While hordetesting continues and some fixes are still being allocated, work continues as normal on the main branch of game development. This month I have been focused on finishing some work in progress mechanics and cleaning up the codebase, refactoring some code and data to be more organized and allow the creation of new dinosaurs or future abilities to be far easier.

In that regard, Rex’s crush and throw abilities are pretty much done code wise and have been sent off to QA for the first round of bug finding. The same applies to Migration Patrols and Mass Migration before we move that to a future Hordetest.

Lastly, several core mechanics are getting their final touches. Pounce is receiving additional function to make it more interactive when latched onto targets, including the capability to dismount in all directions (no more being forced to jump off a ledge to your death). Bucking will also no longer be a random war of stamina attrition, and some animals will have the capability to retaliate against whatever is latched on to them. Some of you may have seen the screenshots for night vision, but there is also a visual update we are trying for scent to make it less UI based.

There is soon to be more, but that is all for now. See you!


A large part of the month was spent working on bug fixes and tracking down various crashes. We upgraded to a new version of Unreal Engine and it came with some changes under the hood, but in the end we were able to figure them out without missing out on too much sleep. One of the more annoying bugs I dealt with during the month was just a small jitter that sometimes happened when jumping into water. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but with this being a multiplayer game there’s an entire system in place to synchronize the player’s location between the server and the client, so that can be tricky to work with, but in the end at least I felt great about working it out.

I made some extensions to our ability system that will be used by some of our upcoming playables. It’s a convenient, reusable way to assign multiple actions on the same key and execute the appropriate one based on whether the key was tapped or held. I also worked on a new tool the team can use to more easily compare dinosaurs at different growths, giving us an overview of all dinosaurs in a conveniently comparable format. This should help a lot with balancing and adding new playables to an existing ecosystem and making sure they’re consistent with what’s already there.

I’m also working on some of the final tweaks for the diabloceratops. It’s not something we want to hold back the update for though, so we’re planning to add the dinosaur to the evrima branch in its relatively current state as it’s in a pretty solid spot right now. After we finalize the other changes we’re planning to add them as a smaller patch to help with some of the disconnect of diabloceratops and its intended gameplay.


We’ve missed a month haven’t we? Well I’m back here to show you what I’ve been doing in that time, starting with the finished enclosures that you’ve seen. This is the next step in large format buildings for human gameplay.

The enclosure kit is complete and semi-modular that can support various standard doorways and unique connections to other structures or interior settings like the GUTS.

Next up is an important gadget of the island's surveillance that’s been behind a few of our videos already: the Trail Camera! I’ve made two versions of this, one fully assembled and the other damaged/destroyed. I believe some of you may have found one that got stepped on by an allosaurus.

I was also tasked with creating our signature Dockyard Harbor Master. It featured some very unique parts of the models, which alongside our kit was really fun to make.

It will be featured in our Dockyard soon enough and is again the next step into our building features we want you to see. I was tasked in making its shell and interior layout of walls.

Next up which took a good chunk of my time is the DTA (Dockyard Transportation Area). This behemoth of a building stands tall at 90m of width and 58m of length, not counting its exterior pillars. It's one of the biggest buildings I’ve made, with partly custom parts for the exterior and the use of our kit for our floorplan.

Such a massive structure was intended to temporarily house various animals that would have been moved to or from an island.

And last and not least I’ve done a lot of minor changes to a whole selection of our modular kit, such as adding trims, new wall types, textures, and much more.

This alongside a great update I’ve made towards our small Dockyard Perimeter fences, which now have broken modular parts that allows anyone to build the fences in a far more organic way with full fence destruction.

Thanks everyone, that is it for these crazy two months. Cheers.


Tyrannosaurus’ audio is starting to come together a bit more this month. I’ve been working on more refinement to its calls, still more adjustments to make to get these really hitting right but they are moving in the right direction.
A lot more work has been done on finishing off sounds for the Tyrannosaurus suite, from its pains and attack cues, a general pass adding filler vocalizations, breaths/foley, and new sounds for its crush/throw abilities and new sounds for its death vocalization. There are also several surprise additions to the Tyrannosaurus vocal suite that you all will hear soon.

