Last week the team made good headway on our planned upgrade to Unreal Engine 5. Work began on the latest of our armour sets, and the programming team sured up player information. As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
Enviornment
This week our Environment team continued work on Unreal Engine 5, beginning with the creation of one our in-game continents. This then lead to testing of the open world map implementation tool, using the new 'world partition' feature UE5 has. This work is key for us to understand the softwares capabilities, restrictions and how we can best utilise this new technology for the game.
Set Piece Design
Our Junior Environment Artist has been working on more assets for towns and cities this week. Although it may seem minor to add things like tables and chairs, it's the little things that really bring a scene together. We always wanted Erendorn to feel alive and lived in. Small additions like these help us achieve that goal.
3D Modelling
We recently shared the latest concept art for our next armour set being implemented into the game. Work began on this, and we're so excited to see the finished product! The first step was blocking out the set, and adding some details. This helps our artist envision what comes next, what's possible and what may be required to complete the work.
Programming
This week we continued our work to switch the Client over from the old PHP Server to the new GoLang Server, we've seen updates to how character inventories and dungeon lobbies are communicated. This included:
- Local Inventory Item Data - As the methods for generating and storing all inventory items has seen an overhaul in the switch from PHP to GoLang, the Client's method has been updated to match. Item attributes are now structured in a way that use base items and applies stat bonuses based on a power level. This means that a player's unique item information can be derived using information stored locally on the Client, cutting down the amount of information needing to be sent over the Server connection.
- Processing Lobbies - Lobbies have seen an update to match the new Server communications and can now be created, joined, viewed in the Lobby List and left.
- Work continues in the client to integrate the changes to combat and the way sessions are handled, to help match the massive rework that happened in these areas on the server.
Golang
Work continues on modularity for the server. Logging in, making a character, and selecting an existing character are now all in their own module.
A couple of tweaks have also been done to the code to allow for better privacy with players that connect. With how our servers were before this week, a 'data miner' could theoretically pull your account details (including email address, but not password) out of the game's data. With a couple of adjustments it's now only your account ID, (a unique number we give you when you log in) which would only reveal a username. We can gather sensitive data from this ID, but someone outside of the company could not.
Animation
This week our team worked on some missing animations for the Eagle model. This included: Attack01, hit reaction and death. These were cleaned up and imported into the engine.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of September yet?!
