Exanima

Posted by Zetheros:

"Hey Exanimates,

We did a big patch for the insider test release this week, fixing up and improving some of the new force powers, a tonne of mostly minor issues and content fixes. Insiders seem to be really enjoying the update and getting some serious playtime and testing in, we have some reports still trickling in and that we've been fixing, including a few really old bugs that are finally getting some attention. Things are looking good and we're mostly polishing and doing basically QoL type stuff, but some of the things we are trying to improve on are on the difficult side and part of our constant effort to evolve things like AI and physics interactions.

One difficult problem we're looking into in particular is part of AI pathfinding within the new system. On the one hand we want AI to do things like drop off relative heights to reach an area below, to take precarious paths like a plank placed over a gap and to attempt to climb steep slopes, but often these same conditions lead to death or points of no return, as this is part of our level design. This quickly turns into very large scale problems that are difficult to solve without lots of computing power, and this is a real-time problem with a pathfinding system that is dynamic and works on raw level data without any precomputation or human intervention. It's an ambitious goal to accomplish all these things at once, but we are keen on this difficult combination of features and reluctant to compromise so we're doing our best to make it "just work".

Ultimately this sort of stuff is polishing and improving that Madoc will continue to do until the new area for this update is ready for release. The changes to the early levels were very extensive and complex with a lot of new and updated assets that needed testing and fixing, and because there's going to be a (story) save wipe we've been taking the opportunity to implement many general content fixes that may have caused issues with saves. This is all done now, so we can really focus on finishing up things for the new level. Hard to say exactly how long this will take, but hopefully we can start insider testing soon and put in some finishing touches in parallel to save time.

Basically we're working on many "little" things at once, so there's not a lot that's interesting to report, but the update is coming together very nicely and it's definitely our biggest and most transformative update yet.

Have a great week! -the BM team"

Posted by Zetheros:

"Hey Exanimates,

We released the insider test this weekend, which is going really well so far. We're working through some fixes and improvements to specific Force powers, but despite a lot of back-end changes the game seems solid and we haven't even felt the need to patch this release just yet. We'll try to work through all or most of the issues over the next few days.

This insider test includes many new and remastered items and the updated first two levels, the overall layout hasn't changed much, but there's a huge number of changes and new assets, which have been very well received by insiders. This rework has also given us an opportunity to test out some of the new level design elements we can introduce with the new features and improvements, and we can happily call it a success.

We hope to have everything we released so far in good shape within days, and then it's all hands on deck to get the new area ready for release. There's a few lower priority items we'll try to complete in the meantime, but in terms of functionality we're basically there. We already plan to follow the update up with a smaller one, so when we're happy with the state of the new content we should be ready to release.

Have a great week! -the BM team"

Posted by Zetheros:

"Hey Exanimates,

This week we've mostly been getting lots of things release ready for the next insider test. We've been going over the last iteration of the updated levels and the many new or updated items, making sure weapons are properly proportioned, held correctly by characters and have good procedural variants, that armour is configured and fits properly with other items etc. Drop tables need to be updated, randomisation parameters defined for the individual items you find in game an so on. We've also been writing new descriptions for these items, in many cases trying to make them more specific and detailed despite the procedural elements, which required some changes and additions to that system. We've also configured the Force tree for the new powers, finalised some UI graphics and so on.

Lots and lots of little things to do and sometimes fix that collectively add up to a lot of work, still a few to do but we're pretty close to a new release build being ready for insider testing and we hope to be done some time this week. This is a big one that functionally covers just about everything that will be in the major update and basically all the new content except the brand new area.

We did also make another addition to our authoring tools which is to make our procedural materials available for offline asset development. Especially with the recent additions and improvements, we have a lot of high quality procedural materials that are very configurable, and cover most challenging cases. We already had excellent tools and a good library of workflows, but with our procedural material system tightly integrated now, many complex objects become incredibly quick and simple to make, with great results that are also consistent with other assets. With how powerful our procedural material system has become this is something we're thinking of leaning into more and more, which has a lot of implications and applications.

