So, it's definitely time for some news from us. I feel like I've repeated myself with this many times over so to summarise (please don't take this as any sort of a rant- I'm just outlining what's going on to try and better explain why everything is taking so long):

At this point, we're still not ready, but the rebuild is coming together now. We are still very much here, and working 7 days a week as we have been for several months now, and will continue to do so until the game is ready. All of our future plans are still on the table, and will be relatively easy to put into place once the framework is finished. All I can say now is that it's going well, and will take as long as it takes, and I personally guarantee that work will continue at this rate until the first true beta is out for you guys to explore. The first full release will be followed by intense change cycles- back to daily-or-so updates as we first provided (the reason we're unable to do this right now is that due to the amount of work involved, we have to finish the full rebuild before we can release the base version, but then we can get back to intense update cycles as we had initially, with constant improvements- only on a solid base this time around). Once we have all of the feedback in and polishes made, we'll move onto new features and begin the real Early Access cycle.

We've been hearing a few comments about us not understanding the resources required, and even points about us not knowing what we're doing based on an unfinished product, which I believe is down to the fact that we're yet to publish our first true build. At the same time, we appreciate this of course, because we can see that we still have a very interested community which wants to see the project completed! I'm still glad with our decision to go down the EA route so early, as it's allowed us to gather a lot of feedback with the initial builds and take these thoughts into consideration with the rebuild. The main time constraint right now is multiplayer, which I'm building in response to lots of requests for online gameplay, which is going extremely well. There is an enormous amount of work involved with every system due to security, because cheating has to be prevented for all features. In short, each system means that I have to consider offline gameplay, online gameplay (i.e. how things sync up, how people could try to exploit the system, and how things can be handled and compressed to cut down on bandwidth usage), and then of course we have to finish it off with all of the artwork.

To try and better explain this, take something as simple as picking fruit from a cactus. In singleplayer, it's pretty simple- add the fruit to the player's inventory, hide the fruit on the cactus model, and tell the framework to keep an eye on the cactus and regrow it's fruit over time. With multiplayer, it's a lot more complicated. If somebody wants to pick the fruit, they need to tell the server what they want to do, and simulate all of this locally with temporary data (Frontier's lag compensation system, so you don't notice any delay between asking the server and waiting for it to reply, which is included with every single networked system). The server then needs to check that the data they sent is valid, whether the cactus is ready for harvesting or not, and also that the player is close enough to be able to pick that fruit. If it's allowed, the server needs to reply to the player with their temporary data and the real data to replace it with, and also tell everybody else that the cactus was harvested. If any of the checks fail, then we know that the player was cheating, and the server then kicks them automatically. Likewise, when the cactus regrows, everybody needs to be notified that it's once again ready to be harvested, and they need to update their local knowledge of that cactus. This is all done with a heuristic LOD system, which basically means that updates are calculated based on time, and objects are only processed when players are nearby.

That's for something as simple as harvesting a plant- you can imagine how complicated things get when for systems such as framework security, identity verification, item syncing, etc. It will all be worth it in the end, allowing us to build a secure and efficient multiplayer environment to expand on.

Now, with all that out of the way, let's take a look at what's been going on!


The full 64km² terrain is now integrated, complete with ultra-HD rendering, PBR materials and a lightning-fast LOD system (in both single and multiplayer).

All games are randomised to add some variation. Plants, including grass, trees and cacti, and certain structures such as mines, are generated randomly at the beginning of every new game to allow us to stick with a high-quality base map while bringing exciting semi-procedural generation, to add some extra depth to each playthrough.


Karsten has built an awesome mine kit for us to use, which is now finished up and integrated. As touched on earlier, mine interiors are randomly generated at the beginning of every game, giving you different layouts to explore.

Mines contain respawning veins for ore collection.


The mining system also encompasses a full smelting setup, which will fully come into play when ingame economies (with imports and exports) are added. For now, ingots are very useful crafting resources, which are made by smelting ore in a furnace, fuelled with wood, coal or even charcoal.

