[BETA UPDATE] 0.4.2b Update is Live in Beta Branch!
Stegosaurus is here!
(in the beta at least)
Some other minor updates and fixes in this beta build as well, but Stego is the big update. Other updates...
Mercenary Credits and Arcade XP
Mercenary mode now earns you CREDITS, while Arcade mode earns you XP.
You spend your XP leveling up in Arcade mode to improve things like your stamina, reload times, damage to weapons, etc.
EVENTUALLY you'll be able to spend Merc credits on gear upgrades - better weapons, larger inventory bags, improved med-kits, etc. That's not in yet but getting closer.
Improved hand registration on Touch, also added some smoothing to the Touch controllers rotations to remove some of the jitter.
Lots of little fixes
Functionality is currently in for upgrading your backpack - we just need to finish out the "store" where you can actually purchase them with your credits.
We also finally got searchable vehicles working (but again not ready to ship). This will let you open doors on humvees to search for loot instead of them just being static set pieces.
Work continues on the big survival mode map.
Also working on a new mission-style tutorial to replace the current one. Also not quite done... a running theme here, but we want you to know we ARE working on more awesome content and features. These things just take time.
Thanks again for your patience - please let us know what you think of the beta and if you encounter any bugs or have any suggestions or comments.
If you don't have access to the beta, the code to unlock it is: i359beta2017
0.4.1 Update is Live - New Interact Mechanic and Movement Option, Ammo Switching, Dino Punching, Progression System Updates, and more!
Hi everyone! If you've been playing the beta for the last couple weeks there's not much new to you, but if not, LOTS of new stuff!
Most notably is that interacts/pickups are now on the GRIP button on Vive, and Hand Trigger on Touch. This makes the interacts more like Arizona Sunshine and feels a lot cleaner. Much less accidental shootings with this. You should get a mini-tutorial on first startup to show you how it works.
Quick overview of the rest of the update:
Progression System Update - upgrades now carry over into Mercenary mode. We will likely still tune the upgrades to scale a bit more linearly to the higher levels. Please let us know if your desired difficulty level seems appropriately challenging WHILE KEEPING IN MIND that the goal is to UPGRADE your character in arcade mode to make higher difficulty levels across both mission types easier.
Basically this means that attempting CRAZY mode with no upgrades is almost certain death. If you have upgrades for your guns and health however, it should feel about the same as normal mode.
Ammo Types - we've added a few new ammo types for the guns, as indicated by the floating ammo icon on the ammo pickups. If you have more than one ammo type in your inventory, you can HOLD the reload button for just under a second and some special ammo clips will appear. Slam the gun down onto the clip/ammo type you want and you will auto-reload and be equipped with that new ammo type.
-Incendiary Ammo: Does damage over time while burning the dinos
-Armor Piercing Ammo: Shots through Triceratops head like BUTTER, also does most general damage of any ammo type
-Explosive Ammo: Does extra damage by producing a small explosive charge on impact
I probably still need to add something that auto-equips your next available ammo type if you run out of ammo. Also had a few very minor bugs with this system reported but nothing game-breaking. As always report bugs to us.
DINO PUNCHING!!! We've wanted this in from our initial launch but FINALLY have a first pass version of it ready for you. A closed fist, or any object held in your hand will now at the very least, knock a dino back, and cause a small amount of damage. This is a great way to create some space in tense situations. Right now the damage volume is ONLY your fist, so you have to always hit with your fist, even if you have say a bow or AK in your hand - we'll get the details sorted out soon. You can kill compys with a couple hits... probably wouldn't recommend trying to punch a Trex to death.
AI Fixes: Some dinos were getting stuck mid-chase, that should be fixed now. Line of Sight for all dinos was also not set up properly - most notable with Trex who wouldnt see you at all. Fixed a few other issues there as well.
Guns shoot through little dinos: Depending on the power of the gun, you can now kill more than one compy at a time if you line your shot up properly. I might make the threshold for this less so you can shoot through Raptors as well later on.
