The Isle News

[h2]Filipe - Lead Programmer[/h2]
This month I have been focused on kentrosaurus and its defensive stance. This helps it to reflect damage back to attackers when they hit its spikes, but this will also be seen for other animals that have spikes or build in defenses like ceratopsians. I also worked on the updated skin system color picker so that we can bring larger color selections back to you. Skin colors are based on a texture which the players can click to select the colors for each section. This allows more colors on a single texture and simplifies the process for us. It also allows us to introduce any additional palettes for skins, being each theme containing a new texture with a new set of colors in it.

See you!


[h2]Ariel - Programmer[/h2]
I continued working on the hill slide mechanic to get it working right in all the different conditions, like how steep the slope is, which way your dinosaur is looking, how fast you were moving when you entered the hill slide state, and what the conditions are for ending it. I also set it up for all the dinosaurs now to test their animations. Other than that I took a look at the pteranodon as well because it received the updated terrestrial animations.


[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
This month started with wrapping up on the five main calls for the Quetzalcoatlus and establishing the vocal palette for the rest of its audio.

Next was creating a set of sounds for the tree knockdown mechanic, including the creaking, squeaking and rattling of the trees as they fall and the punchy, woody and leafy impact as they hit the ground. This meant doing a set of sounds for three size stages to account for the range of sizes of trees that will be able to be knocked down. These sounds were then tested and adjusted in length and weight proportionately to the size of the trees.

Baryonyx calls are now being refined by the rest of the sound team after its new vocal palette was established. Its vocalisations are moving away from the standard guttural growls, a type of vocalisation that is already well covered by the existing roster to bring a different sonic perspective, while still leaning into its amphibious nature. Comprising deep ‘Bomp’ sounds, similar to a large bubble upwelling and popping in its throat, giving Bary a unique and threatening edge.

To wrap up this month I moved onto Oviraptors calls. Since this is the most avian creature to be added to the roster this was a design aesthetic that we really wanted to lean into with its sounds. Its vocals are made up of a diverse range of edited parrot chirps, screeches, squawks, giggles and croaks, juxtaposed with squeals and clicks that have a goblin-like quality to them, lending well to its ‘egg-thief’ niche. These pull from the cooing clicks of crows that have a natural vowel movement, tasmanian devil and rapid small bird beak clacks as well as lemur and honey badger for breathier clicking elements.


[h2]hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
Unfortunately, no funny videos this time. The past couple of weeks for QA have been focused on gathering and verifying community bug reports, cleaning up the bug tracker, and testing new builds. There have been some major issues such as organs and meat chunks becoming uninteractable, sparring issues, and Dilophosaurus hallucinations not hitting players, etc, that we feel need to be fixed before the next hordetest. Fortunately many of these have been resolved but we still have a few outstanding problems we’d like fixed before moving forward with public tests.


[h2]KissenKitten - Animation Supervisor[/h2]
Pretty much all of this month has been a continuation of the previous. Fixing animation bugs, tying up loose ends and putting our heads down on quetzalcoatlus.

I’ve been enjoying developing its personality and style that dips into science without compromising creativity and avoiding being too generic. We want playing the quetz to feel very unique to The Isle. Stealthy, deadly and deceptively alert. Disappearing into the background and at times coming out of nowhere. The animations lean towards illusive and measured but when it is time to deal damage or give chase, its unorthodox body type takes center stage that creates an unnerving silhouette in the darkness.

I’m pretty excited about this playable! Especially for the legacy folks out there that wanted a quetz experience and weren’t able to have it.

Here are a few animations (some revised) for you to check out.








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Surf's Up! See ya next time!
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[h2]Filipe - Lead Programmer[/h2]
This month I have been working primarily on bug fixes for several systems while we focus on bug cleanup, but I’ve had some small time to work on some upcoming changes for the skin system. You will get a limited type of color pick gradient for skin palettes that change per layer and not every palette will be on every pattern, but overall it should offer more freedom and consistency in the look of your animal.

There are also some balance changes coming to pounce related systems such as Bucking and Grapple/Pin, since bucking hasn’t met the mark for either side of pounce interaction. It should help in situations where players just fall to the ground during a pounce, because even during a grapple most animals are capable of fighting back. Some more changes may be needed later, but we have to try things in parts to avoid over changing stuff.

For now that is it, see you soon.