The are currently 5 metal resource types in game; iron, copper, lead, silver and gold (though coal and sulphur can also be found in mines). Basic iron, copper and lead ingots can be made for crafting, but silver and gold can be smelted into bars of masses 50oz, 100oz, 200oz and 400oz. This is geared toward trade at a future date, to build the foundation of an economy- more on this later!


During a graphics overhaul, I added in a pretty unique feature- graphics profiles. The system allows you to easily customise exactly which graphics tech your game uses, which can seem a little technical in some areas, but is very straightforward to use. This includes the basics such as antialiasing, bloom and motion blur, all the way to ambient occlusion, chromatic aberration and advanced colour grading. Profiles are saved to a custom file format, making it easy to grab and share between machines. We may kick off Workshop support with these, to make stylised graphics profiles readily available to everyone.


Our brand new weather simulation and control system, dubbed HAARP, is now fully integrated. We've done away with rain and storms for the time being to keep a consistent dry, scorched theme, and I have instead put more time into the core. This is shown throughout the screenshots, but to note the hidden features, there is full mist, atmospheric scattering, a 30-phase HD lunar cycle, dynamic star simulation and it's all fully deterministic, allowing it to be synced in multiplayer by simply grabbing a few bytes of data when a player joins.

Next, I'll be finalising the major systems. We're still waiting on some animation work, but I'll get to work on completing the tree chopping and mining systems as soon as I have the files. This will complete all the basic gameplay features. From there, I have a lot of minor tweaks to make, before doing a deploy test for multiplayer, at which point we will do final testing and then release the rebuild.

A huge thank you goes out to everyone for sticking around with us. I never wanted to spend half the time we already have doing this, but it's unfortunately a necessary evil. Please stay positive, and don't lose hope- we are still here, 100%, and the next time you see a post about the game being dead, please remember that we're right here, in the background. We'll try to keep you all as up-to-date as possible via Twitter, but we don't always have enough new content to grab screenshots constantly since most of the new features are all in code. On the whole though, things are going very well, if slowly, and we're approaching wrapping the base up!

Time for some news!

We're making great strides now and are at a point where we can show off what's been going on. Lots of the main systems have been wrapped up and polished, and everything is starting to take shape!


First off, a huge tip of the hat goes to Karsten for his awesome work on the terrain design! We're bringing you an all-new 64km² gameworld to explore and make your own! Shown here is a tiny slice of the whole thing; the final details are still being wrapped up, after which we'll be adding an enormous river and populating everything with cacti, trees and plants for you to harvest.

The terrain layout is very specific- there are lots of passes and vantage points which are perfect for ambushing players on their way back from a mining trip, or getting revenge on your rivals. And with plenty of secluded spots up on the rocky plateaus, you can discover the perfect spot for your hideout!


The weapons systems are nearing completion. I've designed them in a way which will let us add new weapons with ease in the future; the basic animations are all motion capture clips, which are controlled through code while playing the game to reposition the player's hands and arms based on the weapon they're using.

The holstering system is fully procedural- you can carry a primary firearm on your back and a sidearm on your belt. You can easily swap active weapons through your inventory.


The building system has been rebuilt from the ground up to bring the best performance possible. Additional polish and features will be added as the project progresses.


Certain building blocks now allow for item storage. The backend is in place for locking container access to certain player- by default we are leaving containers open so anybody can open a container, but a server option will be put in place to either lock container access to the player who placed the container, and/or to allow the owner of the container to grant access to other players themselves.

I've commissioned a set of animations from a master mocap studio which has worked on high-profile AAA titles, which include swimming and crafting clips. These will be retargeted ingame to keep them aligned with the camera view.

I've finished a kick/ban system for all multiplayer servers. Servers are VAC-secured as standard to detect clientside cheats such as aimbots, while our own security systems actively monitor hacking (for systems such as the inventory, crafting, building, and so on), and kick cheaters from your servers. You can easily kick and/or ban players from an ingame menu.



And for the inevitable- the timeline. Trust me, nobody wants to get this update out to you guys more than I do, but Lacuna won't push it out until we're totally happy with the core systems. Everything is getting there now- we'll post further announcements when we have enough new visuals to show off!

