Last week saw our 3D Modelling Team turn their attention to the finer details of our Zentragal rework, focusing on facial features and texturing. While our Thunderclaw Crab got the attention of the Sound Design Team, our Environment Artist began constructing a new waterfall area for the game. As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
The 3D modelling team focused on the finer details of our Zentragal rework last week, as they finish up the face and body. Close attention has been given to the muscle structure on the upper abdomen of our favourite spider. Smoothing work has also been done to the scales and protruding spines to give them a more grown out and organic feel.
Finally, our team have been experimenting with the lower abdomen of our 8-legged friend, adding complexity to the previously unworked section. The pattern follows a similar theme of the work put into the pelvis area of the completed body, as the team turns their attention to the back end of the model.
Programming
Client
Last week the Programming Team worked wonders on a whole host of bug fixes, focusing on things like abilities, player movement, notifications and log management. With these now complete, additional stability has been added to the client and server. Check out some of the work the team got through last week:
- Refactored the event logging of combats and open world logs.
- Created the world session movement command.
- Implemented the world session tick rate and command processing.
- Added Command Throttling and GCD mechanisms to the world sessions.
- Added the worldjoin event which the server creates and listens to when you select your character.
- Commands refactored so server issued commands can now receive a notification once complete.
- Refactored Log/Event IDs to be safe with concurrency.
- Refactored log event management.
- World sessions now contain a movement manager to control the creation/validation and updating of movements and entity locations.
Server
Along with our usual bug fixes, the server team has spent the week rewriting a couple of old effect blocks for some of the first abilities introduced to the game. Growing Arcane Missile was meant to only require 6 effect blocks to work, but ended up requiring 12. Additionally, we noticed a bug that meant that while active effects correctly removed themselves, the triggers to their component effect blocks did not, this caused things like damage over time abilities to last forever.
Another bug found was that our area of effect abilities (where you choose a square or template for the ability to hit), was not counting the uppermost and rightmost squares passed to the server as valid tiles, due to a single maths error in the back end.
Bug fix of the week: Growing Arcane Missile no longer deals 160k+ damage, and scales correctly with distance now.
Sound Design
Our Sound Design Team turned their attention to more of the creatures and animals of Erendorn last week, focusing on the Thunderclaw Crab, Slootan and Sabretooth Tiger. They looked at things like vocal lines and attack sounds, helping to deliver an authentic feel to the audio you'll experience within the game world when encountering these beasts.
Slootan Vocal sample
Slootan Attack sample
Sabretooth Tiger Vocal sample
Sabretooth Tiger Attack sample
Thunderclaw Crab Vocal sample
Thunderclaw Crab Attack sample
Mutant Thunderclaw Crab Vocal sample
Thunderclaw Crab Attack & Hit React
Environment Art
Our Environment Team have been focusing on bringing new life into the first area of Erendorn with eye-catching points of interest! Starting with the construction of a stunning waterfall and quarry area for adventurers to discover whilst on their travels. Here is a breakdown of the work the team completed last week:
- First step was to source assets appropriate for the goal of making a cool feature waterfall area. For which we chose the Quarry Megascans collection.
- Landmass tool was used to displace landscape and create a crater.
- We proceeded to decorate the area by splicing in various rocks, cliffs and boulders.
- Next step will be to add foliage/shrubs/vines to bring vibrancy and life to the new area.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of February yet?!