Mildly Improved Physics HIt Reacts! - I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's perfect yet, but punching/hitting dinos should feel better and you should see less pops in their hit react animations.
New Controls/Movement Options!
We had a lot of requests for HMD Oriented Trackpad Movement: You've got it! I renamed the movement modes with the prefix "Look" and "Point" to denote whether you aim with your head or controller respectively.
Also added free turning, which is kind of nauseating... use at your own risk. But we had requests for it so give it a shot if you think you'd like it. The only thing not quite right with it is that it only rotates from the center of your volume. So if you are not standing/sitting directly in the center of your volume, you will move a bit when rotating. We can look into ways to fix this eventually (sorry, best we could do for now)
Other Things:
-Foliage should be less blue-ish
-The TRex Arcade fight should be less impossible to beat now
-Triceratops is less of a pain in the ass to kill now, depending on your difficulty level. He gives a generous pause before attacking in easy mode, less pause on crazy
-Fixed some TRex foot sliding issues.
-Improved FX on drops for most objects. Melee items might still need some work.
-Started work on a new tutorial mission level.
-Almost have Stegosaurus ready to go.
-Lots of other stuff I'll add if I remember
Beta Updated - Grip Interact and Ammo Selection Update
Hi everyone,
The beta has been updated again. Special thanks to Exyborg and weiss.joe.a for their awesome bug reporting. They found a lot of issues that slipped through the cracks so THANK YOU!
If there's nothing catastrophically wrong I'll set the build live tomorrow.
As always, your feedback makes the game better, so please share it with us!
New "Grip Interact Update" is Live in Beta
Hi everyone, sorry for the delay in getting this updated.
Last Beta update notes here:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/476700/announcements/detail/1298571331991312630
In addition to those new updates, there is also a major change to the gameplay that you should be aware of, and which may take some time to adjust to, which is that,,,
Pickups/grabs are now on the GRIP button for Vive or the HAND TRIGGER on Touch (i think that's what it's called).
This is similar to the Arizona Sunshine control scheme. If you've played that, if should feel more familiar to you, and if you haven't... what's wrong with you go buy that game it's awesome.
In other news, I've got Stegosaurus mostly working in game now!!! He's not in this update b/c he needs more animations and sound effects and some AI adjustments, but he's already super cool.
I've also started revamping our tutorial and tutorial tools, so I make no guarantees that the current tutorial level is not broken at the moment. I still need to adjust the button mapping stuff in there as well so it tells you to use grip instead of triggers... but i might just wait until the new WAY MORE AWESOME tutorial mission is done.
Please let me know if you experience any major issues in this beta update. I'm hoping to launch this as a live update to the game on Monday or Tuesday.
CHANGING CONTROL SCHEME IN NEXT UPDATE
Heads up - interactions are changing a bit in the next update!
Even before the Oculus update, we started feeling like having every interact on trigger caused more problems than it solved, notably with mis-firing weapons. The original inspiration for that design choice was Job Simulator-style "every interact on one button" simplicity. Job Simulator of course, did not have guns.
We put in a number of safety checks to make you unable to fire in certain places (around ladder rungs, inside cases, etc.) but it still caused some issues. After playing Arizona Sunshine and seeing how fluid pick-ups and interacts felt on the grip button, I wanted to alter our interact system to feel like that and alleviate those mis-fires.
Oculus Touch reinforced that, as probably one of the primary responses I've heard regarding the Oculus version is that pickups feel weird.
SOOOOO just get ready to re-learn interacts a bit in 359. I've had it switched over for a day or two now (still fixing all the edge-case bugs I can find in it) and I'm already pretty used to it.
I'll try to include some in-game warnings/updates to let everyone know about this change as well.
I should have the BETA updated later today so you can check it out.
THANKS!
0.4.1 Beta Available!
Hi everyone!
I've uploaded a new beta to the beta branch. We REALLY need your feedback about balance in this update, as a huge amount of changes have been made to the combat and upgrade systems.