While we're all working on new features, we have a quick preview of the upgraded animation system to share with everyone. It features all-new clips, blending techniques, IK (headlook, foot placement) and a robust combat system.

Next up is to finish the remaining multiplayer framework features, and then we'll get started on tools/weapons. The inventory and building systems have been upgraded.

Long time no see, huh?

Don't worry, we've been very busy. After missing out on the first investment, we decided to evaluate our setup and work out a way to get things rolling on our own. And I'm pleased to say that we've made a lot of changes to ensure that we can finish Frontier.

The animations were causing a lot of trouble, and we ended up in a dead end with the system we had planned. This has been rethought to make it easier to build, and while we still have to do this, we won't be running into the same issues.

From reading through the forums, it was clear that multiplayer is high on the list of what you guys want to see. Bearing this in mind, we pulled all of the art assets we wanted to keep, and scrapped every last line of code from the original project. Why? Rather than wasting time converting old systems to multiplayer early next year, and having to work out the bugs as we go, we decided to put down the project so far as one big test. We've learned a lot and won't be making the same mistakes twice.

This is what we've achieved since scrapping everything about 2 weeks ago:

• Can host a server on your own PC
• Can join a friend's server by IP address
• New custom save system (no more XML for save files); .sav files for players, .svr files for servers
• Total graphical overhaul; PBR for everything
• Chat system on servers
• All-new character creation system with dozens of extra options
• Inventory system working over network; rebuilt to use lists instead of a grid, with a carry weight feature based on your stamina
• New XP/stats system with classes in addition to the old ranks
• Character data syncs over network

Things are moving along nicely and while we still have a lot to do, the boring parts are out of the way and we have a good base ready to build on. There are a handful of things left to sort out with the framework but that will take a couple more days at most, after which we will begin on the new animation system and start to build the systems from there (mining, hunting, etc.). The animations are by far the most time-consuming area; coding the systems will take no time at all.

But for now, let's take a closer look at what's going on.


Our plans for multiplayer are to eventually allow you to rent a dedicated server which is online 24/7, but for now we are limiting the system to self-hosted games. This means that you need to be playing for your friends to join your server, but it's free. We hope that this is a relatively short-term setup, for now though it's simply not viable for us to do this with dedicated servers. Our goal is to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host servers, eventually.

As of now, I think our system is pretty neat. When someone joins your server, their PC talks with yours to find out info about the game. They first ask if they have a save file (when somebody saves their game the file is sent to the host and stored on their PC), and if they do then all their data is sent over and they can play. If not, they are sent to character creation. This prevents cheating by players, but the host is free to change save data, which is something we did on purpose. Save files are managed by your SteamID, which is unique, so there can be players with the same display names without any save conflicts.

Our code has been planned to keep bandwidth as low as possible so you don't need a great connection to play without any lag. The data which has to be synced will increase when we add in new systems, but we're confident that multiplayer performance will always be good, even on self-hosted servers.

The chat system is finished and lets players talk with each other at any time. It can easily be hidden or brought back up with keyboard shortcuts so it doesn't get in the way.

Other players can easily be identified by their "marker", which appears above nearby players. This shows their name, class, and rank. We haven't fully built the player class system but the idea is that players can unlock new class types as they progress. Each class has 3 levels (subject to change) which you can use to show off your achievements. For example, as you rack up hunting kills you will progress in the hunter branch and earn new designations. And if you have huge trading profits, you can unlock new trader classes to show on your marker. There is already a large variety of classes written into the system, but they won't be functional until we've built all the supporting systems so you can actually unlock them.


We've mentioned PBR a few times in the past, but for those of you who don't know what it's all about, here's a brief summary. In short, PBR (physically based rendering) uses a combination of textures to push graphics to the most realistic limits. We use real-world material data to make objects shine (literally, sometimes); it's all about lighting. Wood reflects light differently to leather, and this is all taken into account to create the most realistic effects possible. The colour and intensity of light sources affect surfaces, as shown below.

