th This week has been all about decorative props and prototyping signs. More on signs soon! The original sub voxel mesh concepts can be seen here:
We also had a two day bug blitz which we find useful to have every few of months to keep on top of things.
Amanda - Fence concepts WIP. She’s re-working these to provide a wider range of fence themes.
Jess - Final decorative pole models. These are designed to be used in conjunction with blocks and decorative cross beams, decorative props (both hanging and placed) and fences.
Plain, stylish and ornate wood poles.
Plain stone poles.
Stylish stone poles.
Ornate stone poles.
Plain, stylish and ornate stone poles.
Wood and stone together.
Art - September 22nd This week the art team has continued concepting decorative props, doors and fences.
Jess has been modelling metal decorative poles and made a start on the gleam versions.
Jim (with Andy’s coding help) has been tidying up the position, rotation and scale of all items in storage, on plinths, basket, shelves and GUI. He’ll be tidying the held items in 3rd person next.
Art - September 29th This week the art team have been busy mainly working on decorative props and signs.
Amanda has created concepts arranging decorative poles, doors and fences in their relevant material tiers. We think they’re looking pretty good.
She’s been concepting signs to fit with the new tiling sign system that Luca has been working on over the past two weeks. The plan is support a range of different thematic font themes and styles for the large signs, as if the text has been chiselled into the stone material. It’s a little experimental so we’ll need to see how they turn out.
Jess has continued modelling decorative poles. Here’s the plain gleam poles in game.
Plain and stylish poles using ruby tint.
Here with an emerald tint.
Jim has provided a 3rd person resuscitate animation for Andy who has been developing this feature this week. He also softened the visual effect around the Warp border to make it more consistent with the portal and also continued working on positioning held items in 3rd person.
That’s all folks!
Release 180: XP and Progression re-re-balance!
This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.
Overview:
This release is a re-balance of the entire XP generation and Player Progression systems, to make levelling more fun and less grindy. The aims are:
Make all core actions deliver similar amounts of XP per hour:
Mining
Building and Chiselling
Crafting
Hunting and Killing Creatures
Make Feats be a useful source of XP at all levels, whilst still offering long term goals.
Reduce the overall time to level (especially at higher levels).
Smooth out the amount of grind needed at early levels to get recipes.
Rebalanced the distribution of plots awarded per level:
Allow people to build a little bigger at early levels (more plots at early levels).
Balanced by reducing the amount of unwanted / unused plots that most players have later on (less plots at high levels).
The next feature update will include some restructuring of the skill tree. When this lands everyone will be able to re-spec their characters against the new tree.
Important:
All feats will be re-evaluated on your first run, and you could see many feat messages appear on screen one after the other. Please just allow these to play out, it may take several minutes for high level characters.
You will likely Level Up when you next play as the game migrates your character and progression across to the new balance.
Reworked the way backer levels are tracked and awarded. Required to start enabling backer perks in game.
Change how we query DLC from steam and expose all the backer tiers via Steam DLC. This isn’t public, but was required to invite the Trailblazers.
Add a special case check that a user who owns everything gets the Adventurer level, this is to cover devs since we get all DLC via the dev comp packages in Steam.
Return the non Steam tiers for all backer levels not sold via Steam to avoid giving everyone the Steam Powered badge.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Full rebalance of all XP generation and player progression:
More experience for Building, Crafting, Chiselling and Killing Creatures.
Less experience needed to go up levels (especially higher levels).
Increased the number of beacon plots awarded at early levels, slightly reduced the number awarded at later levels.
Increased the number of skill points awards in early levels.
Item crafting and tool mastery skill categories now unlock earlier.
Rounded all numbers to more satisfying numbers.
NOTE: all feats will be re-evaluated on your first run, and you could see many feat messages appear on screen one after the other. Please just allow these to play out, it may take several minutes for high level characters.
Release 180.1:
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Character Progression has been reset and all earned skill points have been refunded. This is to correct the skill points not awarded when player levels increased due to the progression rebalancing.
Skill points are not available until you enter a world.
Engine:
Reworked fullscreen support on windows
No longer leaves fullscreen when switching away to another app.
Activating fullscreen should stay on the same monitor the window was on.
Various other tweaks about keeping focus when switching between windowed/fullscreen.
Better compatibility for streaming
Cross posted from
Release 178: Square, Bevel and Slope Chisels!
This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.
This release adds support for Square, Bevel and Slope Chisels, including all orientations and shapes. A future update will expand the blocks that can be chiseled further.
Please checkout Jiivita’s video that explores and introduces many of the new chisel’s features:
All orientations of the following chiseled shapes can now be sculpted in Boundless.
Release Notes:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Added the following different chisels:
Stone Square Chisel - removes an edge connecting 2 corners per action. Use this chisel to rapidly create steps, walls and slabs.
Copper Slope Chisel - removes an edge connecting 2 corners per action to create a bevel shape.
Iron Bevel Chisel - removes an edge connecting 2 corners per action to create a slope shape.
Silver Precise Slope Chisel - removes a single corner. This chisels is equivalent to the original chisel implementation.
Gold Precise Bevel Chisel - removes a single corner to create a bevel shape.
Titanium Precise Square Chisel - removes a single corner to create a square shape.
Sloped block changes:
Compact soil blocks, rock-brick blocks, decorative rock blocks, compact coal blocks, compact gem blocks and lantern blocks are now slopeable.
The missing rotations and flips of Pyramidal-corner shapes and saddle shapes have been added.
New slopeable shapes: the “half” pyramidal corner, and the “corner-wedge” (a wedge with a corner cut out of it), a “under-saddle” (saddle with an under-corner knocked out), the “bi-diagonal” (saddle/high-corner with both sides knocked out), and the “under-pyramid” (a pyramidal corner block with the under middle corner knocked out) shapes and all rotations and flips are added.
This means we now have all the chisel patterns available for slopeable blocks, with a total of 150 shapes available after taking into account all unique rotations of the base-shapes.
The new slope shapes are used for natural terrain generated in the World Builder now meaning new worlds will have “even smoother” terrain in some cases.
Various texture-blending issues have been resolved for the sloped shapes, though crafted-block shapes continue to have no texture-blending.
Crafted block changes:
Rock-stones blocks, decorative rock blocks, ice, glacier, gleam, sponge, ancient-corruption, compact coal blocks, machined metal blocks and decorative gem blocks are now “craftable” shape blocks (as well as being slopeable blocks). By “craftable” we mean that they can be shaped into steps, walls and slabs.
Crafted-block items (STAIR/SLAB/WALL) are removed (they will have become standard-versions of the blocks in your inventory).
Crafted-blocks are massively updated so that instead of crafting the items and then placing them, you instead use a “square” chisel to cut out the corners of the blocks individually. This means that we also have many, many more possible shapes available than what was possible using only the slab, stair and wall blocks. After taking into account all possible rotations of the base-shapes, there are 254 shapes available for “craftable” blocks. Breaking a crafted block will now just gives you a base block too matching the behaviour of slopes.
After this release these blocks will simply be referred to as chiselled, or sometimes square chiselled, bevel chiselled and slope chiselled.
<*>New “bevel” blocks:
Every block that is “craftable” is now also “bevelable”. Using a “bevel” chisel you can construct all the same patterns as with crafted blocks, but with block-shapes having sloped edges/facets instead of cubical blocks. This means there are also 254 possible shapes available for bevels too including all of the rotations and flips etc.
<*>Engine:
The way that the sun and block lighting is sampled by the voxel-geometry has been overhauled meaning that the lighting of the voxels will now be almost entirely perfectly smooth without any weird dark-artefacts all over the place (often only very subtle, but sometimes very obvious, and caused many issues like square-patterns of lighting on slabs, or really dark edges that should never have been so dark, as well as sometimes obvious plain artefacts around sloped terrain), as well as fixing some cases where light would incorrectly bleed through vertices leading to bright edges on the inside of black interiors etc.
Some minor physics-geometry, and block-selection issues have also been resolved.
<*>World Builder:
Updated World Builder to generate all sloped shapes and orientations.
<*>Bug fixes:
Fixed an issue where friends were removed when scrolling down the Friend list.
Fixed an issue where it was not possible to place items of the same smart stack category onto Shop Stands.
Fixed an issue where the total amount of health for Core Attributes is displayed as zero.
Fixed an issue where right-clicking on an item with a quantity of 1 and dragging to another item with a quantity greater than 1 will appear to show that the single item has a large quantity.
Release 178.1:
Fixed incorrect prices in request baskets and shop stands.
We’d still love to see some screenshots of your experiments and constructions with the new chisels…
Release 176: Beacon Permissions, Daily and Weekly Tweaks and Portal Fixes
This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.
