New patch is out! There's a large movement overhaul for all the playable animals in this patch, details below. Feedback welcome, in case something broke let us know.
Dilophosaurus and Sarcosuchus also got customisation with this patch. If you previously had one of these characters on the servers, you'll end up with an incorrect skin until you restart. Roll a new character in that case.
Features:
* This patch includes the next step in adopting the new movement system. All playable animals have now been moved to their new configuration. This change opens a lot of doors for the game, but more work to polish the new locomotion is needed. There's a few intermediate downsides. Firstly, gliding has been affected somewhat in terms of fidelity but still exist as a mechanic. Secondly, vaulting sadly has been disabled with this patch, pending a rework. More work on all of this is planned. * Added a dash mechanic that increases speed while decreasing maneuverability, default input key is X. Deinonychus can combine this with gliding to dive through the air (make sure to release before landing). * Added customisation for Dilophosaurus. * Added customisation for Sarcosuchus.
Map:
* Opened up a new trail from redwoods to swamp. * Adjusted various trail textures, should stand out more. * Added wooden shelters to escape adverse weather conditions. * Added small trail lighting to the main trails. These have distinct colours and represent routes across the island. The goal is for this to be a tasteful in-world guide to help navigate the island, feedback on appearance and spacing/locations welcome.
Performance:
* Rendering performance improvements. * Server performance improvements.
Misc:
* Slightly shrank Parasaurolophus to correct size. * Slightly grew Dilophosaurus to correct size. * Added breath particles during cold temperatures. * In order to make room for the expanding roster and make species selection easier, swapped out the species selector for a simple list. More UI work pending. * Adjusted footstep sound, check your audio settings in case you want to tweak them. * Reduced volume of windgusts. * Lighting tweaks for Clear Skies and Partly Cloudy to make the shadows less dark, there's more work on this to be done.
Balance:
* Buffed Dilophosaurus attacks.
Bugfixes:
* Various swimming bugfixes. Please note that in some areas you might visibly be a little bit below the surface, especially as a juvie animal. This doesn't end up hurting you, it's a mismatch between the rendering of the water surface and the top of the swimming height. We want to clean that up in the future. * General movement logic & animation tweaks. * Fixed audio settings not persisting. * Fixed various pickup bugs. * Fixed some pickup animations sliding during movement. * Fixed frog not dropping to ground properly. * Reworked corpse pickup and fixed various associated bugs. * Fixed brightness and scaling of various particles. * Tweaked allosaurus aiming blend snap. * Fixed overly bright light during character customisation. * Fixed PBR issue with character skins, should look less flat now. * Fixed certain areas of the landscape rendering as near pure black.
Patch 0.9.5
0.9.5 is now out!
This patch features various polish, and more ambient AI to liven up the world.
There's also lot of fundamental changes to underlying systems with this patch, as well as a lighting overhaul. Feedback here is welcome, there will almost certainly need to be more tweaking and bugfixing done.
Known issues under investigation:
* During certain lighting conditions the water can seem bright/glowing. * Day/night transition seems to currently be very fast. * Certain footstep particles are overly bright at night
Map:
* Further improvements to landscape rendering fidelity. * Increased beach scatter variety.
Features:
More ambient AI:
* Various birds and small critters have been added to the game. Further polish to make their movements and behaviour more natural and dynamic planned. Check out the cloud lake forest! * Frogs now have a physical presence in the world. Their swimming still needs to be added, for now you can find them on some of the swamp islands and cloud lake shores.
Graphics: * Better fog scattering.
Lighting:
* Large overhaul, more refinement necessary. Feedback welcome.
Bugfixes:
* Fixed popping snow ground effect. * Team members no longer show up as food. * Adjusted Allo fall damage. * Tweaked some of the grass foliage interaction to be less extreme.
Performance:
* Improved CPU performance. * Improved VRAM usage.
Polish:
* Improved movement rotation of ambient ai to look more natural.
Misc: * Updated to UE 5.3.2.
Patch 0.9.4
0.9.4 is out!
Features:
* Added foliage tinting during snow, still needs to be excluded below water, WIP. * Experimental: Added NVIDIA Framegen (Requires 40 series GPU, DX12, and hardware accelerated gpu scheduling to be on). Reminder that DX12 can be a bit finnicky, especially if you're on older hardware or have limited VRAM.
Map:
* Improved landscape texture separation/detailing. * Greatly improved quality of landscape texture rendering (note: known issue that this is currently broken on the mainmenu). * Tweaked paths and layout cloud rainforest biome. * Tweaked paths and layout lower desert. * Increased ambient audio variety in jungles. * Improved blending between meshes and landscapes. * Did a pass on cleaning the mesh holes in the desert, where landscape meets the cliffs/rocks. More work to be done here, this area got a bit screwed up when we upgraded the landscape.
