WoA_0129
Movement back working on the player with new refactored controller.  Bow aiming & reloading is now working!  Inventory is still just going to return 0 for the ammo but will let you fire anyways.  Timing of some of the swing anims are also delayed or off by a tad--needs to be ripped out and cleaned up so they aren't over-resetting themselves.  Threads need to be slowed down.

WoA_0128
Testing build for 5.1, many features busted and unstable--determined to be a not good prodction build so still in 4.27 for the forseeable future. 

WoA_0127
Swimming reworking, ripped out many buggy features to uncomplicate the codebase--swimming being one of them.  Refactored movement logic for horses, wagons and ships.

WoA_0126

Save game thumbnails now load only on second game launch.  First time, they're white still so small improvement.  Swimming is absolutely terrible.  Arena combat is broken, but the quest guys do walk to the campfire now. X-DMake sure to get player's vector working for AI's backstep, and get Player's jump anim fixed. 

WoA_0125
Testing out the new save game thumbnail revealed an issue with the instance's ability to load from an empty folder.  Thumbnails come back white on screen. Arena combat broken. Villages are also broken from waiting for player pawn to spawn, they don't continue to look and just go dormant.  Menu buttons and ui selections seem fixed now, though and its running pretty smoothly. 
 
WoA_0124
Ranged combat curve aiming added to AI, tested at 1000~5000cm distances against stationary targets.  Projectile codebase updated with AI Damage output.  Ranged loop functional, needs target death callback event from impact and Ranged Footstep patterns.  New Camel and Elephant rigs updated and first anims added for their craft classes.  Game start zone pass to add shipwreck and other environmental elements.  Wait to fall broken on world load.

WoA_0123
Main Menu updated to show more save data on the generated character at the campfire.  Ocean shader now updated with much better looking roughness and spec glints.  AI Pathing branches for steering vs node following finished.  More AI combat functions added and various new environmental zones added to the world.  Worldmap broken again.  AI Ranged aiming way off.

WoA_0122

Ocean optimization and shader updates, unnecessary multipliers and etc to give back a few more instructions.  Arena combat AI branch added to the codebase.

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WoA_0121

Actor Timer for optimizing the tick rates of villages, fauna, exposure, citizen senses and citizen combat setup.  This is implemented and essentially breaks every threadable into checks for level, to eliminate villages for the arena, and to give each their own ability to wait to be loaded using existing timers.  Villages can now be on a 30s check, citizens on a 1s, exposure on 15s, etc all within one actual timer.  This build broke stuff for the better.

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WoA_0120

New infrastructure intermediate build.​

WoA_0119

Full Rebuild in 4.27.2 with updated Threads for Fauna, Exposure, AI Distances, Villages and Cities--which are running well on lower end devices!  Shelving all UE5 dev time to instead start migrating all AI functions back into cpp.  Brute Forcing the AI's senses has hit a wall when trying to trace collisions and distances for +60 NPCs so more creative means of handling combat and pathing commands is needed.

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​WoA_0118

Intermediate build to check UE4.27 against UE5.0.2.  UE5 is reporting higher memory usage on load for unknown reasons, further solidifying Almerra's place in 4.27.  Doesn't run at all on a Surface Pro 4 when using UE5.

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WoA_0117

New builds are underway in UE5 now, but packaging results look pretty bad so far.  Causing crashing on all lower end devices so 4.27.2 will be Almerra's home branch for some time.  Economy scripts, fauna and citizen tick are now causing too much drag on the game thread so it's time to switch gears back into optimization.  More code changes to follow for AI and world map.

WoA_0116
Happily returning to AI development, they are now getting better at their battle pacing!  A curve based on the min/max of their targeted distance, they switch between a few offsets using a select node on their weapon stance.  Has some stutter and will need to be honed more, but its a good first step in making their battle mechanics more engaing.

WoA_0115
Apparently the victory editor plugin was in the wrong location for sometime after a engine reuild.  Most of the time it was not an issue but flickering was bad, and now its finally fixed for the current 4.27.2 build.  Repackaging is now successful.

WoA_0114
Editor rebuilt with fixed engine plugins.  Few other minor tweaks.  More inc soon.

WoA_0113

Screwed up something in the editor plugin for tools and now the sky flickers across some unknown LUT and its horible.  Going back into diagnostics.

WoA_0112
First build with 4.27.1 and it passed review!  We're now going to be able to start developing more rigorous testing with new editor tools, test out volumetrics, scale animations, and much more fun stuff.  Main menu clocked in 1 whole FPS faster and we'll have more builds available for the latest combat AI and environment updates.  (25,085/641 24.8 GB)

WoA_0111
This is a final 4.24.3 update build before the new engine push to 4.27.1.  Some menu UI animations need cleaning up but it will increase the base FPS for the game by a few ms.  Other nice to haves to follow if the update passes review.

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WoA_0110
Intermediate Build.
 

WoA_0109

This build cleaned up some more AI mechanics with followers' targetted location.  Followers can now trail behind the player and will even climb into a watercraft if the player is piloting or otherwise possessing it.  Will probably be added to any craft the player is standing on for easy movement update mechanics to the AI.  The Open Test (Tutorial) level has now been setup as a free-for-all gladiator pit to test out combat mechanics for AI and the player all at once.  Many things are improved within multiple system at once this way and we're slowly improving the responsiveness for new movements and swings, etc.  Still a long ways to go on combat AI mechanics.

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WoA_0108

AI swapping from waypoint targets to live citizen targets got a reroute to reset themselves properly.  Also the Main menu finally got some much needed cleanup of UI animations and resets for the character builder.  Overall a minor build to reset the binaries.

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WoA_0107

Removing ammo_tooth_arrow enum from world objects list because outdated bugs.