Shown above is the character creation scene at 4 different times of the day. As you can see, every object changes based on the lighting, just as they do in the real world. This even applies to the plants scattered across Frontier's landscape. Speaking of which, I worked on some new techniques to create hand-drawn plants for the game, which are very performance-friendly but look complex. We'll be building a library of trees, grasses, flowers and bushes to populate the new map with.


Character creation has undergone a major overhaul, with tons of new options added. This is all done with PBR, too. We've also brought in stubble for the face and head as new hair options, which weren't in the first system. Eye colour can now be changed along with skin colour, which were bugged previously.

I came up with some scary-looking abominations while testing:

Hair has been thought out in a new way to let it work properly with hats. Each type of hair now has two versions; full, and clipped, which is where the top half is sliced away so it all fits under your hat. The game works out if a player is wearing a hat and then displays the correct type of hair.


We can't show anything just yet but Karsten is hard at work on the new terrain. This will replace the map everyone is used to seeing so far. This is the first sketch of the design, which is mostly accurate though the coastline has been changed slightly.

There will be distant mountains visible in the background and certain exits which are blocked by rocks and other obstacles. When we add new map zones in the future, they will be connected to these exits and the obstacles removed, so you can walk from one zone to the other without us having to build everything in one go. We'll post more updates on the map with early screenshots as Karsten progresses over the coming weeks.

+++--------------------------------+++

We hate to keep everyone waiting, and we know that there's certainly been a lot of it, but we all agree that this is in everybody's best interests. Our reasoning is that through multiplayer there will be a whole new angle to the game, and player interaction will make the entire experience much more enjoyable. With multiplayer, we should be able to make enough sales to expand the team without the need for outside investment, and we can progress from there.


Soon™

It all depends on the animation more than anything, and if it goes especially smoothly we can maybe think about a release around Christmas time. This is not guaranteed in any way, and it will probably take us longer, but development has been stepped up significantly. Frontier is my full-time job, and Karsten and Dazalius are spending every possible minute to ensure that we can complete our plans.

We all want to say one more enormous thank you to those of you who have stuck around through the uncertainty over the past couple of months. We've heard some concerns, and rightly so, about the devs being quiet on the forums, and as a result I will resolve to check the forums daily to keep on top of your posts. Feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts on the new plans, or leave a message over on the forums!

Hi all,

So, some good/bad news today. Let's start with the bad news; unfortunately, we were unsuccessful with the initial investment, however we received excellent feedback from the team at Microsoft and they loved the idea, plus stated that they agree Frontier could fill a very large gap in the market. The only thing they were unhappy with was the sheer size of the project; they believe that we're being too ambitious, though that's what I like to hear!

On the upside, I have some further investment meetings lined up. It's unlikely that we'll receive any funding for at least a couple of months, likely a little while longer, but one rejection is far from the end of the road. Crowdfunding (not Kickstarter-esque, I mean crowdfunding in larger amounts from serial investors) is also a possibility if we are unsuccessful.

We will keep working on things while sourcing funding. As expected, it will take a while with just the three of us but as always, we are not giving up and would like to remind everyone that we will do our best to make this work.

A quick note on development- I managed to fix some major issues with the new player controller so we are certainly getting somewhere. We'll let you all know when we make more progress.

Hi guys,

I did not want to make this post until I had some more solid news, but given the recent forum posts I think it is important to tell you all this now.

Because of the small team size, I have been looking into funding options. Creative England run an excellent startup fund and after a formal application, I have been invited to pitch to themselves, Microsoft and a panel of investors in person. I didn't want to post this just yet, but it seems important at this stage to let everyone know what's going on.

If successful, Lacuna will be opening a local studio with an extra 6 full-time developers and one more part-time contractor, while the three of us will continue on the project. If these conditions are met, we will also be launching on Xbox One after the PC, Mac and Linux builds are in beta. With those levels of staff, we can aim for a multiplayer release in February 2017. The first week will be aimed at cleaning up the project and finally getting the non-PC bugs fixed, which will be easy with a full studio.