Overview:
This release promotes the recent Testing release to Live:
Testing 175: Beacon Permissions, Daily and Weekly Tweaks, and Portal Fixes
Release Notes:
Beacons
Added new beacon permission options: Builder, Worker, Engineer.
Daily and Weekly Objectives
Daily and weekly XP bonus requirements have been reduced.
Removed XP reward for daily and weekly logins.
General fixes for various daily and weekly objective issues.
Portals
Improved smoothness whilst watching someone go through a portal that leads to the same world (may have caused you to occasionally see someone whoosing through the air at superspeed from the source to destination portal due to interpolation between server-updates!).
Fixed held items clipping badly/disappearing near portals. The held items will now just render in front of the portal.
Fixed a crash when watching someone “flip” an open portal’s direction.
Known Issues:
The following items are known issues in this release.
Pressing the Enter key on the Rename Beacon box will disable game functionality. Avoid this by clicking the Confirm option instead.
Breaking the Campfire during the initial tutorial will reset some objectives and display the ‘Build a Temporary Campfire’ objective again.
Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Number of available feats is incorrect.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some feats are not shown on the GUI
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/11 crashes the game on start up.
When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
Release 172.1: Drop Balance, Health and Damage Tweaks.
This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.
Overview:
A point release to address some of the balance concerns from 172, and make mining and hunting more rewarding.
Release Notes:
Creatures drop more drops, especially at higher tiers. Also a range of extra drop types.
When mining seams on higher rank worlds there is a chance to get more than one resource. This is effected by luck.
Fixed Luck and creature drops, so that now the more Luck the more chance of higher drop numbers.
Creatures have less health and slightly less armour.
Topaz slingbow does more damage.
Elemental creatures take varying damage based on the element of the damage done.
Gem tools have move durability.
Fixed a bug in the selection of creature variants to spawn.
Release 172: Alts and World Levels!
This update is accessible via the “Live” release of Boundless on Steam.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it’s unlikely you’ll get the latest version.
Overview:
This release collects together the recent Testing releases:
Testing 170: Multiple Characters and Compass Update!
Testing 171, 171.1: Optimisations, Block Levels, and Angry Creature Spawning!
Release Notes:
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Adjusted experience received from ancient technology seams to be a fair amount, and flowers to be a small amount (to reduce the effectiveness of picking them up and placing them as a cheap XP gain).
Blocks on moons (Level 2 worlds) now have more health than on home planets, and ring (Level 3) worlds have even more. This allows us to better balance the speed and progression of mining.
Can equip specific items from within a Smart Stack.
Moving held items in backpack should leave them still held.
Re-balanced slingbows
Added multishot variants.
Removed cooldown to make repeaters better.
Changed gravity effects for different types.
Balanced damage, and speeds etc.
Tweaked names.
Removed gravity from grapples.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Improved creature spawning so creatures should spawn much more often.
Spawn creatures ahead of the player when they are traveling.
Despawn creatures far away from players more quickly and decreased spawn in/out distances. This increases the number of creatures closer to players.
Reduced creature counts so the game is not overly cluttered with creatures (after the above changes).
Optimised the spawning system server for CPU load.
Improved the HUD damage indicators.
Let the character look almost perfectly straight/up down again so that you can select planets directly above your head again etc.
Re-balanced creature health, damage and armour values to make them much more challenging.
Re-balanced creature variants spawning on each world.
Different power creatures on some worlds.
Rate of fire and projectile speed variations.- Creature names now display their level and if they are elemental.
Elemental creatures now spawn, with different meshes, and applying status effects when they attack.
Fixed the selection of meshes for creatures.
Large refactor of the server and client to support users having multiple characters, GUI to enable this functionality coming soon. This change required a reset of the testing universe (updated to a new snapshot of the live us east servers), it will not however require a reset on the live universe when promoted to live.
Re-balanced creature variants that are spawned on each world to show more interesting variation.
Higher level wildstock have a random chance of being aggressive.
Made high level hoppers be smaller.
Re-balanced creature health and damage.
Wildstock charge now only does repeated damage after half a second.
Creature Threat
The creature threat system has been overhauled.
Creatures now detect players that are a certain range from them in all directions and act aggressive towards the player for a period of time before they start attacking.
Players need to run away from the creature when it is in threatening mode if they want to avoid combat.
Creatures now detect players if they use any projectile weapon near the creature.
Certain creatures will start attacking players if they are too close to the creature.
Certain creatures will not attack the player unless they are attacked first.
Certain creatures will flee from the player is they are too close.
Creature Aggro
The creature targeting system has been overhauled.
Players now accumulate aggro by performing certain actions like: hitting a creature or healing a player.
Creatures will now attack the nearest player with the highest current aggro rating.
A player’s current aggro is decreased the further away they are from the creature.
Aggro decreases over time if a player is outside of combat for certain period of time.
Wildstock combat behaviour has been adjusted
Hit range for a Wildstock charge has been widened from 0.5 to 1.8.
The number of Wildstock charges in a row with a break has been reduced from 3 to 1.
The speed of the Wildstock charge has been increased from 6 m/s to 12 m/s.
The range of the Wildstock charge has been widened from 10 meters to 15 meters.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Modifications in the objectives system:
All the completed objectives have to be claimed to obtain the reward.
Created new daily/weekly panel at the top of the feats screen.
Now the feats can be tracked.
Tracking shortcut with right click for feats and regular objectives.
Moved Equipment crafting skills earlier in the progression unlock order.
Removing level 35 level cap and going back to 50
Removing the need to build a portal on another world to complete the objective
Exploration: Light Source skill now produces a continuous dull light around the player. Be warned that it currently can’t be disabled without unlearning the skill.
For every 500000 xp earned beyond level 50 players will be awarded an extra 40 beacon plots. This can be repeated infinitely.
Swapped endurance and abilities skill groups around.
XP rewards for machine crafting are given to the person who started the crafting (previously all crafting rewards went to the beacon owner)
Re-balanced tool damage to make progression feel more pacy, and mining feel less grindy.
Fixed the application of mastery to action time.
Taken out the bonus for having more mastery than needed.
Updated skill text to explain what recipes are in each recipe pack, as well as saying which features are not yet implemented.
GUI + HUD:
Added hotkey (K) to toggle the social screen.
Added new air bar in the hud.
Certain Crafter feats have been repositioned in the GUI
Certain Explorer feats have been repositioned in the GUI
Fighter feats have been renamed to Combat
Moved “Chunk Cache Size”, and “Chunk Download Rate” settings into a Network tab on the Settings GUI.
Added a new game option in the Network settings tab which disables all of the bad-connection flow, including inputs being reset to 0 server-side when the connect falters, allowing people to play with bad-behaviour and rubber banding if they choose to do so, instead of being returned to the sanctum or prevented from playing on that server.
Added segmented health bars to help communicate health and level variation of players, creatures and blocks.
Added Quickmove (shift and click LMB or RMB) from backpack to quickuse in Inventory menu
Improvements on the HUD’s compass:
Adding new compass entries: portals and settlements.
Removing beacon entries.
Improved the visualisation of enemy entries.
Changed the compass entries scaling based on distance.
Initial GUI for multiple character support.
Updated the debug screen:
Removed the debug screen from the DOT key. This now uses F1 and brings up a debug menu bar at the top of your window.
Press F1 again or click on the close option to go back to playing the game.
Added a latency graph showing the clients current server network latency.
Added a frame time graph for debugging long frames.
Added a debug information window with all of the old debug information.
Added a “Copy Debug Information” menu option which copies all debug information.
SFX + Music:
New audio events in the GUI.
Engine:
Client inputs are now reset to 0 server-side when the client is unresponsive on the network. This will halt players when their connection is temporarily lost.
The bad-connection screen is modified to prevent changing the camera view until only 10 seconds are left in the countdown, the character equally will not go into the logging-out pose until such a time.
The bad-connection “return more quickly” button, is replaced with a “return now” button that will (pending server communications) return you instantly back to the sanctum instead of waiting another 10 seconds.
The bad-connection logic is slightly tweaked to delay putting you into the bad-connection state by an extra second in the hope the network improves first. An extra second is also added to the recovery logic. This should help reduce flip-flopping between the states too often.
Fix some short/long-term physics issues:
Continuous collisions against unloaded chunks may have put you into the world, whilst we generally resolve that with auto-unstuck feature added recently, this should make it just happen less often. That unstuck feature also only occurs server-side, and this issue was causing players to sometimes be stuck in the ground when returning to the sanctum too.
Fix in building the initial set of physics chunk data after optimisations to split physics on y-levels, this would only very rarely have caused any issues and only since the recent releases.
Fix bug in the sanctum where you could fall into the floor beside the warp that opens when “returning” to the sanctum from a game world (initial play of the game was unaffected).
Many optimisations for the game client that should, in particular, make portal transitions much smoother in terms of frame-rate, and being in areas with lots of portals much smoother in terms of frame-rate.