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WoA_0106
Small update added the Return button to the game menu to help address the bug when clicking into World-Map.  The open-world also got some more environment art updates to the Native starter town of Narses.  Also, as a result of the previous few build's Anim and AI optimizations the town now has 50 more pedestrian inhabitants, bringing the grand total to 85 citizens!  This is a huge milestone as our towns were dreadfully empty and previous attempts were halted with the AnimBP overhead.  We honestly don't know how the combat will perform with this many units aside from being very noisy, so a lot more stability testing will be done in the coming weeks to hone in on some realistic numbers. (24,285/520 25.4 GB)

WoA_0105

AI got some more updates this round, particularly with their movement.  The projected spot to attack from during combat is getting more evolved now--we must continue to add more randomness to their attack behaviors.  Not randomness of location per-say, but more in their attitude.  Currently we have a very spread out attack setup that works pretty well, but the constant moving back & forth is janky.  This works very well when chasing the player (although they still need more pathing redundancy for when they are stuck in place trying to chase), however when AI are attacking each other they need to behave more like a group.  Shield walls are currently not possible, nor are any other kinds of AI combat tactics.  If we can figure out how to segment and humanify the Direct pathing so only moving forward when needing to it would help get us there.

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WoA_0104
AnimBP fixes!  We removed a LARGE amount of overhead on the AI!  Like, a ridiculous amount around 15ms.  Meaning we're back around 35fps at full 4k in-village.  It seems the AnimBP really doesn't like LODs and will break when going up the chain, and only working going down the chain.  We've removed a ton of excess layering for crouch, wading, grabbing items, etc.  Basically we just avoid Event Update like the plague and remove/replace any blending whatsoever.  Pretty much get it down to just bools.  This has enabled a ton of new development in the open-world and keeps the whole project on pace for getting towns moving and filled with life!  One for the ages.

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WoA_0103

More AI headaches, but at least now they can return to proper idle after killing all the spotted enemies.  For some reason the AI's all have a hard time changing from a dead target to another one still alive.  They do properly filter out dead bodies in their sense mechanics, but Targetted Villager doesnt seem to update Target Actor as often as it would need.  Still occurs, but only after a few seconds.  

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WoA_0102
This build focused mainly on AI, specifically on pathing and combat.  Combat and Idle states have been an enormous headache but they are back on track!  Instead of just running straight at their nearest enemy, now they each also calculate a 'step-away' vector when too close to their friends and that adds to their final goal's location.  Basically this helps prevent clustering and makes them spread out around their target.  This also helps prevent friendly fire, which also got a new branch in the code.  Collision detection is still kinda wonky, as are the spear stabbing animations.  Look At Target is also still kinda wonky.

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WoA_0101
Quite a large edit for the open-world map got into this one.  The outer-most cells of the map now are properly sculpted to give way to the depths of the oceans beyond the map.  Before there were a lot of trash areas and now they are cleaned up so we can add some form of corral code to the player.  Time compression and click-to-move wont be able to go that far off, but if a player wanted to just leave the map they would end up floating without an ocean too far from origin.  More world-map updates for the texture and some cleanup on the components.  

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WoA_0100

Our first 100 Builds!  Time to order more coffee.  Just some content updates to open world and animation tweaking.  We still have a large overhead in the AnimBP that is preventing us from gaining any more steam on the optimization front.  More things need to be saved back onto the pawn instead of being triggered in Anim (that's a big big no-no).

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WoA_0099

Our first and only build with recently updated Unreal Engine 4.26.1.  The necessary engine updates were quite a pain on this one, relating to the event driven loader.  Some of our old spawning code was really creating headaches and crashing the editor or just not even launching properly.  Finally we get it working in the new engine, and poof goes our performance.  Many other metrics are needed to fully flesh out what needs more optimization in this engine, but for now--4.24 gives us no quarrels so 4.26 is going to stay in a parallel branch to gather dust on the shelf while we create more meaningful content.

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WoA_0098

4.24 Event Driven loader and Async loading threads enabled.  This was previously a huge headache back in earlier engine versions, so now the landscapes and levels do stream in properly without crashing the editor.

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WoA_0097

Broken build.  EDL testing.

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WoA_0096

Broken build.  EDL testing.

 

WoA_0095

Intermediate Build

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WoA_0094

First build of 2021!  This build exposed some enormous flaws with AI pathing, resulting in constant rotations along their nav path.  Doesn't look like the rotation side was properly resetting after initiating a steer to bearing.  Fixing for a new build soon.  Rotation aside, AI goes a little too dormant (behavior tree turning off) after acheiving it's final goal so we'll need some way to restart them and/or prevent that from occuring.

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WoA_0093

This incremental build was a necessary look back into trying to make the game more approachable from a player's stand point.  The in-game menu was pretty atrocious before and unwieldy as well.  Just felt too clunky and basic, so we're taking on a different design philosophy for the UI.  The inventory and character menus are now left & right side panels which house just the necessities, while the rest of the relevant data is displayed on a selfie camera of your character.  A somewhat minimalist view but with live linked data directly on the area is exists in.  There is also a live skeleton/damage displayed ontop your character which will be used to overlay broken bones and other wounds from the health and combat systems.  Many aspects of the worldmap in this build also received an update which joined it into the global menu in its proper place.  Worldmap itself still needs some update tweaking as map actors only update on initial open instead of as you scroll, so the zone you're looking at gets locked in constantly.  Amazing last build for 2020 and the towns are starting to come alive with some pretty great performance.  Many more AI works in the mix to keep them calmed down and simple, with specific jobs & spots, day & nighttime activities and holidays.  Just in time for the real ones.  Cheers.
 

