This is a minor update to expand the newerly added Taming system and make some additional improvements, tweaks and fixes. It's much smaller than what you're used to, but I'm going to be once again fully operational soon, as I'm back to Capri from my trip!
Game Happens!
Tomorrow 24th and Saturday 25th June I'll be in Genova to attend to "Game Happens!" and present DinoSystem. I'll have the chance to finally meet other developers and players, instead of interacting with then exclusively from the internet as I did in the last 2 years from my little room!
I can't hide this is really exciting for me and I'm looking forward to show my project, in which I put so much effort and expectations in the last years and in the future to come.
If you're interested in the event, here you will find all the info about it. I hope to see some of you in Genova soon! (please let me know down in the comments if you're coming!).
Daniel
Update v0.63.0 - Taming system, improved AI & balance
This update IS compatible with savegames from previous v0.62.X update!
To tame a baby Troodon, drop a meat nearby and wait, if your Zoology skill is high enough and other conditions are met, it will be tamed, you can check the ingame guide for more info, as a new guide section has been added explaining how taming works.
This new system is very basic, but will be expanded in future updates with the ability to use the tamed animals for hunting and other activities. Also, only Troodons can be tamed for now.
Improved AI and long term ecosystem balance:
AI patterns have been improved to make animals more responsive to both environment and player actions. For example, when a Triceratops eats, it will quickly check what is its next priority instead of staying still for a while, same when player attacks.
Predators prey-hunt priority is also reworked to allow them to select preys based on prey population, instead of going for the nearest/easiest prey. They also hunt youngs of their species if they're over-populated. This means they will effectively act as a population regulation agent, instead of leading animals to total extinction.
Along with the AI improvements, there are some vegetation reproduction changes that should improve the long-term plant eaters-vegeration balance as well.
Conclusion:
As always, there are several little additional improvements in this update that you can read in the full changelog.
This update is smaller than usual and also the next one will probably be: reason is this is a bad period for me for personal reason, so I decided to go to Milan and stay there with a friend to distract myself. I'm still working on the game and I will return to full time development as I'm back to Capri (where I live) next month. Please do not think even for a moment I'm losing interest in the game, as it's and will be my focus for many months to come, at least until it's complete (and even after that)!
Dan
Update v0.62.0 - Expanded mapgen, improved weather, many tweaks and fixes!
This update is NOT compatible with old savegames!
Saves from previous versions are automatically DELETED as Steam updates the game, as they're incompatible with the new version. Do not update if you want to finish a previous playthrough first!
Added a new game creation parameter: Jagging, which decides how "jagged" the island coastline is, therefore producing more varied and interesting islands. Setting Jagging to 0 creates the same oval shaped island of before this update, while setting it to 100% generates a very jagged coastline, with peninsulas and gulfs:
Note that increasing Jagging will indirectly reduce the island total landmass.
Island size increased:
Generated islands, regardless of the option selected, are now roughly 25% bigger than before, which when setting size 150% is a huge increase! This to both counter balance the fact that the new Jagging parameter reduces the final landmass, and to produce more immersive islands, since performance are getting better as the game is optimized.
Weather improvements:
Rain sound has now two different sounds combined depending on the rain intensity, also rain effect improved:
Added wind gusts happening from time to time, momentarly increasing wind speed and triggering a wind whistle sound.
Take a nap:
You can take a nap instead of sleeping, which makes you wake up much sooner.
Improved player screen:
Character info screen now also shows the current character, zoomed and with his/her gear equipped:
Survival mode rebalancing:
- Reduced damage from MILD starvation, which means you will start getting real damage when your fat reserves are very low, making it easier to survive until you get very skinny.
- Rebalanced food kcal / proteins content, proteins are now much higher.
- Proteins are absorbed/digested much more quickly, which makes it easier for the body to "burn" them to produce energy when calories are low.
- Drink more water with one sip: getting thirst quenched used to require too many sips.
- Dropping with Q now drops one item at time, and now if both hands are free, also drops the gear on your back.
- Buried eggs must be unearthed before being able to take/eat them, which requires some time and effort.
- Skills decay rate now scales by 100% with Stamina (instead of 50%), this means that at 100% Stamina decay won't happen. To compensate this, base decay raised a bit, but overall it is much slower now, especially if you manage to sleep well.
- Melee attack with LMB (left mouse) or during Mouse Turn mode, improved in precision and responsiveness.
- Ranged attack made more fluid and responsive.
- Many more tweaks to the Survival Mode!
Other stuff:
- Added a floating text appearing when the player attacks (including chopping trees) showing the damage dealt:
- Animals produce more eggs, both to reduce the extinction chances and to use room from the larger map.
