Just a couple of small issues affecting gameplay/visuals
Fixed teleporting around loot crate
Changed LOD distance on one of the trees that was billboarding too soon
Changed Chopper glass material to fix water/ocean material bug in Beach Map
Made Health packs reduce damage PP effect
As always let us know if you see anything else we can improve!
PATCH - 10/28/16 - Interaction, Towers, etc.
We noticed a major issue with the interacts after we launched the update. Guns became paperweights after you picked up an item with it in your hand, dual wielding was broken too. That should be fixed and the game should be a lot more enjoyable now!
There was another bug introduced with our new "don't sprint thru stuff" system, that prevented you from entering and exiting towers, entering the choppers, and moving around the loot crates that has been mostly resolved (I still need to hit the loot crate aspect of it), but towers should be functional again, though it looks like they still need a bit of polish on the fade out.
Anyway, a quick patch to fix some major issues. We'll move onto some smaller bugs after this: moving around the loot crate, re-adjusting the sprint speed, balancing difficulty, and graphics savings options in the coming days, as well as taking a look at any bugs reported in the REPORT BUGS forum.
Happy Hunting!
CloudGate Presents: SECOND BLOOD
We here at CloudGate are proud to announce that our first big update to Island 359: SECOND BLOOD!
This took us longer than we wanted, but some big things happened behind the scenes as well that are hopefully going to give us even more leverage as two developers to get content out to Early Access players much faster. We’re hoping to make updates like this happen a bit more frequently!
So, what’s new in SECOND BLOOD?
[B][WARNING: GAMEPLAY UPDATE SPOILERS AHEAD][/B]
[B]New Mission Type and Map:[/B] Big Hunt
This is an “advanced” mission for players who have already played Mercenary Mode. It’s much more difficult than the original game mode! Big Hunt is a stealth mission type where you have to use a recurve bow and arrow to hunt some big game dinos like our new Triceratops in a field of tall grass. Raptors also roam the field, so be extremely careful about engaging them in the open as if they swarm you here, you’re toast. The good news is the tall grass and the foliage in this map can hide you if you get your face down in it, so you can stay hidden as Raptors walk right past you. Stay hidden and move when the dinos aren’t looking your way to get close to the big game, and strike at their weak points (there’s a sign that shows you where to aim for, but it’s not easy!). A single arrow to any of the weak points will yield a kill shot which will cause the dino to bleed out. But be careful! They can still charge and/or bite in this state and they’ll definitely be angry!
Off to the sides of the field is a new lush jungle environment, complete with homes that the local population used to live in before the dinos took over. They’ve been collecting this strange new metal discovered on the Island, so look for it to pick up (store it like ammo) along with health packs and anything else you can find along the way. The “boys and girls back at the lab” really want to evaluate this metal so they’re using it as a score multiplier when you find it.
NOTE: We’ve locked Big Hunt out until you’ve completed Mercenary Mode at least once (make it back to the chopper and get a score better than last place on your local Leaderboard!). If you’ve beaten Mercenary Mode already, Big Hunt should be automatically unlocked when you play the update the first time.
[B]New Dino:[/B] Triceratops
Get ready for a new enemy type! Technically Trikes aren’t your enemy; if you stay far enough away from them, they’ll just leave you alone. They’re herbivores! They don’t even like eating players. But they are extremely territorial so if you get too close, they’ll charge at you. Get out of the way, and shoot at their soft spots! Their armored head and plate are nearly bulletproof and arrowproof, so we wouldn’t even recommend shooting at them head-on as it’s not going to end well for you. Pro-tip. If you’re being chased by raptors, try shooting the trike, getting her to charge at you, and dodge and let her take care of the raptors for you.
[B]New Weapons:[/B]
[B]The Brock:[/B] a black market fully automatic pistol with the most ridiculously awesome (and accurate) rate of fire ever. Be careful; you’ll empty the entire clip in under a second, and the recoil is murder
[B]AX-74:[/B] A mini-carbine that is fully automatic and has incredible stopping power.
[B]The Bow:[/B] Comes with unlimited ammo. Just reach over your shoulder and an arrow will automatically be added to your draw hand. Grab the string to draw bow. Release string to fire.
