Folks,

If you happened to catch today’s live stream with Tim and I, Tyler, you would have seen two hard-working and enthusiastic developers ending the week on a high note! We had a really strong week with lots of cool features getting work done on them, which of course you can read about in our Top Tenish list below.

A couple of my favorites were the improvements to the navmesh, as well as the line of sight work. Both of those are exciting items when it comes to improvements for our NPCs. Actually, I’m just realizing that I could keep going here with my list of favorites, as there’s quite a few cool features below! Instead, let’s move on to the meat of the update.

In terms of testing this weekend, we are not planning on a weekend test. However, keep an eye on our tentative testing schedule for more info on testing next week.

Additionally, CSE will be out of office on Monday, in observance of Labor Day. We will of course be back in the office Tuesday, hard at work. Also, per our first item on the Top Tenish list, Mark and Andrew are at Dragon Con this weekend in Atlanta. Drop in and say hi if you’re there!

Let’s move to the week’s work highlights below!

Top Tenish:

1. Dragon Con: It’s Dragon Con! MJ and Andrew have journeyed to Atlanta, and will be attending a couple of panels. If you are in the area, stop by and say hi!

2. WIP – Tech – 3d Nav Mesh: This week, we got our nav mesh working in 3 dimensions! Certainly something necessary for a 3D game. While this matters for things like stairs and multi-floor buildings, it’s also important for tracing line of sight and visibility.

3. WIP – Tech – Line of Sight: Speaking of line of sight, we added line of sight checking to NPC ability behaviors. This will allow NPCs to only fire at things they can see, and can be used later for stealth and detection.

4. Tech – Net Core: As part of our broad Linux Server effort, Colin was able to convert the Web API to netcore. This is one of the last major systems that needed to be Linux-enabled. The light at the end of the Linux tunnel is in sight now!

5. WIP – Tech – Texture Combiner: To be able to add different types of models in the engine that can swap parts, we need support for different texture layouts for creatures, animals, etc. Andrew and Wylie have been working on this, and Wylie is taking it down the last mile right now.

6. WIP – Tech – Input: Matt has made some minor aiming and movement changes that won’t be visible to Backers, but make our lives easier for future improvements.

7. WIP – Tech – Scriptable entities and events: Most of the Gameplay team has been working on giving us a method for having scriptable entities and events. This should allow Mark and Ben to craft more interactable world elements.

8. WIP – Trigger Volume Scripting: Caleb has been integrating new physics capabilities with our trigger volume scripting. Our physics events surrounding physics collision and destruction are much more ironclad than they’ve been in the past. These new capabilities will allow for some complex scripting and world interactions to occur.

9. Tech – Characters Sticking: One thing we noticed when we had thousands of characters all jumbled together was that players and NPCs could get “stuck” and unable to seperate. We’ve fixed that issue, allowing thousands of characters to move around each other more easily.

10. Tech – Editor – Transform Gizmo: Rob finished his work from last week on gizmos (visual manipulators) and got them working in the editor. The gizmo basically replicates the functionality the artists are used to in many 3D art programs. Having this in the world editor will make it WAAAAYYY faster to place, rotate, and scale assets by hand in the world!

11. Art – Weapons: We created several new weapons this week.  We’ll add these weapons into the game later, when we finalize the crafting model for weapons and armor.

12. Art – Armor: We created a couple of new helmets. Just like with the swords, the final work will be altered depending upon the crafting model.

13. Art – Draugr Mages: Over the past couple of weeks, we showed off several Draugr mage NPC concepts. This week we narrowed that down to four concepts we like. These will be on hold until we get to NPC modeling for the world of CU.

That “sticky” characters issue was actually pretty hilarious in some of the internal testing we did. You would see a few NPCs clumped up, like they’d been tethered together, basically trying to bounce around off each other. Getting that fixed will be a big improvement.

For art this week, we have some render of the weapons we worked on:

These are both Viking weapons. My favorite is definitely this big ole hammer! Next up, a couple of helmets. The first is an Arthurian helm.

This following one is a Viking medium version. Our art style for the Vikings clearly has a bone theme going!

As mentioned above in the top ten, we’ll update these and add them to the game when we get the crafting and tinting tech working. That’s so we’re not re-doing too much of the texturing work at that time. I can’t wait to get a whole pile of new weapons and armor in!

Another big thank you to our “Rich Creepy Uncle,” who sent us all this delicious food for lunch today! We are well taken care of. Thank you!

And that’s it for us this week, and your hard-working crew here at CSE is signing off, coast to coast.

We’ll CU Tuesday,

Bingo Bango (you had to see the livestream to get this).

– Tyler