I have also had a look at the attenuations used for vocals with a fair few improvements. Call attenuations have been improved – specifically in how vocals sound at distance, increasing the amount of spatial processing that is applied and adjusting the filter curves to get closer to a natural sound which should help judging the distance of the source. I also fixed all vocal sounds having no sub frequencies, even in close proximity, even as the animal producing the vocal sound. Finally lesser vocal sounds such as idles, resting etc. are much tighter now, in addition to breaths and some foley sounds (e.g gore when eating a corpse) this should help with not only staying stealthy while hunting or being hunted but also reduce the immersion broken from the distance they were heard at.

I have designed a new set of sounds for the impact of Herrerasaurus’ pounce attack – an impactful landing to indicate the impact of a collision from height is combined with thick hide tearing and a gory squelch to compliment its claws digging into its prey. The landing animation was previously removed but will be reintroduced – this means in addition to the sound of the attack, the vocal sound as it claims its prey will come back into play. However this will not be making its way into the incoming patch.

Finally a large portion of this month has been focused on a whole heap of bug fixes that came with the engine update, the most notable of which being:

Changes to how sounds that happen very often (i.e footsteps, climbing etc.) are managed in memory.
Alterations to waterfall sounds setup reducing the voice count and how its attenuation behaves – (not on hordetesting)

Added sounds to some animations that had none – Galli nest manage, Troodon flung (knocked from latched pounce), Deino open body and Diablo running flip.

Cheers!


It’s been a good month for locomotion. I've been working at getting a bit more Maiasaura animations done, it can swim and graze now. But the main task at the moment is Triceratops’ sparring. Diabloceratops was just a test run, this is the big boy you just don’t mess with. Triceratops is always a tricky beast to do locomotion for as they have a very unusual gait, something between an Alligator and a Horse.

Since I made a pretty hefty post last month this one will be short and sweet. We’ve made improvements across the board in pretty much every department and are working on getting this next update out. In exchange for the brevity here’s some work in progress content. As always and with everything in the game, they are all subject to change.

This month I focused on finishing the grapple mechanic since it will be used as a basis for other upcoming dinosaurs with their own specific variations. Outside of regular bugs, the Hordetest allowed a more “natural” environment to begin balance testing for grapple. Right now it is getting to a very stable state that we can start expanding upon. The same can be said about Mutations; its main functionalities are in with bug fixes and balance values already tested. The only core mechanics still not available at this time are related to Elders, which is planned to be worked on next.

Spectator mode has received some much needed attention to help administrative users. “Physics Foliage Interaction” is finalized both in core functionality and performance wise. Players can enable the two forms in the in game settings. The system now can be expanded to have more foliage types applied to the system and more should be done in the near future as we investigate foliage destruction.

See you next devblog everyone!


Hey! I’ve been working on a few different things over the last month like bug fixing various issues from Hordetesting and QA reports. I also worked on some server performance issues and setting up some backend tools for our profiling pipeline, which should allow us to keep a closer eye on how things are progressing performance wise.

I finished up the additions to RCON and did some more work on an upcoming engine update. The majority of my month was taken up working on the new AI systems that I briefly went over in the last dev blog, which should make finding AI a lot easier along with some behavior and spawning improvements.


Many of you have probably already seen most of my work this month on the hordetest branch. I was focusing on improving the diabloceratops's sparring mechanic, particularly the interactions when two players are locked together or pushing each other. It can be tricky to get things like this working in multiplayer, but I feel like I got it working rather well now.

We had some changes to the ceratosaurus's chuffing mechanic on our internal branch, but we decided to bring them to hordetesting. The ceratosaurus will now receive the defensive buff regardless of whether it vocalizes or not, it will also not vocalize automatically at group members or when it's below subadult growth.

Another change I made was enabling certain diabloceratops and tenontosaurus attacks to knock down fruit from trees and also open coconuts on the ground. Other than these I've been focusing on bug fixes, like I usually do during the horde test phase. I hope you have been enjoying the latest addition to the roster. On a personal note, it wasn’t my favorite at first but I’ve grown quite fond of this animal over our time together.


This month my attention has been entirely focused on lots of small incremental changes to push the update to the finish line in terms of audio, with a focus on both Diablo finalization and last additions to Stego’s new power swing. These include but are not limited to:

• Juvenile versions of Stego’s power swing vocals
  
• Added new sounds for Stego preparing its power swing while raising its tail
  
• New horns sound for Diablo when re-engaging into locked stance.
  
