Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
We've had a bit of a slow week as Madoc had some of his time taken up, but we have been making progress with updating weapon factories and combat mechanics for the new weapon system. As hinted at before we've introduced many new weapon classes with the intent that we can add more specialised motions for weapons, similarly to what we did for greatswords. This gets a bit more complicated however with different weapon combos and various grips for each weapon, so we're introducing more functionality to mix motion sets at runtime.
Something else we've been looking at is how to improve physics and AI performance to support new features and more active characters, and potentially general improvements to the physics depending on how much of an improvement we see. When we first implemented our physics engine we were targeting CPUs with very low core counts, but now the hardware landscape looks different. It's not always as simple as throwing more threads at the problem, as in some cases this has diminishing returns, but we think we've identified some strategies to gain some great benefits with little or no overhead. The main reason we're looking at this now is because of some planned improvements to path finding, some of the new content we're working on features more complex verticality, and this would also solve some existing problems.
We still had a few things to figure out with the weapon factories as the new systems get very complex and we had to strike a balance between versatility and ease of use when configuring thousands of weapon components and their interactions, but we have found nice solutions and updated the factory system accordingly now. Hopefully we can start rolling the changes out on the beta branch very soon.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
We've had a bit of a slow week as Madoc had some of his time taken up, but we have been making progress with updating weapon factories and combat mechanics for the new weapon system. As hinted at before we've introduced many new weapon classes with the intent that we can add more specialised motions for weapons, similarly to what we did for greatswords. This gets a bit more complicated however with different weapon combos and various grips for each weapon, so we're introducing more functionality to mix motion sets at runtime.
Something else we've been looking at is how to improve physics and AI performance to support new features and more active characters, and potentially general improvements to the physics depending on how much of an improvement we see. When we first implemented our physics engine we were targeting CPUs with very low core counts, but now the hardware landscape looks different. It's not always as simple as throwing more threads at the problem, as in some cases this has diminishing returns, but we think we've identified some strategies to gain some great benefits with little or no overhead. The main reason we're looking at this now is because of some planned improvements to path finding, some of the new content we're working on features more complex verticality, and this would also solve some existing problems.
We still had a few things to figure out with the weapon factories as the new systems get very complex and we had to strike a balance between versatility and ease of use when configuring thousands of weapon components and their interactions, but we have found nice solutions and updated the factory system accordingly now. Hopefully we can start rolling the changes out on the beta branch very soon.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