Improved quality of the anti-aliasing in the game removing certain artefacts that can appear especially in areas like the characters eyes, and removing the majority of unintended “blurring” in the image.
Reduced the maximum speed in physics achievable to be about 90mph, adjusting the drag to reach this speed asymptotically now instead of clamping. This is largely speaking an optimisation as the speed achievable in physics by any entity has a direct cost in unrelated server-side systems that need to work in a such a way as to take into account client’s point of views at varying latencies, as they need to “cast a wider net” as it were, to take into account entities which from the clients point of view may have been much closer.
Tweaked some physics values and slightly how stairs work in the physics to help fix/counteract issues that came about from us dropping the frame-rate of simulation from 30fps to 16fps when sprinting at high speeds.
Bug fixes:
Fixed a bug where one side of an open portal could end up with bad data allowing the user to fall into the ground next to it.
Fixed an issue where you could get stuck in the bad connection screen after recovery.
Fixed client crash when trying to add more than 255 columns (not individual plots, but unique columns) to a beacon.
Fixed completed warps/portals not having their breaking decals correctly removed when the damage is reset without being fully broken.
Fixed footfall not being generated by players without permissions… a bug introduced meant the opposite was happening and users “with” permissions were trying to generate footfall instead. oops!
Fixed issues in shader that could lead to weird colour artefacts around blackened areas of textures and the lack of specularity in those areas (eg the blacks of characters eyes).
Fixed not being able to generally walk onto slabs/steps from a low-friction material like ice.
Fixed showing a timeout bar on other warp in sanctum now that it does not close on a timer.
Fixed crash walking out of the sanctum to a location at the top of the world.
Fixed a rendering issues in the sanctum where sometimes the portal would only show the sky depending on where it exits into the world.
Fixed an issue where you could overextend a grapple by running along the ground, and also now allow you to reel yourself in much more easily when standing on the ground without needing to jump into the air first. Running along the ground will still allow you to reel-out the grapple though, only that you will eventually hit the max length before being forced to stop.
Resolved Known Issues:
The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.
Beacons which are greater than 100 metres from the centre may not function correctly.
Placing an item into the Crafting Table will somehow miss the intended slot and will drop instead.
Some creatures may disappear instantly and drop items before their bodies hit the ground.
World Builder currently does not work on Mac.
Known Issues:
The following items are known issues in this release.
Breaking the Campfire during the initial tutorial will reset some objectives and display the ‘Build a Temporary Campfire’ objective again.
Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
Choosing Return to Sanctum option briefly displays ‘wrap error’ text on screen.
Clicking the Craft button very quickly may close the active recipe.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the Furnace does not have enough fuel, the game will state that basic crafting recipes are missing.
If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
Illegal protocol message sometimes appears after going through a portal.
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Number of available feats is incorrect.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Portal UI text overflows when the portal token name is very long.
Region names may not be displayed correctly after discovering one.
[]Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some feats are not shown on the GUI
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon’s plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/ crashes the game on start up.
When Beacon fuel is nearly full, adding extra fuel will display a message saying that there are no consumable fuel items.
When expanding a smart stack offered by another player during trading, it will be empty.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 July 21st, 28th, August 4th - Slope Chisel, Square Chisel, and maybe Bevel Chisel and more!
For the past few weeks we’ve been focused on attempting to finish many features that have been in development for a while. Often these features are connected with each other so you need to wait until you have all the pieces in place before you can do a final pass. And as you can imagine this part is often the most challenging.
We released Testing 170, and plan to do another 1 or 2 testing releases before bringing the latest features across to Live.
The following major features are still in development:
Lance mêlée combat and clearly differentiating it from ranged combat - not much progress in the past few weeks. We have a solid core mechanic in game that encourages combat to be controlled and precise whilst feeling physical as impacts result in feedback on creature motion. This might not sound like much, but it's non trivial once you’re dealing with variable latency and impossible player prediction. We need to make sure that the presentation of the combat feels weighty and this is currently on the art and design teams' to-do list.
Bomb crafting and combat - almost ready, just needs the status effect system to be complete.
Positive and negative status effects for bombs, weapons, the environment and creatures - almost ready - just need the creatures to trigger and respond to elements.
Creature variation, including: Power ranges, Elemental, Non-Elemental and Exotic creatures - almost ready - just need to make sure all the variables are considered in the creature spawning. Connecting the creature tinting to the world and biome palettes will not happen until later in development.
Creature spawning, including: underground, swarms and world difficulty variation - still in development - just need to make sure it’s configured as expected across the different world difficulty levels. We want to make sure that the environments feel alive with variation.
1.0 balance for player progression, player skills and abilities, resource spawning, and world difficulty - gradual iteration - player feedback is extremely valuable.
Finally completing the HUD and GUI - will it ever end?
Server and Client optimisations to reduce network traffic, reduce the cost of player and creature simulation - we continue to reduce, cache, delta and compress the communications between the client and server.
… and more - details below.
Code - July 21st A new multi-segment (string of sausages) health bar has been implemented to show relative scale of health more obviously as multiple segments. The damage indicator has been revamped to better show direction and there is now an air bar to show when you are drowning. The air bar is now separated from stamina.
The reworked creature spawning has been completed with the creatures spawning more often and closer than before, so are more discoverable. The system despawns creatures into a pool that reduces the cost while allowing the population's density to be high and their state persistent. This is an essential foundation to allow more creatures into the worlds, especially for spawning raid events.
We have further optimised the network traffic to reduce bandwidth, especially for some of the large data items such as beacons and achievements. The server optimisations continue to allow more users on the worlds.
We have been analysing the portal transitions to see causes of the portal lag and have fixed several causes of spikes that lower FPS. This is often done by amortising creation and destruction costs over multiple frames. For example, this has always been done for meshing chunks, but it’s now done for deleting the chunks as well.
The multiple character backend support is being tested and last few issues resolved.
Code - July 28th The latest features have been pushed to the Steam Testing branch in Testing 170.
A reworking of the creature threat-aggro mechanic is underway to stop crazed creatures and return tranquillity to the wildstock. The creature spawning update is in, so players should now find more creatures as they explore the worlds. We are working on the AI behaviour to sleep more creatures when they are far from users to help keep the CPU cost down.
We’ve started on an update to how the shaped blocks (step, walls, and slabs) are made so that they will be chiselled in world from blocks rather than crafted. Many more block types will support shapes. (More details below.)
We’ve been implementing refinements to the smart stacking behaviour, so you can use them with quick use slots. Status effect icons are being added to show when you’re poisoned, etc. The backend multi-character support is ironing out the last few issues before merging it in.
We’ve fixed the main causes of frame drops when transitioning to new world through portals, so it should be a smoother experience. We also completed a pass on network traffic optimisations, especially for larger data cases. We’ve also been profiling the servers for RAM use to get more users on each world.
Code - August 4th The HUD work is focusing on the compass to show more useful information more often to users. The GUI completed the smart stack improvements, such as being able to hold a given item in a stack. We also have a local placement student (hi Maxime!) who has been reworking the debug ‘.’ text into a debug GUI window. This will make it easier to find information and tidy everything up.
The multiple character back end is merged in to the master branch and we have started work on the GUI to allow users to create, (re)name, switch to, and delete their characters.
Questions:
Should Character names be unique? Or can many players create characters with the same name?
When you see a Character in the game, should we also display the user name?
Should we show Character names in the forum?
When a player deletes a Character what do you expect should happen to their beacons in the game?
We have implemented the missing slope block shapes (rotations of some existing ones that were missing, and some brand new slope shapes) and are progressing on to the new chiselled block shapes. All the new slope shapes work correctly with texture blending and will be available in prefabs and generated into new worlds’ terrain.
We’re exploring adding more Chiselling techniques into the building system. The following diagram beautifully captures the current voxel shapes, and the exploration of significantly more options. This will be quite a big change:
Teal - right shapes: We’re adding all the missing slope shapes and orientations. So they’ll no longer be shapes you can craft on the flour but not on the walls. The current slope shapes are presented in teal and beautifully highlighted. The additional shapes are below them.
Red - left shapes: We’re also exploring adding a Square Chisel that would allow players to chisel the red shapes. This will mean that you no longer need to craft the walls, slabs and steps. This may seem a bit sideways but we think it’ll make everything much more intuitive. It’ll simplify crafting because the list of recipes will no longer contain 4x the block variations: walls, slab and steps. So crafting will be simpler. Building will be easier because you’ll no longer need to worry about relative placement position to get the desired orientation. Instead you’ll simply chisel the 2 corners you want to remove to make some steps. You’ll be able to make all the currently missing step orientations, and a huge plethora of new shapes. We’re planning to limit this level of sculpting to beacons so that builds will feel extra special compared to the natural world. (These shapes will not be created by the World Builder.) If you mine a previously chiseled block you’ll always get the original whole block back. This will mean that chiselling and mining square voxel variations will follow the same flow as the current slopes. (Which you couldn’t craft or mine in the past.) So in conclusion we think this will help make everything simpler, more intuitive and ultimately more fun when being extra creative.