WoA_0092

Added a new class extending AIController for the citizens' current controller to now inherit from which has given AI it's much needed ability to expose path nodes to the behavior trees.  This build is mostly an editor proof-of-concept that enables AI development to fully switch gears from direct pathing to locomotion & steering.  Doesn't sound like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid.  AI can now use the exact same logic to go to bed, walk to a resource spot, run away in fear, and even join a formation of other AI.  It's a hugely impactful feature for combat AI to be able to steer towards the player or other target at will every frame.  This prevent the old school game issue (as if Skyrim is that old) of simply orbiting enemies to easily kill them beyond their rotation.  At the moment, we just have the nodes exposed to them and some other actors can make them draw--AI are heading for a massive overhaul to enable their continued, and MUCH needed evolution. (10,667/433 56.6GB)

WoA_0091
Much needed rework of the AI system to function again.  Their pathing is accurate again, but still have problems with maintaining a course so their underlying sense systems are screwing with them now.  Le Sigh.  Most Discouraging so this build did get some improvements, especially the menu functions on the backend.  We are, however, going to redo the art of the Game Book Scroll Menu thing and make it more modern with the top bar & stuff.  It's just extremely wierd and messy to use and I hate it.  Honestly our interaction inventory is way better since it doesnt cover the screen.  Plus you always wanna see the item once you drop it.  The wait menu will also get integrated with the scroll menu thing once we've reworked it.  BUT keep in mind that the scroll & worldmap menus must be able to overlap.  In other news, many new developer tools are being added!  First pass at a storyline character creator is up, save editor is working well, and a new way of updating the worldmap--now I'm free to resculpt and decorate any environments and the textures almost auto-update (and the 'almost' is only crucial for performance).  Citizen and player animation layering also got a huge overhaul for performance and elegance with 3 linked but independent branches for legs/torso/head so they are ubiquitous across combat/moving/attacking/talking/literally everything.  This allows for lots of controls but also lots oftechnical performance thru limiting certain features when theyre no longer necessary, and eliminiating overhead  Frame rate is loving it's existence right now.  Gotta keep building!

WoA_0090
Bug smashing like starship troopers was where this latest build excelled.  Fixed a number of issues with the lights and added a new customized distance glare that is dithered and very optimized.  Villages are now refixed and got some slight overhauls with their initial settings to make room for some AI feeds.  It used to be that the citizens would all find their own waypoints when spawned, but that proved to be too much of a frame killer so now they simply read them from the village.  Villages themselves can now keep track of local points and I'm sure at some point will also read types of activities, etc so their undercurrents can be more utilized elsewhere.  AI at the moment, however, are basically broken again.  They all walk towards the same waypoints so it seems their behavior trees are screwed up somewhere.

WoA_0089

Lighting! Lighting, Lighting, Lighting!!!  Currently the only frame rate killer are the number overlapping lights within the starting area in Marteen Village.  Also villages fail to turn on because of init check for controller loc instead of player.  Derp.  More of a maintenance build tho, and many other features have been corrected within Inventory, swimming controls, map menu, and citizen interactions.  Visual aspects have also been improved with the ocean, clouds, dynamic beach waves and boats--while about 60% of the world landscapes have been compiled for grass and shader generation.  Overall, mostly a tock but a good milestone nonetheless.  (10,467/430 55.4GB)

WoA_0088

Main Menu got a few fixes but still has some issues.  Tutorial world OpenTest now working, after the terrible load screen.  Nothing to do in there and the guy is stuck, so nav mesh.  First load of World48 still has the WaitToTrace bug and throws you thru the landscape.  After that, the lights in the world arent on so its ultra dark.  Love the fix to the amount of skylight though, it's much better.  Maybe add like 0.05 and check up the time of day that skylight gets added in the Timeline, etc.  Still DEFINITELY need to fix/develop a solution for weather indoors.  It's bad.  And a continuous trace to see if the player is indoors is out of the question.  So only an initial, and the requirement of triggers, etc.  No.  This is not the way.  Fix that render target.  Test, Repeat. 
 

Currently the Game thread outweighs the GPU thread!  Amazing!  The new AI setups for stances are an improvement!  Loops everywhere, damnit.  Combat memory is set to 30s, while the caution and search state on the last known location lasts 60s.  Their stand-in yells add some hilarity and needed personality to them as they goofily run around like idiots still.  Current amount of Anim blending is probably too heavy--knowing how I tend to intially build things--and will definitely be revisited later on as they have around 8ms.  Tick is the heaviest because of the AI Controllers so we'll need better ways to manage a number of features for each Citizen... Namely Avoidance detection, Climbing systems and Senses.  Can easily add some more invasive Tick Time modifiers to ease up a ton of stress without affecting their waypoint selections, really, but we're on the right track.  36ms can be much lower, then we can fill out more Pedestrians with event lower settings. Even smaller than 0087 in this one still. Wierd. (10,284/429 57.4GB)

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WoA_0087
After some time, the Main menu has gotten more and more buggy.  OpenTest map wasn't included in the build, and the Tutorial button doesn't work.  The faked panel version of the loading screen in the main menu is also out of date from the real loading screen--And both look bad Lol.  Redesign for FULLSCREEN all the UI elements are too damn big and unwieldy.  We are also still falling thru the landscape sometimes on load of World48 so my guess is the WaitToFall trace is triggering off the new physics volume for WorldActors.  On a more positive note, the new dithered particles are amazingly optimized--we're moving forward full steam ahead on rebuiding all particles thru the new material instance.  Also the removal of faked water caustics from landscape shaders in favor of the sunlight function was also a very positive move, and the faked bounce point lights are a nice touch we didn't even have before.  Good last build for 4.23.  Still unsure of why each build is having so different of sizes unless thats just the result of all the foliage optimization. (9538/443 63.4GB)
 

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WoA_0086

Nav Mesh fixed.  The main data actor needs the "Can Be Main" set, derp.  Pedestrian logic is still not properly reducing anything and resulted in 2 fps, so another Intermediate build.

