Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
We're very nearly ready with the update, we should be able to put it on the beta branch tomorrow for a final quick round of testing, and we don't really expect any issues with it.
We've been making further improvements to our tools, particularly for character asset development. The layered slotless armour, procedural materials and extreme physique etc. morphing make creating character assets very complicated and problematic. We've been looking to improve this system for a long time, and when we introduced the tournament armours in the last update we created and used new tools which greatly simplify the process, solve many problems and improve quality. The new tools still lacked some features making them not yet suitable for everything, and there's room for further improvements, so we've been adding to these as we worked on some new items for this update. At this point we're pretty much done developing new assets like this for Exanima, so we will be slowly remastering older assets using these new tools instead.
We also finally added velvet to the repertoire of procedural materials for clothing and armour. This is a difficult material to do, which is why it took us this long to include it.
There's been a few more refinements and fixes and we think the game is in a really good place now as far as combat and arena goes. There will be some more additions and improvements there, but with this update released we will be focusing entirely on story mode for a while.
In other news, we've been hearing that AMD is finally addressing OpenGL performance issues in their drivers. If true this should mean that people with newer AMD GPUs at least should see a massive performance improvement for Exanima, and that we can stop wasting our time trying to work around the issues ourselves.
That's it for now, update on beta branch probably tomorrow, main branch and full release notes should follow immediately after.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
We're very nearly ready with the update, we should be able to put it on the beta branch tomorrow for a final quick round of testing, and we don't really expect any issues with it.
We've been making further improvements to our tools, particularly for character asset development. The layered slotless armour, procedural materials and extreme physique etc. morphing make creating character assets very complicated and problematic. We've been looking to improve this system for a long time, and when we introduced the tournament armours in the last update we created and used new tools which greatly simplify the process, solve many problems and improve quality. The new tools still lacked some features making them not yet suitable for everything, and there's room for further improvements, so we've been adding to these as we worked on some new items for this update. At this point we're pretty much done developing new assets like this for Exanima, so we will be slowly remastering older assets using these new tools instead.
We also finally added velvet to the repertoire of procedural materials for clothing and armour. This is a difficult material to do, which is why it took us this long to include it.
There's been a few more refinements and fixes and we think the game is in a really good place now as far as combat and arena goes. There will be some more additions and improvements there, but with this update released we will be focusing entirely on story mode for a while.
In other news, we've been hearing that AMD is finally addressing OpenGL performance issues in their drivers. If true this should mean that people with newer AMD GPUs at least should see a massive performance improvement for Exanima, and that we can stop wasting our time trying to work around the issues ourselves.
That's it for now, update on beta branch probably tomorrow, main branch and full release notes should follow immediately after.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