Green - middle shapes: We may even add a Bevel Chisel which are the voxel variations in green. If you look carefully the green combinations match all the red shapes but with a different cut style. But this is classic feature creep, so these variations may move into post 1.0 content - it’ll just depend how quickly we make progress.
All 3 chiseling styles can be achieved by “clicking on the corner you want to remove” - so they should be easy to use.
We’re also thinking about adding a simplified Square chisel that would remove 2 corners at once. This would allow you to create a Step with a single chisel, and Walls and Slabs with 2. This may be a useful short cut or might just add more complexity. What do you think?
Questions:
Should we add a basic Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time - so easy to make steps, walls and slabs) and a precision Square Chisel (which removed 1 corner at a time)?
Or should we add a single Square Chisel (which removes 2 corns at a time), and allow players to learn a “Precision Chiselling Skill”. Which would upgrade their basic chiselling skill to be equivalent to the precision Square Chisel. This would make Building more skill-based.
Does anyone have a better names than Slope Chisel, Square Chisel and Bevel Chisel?
For progression we’ve implemented the personal light feature the skills unlock and added a level 50+ that allow users to continue to gaining plots as the gain XP.
We continue to work on reducing the chunk data to reduce network traffic and RAM use, on both the client and server.
Design - July 21st This week we have a new(ish) starter on the team. The ever versatile Matt is back! For those of you that don’t know him he’s been with us in various stints doing QA, as well as building most of the biomes and worlds that you’re currently playing on. Now, having graduated from university, he’s back with us full-time as a programmer. His first focus will be around generating and analysing the metrics and analytics from the game, and that’s why for now he’s coming under the “Design” section of the weekly update. He’s been getting up to speed with the analytics systems we use, and created some interesting graphs. In future weeks he will share some of his findings with you guys. Finally the truth!
Luke has been working on a set of recipes for Bombs, Brews and Crystals which will use existing resources as well as the new gathered resources that Jess has been working on. The plan is to have resources in different biomes as well as in caves for you to find, which will be needed for some of the more advanced crafting recipes. He’s also been preparing materials to refresh the Boundless Steam pages. Up until now we’ve been pleased with keeping our player base relatively small (we’ve wanted quality rather than quantity), but now we’re going to start experimenting with bringing more players to the game to expand our testing and feedback.
Rob has tweaked the chat design from last week, and produced assets for the updated health bars and reticule information, to support Simon and Marc who’ve been implementing them. He’s also been writing up a proposal for adjusting the compass to make it more readable, as well as be more performant. Finally he’s been helping Luke prepare assets for the visibility round, as well as general promotional materials.
Ollie has been helping Matt get up to speed on the analytics, and planned out the next couple of week’s work. He’s given blocks on different worlds different health values which ties in with Simon’s work on the health bars. He’s also worked with Marc on Status Effect visualisation, stacking and removal with consumables and bombs.
Design - July 28th Pretty much the entire design team has been on holiday this week. However, we have been agreeing on the Character switching flow for the current sanctum design. We need this flow to allow players to switch characters.
We’ve also spent some time exploring an updated compass, and how it might relate to a minimap and / or GUI map. You’ll be surprised to hear that the current compass can be extremely expensive as it sends lots of extra information to each client about the status of every other player and beacon. This isn’t scaleable. So we’ve been redesigning it to make it more efficient, more useful to players, connect it better with the skill trees, and more readable.
Design - August 4th This week has been very light in terms of design as Ollie, Luke and Rob have all been away on holiday.
Luckily Matt is here, so at least the analytic work has continued. He’s been testing all the existing data in great detail, and reworked the analytics for some key systems such as progression and damage. He’s also been adding analytic data for newer systems such as beacon fuel and portal fuel.
We continued looking at the compass and making sure delivering useful and efficient details, including:
Showing all creatures within range including a colour variation for passive, threatening, and aggressive.
Showing the nearest Settlements and removing the Beacons.
Introducing a new stepped scaling presentation for the glyphs, this will make it easier to judge the difference between elements 0-100m large glyph, 100-200m medium glyph, 200-500m small glyph, 500m+ nothing or a small coloured square.
Showing the nearest active Portals.
Showing Friends and Players.
Always showing your designated home location, the world's Capital, a Destination location (if pinned, and automatically unpinned on arrival) and finally any number of Pinner locations (not unpinned on arrival).
We also spent a little time exploring the status of the original minimap system and shared a few screen shots in the following linked post. We want to explore how a HUD minimap and GUI map might world alongside the compass. Just explorations at the moment.
Jess has continued adding to our library of natural props.
And Jim has completed improved lighting for all the worlds. This should be in the game soon.
Art - July 28th It’s been a quiet but productive week for art. Jim has overseen the completion of our set of prefabs for 1.0 and combined with Jess’s set of natural props that she also finished up this week we’re hoping our worlds will be even more full of interesting things to see in future. Amanda has been continuing with her designs for decorative props including poles, fences and more.
Art - August 4th The art team have been busy working on decorative props including stickers, wood blook progression, palettes and the new sanctum.
Amanda has been exploring sticker designs. See her post. This is purely exploration at the moment. The question is: given that we’ll have more block shapes via the extending chiselling, is it possible that by providing packs of decorative stickers / decals - can players create their own decorations and props? Does this bridge a gap between sculpted voxels and full meshes?
She’s also working on new door designs. Expect a post sharing her cool designs next week. The aim is to have a range of multipurpose door designs that fit into the standard material variation and contribute to prestige. Ideally the door concepts would work as doors, trap doors, shutters for windows, and other creatures usages.
Jess has been designing wooden blocks following raw, refined and decorative progression. Lustrous wood refined in a ‘basket weave’ parquet pattern.
She also completed other material versions of the bag of bombs.
Jim has iterated the new sanctum blockout. Sorry, this is under wraps for now till a later date. The aim of the new sanctum is to include all the pre-live world features and tutorial: account creation, character creation, spawn region or friend selection, equipping and dual wielding, location creation via the Totem, and Warp usage. The design aims to inspire players about the amazing creative possibilities in Boundless. Yes - there will be some sculptures - go go go crazy chiselling!
Jim has also been looking at world palettes. We want to make an artist friendly procedural palette generator. More of this to come. Meanwhile here’s some palette experiments of Therka market.
The sky and fog is purple on all of these screens.
It’s late and I’m very tired so please excuse the likely hundreds of grammatical and spelling errors. Could someone fix them for me…
Weekly Dev Update: 2017 June 23rd, 30th, July 7th, 14th - Progression, Polish and more!
For the past few weeks we've been focused on polishing up the Player Progression and Build Progression features and releasing them Live for all players.
This has resulting in 4 main releases:
Testing 166 and Release 167 - this was the initial release of Player Progression and Settlement Prestige to Live.
Testing 168 and Release 169 - additional quality, fixes and balance to Player Progression.
In general we're attempting to complete features that have been partially developed and release them Live for the community to play with, this includes:
Lance mêlée combat and clearly differentiating it from ranged combat.
Bomb crafting and combat.
Positive and negative status effects for bombs, weapons, the environment and creatures.
Creature variation, including: Power ranges, Elemental and Exotic creatures.
Creature spawning, including: underground, swarms and world difficulty variation.
1.0 balance for player progression, player skills and abilities, resource spawning, and world difficult.
Finally completing the HUD and GUI.
Server and Client optimisations to reduce network traffic, reduce the cost of player and creature simulation.
Increase the scaleability of the Engine for many active Portal and Warps.
... and more.
The aim of focusing on the quality and completeness of these feature areas is to have a solid core experience. Once this is done we can start thinking about calling the game Alpha and evaluate which additional features need to be implemented before 1.0, and by association the features that will be included in post 1.0 updates.
Code - June 23rd This week we updated the live version with the features seen on the testing branch and working through the issues, such as the portal collisions, and general polish.
The objectives continue up with the weekly and daily challenges. The GUI has been working through the trading and universe screens as well as starting a pass over the Feats UI. The block placement visualisation has been tweaked to make it more obvious when you're inside a beacon.
The new wildstock charge rework is integrated in for the next update. The creature spawning rules have been tweaked to spread the creature more evenly around users. The lance prototyping continues.
We also have reduced the network traffic as entities move around and are working on further reductions. The borderless window mode requested by users is being investigated. The bot testing continues to help us scale users per server. Adding support for multiple characters continues to progress.