The code to access the beta is: i359beta2017
Quick overview of this update:
Progression System Update - upgrades now carry over into Mercenary mode. We will likely still tune the upgrades to scale a bit more linearly to the higher levels. Please let us know if your desired difficulty level seems appropriately challenging WHILE KEEPING IN MIND that the goal is to UPGRADE your character in arcade mode to make higher difficulty levels across both mission types easier.
Basically this means that attempting CRAZY mode with no upgrades is almost certain death. If you have upgrades for your guns and health however, it should feel about the same as normal mode.
**Summary - this is the most important feedback you can give us from this beta!**
Ammo Types - we've added a few new ammo types for the guns, as indicated by the floating ammo icon on the ammo pickups. If you have more than one ammo type in your inventory, you can HOLD the reload button for just under a second and some special ammo clips will appear. Slam the gun down onto the clip/ammo type you want and you will auto-reload and be equipped with that new ammo type.
-Incendiary Ammo: Does damage over time while burning the dinos
-Armor Piercing Ammo: Shots through Triceratops head like BUTTER, also does most general damage of any ammo type
-Explosive Ammo: Does extra damage by producing a small explosive charge on impact
I probably still need to add something that auto-equips your next available ammo type if you run out of ammo.
DINO PUNCHING!!! We've wanted this in from our initial launch but FINALLY have a first pass version of it ready for you. A closed or any object held in your hand will now at the very least, knock a dino back, and cause a small amount of damage. This is a great way to create some space in tense situations. Right now the damage volume is ONLY your fist, so you have to always hit with your fist, even if you have say a bow or AK in your hand - we'll get the details sorted out soon.
AI Fixes: Some dinos were just getting stuck mid-chase, that should be fixed now. Line of Sight for all dinos was also not set up properly - most notable with Trex who wouldnt see you at all. Fixed a few other issues there as well.
Guns shoot through little dinos: Depending on the power of the gun, you can now kill more than one compy at a time if you line your shot up properly.
Mildly Improved Physics HIt Reacts! - I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's perfect yet, but punching/hitting dinos should feel better and you should see less pops in their hit react animations.
New Controls/Movement Options!
We had a lot of requests for HMD Oriented Trackpad Movement: You've got it! I renamed the movement modes with the prefix "Look" and "Point" to denote whether you aim with your head or controller respectively.
Also added free turning, which is kind of nauseating... use at your own risk. But we had requests for it so give it a shot if you think you'd like it. The only thing not quite right with it is that it only rotates from the center of your volume. So if you are not standing/sitting directly in the center of your volume, you will move a bit when rotating. We can look into ways to fix this eventually (sorry, best we could do for now)
Other Things:
-Foliage should be less blue-ish
-The TRex Arcade fight should be less impossible to beat now
-Triceratops is less of a pain in the ass to kill now, depending on your difficulty level. He gives a generous pause before attacking in easy mode, less pause on crazy
-Fixed some TRex foot sliding issues.
-Lots of other stuff I'll add if I remember
Thank you for testing the beta! Hopefully we can release this update sometime this week. I will be moving on to getting Stegosaurus into the game after this.
OCULUS TOUCH UPDATE IS LIVE! (Lots of other good stuff too!)
We're sorry for such a long delay between updates. We've been making a lot of changes under the hood, getting the project more organized, and on the right path toward releasing out of early access. Overall you should notice much better performance in this update, as just about everything has been heavily optimized (still not perfect, but getting closer).
Let's go over some of the new features in this update!
Oculus Touch Support
Oculus Touch is now supported in Island 359. Forward facing and roomscale should both work fine with the inclusion of bump turns and reach assist (more details below).
AI System Overhaul
The entire AI system has been rebuilt from the ground-up to be more modular and expandable. This was a massive feat, and while it's still not 100% where I'd like it to be, it's a pretty awesome system. Dinos should be a little more predictable, clip into the player less, get stuck on things less, and generally feel a bit smarter. Raptors also have jump attacks now! What's most important is that it now has the "hooks" built in to easily expand their behaviors going forward.
One note on this - I still need to put "hearing" on the dinos and improve the stealth gameplay a bit more.
