We had packaged all the games, uploaded them to Steam and everything was going great! And then we noticed a fatal error. I've spent today fixing the bug with our builds- it was an issue with our AI, which was causing a lot of random movement and attacks from far away. Instead of applying a small fix, we've entirely revamped the AI system. It's almost finished, and it's going to seriously boost the quality of the first build. This was a necessary move, but it will unfortunately delay us by a couple of days. I am expecting to have all the builds uploaded once again in about 6 hours from now (it's 12AM over where I am so I have a fun morning ahead of me), so I wanted to keep everyone updated.
It will likely come as an annoyance to a lot of you so I'd like to first of all apologise for the delay, but trust me- it's more than worth it. Let me give you a quick rundown of the revamp;
- Pack behaviour added. Stag, rabbits, boar and wolves now operate in intelligent packs. While travelling you may encounter a small herd of deer which you can chase through the wilderness, or a surprise pack of wolves waiting to pounce!
- Bears have been totally rebuilt. You may encounter a lone bear somewhere up in the rocky areas of the canyon, a formidable enemy which packs a heavy punch. Master hunters may want to track these through the wild in order to gain an advantage.
- Realism has been improved. Rabbits watch out for predators. Stag graze and eat the grass they can find throughout the canyon. Wolves howl menacingly.
- We have replaced navmeshing with A* pathfinding. To most of you, that will sound very boring- to any programmers reading this, that will sound cool! To sum it up, it means animals can intelligently detect slopes and find the most efficient path to their goal. This improves fleeing, wandering and all forms of movement.
- I made some additional improvements today. The camera now uses vector-based motion blur to smooth out camera movement while retaining high FPS.
- I optimised a couple more systems. To anyone who has been concerned about potential performance problems, there is no need to worry! I have been achieving between 50-70FPS with max graphics settings at 1920x1080 resolution.
- The night sky textures have been replaced with high-quality photorealistic graphics. Stars twinkle at night and the moon displays dynamic phases.
Again, I would like to apologise for the delays on behalf our our team. We had to make the decision to postpone for a couple of days, or else the first build would have had many issues. That would reflect badly on the game, as I'm sure you'll all agree, so we took the time to iron out the main issues. Due to the nature of Early Access, you should still expect to come across some bugs, but on the whole it's pretty clean for a first build.
I'm going to get right back to it and finish off the final few tweaks, then prepare to upload the newest builds to Steam. To those of you who haven't read about our supported platforms, you will be please to know that we are building Frontier for Windows, Mac and Linux (which of course extends to SteamOS as well).
Please don't hesitate to ask us any questions, we will continue to be active on the forums through development. We're really pleased to see so many discussions, and they've brought up some important questions. I saw that there were some unanswered debates between our group members going on recently- I am going to focus on the game so we can push this out ASAP, but I'll get back to the forums to answer those questions as soon as this is ready!
Thanks for your continued patience,
-Josh.