Code - June 30th This week we’ve continued with the lance exploration, prototyping various behaviours to find what feels good. The challenge is finding a solution where melee combat physically feels like you're impacting with creatures, and this is a big challenge for a client-server predicted configuration. We further tweaked the creature spawning logic.
Core support for the Contracts feature is being implemented. The Feats and Journal screens are being worked through as well as richer item information.
We added further feedback to portals on their state and added logic to detect whether the server has too high a latency to play on. The Sanctum now allows you to go to another world if the one you were on is down.
The support for multiple character continues. We’ve been optimising the server with the goal of getting more users and creatures on the servers.
Code - July 7th We spent two days on a bug blitz to clean up many of the common issues. The fixes were rolled out in the update on the Steam Testing branch.
Creature spawning continues to be reworked, with the goal of getting more creatures per user with better discoverability and distribution. To make melee combat more engaging the creatures now push users which stops users walking through them.
The GUI continues to clean out the old GUI components and the Journal screen is being expanded. The multiple character support back end is nearing completion.
We continue to profile and optimise the server code to allow increased number of players and creatures. We are also optimising the network traffic to make the case with larger entity densities work well for users.
Code - July 14th The game was updated to bring over the features that were previewed in the Testing branch.
The creature spawning logic rework continues. We also fixed some issues that the creature-user pushing showed up.
The GUI work is mainly focused on the Journal screens. We are also cleaning up some of the back end of the GUI now the old GUI is almost replaced.
We continue to optimise the servers to get more users on a world. This has included optimising game systems such as the physics, as well as changing how the data is stored. We are also optimising the network traffic, especially for cases where large amounts could be sent. The multiple character support back end is almost completed.
Design - June 23rd This week has been mainly focussed around reacting to the live release, and building and polishing up features for the next release.
Luke worked with Andy to fix up some issues found in the tutorial and objectives, and then carried on with phase two of the updates objectives – Feats and Contracts. Feats are background goals which reward you for long-term play and Contracts are “missions” that you can select, customise, and then complete for rewards.
Ollie has worked and re-balanced the recipes for the beginning of the game to improve the experience for new players. He’s also tweaked tool and block placement ranges to make them consistent and interesting.
Rob has been updating the Journal section of the interface which covers the various types of objectives, including working on the design for the Feats screen. He’s also been fitting the weapon and tool attributes into the item tooltip.
Updated Feats GUI.
Item Attribute GUI.
Design - June 30th This week Rob has finished up the design for the Journal screen with daily and weekly feats added and updates to the objectives and tracker tabs. He’s also been working on the flow for when servers go offline, and how the warps and portals react to that.
Daily and Weekly Feats GUI design.
Objectives GUI design.
Objectives Tracking GUI design.
World Full HUD design.
Luke has been building more data for the Contracts, while continuing to tweak the Feats and Objectives.
Ollie has been mainly doing project management work, writing dull documents, and working with our issue tracking software to keep on top of where we are with the project. Boring!
Design - July 7th Ollie has been working on balancing multiple areas of the game, including the various status effects we have in development as well as improving the initial experience of the game. He has made changes to a number of recipes and the speed and performance of a number of tools and weapons.
Luke started the week working on the Contract system with Andy to develop a prototype for the procedurally generated quest system. He also added some new objectives to highlight our chisel tool and using the sanctum when a player is stuck. For the remainder of the week, Luke was working on improving the current threat system as well as the stamina system.
At the start of the week Rob worked with Marc to implement the new Feats GUI as well as the new presentation for Weekly and Daily Feats. Rob then moved onto the creating mock ups of the contract GUI and how players would interact with the contract GUI.
Design - July 14th This week Ollie has been spending time balancing the creatures, including their damage and health values, as well as the logic that chooses which variants are on each worlds. He’s also been working with Fooksy on improving the logic for spawning.
Luke has been working on designs for the stamina system and the creature aggro system. He’s also fixed an issue with the hopper collision.
Rob has been working on designs for the chat system (with Luke’s help). Here are some work in progress designs for the system:
Inactive passive chat.
Active chat.
Expanded active chat.
Art - June 23rd The art team has been a bit light this week with Amanda on holiday but we’ve been busy supporting and playtesting the live release and working on natural props and lighting amongst other things.
Jess has continued modelling our library of natural props and natural resources. Last week you saw the cactus, this week here’s a rockstack and a coralesque formation.
Rock Stack
Coral
Coral at night
It’s quite minor but she’s also done a test clean up on the resource seam decals. We think it’s a definite improvement.
Updated coal seam.
Jim has been iterating the lighting day/night cycles of Therka and Munteen. The other worlds will also have a polish pass next week. The effect in the distance is softer with fog lighting added and the sunsets are more dramatic.
We're also reducing the RGB saturation of the sky gradients. Here’s a less intense Munteen.
Jim has also been supporting Fooks on the Lance prototype and also working on the new Sanctum.
Art - June 30th This week we’ve been a bit light in the art team with sickness but we’ve continued working on cool features.
Jess has been looking at different ways to approach our block texture blending. No firm conclusions to share yet but we will continue looking at this in the coming weeks. Many of the blends don't match their material structure and need customising.
She has also been working through our library of natural props. This week she’s produced:
Aloe Plant
Rock Ring
Jim has been supporting Fooks prototyping the lance. We’re generally happy with the feel of this new melee weapon. After some further review and balancing we will go into full art production on the final lance model tiers and a final animation pass before sharing with you.
Jim has also continued working with Luke on pre-production of the new Sanctum. We’ll be iterating this over the next few weeks before we go into full production.
Art - July 7th This week the art team has been busy with the Bug Blitz and working on concepts, natural props, animation and lighting.
Amanda is nearly there on the core parts of decorative poles concepts. Here’s her latest with images also showing construction and placement ideas. The aim is to give everyone a toolkit to play with rather than single usage models.
Pole cross beams, fences and bunting.
Pole construction considerations.
Hanging construction considerations.
Hanging concepts.
Jess has made snowdrop and scattered fungus natural props models:
Mushrooms
Snowdrops
Snowdrops in the dark
Jess has also been experimenting with new wildstock colours. Here she’s added some new wildstock colours (just base and aux colours, not decals). This is an exploration to understand how colours should be generated in the future so that creatures fit into their highly varied environments and worlds.
Jim has continued on visual targets for the current 12 world lighting keyfames. He’s also added 3rd person animations for eating and shaking the lightcube. Now available on Testing.
Art - July 14th This week the art team have been working on decorative props, natural props and lighting.
Amanda has continued her decorative prop concepts. She has shared a detailed post here:
Jim has been updating the lighting for all the worlds adding slight fogging and reducing colour saturation levels to achieve a more pleasing result. This will be going into the game in the next few weeks.
We're spinning many many plates!
Release 169: Tweaks, Fixes and Performance!
This update is accessible via the "Live" release of Boundless on Steam.
Please restart Steam to make sure you get the latest version of Boundless. If the update happens whilst Steam is open it's unlikely you'll get the latest version.
Overview:
This release contains all the features and fixes from the Testing 168 release.
Release Notes:
Art + Animation + Assets:
3rd person jump land no longer played automatically after sliding.
Consume 3rd person animations added.
Fixed creature decals.
Lightcube activation 3rd person animations added.
Slowed Wildstock run animation.
The top of Ice blocks is now tinted along with the rest of the block.
Upped block vertex distortion from 0.13 to 0.250 so 'raw' material types look more organic.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Any recipe which can be hand crafted can now be crafted instantly on a crafting table.
Beacon fuel has been modified slightly.
Beacon Plotter, and Plot Remover now need ingredients to make.
Beacon plotters now smart stack.
Disabled being able to grapple other players. Was not intended, and causes griefing and an instance of rubber-banding whenever a player is grappled by someone else due to the inability to predict correctly. Grappling friends will be enabled again in a future update.
Fix torches can be placed on doors.
Fixed beacon control effects not always changing state.
Fixed grapple claw not showing in storage.
Ice and Glacier can now be broken with the totem and wooden tools. Gleam can only be broken with copper tools and above.
Skills needed to craft initial recipes tweaked (Copper Tools and Weapons, Fossil Extract, Glue, Nails and Extractor are now basic recipes, Titanium Firepit and Crucible are Machine 1 Recipes).
Stone spanners now have durability.
The range of tools is now dependent on the Control attribute.
Timber is now a fuel source for a Beacon.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Fix for creature drops sometimes appearing before the creature finishes it's death animation.
Fix for creatures sometimes twitching during death animation.
Fix for dropped items disappearing when dropped while facing a wall (they didn't actually disappear they would teleport to the top of the wall).
Fix if no valid NPC spawn points can be found for a player then no more NPCs will spawn for any other players.
Fix an issue where projectiles don't harvest creature drops.
