Combat Arena
We’ve started on a variety of new modes that will be featured in the Combat Arena Beta. These include:
Versus AI: essentially the same as normal PvP matches, but with one side being replaced by AI players. Like the practice arena, except with rounds and a more formal versus setting. At this point it only supports one AI Kinfolk per round, but we plan to expand that out to a full team of four.
2v2: We’ve made a lot of headway on 2v2 combat for the Beta! The basic functions are working pretty well, though there are still some issues to iron out. For example, the fourth player currently is memory intensive and has connection issues.
After several several bug fixes, P2P is getting pretty far along. We have a lot of testing left, especially when it comes to large distances between players, but we're hoping this can make it into a public release for more rigorous testing in the near future.
As a part of this, we made some improvements to the matchmaker on the account system. It now supports P2P matchmaking and coordination (i.e., joining a friend’s practice arena), and is also faster in general -- especially when fewer players are online. In testing, we saw a roughly 50% or more reduction in queue times. Speed of loading into a match and speed of players connecting remain areas for future optimization.
As a reminder, P2P is something we feel must be used for the single player co-op experience, so while we're hopeful that we can also get it to the quality and responsiveness standards necessary for using it in the combat arenas, either way it will be very helpful to begin to test it for that single player use case.
We invested a lot of time this sprint into changing how combat animations end when a new attack is immediately started, so that the next attack animation can start before the animator returns to its idle state. In testing, we’ve found that this is really helpful to the flow of combat.
We have a few more bug fixes for you:
Fixed a Lumala rare idle that previously turned them into a wheelbarrow.
Fixed a bug where Kodoki and Salamurder ran about 30% faster when running diagonally.
Salamurder now uses their sprinting animation for movement when Fear Feed is active.
Fixed issues with Shield not taking damage from incoming attacks, some attacks erroneously showing two copies of their VFX, and small issues with Thunder Clap and Dive Bomb.
Single Player
NPC animations have received some more touch ups!
We’ve completed work on smoothing out NPC motion like we showcased last month. Not only does this affect their starting and stopping, it also affects any big changes in direction.
We added the ability for NPCs to use our headlook animator. No NPCs currently have this toggled, but we hope to add this feature in several situations to breathe more life into them.
We began work on breaking up the world’s navmesh into smaller pieces that can be loaded/unloaded as the player moves around the world. This will allow us to add several improvements to our navmesh:
Currently we must load the entire world in at once and bake the navmesh as one large graph. However, as the world grows in size, this becomes more cumbersome. Breaking the navmesh into pieces allows us to load small chunks of the world and bake the navmesh in pieces that are eventually stitched together. This also means that as we update terrain, we can rebake the navmesh for only the terrain that has changed, instead of rebaking a single navmesh for the entire world.
Only streaming a small chunk of the world’s navmesh as the player moves around, as opposed to loading the entire navmesh graph, also reduces the memory consumption of the graph. This possibly opens us up to the option of having multiple graphs loaded at once. This will come in handy as different NPCs of different sizes and types may need to traverse the world in different ways, utilizing navmesh graphs with different data.
We’re looking to add some new tools to our terrain kit to help with populating the world, and placing vegetation more quickly and effectively.
The swimming animations have been undergoing intensive testing, and we’ve found some… interesting quirks! Here’s an example (with commentary from Andrew)
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on June 17.