[h2]Ariel - Programmer[/h2]
This month I was mostly working on a mechanic we’re referring to as “hill slide”. The goal is to improve navigating steeper slopes and making the biped/quadruped experience a bit more different without making the dinosaurs too mobile in the process. To put it simply, dinosaurs will be able to slowly walk up steeper hills as long as they turn to the side, but trying to move downwards will put them in a sliding state. This also extends to something that’s been happening in the game when a player tries to run down a hill and when it becomes too steep they end up getting “launched off” the hill, often resulting in taking damage. This has been adjusted so that dinosaurs will enter the hill slide state and stay on the ground. There are still some adjustments to be made and testing, balancing, but the implementation is coming along well overall.




[h2]Seiza - Video Editor[/h2]
Over the past few weeks, I've been working on content for the impending Steam page change, including images, GIFs, and of course, polishing the Steam page trailer, which is fundamentally different from our previous work. While our previous patch release trailers were filmed in a more documentary style, this will be the first trailer in a long while that has any cinematic feel to it.

Even though Maiasaura, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus, and the Pteranodon innovations make up the bulk of the trailer, we want to give all previous species and mechanics a place in the trailer as much as possible. As always, all scenes are engine and in-game footage so as not to distort the presentation of the game. The project is already very advanced and just needs a little polishing. We want this trailer to give you goosebumps, and I'm excited to see if we can pull that off.

My next few weeks will be spent finalizing everything. Here are a couple sneak peeks:






[h2]Baardo - Environment Artist[/h2]
This month I had an opportunity to work on some assets for a new biome on the island, the redwoods! We didn't want to use the same marketplace redwood assets everyone uses, we really wanted something that was unique to The Isle. Flora diversity in this biome won't be as great as in the jungle, the redwoods themselves (along with their various growth stages) dominate the various layers of the canopy. This meant the redwoods had to look really good and diverse. To this end I created about 10 unique trees, encompassing a range from small saplings to monsters well over 300 feet in height.

Such large trees have to have quite thick trunks. For trees with trunks this large it was important to create something that held detail well at scale. Any imperfections (such as UV seams) would be much larger and more noticeable so I had to be very strict with how I authored the blend from the root base to the rest of the tree trunk. "Flatness" of texture can go unnoticed on smaller diameter trees, but for these assets I had to increase displacement and poly density on the massive trunks to let the textures pop a little more.

In addition to the trees themselves I created a handful of ground cover foliage types. Some clovers and a leafy plant to add some clutter to the forest floor to complete the look and add some lush greens to the biome. It's been a long time coming and I am quite proud of how it all came together!




[h2]VisualTech48 - Environmental Artist[/h2]
This month has been given to optimization and getting a lot of our buildings ready for the new optimized decal shader that is now in. Previously, we were restricted by the nature of Unreal’s way of storing specific information. The buildings are now properly being culled by both the server and the client.

With this, we should be seeing far less performance issues across the board with our human POIs, and locations and loading times. However, this new decal shader allows us to paint what we had before anywhere in the world, without many restrictions and time loss, keeping the same aesthetics as before.

To showcase this optimization feat, we’ll be using the large Labs shell for the prime example.



As with a lot of our modular kit, the limitations of how specific mesh data was stored forced us for quite some time to use alternative methods until recently, where we finally solved the issue. but still kept the detailed freedom it gives us (at a small cost of time setting it up per building).

We call this the Painting Plane. The current roster of exterior buildings is already transferred to Gateway, with the use of this new technique.



That is all I can share for now, hopefully this will bring The Isle closer to our optimization goals. See you next month!


[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
We are kicking off the new year with a new set of calls for two new creatures coming to Evrima. I have taken on Quetzalcoatlus’s calls, which are being approached with a unique concept. While I would love to share the design intent to its vocalisations and how they are sounding, much like Quetz, the less said the better. Meanwhile, the rest of the sound team is concepting Baryonyx’s guttural bellows and growls, with a touch of moisture complimenting its amphibious playstyle.

In addition to vocalisation concepts, some improvements have been made to various audio aspects, including a major fix to the custom attenuation behaviour and volume/attenuation scaling of foliage sounds. Austroraptor’s sounds have been implemented and we are moving on the finishing touches to Kentrosaurus’s vocal sounds.

Finally some minor adjustments to vocal call attenuation volume curve are underway, adjusting the volume curve so calls are less quiet at distance without change to how distant they sound, in aim to give more life to the ambience and deliver more information to players.