Fix spawning to not allow NPCs to spawn outside the max distance from players. This stops huge spam of NPCs when lots of players stand on a high tower. A new creature spawning system is in development that will allow for aggressive creature raids.
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[Improved pick up logic so that if a pickup falls through the player they will pick it up.
New Wildstock melee attack:
The Wildstock melee is now properly predicted. This fixes issues where players were hit by the Wildstock but on their screen they avoided it.
This makes dodging the Wildstock a lot easier so to address the balance the Wildstock will now charge for much longer and will change direction 3 times.
Only spawn new NPCs near to players (not portals). Portals can still keep NPCs alive but they won't spawn new NPCs in.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
A New Dawn Feat has been renamed to First Steps.
A number of text changes has been made in various areas of the game.
Fixed an issue where the Daily and Weekly timers were displaying the wrong information.
Max level has temporarily been reduced to 35.
New Objective added to teach players about Chiseling blocks.
Objective "Build a Warp To Your Beacon" has been updated.
Re-balanced recipe skills to improve the beginning of the game.
The second exit from sanctum now behaves like the first, remaining open permanently once open unless manually shut down.
XP awarded for crafting has been reduced.
XP awarded for feats has been adjusted.
XP awarded for killing creatures has been reduced.
GUI + HUD:
Added new feats menu on the objective screen.
Changed block placement highlight to be more obvious and will always render if a block is held in either hand. It now has more colours:
Green - In beacon with permission to place and valid placement.
Orange - Outside of a beacon and valid placement (these blocks will be regenerated).
Red - Cannot be placed here.
Disabled block outline for tools (except Chisel).
Fixed seeing planet markers through other planets.
Fixed tooltip position to avoid showing it out screen.
Speed up GUI rendering, especially when HPET is enabled on Ryzen.
Updated item details popup box
Updated Portal GUI
Engine:
Fixed artefacts in sun-lighting of entities to be much closer to voxel lighting results, and fixed a couple minors bugs in block-light directions for voxel rendering.
Fixed breaking decals sometimes showing as barbed grass texture.
Fixed for water not flowing out of chiseled blocks when they are removed.
Fixed incorrectly trying to render more than one portal, killing performance for users.
Fixed portals getting stuck in grey state when going back and forth between worlds.
Fixed random specks on the screen when holding light sources, particularly the light cube.
Fixed the two known crashes in the new multithreaded rendering leading to random occasional crashes for players.
Fixed too many portals becoming active when there are multiple world connections, killing performance for users.
Increased the variability of error messages shown on portal/warp HUD info, whether portal is trying to reconnect/connect, is grey because we're still waiting for data, or because we're already rendering another warp/portal, or is black because we already have too many active portal connections.
Portals that fail to connect to the destination world will now retry after a short interval (currently 5 seconds) instead of remaining stuck grey until you reload the game.
Reduced one of the bottlenecks associated with updating the game for rendering, may improve FPS slightly for players whilst moving around the world or going through portals.
Reduced the cost of entities on the other side of portals.
The game will now monitor network status to servers refusing to connect to servers if the network would not be stable enough to play, or disconnecting servers if the network becomes too unstable once you're already connected. In the case that this is the world you're currently in, the game will try and log you out appropriately so that you will be put back into the sanctum (and you can choose to do a standard log-off to reduce that time if you wish), but in the case that the server is too unresponsive, or that the server really does go down for whatever reason, you will still end up onto the error screen where you will need to wait until the the character data becomes available to use again.
Server:
Fixed server crash using the furnace.
Fixed server crash when a player changes to a tool/weapon in the sanctum then hits a block or entity after going through a portal.
Reduced bandwidth usage of physics state from the server
Reduced network socket traffic ~2x.
World Builder:
Fixed most cases of being teleported up whilst editing a prefab.
Fixed worldbuilder where some prefabs would crash as soon as you joined in the client, and fix a crash if disabling blocktypes whilst viewing a world-generation in the client.
Removing level cap as we have people at 50 now.
Support packets in protocol beyond 64kB.
Resolved Known Issues:
[I]The following items were known issues in previous releases and have now been resolved.
Assigning both mouse buttons to 'Use Left Hand Option' will disable the left mouse button. To fix delete C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\boundless\user_settings\yourname\controls.json.
Cannot switch tabs on Inventory menu using shoulder buttons on a controller.
Fixed Feats - Daily and Weekly Login tasks not functioning. (However, you may need to wait up to 24 hours to see the fix.)
Gem grappling hooks retract automatically when hanging.
Occasional visible specks appear on screen.
Sound effects for Portal and Warp Conduits may be missing.
World Builder currently does not work on Mac.
Known Issues:
The following items are known issues in this release.
[new] Beacons which are greater than 100 metres from the centre may not function correctly.
[new] Illegal protocol message sometimes appears after going through a portal.
Cannot close Inventory when Chat is used.
Changing the Chunk Cache Size in fullscreen mode will disable game functionality.
Entity rendering will not always work correctly when there are multiple warps very close together, or where a warp opens up to a location very near where the entrance is.
Game displays welcome message for a world through a portal without going through it.
GUI rendered incorrectly on Intel HD graphics (and some AMD / GTX laptop GPUs) on Windows.
If the game (loader) fails to start on Windows 7 and 8 you may need to install https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows
If you spend a skill point before the tutorial asks you to, you will be required to unlearn and relearn the skill again.
Item placed into Request Basket will disappear when placing the same item into storage.
Item wanted is completely different to what was placed there before on the Request Basket.
Items will occasionally be unable to smart stack with other items that belong in the same smart stack category.
Menus may constantly reappear on screen after closing them.
Objectives & Feats - Some tasks are not being tracked correctly.
Opening or closing doors and trapdoors when standing too close to them will restrict player movement. To get out of the situation, interact with the door or trapdoor again.
Placing an item into the Crafting Table will somehow miss the intended slot and will drop instead.
Portal UI text overflows when the portal token name is very long.
Request Baskets (previously Buying plinths) that had wanted items set before v151 have unset them. Sorry. Going forward they will be fine.
Skill descriptions are not final.
Some creatures may disappear instantly and drop items before their bodies hit the ground.
Some interactive blocks (crafting table, machine, beacon control) have become corrupted during the migration. This will result in at best those blocks not being able to be interacted with, at worst the game crashing when interacting with those blocks. To fix the issue the block(s) in question need to be re-placed. In the case of anything other than a beacon control the block can simply be broken, picked up, and then re-placed. In the case of a beacon control this will work, although it would result in all the plots having to be re-placed one at a time and during that process the contents being unprotected. A better workaround for a beacon control is to craft a new beacon control, place that, and then break the old one, which will keep the beacon's plots placed throughout the process.
Speech bubbles may still be displayed above players after going through portals.
The recipes are not final.
Using D3DGear http://www.d3dgear.com/1 crashes the game on start up.
Z-fighting with some items (workbench and other machines) when placed underwater.
Release 167: Player Progression and Build Progression!
This update is accessible via the "Live" release.
Testing 161
Art + Animation + Assets:
New tintable ice and glacier textures.
Beacons + Campfires:
Beacons now have a prestige value determined by a combination of factors including the types of blocks used to build a beacon, the variation of blocks within a beacon, the distribution of solid/air within the beacon and the presence of blocks from other worlds.
Beacons now combine together (based on proximity in x/z only ignoring vertical distances) into settlements classified as one of an Outpost, Hamlet, Village, Town, City or Great City based on the total prestige of the settlement calculated by summing the prestiges of its beacons. The character which contributed the most prestige to the settlement will be its mayor, who can rename the settlement via a Beacon Control block within the settlement. Settlements whose prestige is too small will not be classified at all and not be given a name. The beacon control block will also show a ranking of up to the 5 top contributors to the settlement, and settlements will be visible on planets in the sky when holding the Totem. The settlement with the highest prestige will be granted the title of Capital on that world.
Beacons that are part of a named settlement will generate footfall when people other than members of the beacon enter the beacon (beacons owned by the same user within the same settlement won't generate multiple footfall payments) each day, with coin collectable from a beacon control block of that beacon.
When placing a beacon, you'll now get an entry in your 'Beacons' list on the player GUI and the warp conduit GUI which will provide you more information about your beacons and allow you to warp to them directly. You will no longer get an automatically saved 'Location' (that actually has nothing to do with beacons) when placing a beacon console. There is no migration in place to automatically add all beacons you already own, so you will need to interact with a console in your beacons and click 'Add to Beacons' in the Settings tab to add it to the list manually. Note that you can now also interact with a beacon as a villager to add a beacon you have permissions for to your beacons list. These new beacons will show up on the planets too for your own set of beacons.
Beacons can now be given a name by the mayor of the beacon which will show up in the HUD and in the Beacons list.
Beacons no longer require their columns of plots to be contiguous (can have vertical C shapes), fixing bugs in the removal of plots.