• Improvements to arrangement of Diablo sparring vocals when locked
  
• Balance to diablo sparring sounds volume – horns vs vocals
  
• New juvenile Diablo danger call sounds
  
• Improvements to generic Diablo juvenile sounds such as sparring and resting
  
• New adult and juvenile Diablo threaten call sounds
  
• Sounds added to Omni grapple and Diablo Grappled animations
  
• Improved diablo impale sounds – separated pre whoosh and impact sounds to improve timing and play the whoosh sound even if the attack does not hit a target
  
• Minor adjustments to how far horn sounds travel and behavior of sounds at distance
  
• Changed weather sounds to be filtered when indoors instead of silenced
  
• Updated Diablo beg and consume sounds to match new animations

With all this out the way I’ve now returned to working on vocal sounds for the Tyrannosaurus, refining its calls, primary and alt attack sounds and working on new sounds for its pain vocalizations. As long as no other necessary changes come up for Diablo then Tyrannosaurus sounds will be my primary focus for the foreseeable future.


Lately I’ve been working on a mix of things. My more recent task list has been made up of helping bring to life some meta characters and supplementing some surveillance equipment you may have seen alongside some vehicles you most definitely have not. It’s been an interesting project working out what I’ll call ‘vehicular anatomy’ and trying to come up with designs that are familiar enough to look believable while also giving it a unique flare so that it would feel like it came out of the game’s setting. What I like to do is chimera together parts from different vehicles for ideas and play with the basic shapes and then tie all those components together with similar stylings to our architectural designs: such as angular, brutalist, themes and the addition of the bars and rails gave them a nice militant, guarded look for the world they need to function in. You’ll see some of it in Phase Three this week!


It’s been a light month for me as I’ve been out of office, but I’ve been making up for the time working on the Diabloceratops and a bit of Tyrannosaurus so we can get to working on it in-game. Diablo is pretty much done animation-wise, but with how complex it’s sparring mechanic is there is always something to improve on to really sell that bit of gameplay.

Just imagine he’s locked horns with another Diablo.


This month like so many others has been a bit of a blur for me since there’s so much going on. There’s more polish done on mutations, grapple, sparring and diabloceratops that should get into your hands soonish. There will still be tweaks and alterations to the mechanics as time goes on as they need to be fairly flexible so other animals can interact with them in meaningful ways. But overall they’ve been satisfactory barring bugs of course.

The animation department has really been cooking this month. We’ve got some QOL animation smoothing tech being worked on in the background that should help remove some of the jank present in some transitions between animations. That process will be ongoing as there will be audits to all of the animations in the game as a whole for each species so we can pull the overall quality of the game up. We’ve been knocking animations out for the tyrannosaurus, triceratops, maiasaura, pteranodon as well as the now revealed allosaurus. They are all coming along nicely, some being animation complete or nearly complete. The tyrannosaurus has been getting some of its sparring related animations at last as well as polish to its special abilities. The triceratops will be following suit once we do some diabloceratops vs tyrannosaurus testing. For technical reasons, the maiasaura is awaiting the release of diabloceratops before its features are implemented but it is pretty much animation complete barring any issue, so the maiasaura should move fairly swiftly.

The pteranodon’s backburner mechanics have been brought back into the light along with some new features that should bring some meaningful changes to it as a playable that we were not able to deliver upon its initial release. The Isle is animation intense due to the amount of life we strive to breathe into the animals. So creatures that occupy multiple habitats (terrestrial, aquatic/amphibious, arboreal, aerial and subterranean) increase animation complexity by a large margin. Which led to creatures like the pteranodon, deinosuchus and dryosaurus releasing without some of the core features we had planned for them. Not lost, not forgotten.

For the creature on everyone's lips, we know the allosaurus was a super popular playable in legacy and we want to make sure its introduction into EVRIMA keeps with that trend. While we’ve only just revealed it publicly, the allosaurus has been worked on in small parts for a long time. Prototyping varying styles of grapples, claw swipes and more. It's important for us to try to incorporate its claws, which are an evolutionary step up, into its playstyle in a way that feels and looks appropriate for the animal as opposed to something too generic. The allosaurus is likely going to maintain its jack of all trades status by being both an ambush predator as well as a large game hunter. Exploding from cover at speed for a short distance to overwhelm smaller prey before being gassed. But foregoing stealth tactics for a more upfront approach when dealing with larger targets. Whittling them down over longer engagements. All of this is subject to change of course since even our best laid plans don’t always work out. More will be revealed as its features start to take shape and solidify. Here are a few of those prototypes.