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WoA_0085

New AI setup for pedestrians!  Pedestrian logic is now added to avoid having combat and idling logic aways firing, so this is a great step towards filling out the towns.  Something else currently broken with the Nav Mesh though, as they are all stuck except for the Jailor.  Another new addition is the first phase of the questing scene system, which is why the Jailor is the only one walking around.  More datasheets. More work.  But, it will allow for NPC conversations between AI or with the player once we have them properly filled out.

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WoA_0084

Broken 4.25 engine update package.  Ray-tracing build still too ill-performant and buggy to continue developing.  Eyeing the 4.24 engine for next update to avoid the HasAnyFlags-> AnimCompression errors.

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WoA_0083

Foliage cleanup and landscape update.  New procedural foliage setups are in and should now have some auto-gen stuff. Catalina climate has some desert sage brush with proper LODs for 750m distances which is great.  Some other sculpting done to Rhougan Island between Marteen and the mountains as well as some cleanup on the shores.  No more oddly long dock.  AI still needs a ton of work as it's currently broken.

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WoA_0082
Intermediate build.

WoA_0081
New Engine Build! Yet another engine update for improved stability, landscape tools, blueprint performance and various organizational and planning improvements.  At present, certain actors are missing their collision after world translation takes place in the open world.  Doors and containers have functioning collision, but no interaction stream returned--and establishments are missing some mesh geo collision.  The establishment itself is not the issue though, as the building meshes are very high-poly and is causing issues.  For the future we will have to split up our hero buildings so that various pieces can be culled individually for performance of the mesh on the gpu and the collisions on the cpu.

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WoA_0080

After rigorous review and storyline planning, the starting location has been changed.  Instead of the empty beach, now the game begins in the city of Marteen.  This city is almost done with layout and will be the first village to test the prison system and reputation modifier checks.  What is intended here now is for certain volumes of the city to temporary lower your reputation if you enter without permission (like bedrooms, storehouses, etc.).  This will enable the AI guards to make more intelligent decisions when targetting player, so they'll taunt instead of outright attack for small offenses.  Some landscape and building shader optimizations, and some AI updates.  More coming.

 

WoA_0077

New engine build!  First successful build and package of 4.21.2.  This also marks some significant updates to the shader pipeline as a god 80% of the used assets are all now properly instanced.  Surface 4 can now run the game around 30fps at 50% screen res.  Still have many shaders to finish setting up on the character models and equipment but since last package this is an overwhelming improvement.  We also now have some weather setups for open world things and many more functions are now shared for snow, caustics, rain and associated particle systems are ready for implementation into the climates.  AI has also gotten an overhaul, moving combat onto spawned collision volumes that are populated with every weapon change.  AI also has better pathing (slightly) attacking, and elders now have 'hide' firing correctly.  Many new updated engine builds are on the way.

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WoA_0076

The loading movies are causing some extreme hitches in certain cases so we will be moving into a pre-rendered cutscene method for these.  Inventory is still erroring out with the opening inventory slot selection somewhere, or the name isn't being found in the datatable as a bunch of 'None' items keep getting added and even equipped in some cases.  Landscape is also still loading some textures at full resolution which lags everything.  Many materials are still not instanced correctly which is also creating performance drag.  On the lowest tier testing platform, the Surface 4, world origin does not occur from the backlog of loading textures and stuff.  On a celebratory note, this marks the last build with 4.19 as the packaging issues with newer engines has been resolved.  

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WoA_0075

World48 Log spam is fixed, turned out to be a sound system bug for regions.  We also included the new prologue and video cinematic setup which works great!  Movies shouldn't be skippable anyways, but this does mean we can't use a player model unless we start the character with hooded inventory.  The first questline is starting off from the QuestComponent and is spawning the boat and 3 followers well, but they don't have any dialogue or Notes update in the scroll book menu.  More AI work.  Inventory still has log spam issues, which results in crashes.  More soon.  Happy New Year.

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WoA_0074

Okay so we finally got around to reviewing this build a bit and did some testing.  In order to move forward at all, we need to identify some serious bugs here so we can track and eliminate them.  First things first is main menu.  Load and Continue do not work properly.  Load seems to not do anything -- you click the button of the save its data appears and then Load button appears, fine.  But when you hit Load it does nothing.  The Continue button loads up the camera to show your guy and some data, and when you hit Load it simply re-loads the main menu.  Options and all that shit will come later.  For the Character Creator, we need to nail down the opening screens better.  Firstly, I don't think we need to ask the player to define their nation up-front.  I think we can completely skip all that.  No choosing Nations, no Attributes, No forward story.  Should just be Name, Features, Equipment and Confirm.  Cinematics are great.  World48 has some serious issues.  MANY bugs going on with no origin, clouds are logspamming, player has inventory but they are all None, and collisions dont work with player.NPCs and player.Watercraft and player.Landcraft.  I have no clue just fiddle with it.

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WoA_0073

Working inventory in-world!  Not only can you pickup and add/subtract etc from your inventory, but your character starts out with some inventory SAVED, and then pulls and repopulates the player on load so saving with our custom inventory system is finally functioning as intended.

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WoA_0072

So no upgrade to 4.22 since we can't get a build off of it just yet.  This build has some working beginning, ship is run ashore and tutorialman spawns with his follower there on the island with you.  No inventory yet.