Have a great week! -the BM team"

Posted by Zetheros:

"Hey Exanimates,

Last week we talked about how we got the new AI power tactics up and running, but we felt things still needed some overall improvement. A few things stood out in particular, but we've been testing and improving a bunch of things, both with the AI and the powers themselves. Some of this was just making AI generally a bit smarter in situations that we didn't see as often, but are not specific to ability use, but our goal was to make a some good challenging thaumaturge fights and it looks like we're there now. There's still a little to do on some non-combat powers, but this is relatively very simple stuff.

Moving on from AI, we've been working on another power from that third domain. We got this mostly working already, but we still want to make some improvements. This is the last power we felt was really needed to get this update feeling complete.

For now we'll be focusing on wrapping things up and adding some minor features tied to the new content. There's of course always more we can add and improve, but it's a matter of when we feel the new content is release ready and if that gives us any time to flesh out other features. We've done another pass on the updated early content, so in the meantime we should be just about ready for another big insider test that includes just about everything except the new area.

Have a great week! -the BM team"

Posted by Zetheros:

"Hey Exanimates,

This week we implemented the AI power and ability tactics system we discussed recently as well as general mechanics for AI using abilities in combat. This covers all sorts of situational use of different powers, different modes like sustained powers that need to start and end, or powers that need a charge up time that could be cancelled if it turns out to be a bad idea. It also works with several abilities and powers for the AI to choose from, balancing overall ability use with general combat.

The system makes it very easy for us to add more powers or abilities and describe how they should be used. There are some rare exceptions where some higher level strategy may be required, but even then what we have now will come into play. Honestly we're not, at least for the time being, looking at AI making optimal use of every single power in the game anyway.

We've also expanded our tools so we can easily assign abilities and powers to individual characters. We could have mostly used the existing thaumaturgy UI, but it doesn't really make sense to develop the in game UIs for domains the player can't use just yet, there's currently no way for creatures with innate abilities to be playable and it just makes more sense to have a more streamlined development UI.

We've been testing AI with a variety of powers and it all seems to be working quite well, though of course we'll get lots of feedback over time and will improve things and make adjustments. However, by introducing new mechanics to combat we're already noticing some general AI tactical shortcomings, like not capitalising on knockdowns properly, not using movement correctly for faster repositioning when appropriate etc. These things seem particularly important now, but they are general AI improvements that are not strictly tied to special abilities.

While this work continues it's giving the level design guys time to go over updated content that we've had a little time to review and test internally. We're also making some initial improvements to how characters negotiate stairs and obstacles and solving a few specific interaction and other issues with verticality and layering supported by the new engine features, which are being used in some of the new content.

Have a great week! -the BM team"

Posted by Zetheros:

"Hey Exanimates,

Last week we talked about lots of exciting stuff we're doing with thaumaturgy, if you missed it check it out, it provides lots of context and details of what's coming to Exanima. Right now we're very focused on working towards these goals, or at least as much as we can accomplish short term for this update.

We finalised two more powers, both of which are quite impressive and unique, one of which belongs to a domain other than Mind and Force. We did a lot of work on two core effects systems, making some big improvements in terms of graphics, physics and lighting. We're also making these into modular and configurable systems as these are things we'll be using quite extensively for more powers, abilities and other effects. Force now is quite complete. We have a good number of diverse powers, with most of the powers still to come being tied to future features like ranged combat.

Now we're focusing on teaching AI to use different powers and we're doing this by building a sort of shared tactics framework so that we don't need to develop all the logic again for every power the AI can use. The idea is to give AI a "quickbar" with slotted powers just like the player's, then they need to prioritise what to use and when as well as consider preserving resources etc. All the skills that affect these things also affect AI and it's all quite a lot more involved than just using random abilities every so often. Right now we're not really concerned with using a lot of powers, but we still want to develop the right system that we can improve on over time rather than something temporary.

Have a great week! -the BM team"

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