Menu System Overhaul
After playing some more recent VR games, we noticed most are using a "laser pointer" style of UI for their menus. We felt this was more comfortable than our system so we adapted. Instead of completely scrapping our physical button pressing, we kept that same functionality but also added the ability to select with the laser pointer as well. All menus by default will now be laser pointer style, but if you get close to the buttons you can still press them the old fashioned way.
We've also scrapped the "bubble" style buttons in favor of text boxes. We feel like this cleans up the look, but from a practical standpoint it also allows us to fit more buttons into an area. (The exception to this is the tutorial level, which still has the bubbles and in general needs an update pass, but that will come a bit later).
The Settings menu has been organized into categories that will allow us to easily extend and add options as they become necessary. It's now very simple to add more options and categories if we need to.
Automatic Settings Adjustment
This feature is flagged as experimental (the whole game should be LOLOL) but we'd like your feedback on whether this feature is working appropriately for you. We are reading your graphics card and choosing a default quality level based on it. Ideally a 970 should do OK on low, and a 1080ti should be good on epic
PLEASE LET US KNOW if you think these auto-settings work well for your graphics card or if you have even more room for upping the resolution/SS in the settings and we can change that to be more accurate. Make sure to leave your hardware stats (at the very least your graphics card) when you post.
Reach Assist now Available
We added this feature for Touch, but decided to also make it available for Vive as well since it's a nice accessibility feature. We may make bump turns available on Vive as well if there's a demand for it.
Run Toggle
For those of you who prefer to use the trackpad locomotion, we’ve added an option to the controls settings to either toggle run or press/hold to run. This was mostly for Touch b/c it was much harder to hold the Touch joystick down to run than it is the Vive touchpad.
Also cleaned up the “hack” you could do with sprinting while trackpad running and extending your stamina by a lot. Now it’s one or the other and stamina drains equally from both.
Performance improvements
We updated the project to Unreal 4.15.1, and somewhere along the line we appear to have lost a good deal of our performance overhead. I'm still not sure what caused it, but we've spent an insane amount of time trying to get the performance as close to a solid 90fps on 970s as possible (which is always the goal, but we're actually almost there). Working without reprojection on has been a big help. If you use async repro you should have a great experience. Right now it seems that the AI are the biggest problem for performance, but we're discovering new tricks to get their performance cost down as well.
There are also a couple random hitches that are likely CPU related, but seem to only occur in the build, which are difficult to diagnose (and therefore fix), but we’re looking into those as well.
Less Fog & Art Pass on the Jungle Environment
While still probably not final, it’s a much prettier game now, with less fog overall and longer viewing distances, more natural-looking foliage growth, and some extra set-dressing. I still want an actual environment artist to take a crack at the levels someday, but we’ll see how things go. It should feel like a whole new jungle so get out there and explore it!
Before/After
Loot Drops Mission Added to Beach
We added a somewhat simplified loot drops mission to the beach map. Improvements will come to this mission later on, but for now hopefully it's a fun change of pace for the loot drops style mission. I imagine this mission will get more fun when more dinos are added.
MORE TREX
With the AI overhaul came a lot of improvements for Mr. Rex, and we're pretty confident he'll be ok out in the wild. Look for him as you reach higher levels of loot drops and big hunt. We still need to add his boss fight to the other Arcade levels as well (only in the Valley so far).
Other Things We've Been Doing
<*>Fixed up the dinosaurs materials and removed the annoying shimmering effect they had
<*>Built the functionality of a global inventory saving system to allow you to have a personal "armory" in a future update and take your favorite customized guns into battle with you
<*>Got a good start on the 4km² survival mode map. This map feels huge in VR, but will take some time to art up. I've got it "natured" about 80%, and then we'll need to go through and add some civilization to it.
<*>Developing full-body tracking tech for use with HTC's Trackers. This will hopefully result in torsos with arms and actual ammo vests for the final version of the game if you don't have any trackers. If you have one tracker, put it on your hips and we will get be able to track your torso better. If you have two, put them on your feet and we will approximate your hips and give you a full body avatar, and with three trackers place two on your feet and one on your hips for the best looking full body "virtual self!"
