It's been a busy week of development for the team. The set piece design team has been creating highly detailed models for an avian deity. Whilst the wizards of coding have been shoring up the adventuring loop and squashing bugs that come along with it. During this time, the visual effects team have been working on new building blocks for future visual effects and the audio team has added audio to VFX created in previous weeks. Finally, the animation team have been working on updating many of the animations within the world of Erendorn. As always, join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn. Alternatively, join our Discord for all the latest! - now let’s get into it!
Set Piece Design
The set piece design team have continued their work on the assets for city dwellings throughout the week. Focus has also continued creating props that use a higher level of detail. The pieces of furniture fabricated throughout the week have been adorned with bird-like motifs. Assets such as these could find a home within places of worship, especially those that are devoted to an avian deity. On the other hand, these props could also be placed within the home of those who have sworn fealty to the same avian god. With these possibilities in mind, the team have implemented the assets into the engine. Examples of these can be seen below.
Programming
Client
This week has been about ensuring every feature implemented thus far is working as intended along with the full loop of joining an Adventure, gaining and completing Activity Objectives, joining Dungeons in the world, returning to the Dungeon Entrance upon completion and ending the Adventure, receiving progression rewards for the different feats achieved. This week marks the complete implementation of features for the current build target, meaning the next iteration will be focused on bug hunting, updating UI and tightening the overall player experience within those features. Additional work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Worked through the Interactable and Activity logic to ensure Entries and Objectives are correctly updating based on interactions.
- Added fade and remove logic and animation for completed Activity Book Entries.
- Updated client limit on message length to allow larger movement commands in Adventures.
- Updated how Room Ceilings, Props and Light Sources are unloaded when moving between or rerolling Dungeon Rooms.
- Implemented asynchronous unloading for Set Piece sublevels, Room loading no longer requires the previous Room's SetPiece to be unloaded to continue, speeding up room loading times.
- Implemented the ability to transition from Dungeon Sessions back to World Zones, allowing players to complete a Dungeon and return to that Dungeon's entrance after.
- Adjusted Time/Weather code.
- Updated Interactable assets.
- Added 2 extra merchants ready for implementation.
- Implemented Burst Messages so that the client can send large messages to the server.
- Fixed client Time Of Day Calculation.
- Implemented BP nodes for int64 Modulo and int64 to float conversions.
Server
This week the server team has been in full bug-fix mode now that all of the features being worked on have been implemented. As a result, bugs for Subzone despawning, Weather selection, entering dungeon combat, the Activity Log, and Events have all been worked on and fixed! Additionally, completing a dungeon will now correctly return you to the Adventure you came from, saving all the XP and loot you gained from the dungeon. Further work completed by the server-side team can be seen below.
- Changed Weather update interval to 5 minutes.
- Completing a dungeon now correctly tells the client where to go next.
- Fixed an issue which stopped session changes messages from dungeons reaching the client.
- Fixed dungeon room joining and auto-start code.
- Fixed various bugs with the world events.
- Refactored World Event subevents.
- Dungeon session game state gets paused and started again between rooms of a dungeon.
- Added GetLocation helper function to entities.
- Combat starting is now behind a mutex lock to stop a rare issue around combat starting and concurrency.
- Added code to handle going into a dungeon from the open world and returning to the adventure after it has been completed.
- Stopped entities in combat from being considered for dungeons if they are in combat.
- Added code to keep the session open while the party is in a dungeon.
- Fixed a crash related to disconnecting while in a dungeon lobby.
- Fixed a server crash triggered by completing one of the world events.
- Fixed a world event dialogue.
- Fixed a server crash relating to disconnects and expected players in sessions.
Sound Design
After their adventure through the wilderness, the audio team have been back working on the level three abilities for the character classes of Erendorn. Taking the work completed by the visual effects team over the last couple of weeks, primary resources have been used to build up some impressive audio for the Twilight Elf Assassin and the Human Knight. The two sets of abilities have very different styles when compared to each other. The Twilight Elf has abilities that are shrouded in darkness and need a stealthy undertone. The team achieved this by imitating gusts of wind and echos that would be found in caves, to give the abilities the same aura as the visual effects. In doing this, the audio fits the visual effects well enough that hearing them emerge from the shadows is within character. On the other hand, the sounds of the Human Knight's abilities take on a stronger and more destructive stance, conveying a character not afraid to charge head-first into battle. These characters will play very differently during combat and this is apparent through these audio effects, examples of which are in the videos below.
Animation
Polish and updating previous animations have been the focus of the animation team once again throughout the last week. With the Zentragal being such a complex creature, the team have taken the time to smooth out and polish some of its movement cycles. Throughout the development of Depths of Erendorn, the team have learnt many new techniques that would not have been present for animations nearer the start of the project. Using these new techniques, the team can start improving many of the cycles that they have completed. The team will continue to update animations through the coming weeks, starting with the idles of character classes. Examples of the updated movement cycles for the Zentragal can be seen below.
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Visual Effects
With the majority of the work on the level 3 abilities completed, the visual effects team has been working on more building blocks for more complex effects. Using these building blocks will speed up the production of more complex visual effects going forward. These pre-made nodes, known as emitters, will be used when the team need to create a 'Fresnel Sphere' and 'Ribbon with a moving material'. In the past, the team would have created these types of emitters from scratch, now effects such as the one in the example below can be made in mere minutes. The team will continue to polish and work on additional effects using these emitters throughout the coming weeks. Examples of the application of the brand-new emitters can be seen below.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of October yet?!