WoA_0071

Another Intermediate build before the upgrade to 4.22.  Some errors were occuring with the CloudsWater Environment Actor in the new engine, so I've corrected the bugs within 4.19 in the meantime.  Still some build error occuring with plugins so for the meantime I'm delaying the engine upgrade.  Other bug fixes also in thie build is the world location spawning which is confirmed working.  This lays the foundation for respawning the player from savegame location across the open world--involving rebasing the world origin and tweaking bounds scale stuff to make sure the right cells are streamed in during runtime.

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WoA_0070

New Intro Cinematic, and it's getting a whole lot better! We have a much better idea on how this should start the game itself--and now it's much less daunting. Fauna also got a nice update, but the fish and stuff are still spawning a ridiculous amount. I think cell #4 is really all that is necessary to spawn area stuff now so we have some optimization to do. The Character builder also got a big upgrade, basic variables are set and a few of the controls are hooked up and functioning properly. We'll need to check that variables are being pulled from the CurrentSaveGame and not from Instance as we add more shapes. This will also probably be the last build within 4.19.2 as 4.22.3 is looking like the next Engine migration. More soon.

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WoA_0069

More new clothing! Added a new Brigandine, although its just a robe with a vest. Looks kinda neat tho. Many bug fixes pertaining to Citizens and Fauna. Godamn Barracuda are running rampant!

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WoA_0068

Containers now working! You can use the 'Take' button to add the transaction items into your inventory. We'll have to add a pane to the other side of the screen though to show your current stuff, otherwise you can never stash anything.

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WoA_0067

Some new additions to the open world added! Marteen and Belgos have a decent area setup with walls & buildings now, and about half of the Village Managers are functioning now. Their tick-to's aren't really going the right directions and speed is still not accounted for within their location checks, but at least they aren't horrible. More Container updates too, but nothing is really transferrable from Inventory to Container yet.

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WoA_0066

New Intro cinematic setup. Still don't like the general feel of the VO and shots but it's a step in the right direciton.

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WoA_0065

First build with some useful Blendshapes functioning in the Character builder. No Controls are hooked up. This does prove the pipline is functioning with updating morph targets on the master skeleton though. More on this later.

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WoA_0064

Good progress on a few items, first build of the new year and it starts off with some MUCH needed features.  Most notably, the Inventory system's clothing equipping is now fully working!  Book now animates open, and the inventory buttons & dropdown menus are all the correct layers now.  Looks great, works quickly -- just needs to have a completed filtering system and sorting headers then it's done.  Equip works as well, and you can drop the item after you equip it--eventually we'll complete the secondary array for what's equipped/not to serve as a mirror of the main inventory array. 

The PlayerHUD also got a complete overhaul!  We don't really need to see so much information, really just your health and breath.  However our damage system wouldn't give you an accurate update if it's just a number, so we duplicated the Book's player image with the red limbs to the main UI!  It's basically straight-up Arma's transparent gradient HUD just with our data points.  It stays well out of view being at the top right instead of bottom right, and we'll sit on it for a few builds.  Looks great tho.  Physics Ragdolls also got a stiffening overhaul and now they flex much more gracefully.  We also added the prep-swing animations to the fisticuffs stance, but no swings just yet.  Definitely more exciting things on the horizon.

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WoA_0063

This was a major milestone build.  EOY we finally have working clothing and inventory on the player.  Starts with sandals, a tunic and leggings plus some weapons but they arent equipable thru the UI just yet.  The load game menu is finally 100% working on the main menu, included with some UI animation adjustments.  Looks great.  The OpenTest world is so much godamn fun lol.  Running around hitting L firing arrows at NPCs is feeling REALLY nice, obviously needs work but it's gonna be so much fun.  Inventory on the dead guys also works, but also needs further scripting for actually taking the items you see on the UI.  Sound reworks were a great addition too.  The opening cinematics are getting overhauled back to montages with  soon so whatever with them.  Hell of a good progress build to end the year.  Cheers.

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WoA_0062

This was a good progress build.  Many AI issues have been fixed allowing them to properly randomize thru the proper waypoints.  There were also a number of issues with the implementation of the kick that are causing an animation hitch on npcs.  Their weapon just ends up floating in space probably to do with the activation of the damage system on their weapon.  Although at least they do start attacking you if you kick them, but this is fixed for next build hopefully.  On the brighter side, the new rainstorm is new added and I love it.  Fires off with a simple event call which is amazing, so that'll come in handy whenever we data up the climate csvs a bit more.  Rain particles still not attaching to player tho, so check that.

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WoA_0061

Intermediate build.

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WoA_0060
Okay so we still had some building LODs that weren't set causing a significant gpu slow-down, and we also removed cloth sims from the more basic clothing assets which helped performance greatly.  Without a way to really control how many cloths are on screen at any time we're leave that for capes and large stuff only which is fine.  There's also some issue with the ocean's performance and using scene depth with the displacement.  Will need some tweaking for more performance.  Opening cinematic also got some love, but I'm sure we'll be re-writing it soon anyways.  The boat at spawn is also useless until we finalize the unbeaching script, so it's moved down to the dock until further updates.  Still need to get that first quest working.

0

WoA_0059

Everything much smoother after adding some proper graphics options, running a solid 35 even on ultra shadows, many more optimizations to be done but I'm feeling good about the current tech's performance. Need clothing improvements, new story VO, master quest to begin once world48 is loaded and save game options within game worked over a bit. Also need to redo the post-character buildings UI screens theyre horridly oversized. Inventory screen needs more love too. Only shitting on this build this much because of how well it's doing :-D

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WoA_0058

Didn't like the audio so it's removed from the cinematic for now. Landscape missing from second sequence. World48 fails to load because of some world origin reference failing. Rebuilding.

 

WoA_0057

Building again with new audio added for opening cinematic. Second level sequence cinematic added.

