In the past week, the Depths of Erendorn development teams have made substantial progress in various aspects of the game's development. The 3D modelling team has been meticulously refining character design, focusing on sculpting and detailing various elements such as adding intricate trim to the shoulders, belts, and wristguards, as well as enhancing the character's hood and face mask for added authenticity and visual appeal. Concurrently, the programming team has concentrated on integrating a Help Controller to enhance the player experience by providing gameplay concepts at key moments and improving tutorial guidance. They've also addressed technical issues and improved server performance. Meanwhile, the environment team has been devoted to enriching the woodwork in the Viking-inspired settlement, conducting research on wood carvings and exploring methodologies for efficient application in-game. Lastly, the animation team has continued their work in cleaning and optimising animations for smoother integration, addressing skin weight challenges, and researching cloth animation techniques for more realistic character movement. These collective efforts reflect the commitment of the Depths of Erendorn teams to enhancing various aspects of the game's development. 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!
3D Modelling
During the past week, the 3D modelling team at Depths of Erendorn has made significant progress in their character design endeavours. Their focus remained on sculpting and detailing various parts of the character, demonstrating their commitment to refining every aspect of the model. Notably, intricate trim was added to the shoulders, and details were meticulously incorporated into the belts and wristguards, enhancing both functionality and visual appeal. The team's attention then shifted to adding intricate details to the character's hood and face mask, further enriching the character's overall appearance. Examples of the work in progress armour can be seen below.
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Programming
Client
This week has been about integrating the Help Controller (responsible for tracking tutorial progress and prompts) with the Help Book and Help Sidebar Widgets to allow us to communicate gameplay concepts at key gameplay moments and prevent them showing unnecessarily for more familiar players. Additionally, this has entailed some implementing more ground functionality for linking the popups with their cues and with the main tutorial book. With some extra focus on populating the popups with all the relevant text and images for each cue. Additional work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Added Tutorial Progress data to DoE's Save Data to allow us to determine when it's relevant to provide gameplay help.
- Added a function for applying sets of help pages from different triggers.
- Added the ability to switch between help pages in the Help Sidebar.
- Updated layout for Help Book and Help Sidebar.
- Added Tutorial triggers at key gameplay moments to provide new players with relevant help with DoE's core mechanics. The Triggers include things like;
- The first time a player enters the Settlement.
- The first time a player sets out on an Adventure.
- The first time a player enters Combat.
- The first time a player enters a Dungeon.
- Added keybind saving for Inventory, Summary, Help and Stat Panel Toggle inputs.
- Fixed a missing texture issue affecting cliffs and certain objects in the Settlement.
Server
Last week was mostly bug fixing for the server team and a massive upgrade in server performance. Improvements were made to the networking code to bring a very large increase in performance especially as the number of players increases. A major bug was also discovered caused by disconnecting at a specific time was able to lock a session from being able to continue. Additionally, the Server team has just finished doing the last work required to implement Navdata! This comes with a lot of testing and bugfixing to do, but for now the code will run, and the servers will switch over to this new Navdata system after an important upcoming internal milestone. Other work completed by the server-side team can be seen below.
- Movement was improved to be a little more responsive.
- Connection dropped reasons were converted to constants for better maintenance.
- Added Connection dropping if a connection becomes unresponsive for a time.
- Connection timeout time reduced.
- Added buffer to network message sending.
- Added dev teleport command.
Environment Art
Throughout the week, the environment team at Depths of Erendorn has been dedicated to enhancing the intricate details of woodwork within their Viking-inspired settlement. They embarked on a thorough research and reference gathering phase, delving into Celtic and Viking wood carvings to inform their approach. The team explored various methodologies and techniques to apply these intricate details to in-game assets efficiently. Once a suitable method was determined, they put it into practice by creating test assets and initiating the development of a trim sheet in Substance Designer, marking the ongoing progress in this endeavour. Examples of the work completed by the team throughout the week can be seen below.
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Animation
During the past week, the animation team at Depths of Erendorn made significant progress in various aspects of their work. They continued the process of cleaning and optimising animations for smoother integration into the game engine, with a focus on the Human female and Dwarf characters. Additionally, they tackled skin weight issues to improve character deformation, a challenging task that contributes to lifelike movements. The team also delved into cloth animation techniques, aiming to achieve more realistic character movement and conducted research in this area. Examples of the work completed throughout the week can be seen below.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of August yet?!