Beacon plots can now be removed even if there is a console inside of them, this is a change that also removes the limit on the number of consoles a beacon has and is forward planning for beacon fuelling. Beacon consoles are purely an interface onto 'whatever beacon happens to be that position' and no longer store any state whatsoever. They're just blocks!
Beacons will now expire after a given period of time. Beacons already existing in the world will have approximately 6 months of life on them.
Beacons will no longer automatically reserve a plot when placing a beacon control, you must fuel them to reserve the first plot and create 'the beacon'.
Beacons can be fuelled currently using leaf blocks and tree trunk blocks. Further fuel items will be added later with additional balancing and tiers of fuel. As a flavour of this, the leaf blocks will be able to take a beacon up to 3 months of life, whilst a trunk block will be able to take it up to 6 months of life in total.
Campfires are a new item which acts as a device for temporary reservation of beacon area using up two plots and which has no permissions or fuelling, and takes no part in settlements or footfall. Campfires are automatically fuelled and have a life time of 1 day. Placing a beacon control into an existing campfire will 'upgrade' it to a beacon wherein it can now have plots added and removed, and have additional fuel added to it along with permissions. Campfires will be destroyed when the campfire block is destroyed unlike beacons.
Beacons and campfires will both appear in the 'beacons' list of the new 'universe' screen which now holds the locations GUI also.
The new universe screen also contains a 'settlements' list detailing information about settlements you own a beacon in (villager status is not enough).
The new universe screen contains also a 'worlds' list detailing information about all of the worlds you've visited (there is no migration in place to auto-populate this).
Huge changes to character progression:
Character Experience - XP:
All XP and levels have been reset. Don't worry though, because you'll retain all coins and beacon plots earned so far.
Total experience required to level up for the early levels has been adjusted slightly.
XP is now a single pool, not tracked per profession.
XP is earned by completing objectives rather than awarded for individual actions.
Character Objectives:
The first tier of objectives is available.
Objectives give you XP, allowing you to level up. Each new level gives you coin, beacon plots, and skill points to spend.
All objectives are split by profession.
One time objectives can be used to learn about a profession.
Daily objectives will reset each day, allowing you to earn regular XP.
One time and daily objectives must be activated for progress to be recorded. They are tracked in the top left corner of the screen.
Weekly objectives will reset once a week and are always active. They provide big chunks of XP towards your next level. You'll need to view these in the objective screen to track your progress.
Press J or select Objectives menu in the Options to access the Objectives list. This can only be accessed after you have completed the tutorial.
Character Attributes:
We've fleshed out the attribute system with lots of the underlying game systems now using attributes. You'll probably notice you're moving and hitting slower than you used to. Try increasing your Agility and Dexterity to improve that!
Character Unlockable skills:
There's a whole new skill unlock system in place that lets you improve core attributes, combat competencies, and unlock some specialised skills too. Press K or select Character menu in the Options to access the Skills page.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
New players will start the game with just the items they have collected in the Sanctum. Players no longer receive a free Beacon and are instead encouraged to craft one in the tutorial.
The recipe for crafting a Beacon Control has been updated, it is now made with the Crafting Table.
Warp Location Picker Upgrade has been renamed to Warp Shard.
Creatures + Combat:
All five power tier variants of Spitter models are now in the game. Spitter colours have changed slightly.
Items dropped by creatures now always drop in the direction the player is facing to make them easier to find.
Items dropped by creatures now stay for a second to give players time to see them before they are picked up.
Melee hits are predicted on the client, so effects play when you hit a creature irrespective of latency.
Point projectile damage and break blocks if their power is large enough. However only tools create block drops.
Wildstock have all had their textures tweaked and will be slightly different colours now.
GUI + HUD:
Drop items by picking them up from your back pack and clicking on the left side of the screen (replaces previous GUI button)
Improved HUD for beacons to show the beacon name and it's mayor and improve styling.
Improved HUD for other basic interactable items to improve styling.
Improved HUD for portals/warps to show some extra information like whether they're in a valid state, and improve styling.
New tutorial to introduce players to the game and the progression system.
Updated GUI for grid item tooltip, information popup, Smart Stack and Amount Picker.
Updated GUI for Crafting Table, Machines and Spark Core
Use location tokens by taking them in hand and actioning them (replaces previous GUI button)
SFX + Music:
Added character audio for actions, running, landing and emotes. Yarbo!
Engine:
Increase default chunk cache size to 2GB. Added 4GB and 8GB options.
Server:
Reduced the number of protocol messages being sent between the client and server for better network performance.
Bug fixes:
Fixed an issue where health would briefly change after entering portals and warps.
Fixed an issue where the Spark Core was still being referenced as the Power Core.
Testing 162
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Slingbow special fire modes are now locked behind Slingbow Mastery skill upgrades.
Rapid fire mode: Hold the fire button to spam shots.
Charge fire mode: Hold the fire button to charge up your shot and increase damage.
Some slingbows can rapid fire, some can charge shot, and some can do neither. You'll have to experiment to discover which.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
The impact effect when the Slingbow hits a target is now predicted and played on the client rather than server.
Improved visibility of cuttletrunks, hoppers and spitters in the dark.
Stamina:
The blue SP bar under your health bar now represents your stamina rather than air.
Air is still functional, and you will drown if you remain under water too long, but for now the UI won't display it so be careful while swimming!
Stamina is spent when moving, jumping, and using items.
Stamina is regenerated over time.
When your stamina runs out your are temporarily "fatigued" which reduces all of your attributes down to basic levels and stops you sprinting. Regain stamina to fix this.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Experience Points required for each level has been rebalanced.
The default jump height has been lowered but the jump height and double jump upgrades have been increased.
The NPC in the Sanctum will now appear after the intro.
The spawn location in the Sanctum has been changed so both Warps are now visible.
Various changes have been made to the tutorial and its flow:
Some of the text shown in the information box has been updated.
The order of the tutorial has been changed to better introduce new players to Boundless.
Various changes have been made to objectives:
After the Tutorial you now only unlock 1 Miner, 1 Gatherer and 1 Explorer objective instead of 90 objectives for all professions.
You start with two objective slots. Further slots are unlocked as you level.
Tier 1 objectives have been updated.
Tier 2 objectives are now available.
The unlock order for objectives has been updated.
Completing an objective for a profession will unlock new objectives.
You now need to complete Miner, Gatherer and Explorer objectives to unlock objectives for the other professions.
The Mender category has been removed until the profession is playable.
A number of the bug fixes have been made, however there may still be some issues with the objective system.
GUI + HUD:
Update machine recipe lists and queue GUI
Update warp conduit GUI
Update skill tree GUI
Testing 163
Art + Animation + Assets:
The Buying Plinth now has a different appearance to distinguish it better from the Selling Plinth. It's now a Request Basket.
New First Person Animations for held items. Animations are more specialised per item and scale better across game aspect ratios.
New effects for slingbow charge, entity despawn, item break and the warp surround.
Fix effects not playing after spawning when holding a torch in sanctum and after portal/warp transitions.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Changed the resource distribution on home worlds to increase the probability of Iron and Copper spawning when the world regenerates.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Introduction of creature and combat Threat:
Creatures now have a 3 stages of threat:
Passive - No interest in any nearby players and is unlikely to attack, even if provoked.
Aggressive - Will turn to a nearby player and start acting aggressive towards them. Move away to avoid combat or it will eventually attack.
Hostile - Creature is now hostile towards the player and will attack the player.
In this update players now generate threat with each attack on an enemy. Creatures will now target nearby players with the highest threat value.
Warning! As your threat increases the range at which a creature will become agitated is increased.
If you wish to lower your threat value stop attacking creatures and let it decreases over time.
There are skills in the skill tree which increases or decreases the amount of threat you generate per action.
Improved combat prediction and feel:
Slingbow projectiles will now feel much better at higher latencies, previously a higher latency player would see his projectiles move more slowly for a period of time until the latency was resolved between client and server, but now their projectiles will fly immediately at full speed.
Interactions with creatures, whether with melee items like the totem, but especially with projectile weapons will be much more accurate for collision detection at larger latencies, including for grappling to a creature, you should see far less mis-predictions now.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Objective changes:
You now gain x4 XP for all objectives including Daily and Weekly. (This is a temporary change for Early Access as we'll continue to balance this area throughout Early Access.)
Some objectives have been reordered, altered or replaced.
Objectives aim to teach you all elements of the game. However some areas have not been implemented yet, but more will be added throughout Early Access.
Updated Tutorial with the following changes:
Less materials required at the start for gathering leaves and timber.
You are now told how to use the Beacon Plotter in the initial tutorial.
You are no longer required to find a new region until after the tutorial, instead you only need to travel a certain distance.
Warp activation rule changes
Your "Warp Distance" skill now limits maximum warp and portal activation. You can still walk through any portal or warp opened by another player.