 

WoA_0056

Remove the loading screen plugin and rebuild without. Movie for opening logo works now so the plugin is no longer needed.

 

WoA_0055
A lot more work put into the World Map and music backend and it has made everything a lot more enjoy able to debug.  Each type of background sound is properly set through another very large image to csv data table that spreads across the entire world in-game.  This kind of system was wierd to work out because of the way Unreal loads maps but it now has all the references to properly check for every state of the game and swap to the right music accordinly now.  Movement Speeds and Breath also got a ton of work done so now running at high speeds and sprinting drain breath, and walking or moving slowly enough drains it.  Jumping itself also drain and now a lot fewer things are ticking on the player pawn.  The colors of the ocean and horizon curves also got a nice tweaked setup that has separate curves for morning vs evening so it has much nicer colors as it accents the ocean.  Very happy with the latest progress on this build.

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WoA_0054

Blend shapes are all set back up, although they don't do anything yet.  But at least their namespaces are added properly.  Many new rendering features are working with the underwater volume and it really looks great!  Some new edits to the sand layer of landscape materials now, although there is still some pink hue escaping from some power node in the two texture blend.  New RedWolf added and the new plugin for fur, GFur, is updated and running although I'm sure there will be many performance updates necessary to ensure it performs well enough to justify itself.  Looks great though. As long as there aren't 20 bears attacking you all at once it should work well enough.  It'll need a branch node from options to make sure it's on in the player's settings.

 

As for problems, the opening matinee is now working perfectly so we can move forward on blend shapes stuff and figure out some cinematography, and we spawn aboard a randomly placed boat close to argyle's shore. top half of the body is failing in the animgraph somewhere, probably a referenece back to the controller or something. no inventory on the character, although that could even be because we started a previously created character as opposed to a newly created one on its first load. Log spam indicated that the  QuestComponent was failing a reference somewhere and no controller was found on the Almerra_HUD so thats the next immediate issue to look into. Seems to be just a cooked build issue, but we should definitely start debugging using the MenuWall level and actually playing because we now getting into issues specific to a previous save and active interfacing with the save game. Last note is that the camera is still moving and orbitting the previously created character instead of the 'new' one in the main menu. Case in point.

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WoA_0053

Failed to build.  Yet another piece of shit software update I didn't need nor ask for screwed up Visual Studio and now the compiler fails to build.  Fuck you, m$.

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WoA_0052

Nothing works. Build crashes on load. :/

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WoA_0051

Okay, so we went back into the main menu level and retouched some stuff, mainly to address consistency between player camera and the AnT camera.  We've got new lighting, DoF and other settings on the AnT's camera, and the level itself is now smaller so it loads a tiny bit quicker.  I also lowered the landscape so the water comes further into the cave which looks nicer.  Startup sequencer and open world48 are still broken for some reason, but there are still a number of red errors in the log so it should be simple to fix.  Lastly, we're still having a major issue with the ocean post processing.  For some odd reason the post process setting we added in the Almerra_Player's secondary init is not being used, instead it's just using the default camera.  I think we have a duplicate graph somewhere that's overriding these settings, so we need to track this down.  Gotta check the Instance BeginPlay and Controller BeginPlay first, then maybe check the AnT or something.  Maybe also try removing the fake post process from the level since it gets deleted anyway, maybe it's causing the issue.  More layter.

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WoA_0050

This was an intermediate build to re-add the clouds shader using a different method.  The previous method was using a moon disc up in the skydome but that proved to be way too complicated since we can't alter or mask the sun disc in any way.  Instead the moon is now its own mask function in the shader graph and can utilize separate images for the phases.  We still have yet to make it rotate or have any kind of eccentricity, but in due time.  Also in this build for some reason the startup matinee sequencer thingy busted.  It just sits there and loads for a bit and then continues on to the open world48--which doesn't spawn the player.  Seems like some more references between starting AnT and the player controller are broken.  New build soon.

WoA_0049

The ocean now has coloration!  It took a while to fully understand how to make a non-worldspace UV'ed mask to move independently of the ocean's global shader but I now have a great setup for making specific regions of the ocean more location customized.  Before, the ocean was just a simple repeating shader to make the ripples, waves and sky reflections that fed into world-space, meaning the pattern would repeat forever.  This meant any textures I added also moved so shorelines and murkyness was all 0 or 1.  Now I can drive a separate mask within the ocean's shader, so I can have some areas with clear water, some with silty river-runoff, or anything else I can dream up.  All well and good, but now we gotta get back to finishing the new animations and hooking them up, as well as spicing up the swimming loops and creating particles.  VERY happy with how this build turned out, so I'm gonna grab tacos and keep hammering.

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WoA_0048
Basic walking back working, and the new form of Apex cloth on the characters naked self.  Many reworked elements in the Book
and Debugging UI.  No Swimming, laddering, climbing, dooring, horsing, boating, crouching or crawling.

​

WoA_0047
Successful Update to 4.19.2.  Source code updated.  Animations are all fucked since we are still working in the new AnimBP and 
Maya pipeline.

​

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>

<!---   Engine Update    --->
<
WoA_0046
AI got even more love this time around, Job Trees were somehow cancelling out the Checks for Idle and combat.  They are now fixed, 
and AI now appears to be classifying us correctly based on player's master alleigance to nations.  Click to move has also been
fixed within Commander mode, and we have the Dummy AI Controller tapping in to make it work.  It can possess the pawn whenever
the widget calls for it.  Inventory is also working, but equipping items is still wonky.  This is all good, but the biggest 
issue right now is Animations.  The player animations are ALL kaput, everything made with MLT which are the crappy first 
animations I made.  Painful.  However they were painstakingly made in an ill-conceived manner that is inefficicent.  I can now
spit out 3~4 in the same time it took me to do 1 back then, and they look 10x better.  Smart IK Handle placement.  More camera 
edits on Map and Commander, and the Quality settings for lighting have gotten an overhaul in resolution--EXTREMELY large impact
modifier so this is the Aorta of performance efficiency for fps.  2048 is max which performs fairly well and looks amazing, 1024
keeps it more around 40fps and the best optimization.  Lower will just look more potato.