[B]Throwing Knives:[/B] Come in packs of 5, so when you throw one, we put your next knife immediately in your hand. Pull trigger to prep knife to “throw” position. Release knife to throw. They stack like ammo so if you pick up 3 packs, you can throw 15 knives from your one hand without switching packs.
[B]New Upgrade:[/B]
[B]Sniper Scope:[/B] Use for accuracy at extreme range. Probably not a great idea to slap it onto a fully automatic gun other than the lower rate of fire AX-74, but we’re not going to stop you from doing it. The manufacturer recommends using it on the Magnum, the Falcon, and the AX, because, BOOM, HEADSHOT.
[B]Animation System Refactor:[/B]
This was so important to us we’re calling it out as a feature. We weren’t as happy as we wanted to be with our dino animations, so we rebuilt the entire animation system for every dinosaur so we get smoother interps. You’ll see it in the Raptors and the Allosaur especially, but dinos now have stalk animations, injured animation states, and should pathfind to you in a much less glitchy manner than our previous system. Oh, and the Raptors got a LOT faster. You’ve been warned.
[B]And A Whole Lot More![/B]
Besides a ton of boring stuff like how we build missions and modes, there’s a ton of perf improvements behind the scenes. We’ve mostly un-choked the CPU by optimizing how we do a ton of our systems, we’ve done a lot of first-pass foliage improvements (and more coming, soon). If you have the latest SteamVR Beta with asynch reprojection, you’re going to be able to push the graphics settings harder than you’ve ever pushed them before in our game. On our tests on our 970 cards, we were able to move the default graphic setting from Medium to High without any noticeable increase in dropped frames (nearly zero) using the latest asynchronous reprojection. We left the default graphics setting to Medium for now, however, as we’re still trying to improve our performance there. We’re within striking distance of true 90fps on Medium on 970s and we’re working hard to get it there if we can. Lastly, we’re hoping to sneak out some lighter bite-sized updates in the coming weeks on top of our future plans for larger updates like this one!
New Graphics Scalability settings will be coming online very soon as we have changed so much that we need to change some and tweak others, and we want to give you a way to save your selected settings so you don’t have to keep re-doing it every mission!
[B]Known issues:[/B]
Dinos can get stuck on some slopes and bigger objects due to the new animation system.
Water won’t look correct as the water shader is broken.
Arrows may still be left in world after dead dinos despawn.
Let us know in the Community Forum “Report Bugs” thread if you notice anything else, please!
Thanks so much for supporting us! We’re really excited that reception has been positive to Island 359 so far and we can’t wait to show you what’s next!
Steve and Jeremy
SECOND BLOOD. Coming Soon!
We're back from doing conventions!
We're hard at work putting a bow on this first big update!
We'll leave it up to you to figure out what's in it!
MOAR DEV STREAMING! DINO ANIMATION EDITION
I'm going to be working on the Triceratops animation tonight, might not be terribly exciting until I get into the animation system stuff but tune in if you want to see how we're setting up the new dinosaur movement system!
https://www.twitch.tv/cloudgatestudio
I'll start around 7:30CDT
Doing some dev streaming
If you want to watch Steve work on the new map and chat with us, check out the stream here:
https://www.twitch.tv/cloudgatestudio
Will probably be streaming for a couple hours.
An Update on... UPDATES!
We're hard at work on some bigger content/game infrastructure updates that we know you're going to love - it's just taking some time.
Since we're kind of on a roll with this stuff, we probably won't shift gears into bug fixing for another couple days, but I know we've racked up quite a few reports since our last patch and we need to address them. We just really needed to get back to content/feature creation for a while.
We were at PAX last weekend giving demos of the game and didn't have much time for development, but we're back at it full steam now.
Thanks for your patience!
UPDATES - 8/30/16 - DIFFICULTY!
PATCH 0.0.1c
(8/30/16)
Features Added:
(as always, let us know if these are fun and/or functioning properly)
DIFFICULTY! - you can now change the difficulty of the mission when you select it! There are 4 difficulty levels, and we will eventually tie in more variables affected by these levels. For now, it's mostly dino attack damage and health multipliers, as well as your melee weapon strength.