- Some objects decay rate reduced even further.
- Graphics improvements to fog and reflections.
- Huge optimizations, especially in fullscreen mode.
- Tons of fixes.
As always, make sure to read the full changelog for the complete list of changes!
Dan
Update v0.61.0 - Controls mapping, terrain improvements, much more!
This update SHOULD be compatible with old savegames!
But it's still advised to start a new game, as some changes could potentially corrupt the save.
Terrain texture have been upscaled by ~50%, along with some changes in the color palette. There are also improvements in weather effects, like snowflakes made bigger and more visible, enhanced rainbow and sunlight reflections.
Controls remapping, at least!
Yes, it's true! It's finally possible to remap most of the game controls from the settings menu, including all the Survival Mode actions. In addition to this, most of the default control keys have been changed to reflect the keys used for similiar actions in other games; remember that now you can always change them at will!
One of the most common problems reported by players are the controls: they are difficult to learn and counter intuitive. Although I'm doing my best to improve the situation with little tweaks here and there, in order to effectively change the movements I should made deep changes in the whole system, which is pretty unlikely to happen. Therefore I hope the ability to remap the controls will help improve the situation, at least partially!
New menu background and music:
Main menu background has been replaced by high quality art from the artist Lukas Jevcak. The new background perfectly recreates the sense of mystery, wonder and loneliness felt during the game, along with the wild, inspiring environment.
The main menu music has been replaced by a longer, more inspiring track. In addition to this, game generation and loading phases pick a random screenshot of the game as background, instead of a black screen.
Hair growth system:
You have now the option to start as a bald or semi-bald character! Hair will gradually grow during the game, based on your conditions (as in real life, hair can grow more quickly based on some factors like metabolism and nutrition).
This still has no impact on the actual game, and you still can't cut them, but in future I'll expand this system to be more organically intertwined with the game mechanics.
Animal pathfinding and ecology improvements:
Animals will now avoid (or try avoiding) obstacles from distance, not only when hitting them. This prevents them from always breaking your walls or hitting each other like bumper cars. In addition, several ecology balance tweaks should improve dinosaurs survival on the long term, although the work on this front is still in progress.
About the Taming system that I announced for this update, unfortunately I had to scrap part of the work done so far on it as I wasn't satisfied with it, so it will come with the next update if everything goes well this time!
Survival Mode tweaks - lots of them:
Needless to say you should check the full changelog under the Survival tab to get a clearer idea of the amount of tweaks done to the Survival Mode.
Just to name a few, Stomach Fullness "cap" relation with metabolism is now inverted: the faster the metabolism, the higher the cap, allowing you to eat more. It also scales partially with Body Fat, which means that being fat urges you to eat more (and get even fatter).
Major rework of how maximum Health and Breath are calculated based on Metabolism, Nutrition/Hydration, body stats and skills.
Most of you will love this one: Building a Thatch or Walls now require less resources (especially wall).
Many, many other things...
Conclusion:
This update brings the game to a level of polish that leads me to consider it closer to the full version than the initial alpha version: in few words, it's now over 50% "complete". I've used the quotes because DinoSystem will never be complete, as I'll continue improving it over and over, but there must be a time when I say "ok, it's a proper game now!".
Now let me stop dreaming and back to work, there is still a huge amount of features and content to add!
As always, please report any bugs, deliver suggestions, and help me share the word about DinoSystem!
Dan
Update v0.60.0 - Troodon, flowers, many fixes and improvements!
This update SHOULD BE compatible with old savegames!
But it's still advised to start a new game, as the amount of changes is enormous.
Check the FULL CHANGELOG for the complete list of changes in this update!
New animal: Troodon:
Troodon is a small, nimble and smart meat eater covered in feathers, it is more active at night and can hunt in packs. Troodon cares for its youngs even more than the T-Rex, youngsters will follow their mother until adulthood, but they have the bad habit of stealing stuff from other animals nests and.. you, especially when you're sleeping.
Player footsteps:
This is a little thing that enhance the feel and the variety of the game; the character will now leave footsteps on sand or when the soil is wet...
Flowers - for a more colorful world:
Flowers will now bloom in spring and, depending on weather and environment, can continue appearing until summer or even autumn. Flowers are not harvestable yet, but will be in a future update, for now they contribute to enrich the environment with colors, especially in spring.
Also, the new "small plants" system built to implement flowers will allow me to add more type of plants and plant-like things, like mushrooms, that will probably come in the next update.
