It has been a busy week for the team! The set piece team have been implementing assets for world events and creating new visual effects to make them eye catching! During this time, the wizards of coding have worked on bug fixing and making improvements to the gameplay UI. Meanwhile, the audio team has continued to work on rewarding sounds for Erendorn, whilst the environment team take the time to re-light the initial settlement. Finally, the animation team has been updating movement cycles and creating new movements for spellcasters. As always, join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn. Alternatively, join our Discord for all the latest! - now let’s get into it!
Set Piece Design
The team has been working on some interactable set pieces throughout the week, creating scenes that will be used within the world event system in Erendorn. Some of the set pieces the team completed are; a destroyed caravan, a combat shrine, the cursed brazier, a dwarf heirloom, a ranger's camp, armour and weapon vendors and a black market Ogre vendor. All these pieces will be implemeneted into the world of Erendorn for players to interact with as they adventure throughout the landscape. The team would also work on adding collision to these set pieces used the Nav Edit tool that was implemented by the programmers in previous weeks. Examples of the set pieces mentioned here can be seen below.
The team would also work on some visual effects for the set pieces through the latter part of the week. To ensure world events can be seen by adventurers, visual effects will be added to make them more eye-catching. These effects can also be edited within the engine to change the colour and frequency, allowing for many different events to span from one type of set piece. Working with a couple of the assets, the team has now added customisable visual effects to the dwarf heirloom, combat shrine and corrupted brazier. From the examples below we can now see how these events and objects will appear within the world of Erendorn.
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Programming
Client
The client-side team have been working to fix a Dungeon breaking movement bug and improve how the gameplay UI updates during Adventures. Additional work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Fixed a bug where Room Tiles weren't being assigned their RoomID and made use of the property in room unloading.
- Updated how Combat Finished Events are handled by Core Widgets, properly clearing and hiding the Turn Display.
- Core Widgets now update their 'Focused Combat' if an already selected Entity enters a new Combat and removes if the selected Entity leaves a Combat, automatically updating the Turn Display.
- Fixed Ability Tooltips text at the start of Adventures.
- Enabled audio in the new map.
- Added settlement music.
- Added zone 1 music.
- Added combat music.
- Added the ability to switch to and from combat music.
- Added StartTime to session data to ensure all player's music is synced.
- Fixed Audio Manager volume multipliers.
- Fixed Burst Message implementation to send very long commands in batches.
- Fixed several bugs in the audio manager.
- Integrated ultra-dynamic weather sounds with our audio manager.
- Attempted to align the combat grid, it should be aligned correctly in most situations now, more testing is required.
Server
The server team has been mostly busy on some tougher bugs to fix, many as a result of Events spawning or interreacting with non-event things like nearby enemies, the inventory manager, and some finer details for where Events choose to spawn. Additionally, some work was done on fixing parties to make sure all members of the party are given a new one when a party is disbanded. Finally, level 2 basic abilities have begun some work on creating them in the ability editor, ready to be given to an entity. More work from the server-side team can be seen below.
- Fixed incorrectly indexed AI types.
- Adjusted Dungeon Session Zone IDs.
- Fixed incorrectly placed Mutex lock around combat starting to fix a crash caused by concurrency.
Sound Design
With some extra primary resources under their belt, the sound design team has continued their work with the rewarding sounds of Erendorn. These effects created throughout the week will go into the large collection for rewarding sounds that will be utilised when players have completed a dungeon or quest. The team also worked on unique sounds that will be used when certain world events have concluded. Audio such as this will be of great use to the player, especially when sound is used to conclude a stressful event, such as the cemetery battle. While working on the many different sound effects that will be used throughout the world events, the team also created some more generic magic effects that will be used within other audio in the future. Examples of all the sound effects created throughout the week can be heard below.
Environment Art
The environment team have been working in the engine throughout the last week. Due to conflicts that have arisen while using the Lumen and DX12 plug-ins, the team have been working on re-lighting the initial settlement of Erendorn. The team has compensated for these issues by adding more lighting to the area during the night time. This will ensure that the initial area of Erendorn is nicely lit throughout the entire day through to night cycle. Using wall-mounted torches, the team has also added a rustic but cosy feel to the buildings. In doing so, as these torches may only be on during the evening, the team has added an extra dimension to the settlement giving it the appearance that it is both lived in and alive. The team will continue to work on the initial settlement lighting through the coming weeks.
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Animation
The animation team has continued to work on movement cycles for a range of Character Classes throughout the week. Small changes have been made to the Human and Dwarf idle that have been imported into the engine. The main bulk of the work would be focused on creating a new movement cycle that will be used for the spell casters within Erendorn. With a range of abilities that can be used by the characters of Erendorn, the team will need to fabricate multiple animations to fit them. The team started with a simple throwing animation, that portrays the user casting the ability from the palm of their hand. The team would apply this animation to a couple of different spellcasters, thus saving time when compared to creating a brand new one. The team will continue creating new animations for different abilities throughout the coming weeks. Examples of the first spell casting animation can be seen below.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of October yet?!