As of writing, nothing is finalised but I am feeling highly optimistic for the future. I just have to ask everyone to relax a little; I know things have been painfully slow lately but we are honestly doing everything we can to move things along. I will post an announcement as soon as I have news.

In the meantime, we have made a lot more progress. Clothing is now fully working in-game, and functions are in place to swap clothing with a single line of code (so once we add more outfits, they will take literally seconds to integrate). There is also a range of hairstyles and facial hair options for you to choose from!

Karsten has been finalising the mine construction kit and I love the new details! Once the player animations are upgraded we'll spend a couple of days on new resources so you can explore mines and learn locations for resources (if you need gold, go to mine A, etc.). We're excited to move this to multiplayer- you'll be able to capture and hold down a mine with your friends, export the resources and make a huge profit. Outlaw-style players (and NPCs) will attempt to rob your shipments, so make sure to send some guards!

As I said above, we can't promise anything just yet but I will have more info soon. We ask that everyone please remembers this- there has been a lot of worry on the forums lately, but we will not stop until Frontier is complete. This is a very personal project for us and remains out highest priority, and we hope that you all stick around with us to see Frontier grow!

Thanks as always,
-Josh

Things are starting to shape up nicely now! The default male outfit is ready to be added into the character customisation system and should be fully working with the animations this week. I think Karsten did a really nice job with the texture on this one!

He also finished stitching together the first version of the first mine, which will be available to explore in the next update. Instead of surface mining, you'll have to explore mineshafts to find ore veins if you need any metal. Rocks above the ground will still be useful for providing stone, but you won't find random golden nuggets so easily. Note that the mine still needs some hanging lanterns, barrels and loot before it's fully fleshed out.

When the first "beta" map arrives (planned for within 3 months), gold panning will give you another option for finding riches. In preparation for the next map, we've been making yet another round of adjustments to the terrain shader, trying to achieve a more realistic look.

There's also a neat little feature coming with 0.3.0- ultrares screenshots. We discovered SuperSampling, a technique which can dynamically change the game resolution. It's heavy on FPS so we're adding it along with screenshots- it will double the quality of images captured ingame! Here's a sample:

We are also pleased to announce that our original website is back online after some domain issues- you can now find us at http://lacunacorporation.com. We will be expanding the site over the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for reading! I'll post some screenshots once the clothing is fully integrated. We're excited to finally be making significant progress with 0.3.0! And as always, feel free to come and check in with us on the forums!

Hey guys,

Long time no see. We've been quiet the past month and there have been some concerns on the forums that the project is no longer on track and even a couple of questions that we may have given up on it.

Well, I just wanted to quickly clarify that Frontier is far from over and the reason that we've been quiet is simply that there's sadly not a ton of news to share just yet. A ton of progress has been made but the vast majority of it is backend, meaning that even though countless hours have gone into the next update so far, most of it is code so you can't actually see what's changed in the game. And that would be pretty boring to share!

I don't believe we ever actually told you about the team size, and in light of recent events now would be a good time to clear things up. BlazeMcNight has left the team, and it's important to note that he was our PR manager (which is also why the forums have been a lot less lively). As a result, because he wasn't a developer, the actual work rate has not decreased and the effective team size is the same. It simply didn't work out between us and we have gone our separate ways.

Now we are left with only myself, Dazalius and Karsten. Frontier was built by the three of us since the beginning, with the exception of a couple of freelancers who were with us for a short while when we started the project (though their work has since been replaced by our own). The amount of work we have is no small task even for a well-staffed studio, which is the main reason things have been slow lately.

So, what exactly has been done since last time? Well, while they're certainly nothing fancy, I went ahead and grabbed a couple of screenshots of the work-in-progress systems so you can see at least some of the progress.

First up, this is the default male outfit. It still needs texturing but I created the models for ingame tests in the meantime. The female outfit will be pretty similar and you won't be able to change clothes until a couple more updates into the future, when we add in multiple clothing items. Better than running away from bears with no clothes on though, right?