Tons of little (and bigger) improvements:
The update brings much more to the table, especially tons of fixes, Survival tweaks, AI improvements, ecology balance fine-tuning, and so on!
Player now inflicts more damage with attacks, especially headshots, T-Rex will no longer chase you during the tutorial (unless you're so stupid to provoke them :P), and you can even start the game in "Peaceful mode", with no T-Rex on the map (especially useful for smaller maps).
Stomach fullness has been reworked to be less restricting, and a simple leaf can be used to threat bloodloss, even if not efficiently.
The amount of tweaks is enormous, and I really recommend to check the full changelog for a more detailed view on this update.
A warning about ecology balance:
Reaching a point where the ecosystem is perfectly balanced is no easy task, it requires weeks, if not months of work. Before the Troodon was introduced, the balance was quite good, but everything changed with this new actor, and this required me to rebalance many things. Remember that the game does not "cheat" by spawning new animals or killing the ones that are overpopulating, so it was needed to make little changes in reproduction rates, AI, age process and strength of all animal species.
At this time the balance is not bad, but not as good as it was before this update, and it will require some time before it will be balanced again, so don't dispair if species go extinct too soon or take the upper hand.
Development plan:
As announced in the previous post, big updates will now come on a monthly basis, instead of every two weeks, this will allow me to make more important additions in a more relax manner. But smaller updates (for addressing bugs and balancing) will still come often, even more often than usual.
In the upcoming days, I'm going to overhaul the development roadmap, making it more detailed (like UnrealWorld RPG or Dwarf Fortress did), in order to give you a better idea of the general plan.
Thanks for reading all the badly written stuff, and have fun!
(but pls report bugs :P)
Daniel
Update v0.60 release date announced! (+changelog)
After a long delay, the next big update featuring the nimble Troodon, along with many improvements, is finally approaching!
The update is going to be live on Tuesday 16th this month!
Unless Steam prevents me to upload the files again, there should be no further delays!
In the meantime, you can check the changelog preview, note that the changelog is evolving and will list more changes when the update is released.
Dan
Next update release soon!
Next major update is nearly ready, i took few more days to refine some mechanics and make sure everything works as smooth as possible, in order to avoid breaking something (which would require more time to fix later, due to the ecosystem mechanics complexity).
Last week I've been in Florence with my gf for vacation, but took my new laptop with me, so I managed to work on the game in the hotel during the evening (and on the train!). My girlfriend is starting to believe I'm more attached to the DinoSystem development than the rest of my life, which is somewhat true :P.
I apologize for the delay, expect the next update to be released in few days!
Next update sneak-peek & important news!
Hello folks, hope you've spent happy holydays! There are some important info for you regarding DinoSystem and a little preview of the next big hupdate!
64 bit removal:
If some of you did experience problems running the game today (17 jan), and Steam asked to update it, it's because i've removed the 64bit client, keeping only the 32bit one. In the process, as always, i messed up something in the Steam depot, and had to reupload everything... but everything should be fine now!
The reason is that there is no difference between 64 and 32bit (the game never uses more then 4gb ram), also, 32bit client seems to use slightly less CPU. All users will now automatically run the 32bit client, which is approx 20 mb smaller. Additionally, some users reported issue launching the 64bit client on their 64bit OS, which should not happen with the 32bit client for some reason.
Update v0.60 preview - Troodon:
Troodon is finally complete, few things still need to be refined, but the little guy will be finally here very soon!
Troodons are smarter than the T-Rex, and will seek aid when hunting. Catching a single individual isolated won't be very common, as they tend to stick together (for a good reason).
The Taming feature will not be included in the 0.60 update yet, but will come afterwards, so you won't be able to tame the new dinosaur just yet.
Footsteps and flowers:
Next update will also add some little things that enhance the feel and the variety of the game; the character will now leave footsteps on sand or when the soil is wet...
Also, flowers will now bloom in spring and, depending on weather and environment, can live until summer or even autumn. Flowers are not harvestable yet, but will be in a future update, for now they contribute to enrich the environment with colors, especially in spring.
The new "small plants" system built to add flowers will allow me to add more type of plants and plant-like things, like mushrooms! They could also come directly with the 0.60 update if i manage to complete it in time ;).
More stuff and update frequency changes:
The update brings much more to the table, especially tons of fixes, Survival tweaks, AI improvements, ecology balance fine-tuning, and so on!
For this reason, I'm thinking about changing the update frequency from bi-weekly to montly, to be able to work on bigger features. January has been a very productive month so far, even though no public updates have been released yet!
So when is the 0.60 update coming?
Before the end of January for sure, 1/2 weeks from now.