Added surface height detection to player pawn - sprinting adjusts to the terrain height. We're liking how this feels, but acknowledge that the ups/downs could cause some discomfort to those who are sensitive to it. In the next patch we will likely make this toggleable in the advanced settings. We had this working for standing in place as well, but ultimately have to pull it for now as it causes too many other issues with object interacts and physics.
Bugs Fixed:
Melee strength is actually in effect now - you will probably notice melee items breaking quicker (they weren't counting compies before). To compensate for the increased breakability, we've added another dozen or so around the map with certain odds of spawning in per game.
Fixed a collision bug on explosives that allowed a player to teleport up onto held items indefinitely
Fixed and old bug that came back where players could get stuck in collision and would jump up into the air
Dialed in red-dot sight to be more accurate
Fixed laser beam sight sporadic turn off bug (hopefully for reals this time - Thanks again @Sixx)
Disabled player sprint boarding final chopper (although the player positioning is a bit off, will adjust in next update)
Adjusted the location of the inventory bag trigger box (behind head) - should be easier to grab/return bag now
Fixed a guard tower enter/exit bug that would send you back to the ground on your second climb up (along with many other minor bugs in the tower logic) - Added a fade out when exiting towers
Additional notes:
Regarding difficulty, we hope you'll find the game more challenging overall now, and dino encounters will hopefully not be so spammy. We've found this balance pass to be a lot more fun as it makes us more engaged seeing fewer packs of raptors and compys in the world. It makes their interaction feel more special. The two hardest modes are definitely what we find to be the most fun, but and the two easiest modes are very similar to the last build's difficulty levels - the only difference is less dinos.
Also note that the difficulty balance will definitely be tweaked as we go forward. We value your feedback as to how each level feels, so feel free to discuss and let us know.
Raptors and compies MAY jump up now, and it might look broken and hilairous as this needs a lot of tweaks, but it's a start. The jump animations (like most animations in the game) are placeholder and will hopefully look more bad ass in the near future.
UploadVR Review: 8/10 - Great
Final Score: 8/10 – Great
While it may only be in Early Access with a handful of minor issues, Island 359 is clearly building a strong foundation for one of VR’s breakout titles. The massive island is empowering to run around and explore in VR and the gameplay mixture of stealth, exploration, and combat, meld together to create one of the most engaging shooters we’ve seen inside an HMD so far."
Full Article: http://uploadvr.com/island-359-early-access-review-jurassic-park/
UPDATES - 8/26/16
PATCH 0.0.1b
(8/26/16)
Bugs Fixed:
Rebuilt landscape collision - will improve teleport aim and may improve laser sight behavior
Tweaks to movement system - should see less buggy sprint/teleporting
Added first-pass of a system to help catch items falling through the ground
Fixed bug that occasionally spawned multiple upgrade/ammo cases on top of each other
Fixed bug where case handles sometimes stick to your hand position after releasing trigger
Added a "No Fire Zone" to the ladders to avoid accidental weapon firing when climbing
Adjusted Raptor and Compy collision to improve hit detection
Made an adjustment to the laser sight that may fix sporadic on/offs Nevermind this apparently didn't work
Lowered the pawn even more to help with dropped item pickups from ground
Increased Raptor sound FX volume
Lowered the default resolution tiers for each "Quality Level" basic setting in the settings menu, Epic now caps at 190 (it's all still 100% adjustable to your liking)
(Minor) Added haptics to overlapping ladder rungs
(Minor) Made selection bubbles stay orange after selecting
(Minor) Adjusted LOD settings on ammo crate and tent help reduce obvious popping
Priority for this update was getting the landscape collision/movement stuff sorted out. Luckily that went pretty fast and we got to fix quite a bit more.
Worth noting - we removed the L/R indicators on the controllers. Unreal chooses the first controller turned on as the left controller whether or not that is what Steam says, and since it has zero impact on the game, we just turned them off to avoid user frustration. Enjoy your blissful ignorance!
