PROGRESS
Happy New Year! The Skymill team had a great holiday, and we’re looking forward to making this a big year for Kindred Fates! Since we last updated the Alpha, we've been hard at work on UI improvements, stability, and bug fixes:
With the addition of controller support for the Kinfolk management and Kinfolk ability pages, we’re nearing full controller support for all of our UI!
We’ve simplified our button rebinding UI to allow 1 column for keyboard/mouse rebinding, and 1 column for controller rebinding. The third column has been repurposed into a "Reset" button per key-binding instead of a being a third binding slot.
Button prompts on the ability bar and on the team viewer update as you change key-bindings for specific actions.
We’ve streamlined the Give/Take Item options so that the whole process takes place in the storage box UI instead of forcing the player to equip characters, close the storage box UI, and open the team/inventory UI to give them items.
We modified the "Known Abilities" UI window used for equipping abilities to now use a single click to select an ability, and a single click on a slot to equip that ability, instead of using click/drag. You can also reorganize equipped abilities by clicking an equipped ability and then clicking a different equipped slot to swap their positions. This window also has some new visual polish to make the process of equipping abilities feel more intuitive.
On the performance side, we’ve fixed a memory leak in our scene loading, which should potentially help reduce crashing on PCs with RAM of 16GB or less.
We upgraded to the latest version of Unity with Long Term Support, which gave the game about a 5-10% performance boost, better stability, and surprisingly cut down our build times to be almost 5x faster! This has already begun to speed up development.
We’ve added loading windows that show when two players are connecting.
Players should be able to connect to each other faster now! We added stability improvements and optimizations for how players join a multiplayer game. Instead of streaming roughly 10+ KB of data from the remote player to the host, we now only need to send about 900 bytes, a significant improvement.
Most of these improvements will make it into the next Alpha update (very soon!), while a few of them will be included in an update after that in the coming weeks.
Community
Our heartfelt thanks go out to all the Alpha players who’ve been posting to our bug reports channel on Discord! It’s such a huge help for preparing the game’s combat to go out to a wider audience as quickly as possible. We’ll include the full (long) list of bug fixes in our next Patch Notes.
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes.
Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
Editor: (aka Unity Editor) The program developers use to make changes to the game. Developers can test their work here before their changes are added to a build.
Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server.
Remote Client: (aka Remote Player) Any player whose data is being networked across the server to simulate a character's actions. In P2P multiplayer, this is the opposite of the host.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on January 24.