Performance:
* Removed distant impostor fog particles from swamp and cloud rainforest, were too much of a drain on performance. Regular HQ fog is still there, these are just individual particles that were shown at a distance. Replaced with a fog volume
Bugfixes:
* Fixed ambient AI not animating. * Fixed ambient AI staying stuck in place and not moving. * Fixed various spawn locations. * Fixed menu requiring confirmation even though no settings were changed. * Fixed overly-dark cliffs in shadows.
Patch 0.9.3
This update introduces wildfires on herbivore feeding fields, expands spawning of ambient AI, and brings a slew of bugfixes, and significant performance improvements.
A few PSAs:
* We've migrated to Unreal 5.3 with this release, shoot us a message in case something unexpected breaks. Feedback welcome. * Graphics presets have been updated, so we recommend you re-apply the appropriate preset for your hardware. * Important note: we had a case of AMD Instant Reply causes performance issues. We recommend to have it off while playing the game if you're having trouble.
Features:
* Added the first iteration of dynamic spawning of ambient AI to complement the static spawning spots, for now lizards and fireflies. * Overhauled performance of foliage fields to allow a larger variety of foliage. * Wildfires! The first implementation of this natural disaster is now available, and will trigger randomly within herbivore foliage fields during warm weather. It can spread, but not beyond the foliage fields for the moment. More fire starting scenarios and expanding beyond the fields are planned as features.
Tweaks:
* Aim mode can now also look and move up/down to improve the usability while swimming and chasing fish. * Adjusted Sarcosuchus' animation limits for looking around. * Reduced sliding when letting go of input. * Tweaked surface alignment interpolation speed to reduce floating on inclines. * Polished Sarcosuchus water enter/exit transition, but still requires further work. * Added bite collision trace during tail attack Sarcosuchus. * Tweaked spawn preview to make character not rotate & snap.
Bugfixes:
* Improved reliability of herbivore eating, fixes a case where the removal of the plants didn't trigger correctly. * Fixed Sarcosuchus drink and eat anims not looping. * Fixed Sarcosuchus bask action being in the wrong place on radial menu. * Fixed Salt Marsh spawn turning screen black. * Fixed flickering biome preview for prairie. * Prevented Sarcosuchus basking underwater. * Corrected "hints" typo in controls options as well as the settings change confirmation wording. * Temperature icons are now correctly always shown on the UI if the "Hide needs when satiated" option is false in the options. * Fixed options requesting confirmation without having changed anything. * AI name tag now disappears correctly when removed (swallowed/despawned). * Tweaked bodypile that was sometimes causing temperature drop. * Fixed various foliage fields not respecting the min-1-blooming-field-per-biome rule. * Fixed a stretching issue that would happen occasionally while interacting with jungle grass. * Fixed various water particles rendering pitch black at great view distances. * Fixed Dilo not being able to emote while sitting. * Fixed animation loop on sliding end for Allosaurus.
Performance:
* Optimised landscape rendering. * Various rendering optimisations. * Client game thread optimisations. * Further modest VRAM savings. * Optimised Ambient AI server performance.
Map:
* Increased fish in swamp. * Fixed various locations where water was stretching and showing underwater postprocess above water. This is a workaround and a proper solution is still being looked at, reports of other locations where this happens are useful. * Smoothed out the banks in the alpine lake to make it easier to climb out. * Fixed water collision hitbox at swamp -> ocean waterfall.
Patch 0.9.2
0.9.2 is now out!
A round of polish and map changes for this patch!
Just a heads-up that that we have a couple more items to fix and polish with Sarco lined up for the next patches. Further bugreports are appreciated.
Features:
* Season and the amount of days into the season listed on the status tab to make it easier to understand why temperatures are trending one way or the other.
Changes:
* Biomes now inform which species can spawn there. This will allow us to tailor each biome more to the species that call it home, and exclude poor spawn spots for the animals. More changes for the spawn flow are planned. * Removed player spawns upperdesert and eastern alpine region. * Added spawns within swamp.
Map:
* Fixed wetness layer on ocean. * Added extra rivers from alpine to swamp. The new rivers might need further polishing, collision/triggers are a bit tricky, feedback welcome. * Overhauled swamp with new watersetup that offers better interaction, fixed various improper collisions, and scattered more grass on the islands.
Tweaks:
* Added Salt Marsh biome as spawn point. * Improved backwards walk Sarcosuchus. * Added a return to spawn point selection button. * Tweaked fading spawn flow. * Reduced max brightness swamp fog. * Grouped raven sound with ambient UI audio setting. * Adjusted various collisions in swamp. * Tweaked damage traces for Sarcosuchus' attacks.