WHAT'S NEXT???
We feel that under the hood, Island 359 is in a good place to make a sprint toward launching out of early access. The coming months will be all about creating as much content as we can. Getting more dinosaurs in the game is first on my list, while Steve is heading up the full-body tracking tech. After that, it’s finishing the Arcade modes/Level-Up/Progression systems, and any other big ticket game mechanics, and then finishing Survival Mode.
With the inclusion of new dinos, the survival mode, and polish to arcade mode, we hope to to launch the game out of early access in the next couple months.
Enjoy the update and please report any bugs you encounter to the bug reports forum.
An Update on Updates
Hi everyone!
We just wanted to give you an update on where things are at with Island 359’s development since we’ve been a little quiet lately.
We’re still hard at work, but the new year has brought a lot of opportunities for CloudGate and we’re doing our best to manage 359’s production while also following up with these possible leads.
Steve has been exploring full-body awareness in VR using lots of Vive controllers (and a second HMD plugged in to track them).
First Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYCRDZJkSRk
Second Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNNR_Ab15Bs
The implementation is still in the prototype phase, but we’re laying the groundwork for full-body avatars in 359 when the Vive trackers become available to the public in Q2 later this year. We’re designing the system to take advantage of the trackers if you have them, but also not be dependent on them. Ideally, you will still see your arms/torso without feet trackers (we’ll also be looking into chest holsters with this), if you only have feet trackers we will track your full body and try to solve your hips position, but if you also have a hips tracker, we’ll use that as well for the most robust solve possible. This is still a ways off from being shippable, but since we’re all waiting for the hardware anyway, by the time the trackers are out we should have an amazing full-body rig ready for you.
I’m presently a couple weeks into a major AI overhaul for the dinosaurs, it’s been a significant undertaking (and I promised myself I wouldn’t rip the game apart like this again but too late), but it’s becoming a really elegant and expandable system that will hopefully allow us to create more intelligent AI for 359 and future games. In addition to being a single system applicable to all AI (and allowing changes/features to get propagated to all dinos), I’ve tried to make the targeting more generic and allow for AI to interact with each other in various ways. Examples of this include more intelligent raptor communication and predators threatening/attacking prey.
We’ve also got jumping attacks working for raptors now, which is pretty intense. I’m still figuring out solutions for letting raptors attack you when you’re elevated and also need to get to jump onto objects and climb the towers, but this system should make that easier.
Figuring out behaviors and state changes based on the navigation system status has been a huge challenge but it's paying off and a ton of the old issues we were seeing are already resolved.
I have a few dinosaurs in my queue to put in the game, which will add a ton of variety, but I need to finish the AI system first. As soon as the new AI at LEAST reliably back to what is currently in the game, we will probably roll that out and then expand the system with new features in mini-updates/patches.
We’re also in the process of getting an Oculus Touch build working. Thanks to everyone volunteering to test. We’ll let you know when this is ready to go.
We appreciate your patience!
Quick Fix: Freezing on Red Death Screen
Had a bug report of hanging on red screens when dying in ranger arcade modes (and potentially other circumstances could cause it as well).
Sure enough, I MESSED UP - SORRY! I forgot to hook something up that was kind of important. Hopefully it didn't ruin too many of your arcade runs. Apologies everyone, keep us informed of bugs you encounter!
Quick Bugfix Update
Hey gang. Just released a patch because we realized we broke the T-Rex battle at the end of Arcade. Thanks to everyone for pointing it out to us in the forums! That should be hooked back up now and working, and we're trying out something new in this build for you to check out:
Mercenary Loot Drop (Jungle) now has Time of Day turned on. We've added some flashlights to the world. They go in your backpack and you can turn them on and off with the trigger and are held like a weapon (but don't do damage). You'll need them if you survive long enough for nightfall, so make sure to grab one and put it in your pack before it's too dark out!