 

WoA_0045
AI got lots of love this build.  A few new structs added for Citizens details, features, basics and physical stats.  These aren't 
hooked up currently, but are exposed for filling in from database for unique peoples.  Once cBuilder is more fleshed out these
will allow for the Innkeeper from X to have Beard Z, etc.  Containers are also working, although it seems nothing can be looted
from them currently. This build also has many reworked animBP settings for going crawling and prone translation offsets.
Swimming is also reworked, not sure if its broken on AI now, but the trace for player to get it and out is working as well as 
wetness.  2 New building types added and cellars re-tweaked a bit.  Lastly the AI has gotten a lot of love concerning alliegances.
Alleigance for entire nations is now handled within the MasterGrouing for that nation.  Currently everyone starts with a 0 so all
villages will have you everywhere by default.  Once we setup cBuilder it'll simply add a 5 to the home nation so you start neutral.

 

WoA_0044
Reworked some IntroTest map.  New Longhall added to the map, and this build also introduces the new Cellars!  So we now have 100%
working underground assets with the sink and fill method.  The main Longhall has its own cellar and there is a dedicated cellar at 
the end of town.  These are fully working with AI navigation and currently have waypoints scattered around to make AI walk down there.
Also now working are profession waypoints -- specific professions look for these during their calcs and randomly choose one to walk to.
Also working is the specific NPC equipment lists -- but we are missing some clothing types, namely the chainmail Byrnie, and the
leggings on everyone need some weight paint work cause their asses stick through the pants lol.  More to come.  Good progress tho! :-D

>

<!---   Landscape complete, back to Product AI    --->

<
WoA_0043
Allllllrighty, so this build accounts for all the landscapes fully textured--coming to a grab total of 30.9 GB.  Perfectly reasonable.
Everything else still in work.

 

WoA_0042
K, so this is the new setup for landscapes.  All cells are added to world48 and accounted for, although the textures were
not compiled for this build.  The settings are from 505s with double the components and 400x400x400 sizing.  The total file
size is just under 30GB for the entire game as it stands now, and we have a decent framrate above 35 in 4k on ultra which is 
satisfactory for now.  Randomization on characters is working well, but needs refinement to the subsurface
scattering -- its ruining their heads when in the shade.  Just needs work on the mask texture for that.  Also working is the AnT's 
setup event to recreate the world units from save--right now that exists as putting the player aboard the boat in the ocean.  
Something I noticed was that the world map is incorrect with its placement of the player icon in reference to the world.  Obviously
this could be from incorrect divisors within the map construction script and/or the real world divisor size in the possess event.
What's next will be incorporating the Quest tracker into this boat's spawn event and letting the Quest Actor do all of this.
More input is needed to further the Questing System and how the initial game plays out.

 

WoA_0041
This time with 505's and just 16 x 16 components. Size checks out.
Same, 47 MB per cell.  

 

WoA_0040
Retrying the 993's with 200 x 200 double components.
32 x 32 components drove the file size back up to 160 MB a map.

 

WoA_0039
New set of cells using the 505's with 400 x 400 resizing and doubling of components.
Cells now VERY small, 4.5 MB each, coming to only 10 gigs for all of Almerra.  Not terrible quality but theres an average to find now.

 

WoA_0038
Dropped some cells from 2017 down to 993 resolution from WM, very minimal reduction in quality honestly.

New size is 47 MB per cell, getting us to 109 GB.  More tests incoming.

 

WoA_0037
Size dropped by previous settings, now we're at 76 MB per cell -- bringing us to 176 GB...
Still too big, next test with lowered cell count on landscape from WM.

 

WoA_0036
Test with world tiles in function map.  Size is bloated to 168 MB a cell, coming to 389 GB...
Changing more project build settings for next build.  shared material libraries.

>

 

<!---   Beginning of Landscape size testing    --->

​

​

<
WoA_0035
Updating Project build settings, Landscapes are accounting for a huge portion of published game size, games can't just
be +100GB and shit.  We will do landscape testing.

 

WoA_0034
Finally working, this version has new blendshapes that spawn on the AI only.  It is a basic randomizer for their facial
features.  Ladders are also somewhat working, but anim doesnt climb.  Needs more timelines.  Next build will include
entire World48 map for further testing.

 

WoA_0033
Still fucked, apparently the level lost its ocean and cloudswater?  Rebuilt for next build.

 

WoA_0032
Massive bugs, empty menu level with fucked controls.

 

WoA_0031
Okay, skyrim camera now setup -- other stuff removed.  Rescaled some of the UI--namely the in-world options.  Anims
are completely fukked up for now, still in work.  More debug shit added to UI.  Need to check out the worldmap lineup 
since thats pretty far along.  Still no character blendshapes complete, but the character creator UI is fairly done--
has nice panels and plenty of sliders working at least on the UI side.  The only real big change in this build was to 
landscape and ocean textures.  Ocean now has proper depth opacity, refraction and normals up to a good par; and landscape
now has caustics and coastal waves all within one texture!  Landscape also has support for tessellation now, but is turned
off by default.  Eventually it'll hook into settings menu.  lots of character anim and funcionality coming up next because
now I really wanna swim in the ocean... with sharks!