I'm currently working through the 1st/3rd person system, which is being extremely awkward. Because of current project constraints, I am the only person who is able to work on the player update so in short I'm doing a job for several developers on my own, which is why it's taking so long. Right now I'm working upwards of 14 hours a day to get it done ASAP but there's still a long way to go. Please just know that we haven't abandoned the project in any way- in all honestly, it's an enormous task and these things take time but it will be worth it in the end.

I'm still considering various options for making it work better but on the whole the base is pretty solid. Once I've finished this, I'll integrate Daz and Karsten's work into the main project and 0.3.0 will finally be ready. The bad news is that right now, I really can't say how long it's going to take me because I keep running into issues and having to adapt to them, but fingers crossed it will be as painless as possible.

Again, we haven't been active on the forums much lately but I'll do my best to answer your questions. We all want to personally thank everyone who has stuck with us through development. It sure is a shaky bridge but we will continue to do everything we can to get this out to you guys in good time.

Thanks again!

Hi everyone,

We've been a little quiet lately but we're making great progress. The inventory rebuild turned out to be a bigger task than we first expected, and is still being worked on. This has given me time to look into an old character avatar system available for our engine. It worked well so I extended it to work with our setup and character generation is now integrated. You can customise everything from your character's gender to forearm length. I also have it saving and loading characters with each save file, and the systems are in place to add clothing. There's still a lot to be done but I'm working on this every second I can, and it will make multiplayer possible once it's finished. We had to come up with a way to replace our first-person rig with a full 3D setup, and this is a very efficient solution. It will keep performance impact to a minimum when we extend everything to multiplayer.

This will be the next major update- the game is sort of in "surgery" right now and we have to close everything up before it's playable again.

Right now my biggest problem is an issue with applying animations to the loaded characters. Once it's fixed I need to create some basic clothes to act as placeholders for the time being. This will just be a single outfit in the beginning- more clothing models will be added in future updates.

Speaking of clothing, we've had some questions around armour and combat gear. Plans are to eventually add leather armours, and similar lightweight gear to help with damage reduction. These are far-off plans, but they're definitely a part of customisation we want to include.

I've also replaced the old camera control setup with a brand new controller. You can now CTRL-scroll to zoom in or out, and you will seamlessly jump between 3rd and 1st person mode if zooming in past a fixed value. It's possible to jump between modes without zooming by hitting 'V'. The camera is attached to your character's head, so your eye level always depends on the character size you choose.

Here's a quick preview:

I will be working on this all week, and hopefully the animation issue will be resolved by the weekend. I'll then be able to rebuild all of the old tool systems with the new 3D rig. It's a big job, but once it's finished we'll be ready to expand the game with all sorts of new systems.

Our environment artist has also been hard at work building a construction set for us. It's a kit of mine sections for building structures you can explore. One idea we have is to add in the ability to purchase mines, to create a realistic economy on servers. This would be beside other lucrative roles, so there are many different ways you could build a fortune.

Here are a few renders of his work:

He has also been trying out a few ideas for the first map update. We are aiming for an iconic Western setting with desert lands, plains and even rivers. He designed a "monument generator" which creates layered sandy landmarks which will be scattered across the landscape, and this will form the basis of the new environment. They are all unique- below is a preview of just one variant.

You can see more of his creations at:

https://sketchfab.com/playdagaimz

We are still at a junction with the Mac and Linux issues. We are doing our best to resolve them but it's very difficult for us to trace the cause of the problem. We have ensured that everything we do is suited for multiplatform use, and the rendering chain is configured to work with both DirectX and OpenGL- in other words, the most common causes of these sorts of problems simply aren't there. It is still a work in progress but we are determined to find out what is causing this issue and we will continue to look into fixes. We apologise again to everyone who has purchased the game for Mac and Linux and would like to remind you that we haven't stopped working on the problem.

That's about it for our first Devlog. We will post more of these inbetween updates so everyone can keep up to date on what we're doing. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to post in our Steam forums or leave a comment below and we will get back to you as soon as we can! We have a lot of upcoming plans and the team is excited to create the huge simulation we've pictured since the beginning!