Coffee Diary 17/7/23

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"