[h2]KissenKitten - Animation Supervisor[/h2]
I’m blowing the dust off my devblog skills since it’s been awhile since I’ve made an entry. For the past few months I’ve had my head down and sights firmly fixed on new species. There always seems to be a mountain of work to do in so little time but as a unit, we do what needs to be done.

As you may or may not know, there will be new playables released onto The Isle in the very near future. Austroraptor, Baryonyx, Kentrosaurus, Oviraptor and Avaceratops. Most of those we’ve shown here and there a fair amount. Following quickly behind them are Camarasaurus and Quetzalcoatlus. The former either have or are in the process of getting their sounds. Once that is done, they’ll be entering a HT as production allows. Then we’ll see how they perform, iron out whatever wrinkles and kinks they exhibit and then prepare them for Live Evrima. That trend will continue until we’re done with all the playables.

I mentioned many moons ago that I was ordering our steps to allow us a clearer and faster pathway for releasing playables and at last we are here (especially now that the tyrannosaurus is off our plate because that thing was a doozy). Get ready for the ecosystem to be in a relatively constant state of flux for a while. The new playables are likely to disrupt what you have come to know and expect on the island so much like the animals, you need to be prepared to adapt. It takes awhile for the dust to settle and each species to discover its most effective position within the food chain and how to navigate life with the other species.

The animation team has been working on additions for the older playables as I mentioned in devblogs past. Pteranodon, Austroraptor, Hypsilophodon etc. I’ll include a few animations. There are other additions here and others not shown but for the sake of brevity I’ll only go over a few and let the rest show up as they show up.

The pteranodon is being outfitted with better movement and attacks on the ground so hunting and fighting on land doesn’t feel like as much of a lost cause as it used to be. It should be faster, dish out more damage and likely be slightly larger. But be that as it may, you are still a fragile species comparatively so act accordingly. These changes will not turn you into anything other than a more powerful pteranodon. Which is still a pteranodon at the end of the day.

Hypsilophodon has some new attacks and nest related animations. Since we’re doing some new things with it, all of this is subject to change should it not work out. But if all goes according to plan, it should introduce more interesting gameplay options for this tiny but iconic species.

There were a handful of straggler animations for the austroraptor that the animation team has also completed, many including idles. Each playable has always had a number of different idles but with some of the newer playables and the introduction of the elder system, we’re likely to add more (some of which may only play or be attained under special conditions).

Now for the species so many have been waiting on, we have the quetzalcoatlus that’s in active development. This animal is being designed to be an imposing, stealthy, stalking terror from the land and sky. One of the pillars of the characterization we want to nail for quetzalcoatlus is to ensure it feels like a terrifying presence no matter where you encounter it. Be that on land, in the water, in the sky or even in the trees. The quetz is no less dangerous no matter where you encounter it. When the quetz makes its entrance into The Isle, make sure you keep an eye on your herd/pack mates. Turn your back for too long and someone may vanish without a trace.

That’s all from me. Remember that everything you’ve read or seen is all subject to change. But for some extra razzle dazzle I’ve included some prototype animations. See ya next month. Toodles!



















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[p]Hey Islanders,

A new patch is now available on the Evrima Public Branch. Thank you to everyone that participated in our latest hordetest. To spare you all a novel-length read, we’ve trimmed the changelog down to the highlights. A list of known-issues will be updated and posted in a few days.

You may need to restart your Steam client if the update is not immediately available to download.


[/p][h2]Changelog for Patch 0.21.321:[/h2][p]
Added Tyrannosaurus
RMB - Muzzle Swing
A light attack capable of knocking down smaller targets
Hold RMB - Heavy Muzzle Swing
A heavy attack capable of knocking down or killing smaller targets and staggering similar sized animals
Hold LMB - Crush
A powerful attack that sends the tyrannosaurus lunging forward with a powerful bite and fracture damage. This can pin and execute smaller or wounded targets, or stagger similar sized animals
Spacebar (After achieving subadult) - Ambush
Ambush will give you a temporary increase to your sprint speed before going on a moderate cooldown. Useful to help catch prey that will soon outpace you
Hold F and press 1 or RMB (After achieving adult) - "Paleo" Vocals
Tyrannosaurus possesses some unique audio for generic and broadcast calls as an adult. There is no special use for this yet. It's just for fun
LMB/RMB - Directional Attacks
Tyrannosaurus possesses primary and secondary directional attacks. Primary attacks are standard bites. Secondary attacks are less lethal but medium hitting muzzle swings
RMB (After crushing a target) - Throw
Throw a target in the direction you're looking. This will always kill them

