Build 1510

Just to get it out of the way first; yes, all the grass has died. I know. I’ll get around to watering it later. The terrain itself is brand new, sourced from realworld data with only minor alterations, and is quite expansive. Ideally, the entire playable area will not be traversable within a single ingame day.

The ocean is also new, using the one of the Epic-provided water planes. It’s no longer solid, but there isn’t any physics alteration when you step in the water, either, so it’s just like walking on land. I’m going to hold off on implementing drowning until it’s possible to swim just to keep things fair.

Punching, both left- and right-handed, has been added. Because of the way that the animations are currently set up, punches will move the character forward, to take care when fighting near cliffs. Weapon sheathing and unsheathing has also been implemented; press R to toggle between the two. With the weapon sheathed, the thirdperson camera will orbit the player when the mouse is moved. When the player raises their fists, moving the mouse controls the character’s yaw, just as when in firstperson mode.

Internally, I’ve added and consolidated a few things. Firstly, there are now equippable items, or at least the framework for describing them. There’s only one in the world right now, and it looks like a bright white pizza-box looking that says “tunic” on it. You can pick it up, but you can’t currently equip it. I’d say that it’s just there for looks, but it doesn’t even really look all that good.

Speaking of picking things up, the inventory and all its related functionality has been moved into a component. There’s literally nothing different about it from the player’s perspective, but this means now that inventories can be added to any actor. A box can become a treasure chest, a table can have drawers, and I suppose it would be possible to add a small (in terms of volume) inventory to a cooked chicken so that you could sneak a dagger into a dinner hall or something like that.

The sky controller has been now been rolled into a single entity so that it can be just dragged and dropped into a map, lowering iteration times when I feel like experimenting with new terrain, and putting another paving stone on the road to fully-procedural map generation.

I haven’t decided what’s in store for next month, but it should be fun.

Changelog

added

• consolidated all atmosphere and sky functions into one SkyController which can be just dragged and dropped into any new map.
• an InventoryComponent to handle all inventory-related functions.
• a brush-based SpawnVolume with various debugging visualizations.
• equipment slots, an equippable item class, a clothing class, and a placeholder clothing item.
• punching for both primary and secondary attacks.
• death animations.

fixed

• looping death animation that was causing characters to try to enter ragdoll forever once they died.
• dead characters blocking the live player’s camera.

changed

• adjusted some checks to provide additional stability when starting from a blank map.
• significantly reduced the amount of time that the “fell out of world” message stays onscreen (from 3600 to 30 sec).
• lowered target pop to 50 to improve performance.
• switched to FXAA and lowered upped the character’s material’s roughness to remove the sparklyness that occurred as a result of the new AA.
• plugged prehistory sim all the way back in.
• the death animation played is now chosen by walking state.

Known Bugs

The ocean is no longer solid, but you still can’t swim in it.

The esc menu is reluctant to give and take focus, requiring the user to click once to focus it upon opening and click once again to defocus it after closing the menu.

Turning headbob off will cause the player’s head to move through the camera while running or sprinting, temporarily obstructing your view.

Running out of living people to spawn into upon death will cause you to freeze in place and will display a debug message onscreen. To “fix” this, open the console and type RestartLevel, then press enter.

During periods of high CPU use, ragdolls may occasionally fall through terrain. This can sometimes also occur if you rapidly toggle in and out of ragdoll mode while moving. (potentially resolved, needs further testing)

There is a very small chance that everyone alive may die before the player has a chance to start playing.

Starting and stopping movement in a diagonal direction is very slow.

Download

You can download 1510 as a self-extracting archive (411MB, 1.35GB decompressed) directly from icannotfly.net.

Mirrors: Bitcasa, Dropbox, Mega

If you find any bugs, please let me know.

Please Note

To start the game, extract the contents of the archive and run PlayGame-1080p.bat. You can edit this file if you’d like to change the resolution to better match your screen.