I added in cats. They are very naughty and will run and jump everywhere. The jumping detection logic took some time to code. Cats can both jump up and down a reasonable height. However they still may screw up and lose balance or get stuck. Just like real cats!
Cats can be picked up and stored in inventory. Great for bringing your cat companion wherever you go. Make sure they don't fall off a cliff though.
Also, cats are not edible. You can't butcher meat from them.
Devlog 40: Wolf
I've added in predator AI logic along with a wolf. Wolf will attack the player as well as deer. And they are good climbers too, so don't expect to climb up a slope to escape.
Animals have active ragdoll physics and can lose balance on steep slopes. Sometimes you can push them over too. Lots of fun sliding down slopes!
Vegetation reacts and bends realistically when animals walk through them. Beware if you see leaves bending and hear rustling sounds. Animals are really hard to spot in the thick jungle undergrowth.
Devlog 39: A Fishy Situation
Added in a lot of new fishes, both freshwater and saltwater. There are 16 different species so far, Nemo and Dory included! Other coral fish include angelfish, saddlefish, yellow and sailfin tangs, all commonly kept as aquarium fishes.
Freshwater fishes can be found in rivers and lakes. Trout, carp, bass, salmon and others. These are bigger and juicier and provide more nutrition in the game when cooked properly.
All fish are interactive, you can grab them and drop them back into water or into a different body of water and they will react accordingly. Fish out of water will struggle and flail about and will eventually die. Kill them in water and they will float to the surface.
Fishing has not been implemented yet, so for now you just catch them by hand.
Devlog 38: HDR Support
Above video best viewed on a HDR screen (1000 nits). Or on iPhone 12 and above.
Added native HDR support. It was not just a matter of simply enabling HDR, because the colours, lighting and exposure all need to be retuned otherwise it may look washed out in certain conditions. Some shaders needed to modified to unclamp colour values so that they can achieve HDR ranges. UI needed some rework too to achieve a suitable brightness.
HDR is not just simply increasing brightness. If that were the case then dark areas would also brighten up. Proper HDR increases dynamic range, so that dark areas can remain dark alongside bright highlights. Like sitting in a dark room and looking at a bright spotlight. In non-HDR, the blacks or highlights would get clamped and lose detail. Achieving HDR requires screens that can achieve high brightness, usually 500-1000 nits.
The game now looks truly brilliant under high contrast lighting conditions. However, not many people have a HDR-capable monitor as it is still rather niche and expensive. But the game still supports normal monitors and still looks the same as before!
Devlog 37: Meat butchering and grilling
I added meat butchery that allows for different cuts of meat. Now you can cook your favourite tenderloin, sirloin, ribeye, short ribs, brisket or round steaks. It's more realistic rather than just dropping one measly piece of meat.
I modelled and textured each cut of meat from actual steaks that I photographed and then cooked. Yummy! It looks absolutely juicy and delicious. Meat jiggle physics and slapping sounds seals the deal for the best steaks ever.
Since the fire system is physically based, as long as your meat is somewhere near the heat, it will cook. So you can freeform build your BBQ pit in any shape.
Food decay has also been implemented but not shown in the video. While you can cut lots of meat from a deer, it will decay quickly and you can't possibly eat it all.
Devlog 36: Storms, heavy rain and weather
Custom wind, rain and weather system with sparkling water droplets shader.
Finally all that work writing a custom vegetation shader is paying off. This has allowed adding water droplets on leaves, complete with sparkly light refraction/reflection effects and subsurface translucency. Plus better wind speed blending without jittering. Doing this in a 3rd party vegetation shader would be very hard to impossible if they did not provide full source.
In the future I plan to add some sort of exposure system. Staying out in the rain can't be good and should encourage you to build a shelter.
Devlog 35: Custom vegetation with realistic touch, sway and flutter
I wrote a custom vegetation shader to allow it to respond to touch and wind. Ironically, most of the shader is about handling wind and not shading itself. There are just so many ways leaves can move in the wind and accounting for these is key to making it look realistic.
Also rocks are treated somewhat as vegetation too, only that they don't move. They are specially made to dynamically conform to the terrain so you won't get any floating pieces.
Vegetation can all be chopped down. Trees, bushes and even grass can be cleared. I haven't added resources yet, but chopping should yield some useful stuff like wood and fibre. As in the real world, you will need to dry chopped wood before you can use it as firewood.
The starting area vegetation is now more of a tropical biome with a lush green rainforest. No coconut trees. Real beaches in the remote wilderness actually do not have many coconut trees, most are human planted. There will be more biomes to come, like temperate, snow, desert and others.
Devlog 34: Rivers and lakes
I made a beautiful lake where the river flows to. A calm and relaxing place where you can build your base, go for a swim and go fishing (future feature) too. Some colourful flowers makes it more picturesque.
The river is looking pretty nice with frothy foam. You can float logs and other junk all the way from upstream, but it tends to get stuck at the edges however. Haven't made a boat yet, but I suspect it will suffer the same fate unless it's player controlled.
Devlog 33: Underground cave river and waterfall
Added underground caves, river and waterfall. Cave diving maybe? A most terrifying experience!
Also added cave stalactites, stalagmites and basins. Beautiful structures formed over millions of years.
I've been working on a lot of under-the-hood stuff so not much to show for the last couple of months. Bug fixes and performance optimisations like texture streaming so that the game doesn't use up so much VRAM. Modifying the river system to support multiple instances, river blending, add deer skeleton stencil shader, among other things. Also upgrading to Unity 2022.2 required quite a lot of fixes.
Devlog 32: Real-time dynamic GI and ray-traced lights
I added real-time dynamic GI lighting. Global illumination simulates the light bouncing and scattering in real life. So a small enclosed space like a room or cave will light up completely even with a small light source because almost all the light bounces back.
Also for flashlights, this means there is a 'throw' to the light. It will be able to effectively project a further distance away just like the real thing. Shining on a concave surface will appear brighter due to more of the light reflecting back. A coloured material will make the bounced light coloured as well.
This is simulated on the CPU with multiple threads, so it's very fast. Not as detailed as real RTX, but given the diffuse nature of the light, most people won't notice a difference.
Dynamic GI is also applied to sunlight, but it's less noticeable due to everything being bright. But for cases where the sun shines into your enclosed base, there will be a difference.