Added Allosaurus
Hold LMB (While Running) - Claw Swipe
A medium attack that deals heavy bleed. This can also move the allosaurus slightly in the direction its looking to close distance for the attack
Hold RMB and Release - Pounce
Allosaurus latches on to a target, dealing increasing damage and bleed over time

Updated Pteranodon
Automatic (Run off a ledge) - Ledge Flight
Enter flight automatically by running off the edge of a surface
Double Press Ctrl (During Flight) - Barrel Roll
Spin down into a dive or just show off
Z (During Flight) - Air Brake
Depending on how fast a player is going, quickly braking and using turn will drastically increase your turn rate at the cost of some momentum
RMB (While over mud or a water surface) - Spearfishing
Only usable during the day, this will cause the pteranodon to enter a stance to lure fish or clams nearby. When a target is highlighted, press LMB to catch them. If you catch a clam, press LMB when on a hard surface like rock to throw a clam down to open it
Carnotaurus Headbutt is now activated by holding RMB and pressing LMB while held. This can be activated while standing or running and depending on charge time, can knock down or stagger targets depending on their comparative size

Added Elder life stage
At 100% growth, players are eligible to Entomb. This kills your current animal and respawns you again as a fresh spawn of the same species. Mutations from the previous life are kept and their benefits are enhanced, as well as letting you choose more mutations to benefit your animal