 

WoA_0030
So we now have fully working camera controls within the character creator, moves nicely over to the character
pawn when you're working through it.  We now just need to figure out how to layer in certain stuff and
what order it should all go in.  Still working on that structure.  Still need to setup the skyrim camera and 
alternate controls for player cam though, and we need to test the worldmap again to see if we are anywhere close
to accuracy with player position.  Also tidy'd up the cBuilder widget so it'll be much easier to edit in the future.
We also need to label out and probably doodle some different hair and beard styles in the ol' notebook for future
modelling.

 

WoA_0029
Camera controls completed as designed, but it'll def need a tweak somewhere. I do like using the Control
based scheme for using the system, but the current implementation of mouse speed is lacking--so the skyrim 
method may also be of consideration.  Control for weapons/shields like warband, and regular mouse for skyrim
camera.  AO added to sand landsacpe function--really brings out some detail if you lower the values in
Crazybump, also get rid of that fucking shitty cliff texture.  Main menu overhaul, resetting camera and
tidying up the scene--big professionalized improvement.  It looks tremendous. Find out how to get rid of 
the loading thingy. i hates it.  After playtesting, the Arena level never loads because of 
"Found no bodies in save by the AnT". Some sort of spawning or reference error. Savegames are being created
correctly, with save 0 being user options, and 1~38 for users (39 is quick slot).  Make sure AnT is getting
the right savegame stuff loaded.  Need to add more UI sub panes in character building stuff.

 

WoA_0028
Controls scheme added to options menu, commander cam first draft.  Controls for moving the camera are 
still keyboard-only with wasd, mouse scrolling to come in next.  Also still need to figure out a max 
allowed camera distance for commander cam--which will increase with certain Feats beign researched by
the player.  The next hurdle though, is switching the player over to an AI controller if that's even 
possible.  We may have to spawn a fake/hidden character in the world just so we have a freed-up AI
Controller that can take control of the players pawn while in commander mode.  A dedicated player AI.

WoA_0027
Engine upgraded to 4.18.3
Continuing to re-organize the content folder because is hell, and now we can keep any textures we make
at work and take them home--especially material functions and collection parameters.  Particles too.

>

 

<!---   Engine Update    --->

 

<

 

 

WoA_0026
Arma camera fully functioning in third and first person.  Alt held down allows for head movement
without body movement, and third person is dynamic cam.  However the UI will need to be deactivated
while freelook boolean is active (use a function)--as the offset is fooked and we can't force everything 
to work in 3rd person.  UI will be gimped for ranged combat--possibly still active for interaction though.

 

WoA_0025
Cameras are now updated, but have a wonky offset and gimbal lock in third person.  Fixing camera
and then moving on to UI updates in next rev.

 

WoA_0024
Proof of solution after migration to new folder structure.  New build to follow with camera updates
and working graphics options.

 

WoA_0023
Not much added into this build, more of a test after some basic changes and recompiling.  Some
stuff that did change was the basic camera controls setup.  It's now powered by the more Skyrim
style mousewheel zoom, with a cutoff to first person around 25cm from the head.  This is functioning
now but needs some tweaks for up and down.  Our character and camera pitching need to work together
and not get out of sync--the problem is obvious when looking down or up in first person, then zooming
back out--the camera for third always starts at Y=0 instead of whatever angle the players back is in.
basically the chest and neck rotation we use in first person should translate to Y camera pitch in third.

 

WoA_0022

Loading screens working perfectly!  We also redirected the "Arena" button on the main 
menu to go straight to introTest--if not for reals then at least for demoing and debugging.
Level sequence in WorldNative also functioning with a basic 3 camera setup, and we can
continue dressing that set and figuring out what exactly should be said.  Rmember this is
where Argyle tells you to go home and see your family.  But we still dont have a reason as
to why you are away in the first place, or why everyone is so separated in your family.  
Years have gone by and something more local needs to occur within the basic story to give
more meaning to these events.
On another note, the character creator still needs a redux UI, with paging for various parts
of the skeleton to edit more like Skyrim's.  Deicisions!  Also none of the levels are pinging
background music on the Instance correctly--all levels simply restart the main menu song it seems.

 

WoA_0021
Camera and sequence attached within the WorldNative intro cinematic level.  Still not 
able to control camera view during character builder, and level sequence locks you
out of continuing to game.

 

WoA_0020
Failed attempt...

 

WoA_0019
broken links...

 

WoA_0018...
Failure travelling to matinee level (invalid url)

 

WoA_0017...
Failed to load something...

 

WoA_0016...
New build with more updated cloud info for IntroTest level.  No other changes.  Next
build should it with the slack-linked fix.  Next build will be after we strengthen the 
savegame system.  Currently when you start the game, it creates all 40 savegames, and
then if none are active, uses savegame 0 to store your options and settings.  This is
kinda hacky.  We might want to say--save 0 is used when you have NO characters.  And 
therefore the "Continue" button stays greyed out.  That first save 0 can still be used 
intially to store settings, but once you create a new character and get into the 
world--it flags the save as "begun" and therefore accessible via "Continue" button.  

 

WoA_0015...
This build adds updated artwork for the loading screen using a non-streched logo
in the center of the screen.  Still not sure how to add or change the loading swirl
thingy.  Will need it to reflect one we use for in-game load screen after level swap.
Also still not showing the SimsLab logo movie, or any other movie we've selected in
the plugin settings.  Will check into.

 

WoA_0014...
0014 introduces us to our current pipeline.  Only has main menu functioning.  
Performance is still a small issue with the menu, and we still don't have a 
good "start time" for the world.  IIFC it's set to hour 15 normally, and this
level starts at hour 11.  This is so light enters the cave and illumates the
helmet and sword.  The helmet and sword will later be accompanied by a worn book, 
possibly adding your last character's name to the cover. (very cool idea).  

>

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<!---   End of Notes   --->