This update is a milestone for the development, and I want to make sure it comes with the lowest amount of bugs/glitches, in order to continue working on the upcoming stuff without problems.
Thanks for reading (my poor english) and stay tuned!
Daniel
Update v0.56.0 - Reworked ranged attack, pterosaurs, many improvements
This update IS compatible with old savegames!
But it's still advised to start a new game, as the amount of tweaks is enormous.
Previously, in order to trigger a ranged attack, you needed to click 2 times, according to a "timer". Now, you enter in "Aim Mode" (holding C or Right Mouse) and Left Mouse click to attack. The camera will slightly shift towards the mouse position in order to make aiming easier, and there is no need to time the clicks in order to give power to the shot.
There should be a visible target cursor on the Triceratops head in this screen, but for some reason it was not captured.
Pterosaurs:
The old bird sprite is changed to Pterosaur (no specific species name for it, suggestions are welcome). It's still a mere visual effect, not a full-fledged animal yet, but it works much better in reinforcing the cretaceous atmosphere. Also, it can vary in color, and wind can influence its flight.
Fire Pit improvements and other stuff:
Fire Pit will now always prevent a fire from becoming uncontained, the previous mechanic didn't work very well, and was rather frustrating as it was not clear how much fuel was too much, causing the fire to go out of control.
Many more improvements have been made to fire and torch mechanics: charcoal is a much better fuel now, branches last longer, as well as some other additions. Several items take longer to decay over time, especially wood.
Improved tooltips and Muscle Soreness:
Some UI Tooltips expanded to include more info in less space, and in a more easy-to-read fashion. You can now asses factors causing your Health to drop, and what's the downside of your Muscle Soreness:
Speaking of Muscle Soreness, it has been nerfed, and partially reworked: it reduces much faster when sleeping and resting, and increases more slowly from fatiguing actions.
"Sexier" character sprite and refined balance:
Added a needed feature to the character sprite: nipples; will a gender option be added in future? Probably. Also, the body sprite changes more drastically according to mucsle and fat % (veins are visible with high muscle and low fat, for example).
Survival mechanics balance has been improved even further in this update, which means the game is less frustrating, but at the same time more realistic! You can check all the changes in the changelog, as always.
Next big update - Troodon:
As title. No more waiting, the next major update will bring the long awaited new animal! There is still work to do, but it's close to release.
Dan
Update v0.55.0 - 2° balance round, optimization!
This update is NOT compatible with old savegames!
Savegames are automatically deleted due to the different way the new build handles them.
If you have a current game you don't want to lose, don't update now, finish your game first!
Previous update was all about balancing survival mode mechanics, mainly body fat, muscle and metabolism. In v0.55, I've gathered more players feedback to complete the balance overhaul and bring a more enjoyable Survival experience (even at this stage of development)!
Nutrients and water absorbtion from stuff in your stomach has been reworked to be more consistant: you'll never again have the stomach full with no nutrients being absorbed. Absorbtion is now tied to content in the stomach, meaning you'll be always able to eat or drink when you really need it. This seems like common sense, but making a system that is both realistic and playable was a real challange, which has been won hands down :P.
Many other areas of the Survival mode have been improved balance wise, especially skill increase/decay, T-Rex damage, objects and structures decay rate and much more, make sure to check the full changelog for a comprensive list!
Optimization - up to 25% performance increase:
Testings show a 20-25% performance increase, which is theorical, as on my system the game runs always at 60fps meaning I can't really appreciate further improvements.
What it shows is an approx 20% reduced CPU usage, but the practical effects can differ depending on your system! Also, pressing "i" now enables the performance tracker on the top-right of the screen, so you can check exactly what's the CPU usage, fps, object number on map etc.
Character overview screen and interface improvements:
A new interface panel now shows the main character statuses in an immersive fashion, the panel is in the character info screen accessed with Tab.
I've also made some little tweaks to the interface to make it more clear, compact and appealing. There is still work to do on this front, but the UI went a long way since the first Steam release of the game!
Troodon/Taming update - progress:
About the next big update, I'm close to the final stage. The Troodon with basic AI is there, which was the hardest part. Now I need to implement some advanced behaviours to make it somewhat "special" and smarter than other species, including the ability to tame it. There is still a lot of work to complete and polishing to do even after all the systems are in place: usually, as I add a new feature, several others may break as a result, that's why I'm so slow when it comes to adding new stuff. But yeah, it's totally worth it :D.
Help me testing!
Please make sure to test the new update and report back! I'm especially interested in hearing how performance are after the optimizations and if the update broke something (aside the saved games, which was intended).
