First of all, we have to mention that halfway during developement of this update, the decision was made to push vr support back indefinitely. It will still be worked on, but we can't promise that it will be part of the next update, as it probably deserves an Update of its own, due to the scale of the changes that would have to be made to the code (some of which have already been implemented such as items being put into structures if they fall into the right place).
Now let's talk about what has changed.
The old terrain system has been completely overhauled with new hilly terrain with oceans and caves. All terrain is now breakable (except for the Ground at the bottom of the world, which will stay either until the world is expanded or reworked into actual planets).
There is now flowing water with semi-realistic physics, which will later be used for structures such as water wheels and to simulate currents.
Iron tools have been added with the new process of smelting it in a bloomery.
Copper tools have been removed to fit into the 3 ages system.
Chopping down trees has now become realistic and trees can be replanted.
The ingame UI has been completely overhauled to always be in some way represented in the world.
Support for Controller input (except for in the Skin Creator and when needing to type).
Uncountable quality of life changes to make this Update feel more polished than the Alpha versions.
The developement team will take a break for a few weeks/months (while still working on fixing bugs where they occur) to work out the details of the next update, but some things have already been determined and we will share them here.
The next Update will most likely be called The Invention of the Wheel Update.
It will completely overhaul how Structures work, making it possible to create movable structures.
It will also add Mechanical Structures, like wind mills, water wheels, gears and axles, as well as some other structures to allow for a simple logical system to be created.
Profectus Alpha 1.3.0 - Better Together Update release
After nearly a year, the first major update since the steam release is finished.
The Update includes:
A Multiplayer with the options "private", "friends only" and "public", as well as 3 different selfcontrol values, which affect the strength of the anticheat and inversely the load on the connection
A voxel based skin creator that allows skins with 3 layers
A complete overhaul of all items and structures
There will undoubtedly be a few bugs to work out over the next weeks and a few small things to improve, for example the performance when using the skin creator. It is always hard to work out all the bugs without a real team of beta-testers, but all bugs we were aware of are now fixed.
So in a few weeks work on the next Update will begin, so let's discuss what we plan for the next Update.
Next we will release the Beta 1.0.0 an Update which builds on the complete graphics overhaul done in the Alpha 1.3.0
The Beta 1.0.0 is planned to include:
Completely random generated breakable terrain
A rework of the current breakable system, where the organic breakables like trees and bushes will stay relatively untouched, but all inorganic breakables will be replaced with the new terrain breakables
VR compatability
The iron Age
a lot of other smaller things, many of which will be a base for either future updates or required for this one
Some of these features are already in the works, some are barely more than a concept.
The next few days will be spent fixing bugs and bringing all the Steam assets (like the store page) up to date, after that we'll make announcements in our Discord Server regarding the Beta 1.0.0 and its roadmap.
The Alpha 1.3.0 - Better together Update is approaching
After a few Months of work and rewriting more than half of all code and nearly all of the Player code to make it compatible with Multiplayer, the Better together Update is finally nearing completion.
So now we take time to discuss what changed, whats left to do and how you can play the new version prior to release and help release it faster.
What the Update will change:
All Worlds are now hosted as a local Multiplayer world, with the Player being able to choose between "private", "friends only" and "public" and also having a self control value that determines how much calculation is done by the Client and how much is done by the Server
Players can create and select skins to distinguish between each other
Player skins have several layers to better represent features such as stature, armor, hair and other distinguishing factors
The UI got an overhaul to not look like the standard unity UI as much
All Models were overhauled to better represent a unique artstyle instead of just lack of modelling talent
Items are now held differently according to their type, for example spears are now held over the head, to make them clipping into the ground less likely
What is still to do/fix:
The layers of the skin have not yet been completely implemented and can't be used in the pre release
Some items are held wrong, because of the new Models and the items now being held at custom positions according to their type
Around ten of the new Item Models and most of the new Breakable and Structure Models are still missing
Some sounds for actions are still missing or could use reworking
A few other bugs, such as the position of the player being reset after rejoining and the items not being rendered, without doing an action like swapping hands, dropping an item or crafting
To gain access to the pre release use the beta code "AlrekPublicBeta", if you want to report a bug, you can do so either on the Discord Server or in the Steam Community Hub. Please be aware that we can not guarantee the safety of savefiles that have been created on a pre release version.
Shortly after this Devlog a new prerelease version will be published.
Alpha 1.2.2: Quality of life updates
In this new update we've made a few adjustments, to make the game more intuitive.
The biggest adjustment we made were changing how unbound items work, in making them break into it's original parts when used and adding a third party russian localization, done by Karina Makhmutova.
Smaller adjustments we made included sorting worlds by when they were last played, recognizing where items belong in a structure and thus making it possible to click on any possible area to put something into the structure, and lastly expanding the surfaces you can craft a flint knife on to include items and harvestables like trees and boulders.
Lastly we fixed two bugs. One that made items in a structure invisible after reconnecting and another that didn't use up the content of a bucket, effectively duplicating it.
Alpha 1.2.1: Structure building hitbox enlarged
After noticing a flaw in our game design, in that the hitbox of the structure is too small, leading players to miss the hitbox and thus not being able to finish them, we fixed this by making the hitbox larger, creating a 1x1x1 meter cube around each structure in which you can click to add a Material.
This served as a lesson in intuitive game design, as it showed how unintuitive game design can lead to Players being stuck and losing interest in the game.
As a side note, we will soon add a russian translation of the game, but it didn't make this update, as the game still has problems displaying cyrillic letters.
UI Text bug fixed
The bug might not have made the game completely unplayable, but as it made all text invisible, Players that startet playing the game with the Steamrelease had no way of knowing the game mechanics and how to build their first tool.
This bug shouldn't have slipped in after more than a Month of testing, but nonetheless, it did. The reason is that the bug only happened if you never selected another language in the game, this happens because of how the system for automatically selecting your game language works, which is one of the few Systems that hasn't been tested, as the testers had already selected a language prior to the automatic selection being added.
We apologize to everyone whose first experience with Profectus has been made unnecessarily frustrating, but also thank those that brought this issue to our attention and that decide to give it another chance.
We learned from this experience and will have all testers clear their Profectus gamedata before testing in order to prevent further issues like this.
As always, if you have other bugs to report, you can do so on our itch.io page, in the Steam community forum or on our Discord.
