Coffee Diary 31/7/23

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"