"Warp Distance" is ignored for your "Home" location. You can always warp home.
Block count limits still apply to portals, but no longer restrict warp activation.
GUI + HUD:
Added a Profile panel to the Character screen (Press K or Character in the Options menu):
See your current level and progress towards the next level.
Additional information such as your Home, Coin, Plots and Skill Points.
Your character's attributes and defensive stats.
Separated out Game Menu GUI and updated look.
Skills in the skill tree now display an info box giving details of the skill.
Updated Beacon Control GUI
Updated dead GUI.
Updated return to Sanctum GUI.
Updated Settings GUI.
Updating character screen GUI.
SFX + Music:
Additional per tier wildstock audio.
World Builder:
Fixed an issue where image noise nodes were having their frequencies too rigidly fixed. All noise nodes are forced to wrap on the world size, which discretises the frequencies that any given noise node can validly take, but the image noise node was being prevented from having a large range of frequencies (higher frequencies). This may well affect any world builder configurations using image noise nodes, so you may need to check.
Testing 164
Art + Animation + Assets:
Added campfire and beacon control meshes. These show the fuelling state of the beacon (on, low, off) and cast a little light.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Titanium now needs gold alloy or silver alloy (rather than both).
Totem Ammo now only needs base metals an a standard workbench (rather than gold alloy and a powered workbench).
Totem Ammo renamed to Warp Crystal.
Creatures + Combat + Characters:
Player projectile damage to blocks is now predicted client-side.
Player projectiles should feel much more accurate at closer distances now, this was due to the visual offset to make it look like the projectile comes from your hands being applied for far too long.
Projectiles shot by creatures now work in such a way that clients can perfectly predict whether they will get hit or not by the projectile, no more feeling like you missed the projectile but then it hitting you anyways! A downside, is that the creature's projetiles now take longer to fire, which makes it easier for you to trick the creature into firing in the wrong direction, but this is somewhat counteracted by the creature projectiles now being able to curve slightly towards the player too.
Reduce size of player hitbox (Was way too big) and physics, and increase/modify the sizes of creature hitboxes/physics slightly to better match the visual meshes.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
XP Actions
Players now earn XP by completing the following actions: placing blocks, defeating creatures, mining blocks, crafting items, and chiseling blocks.
XP is awarded to the player who is placing, mining or chiseling a block.
XP is awarded to the player when an item has been crafted. For machine crafted items, the
XP is stored until the player enters the Beacon where the item was crafted.
XP is awarded to all players who have participated in defeating a creature (this includes players who have healed a player currently in combat).
The amount of XP awarded per action is based on difficulty.
Experience
Coins have been removed from levelling up, as they are now exclusively earned through completing Objectives or by trading with other players.
Experience required per level has been increased due to the new XP Actions.
Objectives
Fixed an issue where items in a Smart Stack were not being tracked by the objective task
XP rewards have been rebalanced for the Tutorial
Variable sized player backpacks:
New players start with 16 inventory slots.
Slots can be unlocked in groups of 4 by purchasing "Inventory Space" skills in the Exploration skill tree.
Existing players will be gifted all "Inventory Space" skills for free and will see no change to their inventory capacity.
Stamina rebalancing:
Stamina drains at a much slower rate.
Movement costs stamina.
Consumable items restore stamina as well as health.
Stamina regeneration is disabled by default and must be unlocked through the "Stamina Regeneration" Endurance skill.
GUI + HUD:
Open Portals and Warps may now have their directions flipped directly in the GUI instead of requiring complex care when setting up to get things right.
Fix for the damage indicator and damage log appearing before the player was actually damaged.
Fix for the damage log showing twice when healing yourself.
Partial update for plinth and trading GUIs
Updated Furnace GUI
SFX + Music:
Updated Hopper SFX.
Updated slide SFX.
Fix missing Spitter SFX.
Engine:
Add some measures to un-stuck players/creatures automatically if they manage to get stuck in the ground somehow.
Choices of which chunk to mesh next are now also moved onto the meshing threads, and should give faster turnarounds on chunk deltas from breaking/adding blocks to seeing the new meshes.
Chunk meshing is now multithreaded (fixed at 2 threads for now). Assuming you're not network bound on receiving chunks (even max download rate is likely still not enough if your chunk cache isn't full of the chunks you need), you should see the world render in more quickly now, but at the very least re-meshing of a chunk when breaking/placing blocks should now be faster, nearly 2 times as fast in local testing.
Fix an issue with pushing players into 2-high gaps when jumping when moving along the Z-direction! Oops.
Fix horizontal(flat) portal/warp rendering.
Resolve inconsistencies between generated grass, and whether grass can be placed by hand, and when it is removed by world simulation (squashing grass by placing a block ontop), can now place grass by hand at the bottom of corners correctly.
Testing 165
Art + Animation + Assets:
Improved day/night cycle lighting settings and added fog to Therka.
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Campfires and beacons can now be warped into by strangers without permissions by default. Beacons may be configured once created to prevent this action so that only members may warp into the beacon. This allows "public" beacons like market places to allow people to warp into them even if they're not members of the beacons.
Fixed incorrectly showing plots that can be added when you have a plot REMOVER in your hand.
Fixed incorrectly showing plots that can be removed when you have a plot ADDED in your hand.
Fixed not showing plots claimed by campfire in hand if there is something in your right hand.
Fixed not showing plots that can be added/removed when holding a plot adder/remover in your left hand with something else in the right hand.
Resources generated with new redistribution.
Some quality of life changes have been made to the recipe timers.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Balanced weapon and tool damage and speed, so the beginning of the game feels more fun, and less grindy.
Feats, passive tasks, have been added to the Objectives menu and reward the player with Coin and XP when they are completed.
Fixed objectives data bug where some objectives where not showing the activate button properly.
Multiple tutorial objectives have been grouped into a single objective with multiple tasks.
New descriptions have been added to a number of objectives.
Objectives can be toggled on or off the HUD in the Objectives menu and up to 5 Objectives can be shown at any time.
Objectives can be unlocked by performing certain tasks or by completing certain objectives.
The initial skills order has been modified to match the new tutorial flow.
Tutorial flow updated, you are no longer required to find a region or travel a certain distance from your campfire to place Beacon.
Unlearn (the action to forget a skill) has been renamed to Cleanse.
When you complete the initial tutorial new Objectives will unlock and they will be tracked in the background without the need to activate them.
GUI + HUD:
A hint is shown on the HUD for each objective task, instead of per objective.
Fixing incorrectly showing compass home locations.
UI for the objectives shown in the HUD has been updated.
Updated "Shop Stand" GUI
Engine:
Fixed issues in smoothly interpolating entities like creatures that caused them to appear to shake somewhat whilst walking around.
Fixed items like machine crates not having decals shown when in the hand, inventory or dropped into the world.
Introduced synchronisation of chunk remeshing so that when meshing along chunk borders, the meshed results are applied together synchronously to prevent any "holes" appearing whilst mining around chunk borders. This introduces a slight delay in these cases, but is better than showing through into the underworld!
Reduced memory usage of world chunk data, this should allow less memory usage in the client and server and also allow more chunks to be stored in the client chunk cache.
Players now collide with portals while they wait for the other side to load. This should fix most cases where players get stuck on the wrong side of a portal.
Testing 166
Crafting + Resources + Equipment:
Damage changes have been made to the early levels to speed up breaking blocks.
Storage shelves have been made easier to craft.
Wanted Basket has been renamed to Request Basket.
You now get more Timber blocks per Trunk.
Sanctum + Tutorial + Objectives + Progression:
Objectives
"Bookmarking And Sharing Locations" has been fixed.
"Building A Crafting Furnace: Part II" has been fixed.
"Hunting Creatures" is a new objective and informs you about collecting items from creatures.
"Improve Your Beacon Base" prestige rating required has been increased.
"Time To Collect Resources" has been altered. You are now required to gather Starberries and the text has been updated.
New descriptions have been added to some of the objectives.
Quality-of-life improvements have been made to the tutorial to avoid the need to repeat actions you may have already completed.
The experience multiplier for completing objectives has been reduced from x3 to x1.5.
GUI + HUD:
Item Crafting recipes have been swapped with Equipment Crafting recipes in the GUI.
New icons have been added to the skill tree.
UI improvements have been made to how objectives are displayed on the HUD.
Updated Trading GUI
Bug fixes:
Resolved an issue where creatures wouldn't attack you if you hit them.
Resolved an issue where Feats you've completed would be shown repeatedly.
Resolved an issue where the coordinates were being incorrectly calculated in the GUI.
Resolved an issue where the first two slots in the inventory would be locked.
Resolved an issue where the server would crash when crafting under certain conditions.
Resolved an issue where travelling through a Portal would cause a crash.
