Madoc
Project Lead
HEADING FOR COMPLETION
In the past months we've been trying to break free of the endless cycle of improving core features and instead focus on adding what's needed to finish the game. This includes quite a few things, but the really crucial ones are terrain, dialogue and thaumaturgy. Those are what we need to continue and complete the story.
Adding terrain was a late decision. We had an incomplete terrain system, and we thought to get it to a state where we could use it for some outdoor arenas. Since then everything's been hugely improved and optimised to support larger and more complex maps, many more dynamic lights and objects, more detailed and realistic graphics and physics, and many other features and improvements.
Our terrain wasn't just incomplete, it was fundamentally outdated, it could never support all the things we've come to rely on. We could have maybe worked around these limitations, but it would have been a waste of time. We had to completely redesign and redevelop it.
Knowing we had to go back to the drawing board, making an improved and complete terrain system that could also support all these advances, we thought we should take it a step further. Rather than build our engine around two types of environments, we could try to adapt everything to work in the same way, make a unified system that could seamlessly integrate terrain and modular environments.
It would take a lot of work, not only to develop the terrain system, but also to abandon the comfortable constrains of highly segmented and flat environments. The payoff was clearly huge though, it opened up many exciting possibilities for future level design and visual variety.
After much head scratching, prototyping, developing and refining we finally succeeded. We have a fully functional integrated terrain system with all the bells and whistles. We have our first outdoor arenas, we're preparing to release new story content with it and we will also be adding it to existing content.
WHAT'S NEW IN 0.6.5.2
Version 0.6.5.2 features the new terrain system in the form of arena matches that take place outdoors, with variable time of day and weather conditions. Many new items have been added, some important new features and a host of critical or required changes.
There's more content and additions that are very nearly ready, but this much has made it through testing and seems stable enough for you to get your hands on it. We'll be releasing some more updates shortly.
While we've tried to avoid spending time on improving things, a few improvements snuck their way in as we worked. There's some notable upgrades to combat physics and animation, and in adapting things to bright sunlit settings we've made some nice enhancements to lighting.
Changelog for 0.6.5.2:
- Terrain based outdoor arenas
- Time of day and weather system
- Many new items, including:
- Brigandines
- New shields, including kite shields
- Many new footwear items
- Jackets
- Complete in game manual
- Improved combat, animation and physics
- Local reflections
- Lighting improvements
- New arena music
- Improved interactivity for many common objects
- Improvements to pugilism impact mechanics
- Alternative characters require unlocking (one unlockable now)
- Introduced inventory and container space mechanics
- New portable containers
- Smart randomisation of match locations and music
- Added shopkeeper to arena
- Added encumbrance gage to management screen
- Added restart prompt to practice arena after death
- Improved in game menus
- Many sound improvements
- Various updated graphical assets
- Functional and visual tweaks to equipment
- Numerous other improvements and fixes
Head over to the account page to download the new version of Exanima.
Best,
Bare Mettle