Balance:
* Boosted HP Sarcosuchus.
Performance:
* Significant VRAM optimisation.
Bugfixes:
* Speculative fix for helicopter event. * Fixed edge-case where oxygen would not stop draining while above water. * Adjusted a couple player spawns that placed you in an obstacle. * Fixed glitches with river surface rendering. * Fixed packing for Sarcosuchus. * Fixed a bug where spawning in rivers would fail to start swimming. * Fixed a bug where sarco/dilo couldn't swim to surface in river. * Added fallbacks to handle edge-cases where swim triggers fail.
Patch 0.9.1
0.9.1 is out!
Couple small bugfixes for this one.
Bugfixes:
* Fixed server crash * Fixed sarcosuchus' immobility during sit/sleep not being quite as immobile as intended
Patch 0.9.0 - Sarcosuchus, biomes, temperatures
0.9.0 is now out, bringing you sarcosuchus, new biomes, and temperature gameplay!
Sarcosuchus
Sarcosuchus has been added as a playable, the game's first venture into semi-aquatics! Movement is work in progress, feedback welcome. One point of concern is still the IK which screws up a bit at certain angles.
Temperature gameplay
The game now has temperatures in the world that are important to keep in mind. Some pointers:
* The status menu shows body temperature and environmental temperature. * Simulation ticks ambient air and water temperatures independently, with the water retaining and losing heat more slowly. * Weather and time of day influence the temperature as well. * Find hotspots to warm up! The swamp is heated, as well as the lagoon around the volcano. VFX to properly show the water is hot isn't in yet, but on the todo list. * Shade provides cooler spots. * Getting close to other animals adds some heat (simple addition of 2 degrees per neighbour currently). * Dense foliage also provides cover during cold weather. * Endotherms are able to stay warm by burning food, whereas ectotherms like Sarcosuchus need to shift around their environment more. Endotherms generally don't need to worry about their body heat during most circumstances, except when the temperature drops hard (such as during a snowstorm, or a winter night). * Your movement speed will decrease if you're hypothermic.
The system is designed to be forgiving enough not to be bothersome, but still something to keep in mind as you play in order to add some extra depth to the gameplay. Feedback welcome.
One thing to watch out for is that we haven't added enough helpful hints on the UI so you know what actually influences the temperature easily, we still want to add this.
Full changelog:
Features:
* Temperature gameplay has been added! See above for details. * New ambient ai, snapping turtles have arrived.
Map:
* New biome! A salt marsh has been added to the beach, and the rainforest beach area has been reworked. The salt marsh has fish as feeding opportunities. * Iterated on volcano with hot lagoon, hotspring, and extra areas of land with a geyser (non-drinkable, will be made toxic in a future patch). This latter area is still very much so a work in progress.
Seasons:
* Each season now lasts 3 days (listed on the F7 debug screen at the moment), cycling through the year faster than before. This allows us to make seasons more impactful, but also shorter and more manageable. * Snow now remains on the map after the weather clears up, if temperature is low.
Bugfixes:
* Fixed server crash. * Resolved an issue preventing pack invites. * Fixed Dilo not having any oxygen timer. * Fixed Dilo floating too high above water while swimming. * Fixed Dilo not triggering swimming in rivers. * Fixed various rendering bugs underwater, we want to improve the rendering further still, especially the movement of the surface water and the underwater surface, which isn't fully proper yet. * Fixed a couple places where nest placing was erroneously prohibited. * Fixed aim lock ("L") for Dilo. * Further stabilisation of the new movement system, reduced rubberbanding. * Resolved various issues with ocean surface rendering during some weather types * Fixed water interaction
Tweaks:
* Adjusted lighting on water particles to be less bright * Going to and from the spawn selection is now a fade-to-black transition instead of the camera blending to the spawn location. Previous implementation was too choppy, simplified for the time being. * Small animals like trilobites and fish are now immediately picked up when killed. * Improved hit detection of combat with ambientai.
Patch 0.8.2 - Ambient AI
0.8.2 is now out! This patch expands on the first ambient AI introduced in the last patches, trilobites, and adds more small animals that serve the same purpose.
All the details below:
Features:
More ambient AI! They're currently pre-placed (more randomisation planned) in various spots, listed below. Because of the pre-placement, they might be hard to spot in the world right now (tip: visit the cloud rainforest lake), which something we still want to improve.
These are the new additions:
Fireflies can now be found around lakes. These insects will come out at night and can be killed for a quick snack. They also flee from you if you get close.
Lizards in jungle and deserts/prairie.
Fish in lakes! Just arganodus for now.
Bugfixes:
Fixed bug where ambient AI sometimes wasn't visible even though it was active.
Map:
Fixed a couple more places of stretching around map borders.
Increased scatter on beach.
0.8.1 - Polish & Performance
0.8.1 is now out!
Some polish and performance improvements in this one. There's another update being cooked up that will add a lot more ambient ai, launching soon.
Here's the details:
Polish: * Trilobites now respond to pawns and try to flee.
Bugfixes: * Fixed items picked up under water falling out of mouth. * Fixed trilobites not being re-pickupable.
Map: * Fixed a couple instances of the landscape being distorted at the edges of the map.
Performance: * Significant performance improvements due to landscape optimisation.
Patch 0.8.0 - Dilophosaurus, AI interaction/packs, trilobites
This release brings patch 0.8.0 onto the main branch, making it available for everyone without tuning into the experimental branch. It also adds a few new goodies compared to the last experimental build (see end of page), read on for details.
Highlights
Dilophosaurus
The first highlight of 0.8.0 is the preview release of Dilophosaurus, which features an entirely rewritten movement system. The goal here is to improve the overall fluidity of the movement, and build a system that we can easily extend further as development continues. It features much better pivoting, by-default backwards walking, and should soon also feature much reduced rubberbanding (in progress).
🚧 Dilophosaurus is still in preview 🚧
Due to the complexity of this change, we're haven't hit the level of polish we want yet (especially the rubberbanding that we're tackling is an on-going concern at the moment). Dilophosaurus is freely available for testing and feedback for everyone, but we're keeping the experimental designation on it for now.
AI interaction & packing
This patch introduces the ability to pack with AI of your own species, including giving them commands once packed! These commands can be requested through the radial menu, currently including follow, roam, guard, or to change their stance (aggressive/neutral).
Juvies/AI with much smaller growth than yourself require gaining their trust to pack. The current implementation is intended like this:
Drop food when near them.
Friendly call to invite them over to eat the food.
(Optional: Threaten to reject).
Invite once the food has been eaten (note: tear chunk action conflicts currently, has been noted to be improved).
Trilobites
Trilobites have arrived on the island and are available as a snack. You'll be able to find them in the rocky coastal areas.
These critters are the first in a series of smaller ambient AI that we're intending to introduce to spruce up the liveliness of the island. More on this soon.
Map
The map has seen various updates, including new waterfalls!
We've also regenerated the landscape and tweaked the performance hotspots. This should yield more uniform and stable performance across the world.
All the changes are in the changelog below.
Full changelog:
Features
New playable and early look at the new movement system: Dilophosaurus. Expect the animal to not be fully featured yet on initial introduction, its main current goal is to be the dedicated testbed for the character/movement overhaul. Other animals currently still have the old system.
AI can now be packed with. Invite them by walking up to them, and hitting the invite button that pops up. AI will not pack if already in a team, or if they are below your growth stage.
Juvies/AI with much smaller growth than yourself requires gaining their trust to pack. Drop food nearby, 2 call to invite over, invite to pack once food eaten.
Packed AI can be commanded through the radial menu to follow, roam, guard, or to change their stance (aggressive/neutral), check out the options available!
Corpses much smaller than yourself can now be swallowed whole.
Map:
Redesign pass of the redwoods beach.
Added a waterfall to the prairie. Rendering still needs some tweaking, early look.
Adjusted map landscape, should yield more uniform performance.
Note that as a side effect of this change, we still need to do more touch-up still of the landscape blends with detail meshes.
Adjusted various landscape mesh holes.
Removed collision from moss around swamp.
Adjusted reed spawns around swamp, cloud rainforest lake, and large alpine lake
Added another waterfall and small rivers at the cloudrainforest lake.
Updated water and lilies at cloud rainforest.
Swamp now spawns random geyser effects.
Lighting:
Adjusted brightness of fog at beach level.
Bugfixes
Fixed a bug where meat-chunk couldn't be swallowed.
Various fixes for edge cases where character creation would show the wrong material.
Speculative fix for the server restart leaving the selection overlay visible on disconnection.
Fixed an edgecase where nest placement failed.
Fixed ocean waves not curling at the coastline.
Fixed a bug where lower cloud settings would draw through the world.
Fixed black squares rendering over water in some places.
Fixed ocean rendering holes at large distance.
Player's adult animals can now pack with older animals past adult.
Changes
Turn in place has been removed. It didn't work out the way we'd hoped and became too buggy to support. As movement is being completely rewritten, might come back at some point or in a different form.