Adjusted new menu and in-game HUD (WIP)
Added Player Report function after death
Added clams
Added Sequential Hermaphroditism - Players can take this mutation to change the sex of the animal once
Added Parthenogenesis - Players can take this mutation allowing a female animal to nest and lay eggs without a mate
Updated foliage meshes
Updated island layout
Fixed nesting crash
Fixed the length of wallow trace sometimes extending further than it should
Fixed certain objects dropping from a player's mouth when trying to swallow
Fixed several instances where a rotten egg were not being shown as rotten
Fixed juvenile vocal animations not stopping if biting in the water
Fix attempt to bite audio not playing
Fixed cypress stumps using the wrong shader
Fixed certain bushes having a small piece of collision that would interrupt player movement
Fix attempt to dilophosaurus hallucinations not causing damage and not disintegrating
Fixed psittacosaurus positions when carried
Fixed players pouncing on occupied slots
Fixed audio sounding as if a player was above water while waterwalking
Eggs no longer give nutrients
Fixed nest debris spawning inside rocks
Fixed subadult stegosaurus locomotion animation blending
Fixed patrol zones not swapping for carnivores
Fixed "Leave Ground" button not being visible
Fixed Admin Teleport not working if too far away from original point
Added back pounce slot for boar and turtle
Fixed scavengers contributing to pack scent
Fixed idle animations occasionally overriding player movement
Fixed jackfruits not falling properly
Fixed pounce deflect animation not playing when hitting the front of a target
Fixed underwater deinosuchus lunge vocals being heard by players above water as if the deinosuchus was also above water
Fixed death logs showing wrong growth values
Fixed maiasaura stamp moving at incorrect speeds
Fixed namespace issues
Fixed hypsilophodon obstacle avoidance not working
Improvements to footstep metasounds — Volume adjustments and metasound setup fixes across dinosaur weights
Fixed rain soundmix muting ambience with no active rain
Fixed herrerasaurus drop attack not dealing damage at times
Fixed juvenile beipiaosaurus being kicked from the server when swimming in some circumstances
Fixed spar pushing not working correctly from the side/back of a target
Fixed the camera clipping through the ground for small playables
Fix attempt to 4th mutation alert not showing up
Fixed jump attacks being usable when swimming
Fixed hatchling begging sometimes ending by itself
Fixed maiasaura animations when switching between biped and quadruped with fractures
Added directional 180 attacks to maiasaura quadrupedal and bipedal stances
Fixed bees calling sound on server
Fixed head movement during gallimimus directional attack
Fixed hatchling begging ending early
Fixed pteranodon animation issue after biting while flying
Fix attempt for entomb taking cached client data
Fixed compy not eating corpses
Fix attempt to Multichambered Lungs not affecting resting threshold
Fixed server memory bloat
Fixed spawn commands not working in shipping builds
Fixed queueing sometimes kicking people with server is full message
Fixed pteranodon animation issues when landing in mud
Synched out of place footsteps on triceratops drink in/out anims
Fixed pounce vocal sounds not playing when standing in water
Fixed blood splash effect
Fixed lamp post collision
Fixed sliding stopping early when turning too much
Fix attempt to issue with "breath" parameter on vocal sounds
Fixed crash on gallimimus overlap regarding "Remove Hint" on server
Fixed carnotaurus being input locked after quick get up
Fixed AI not walking
Fixed footprint tracking
Fixed compsognathus walk animations
Increased number of table pages in VT
Lowered wind volume during storms
Fixed rare crash instance related to beipiaosaurus
Increased brightness of lowest possible nightvision
Fixed corpses not floating to water surface
Fix to a rare crash when the function is called but the target got wiped out
Fixed pachycephalosaurus ram occasionally not ending
Fixed ceratosaurus chuffing damage multiplier
Fixed slide on Trike's wallow montage end
Fixed confirm button sometimes not showing up for nest codes
Fixed pteranodon slightly draining in thermals and wind currents
Fixed triceratops sliding when grabbing objects and moving right away
Fixed pteranodon latch animation being too far from the wall
Fixed a rare instance that would cause a crash on player death
Fixed debris nest building not ending when releasing E
Fixed several blood effects being too dark
Fixed getup animation occasionally restarting for part of the animation after getting up
Fixed deinosuchus not rotating when lunging on land
Fix attempt to white eyes on skin creator if night vision is on and 3D background is off
Fixed certain sanctuaries failing to spawn juvenile mushrooms
Fixed defense power not scaling properly
Fixed deinosuchus lunge movement issue when waterwalking
Fixed hypsilophodon crash on spit when a target is invalid
Fixed slot swap getting interrupted sometimes
Fixed strange tick reset when latched to a target that is currently being grappled
Fixed tenontosaurus swim turn animations
Fixed stegosaurus power swing not recoiling when hitting certain trees
Fixed deer AI not having a proper buoyancy plane
Fixed pteranodon head animation when ascending from skimming
Fixed lighting overly darkening from cloud coverage
Added impact splash sounds to tenontosaurus tail slam connecting with a mud pool
Fixed an occasional endless loading screen from failed server join
Fixed being able to activate spar mode while resting
Fixed pteranodon crashing too easily when flying down on the ground
Fixed pteranodon not being able to pick up fish by biting
Fix attempt to drink hint disappearing if pressing H
Fixed remaining objects missing collision
Changed herrerasaurus latch hoist hand climbing sound notifies
Fixed pterandon occasionally regaining stamina when ascending
Fixed some alignment issues when swimming and flying
Fixed pteranodon latch speed conditions
Fixed branch snapping missing from certain trees
Fixed being able to cancel stegosaurus directional attacks during the attack
Fixed pteranodon directional attack not working in mud
Fixed an error causing Graphic Settings not saving
Fixed diabloceratops sliding rotation rate
Fixed deinosuchus sniffing animation with broken legs
Fixed spar flung animations not always playing
Fixed pteranodon landing animation not always playing
Fixed spar flip occasionally not working on triceratops
Fixed damage mutations not properly applying to ram and pounce
Fixed rotten organs showing as diets on scent compass
Fixed weather not properly changing
Fixed storm audio sounds
Fixed subadult deinosuchus nesting related animations looking incorrect
Fixed deinosuchus lunge never ending when breaking water surface if holding RMB and spacebar
Stegosaurus power swing can now open fruit
Lowered diabloceratops, stegosaurus and triceratops sprint decay
Larger animals now become infertile when reaching 100% growth
Raised speed on several animals will require manual check
Slightly decreased omniraptor adult weight
Updated "Multichambered Lungs" - Travel a distance of 200,000 units (2km)
Adjusted maia visual growth curve to set into subadult slightly faster
Increased time between stamina pounce decay
Lowered maia thirst decay
Decreased Beipi oxygen decay
Updated "Reniculated Kidneys" - Drink 1000 units of water (down from 2500)
Updated "Osteophagic" - consume any amount of bone while having a bone fracture of any type
Made triceratops engage attack faster
Made pteranodon 45 degree directional attacks faster
Made triceratops juvenile and subadult turn faster
Updated juvenile triceratops directional attack speeds
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[h2]Filipe - Lead Programmer[/h2]
This month I worked more on updating some remaining UI panels and bug fixing them. The UI took less time to implement than expected, which is great for once.

Besides that, new mutations have been added which allows you to change your gender, but also another one that allows a female to lay eggs without a mate, allowing more nests to be around. These are needed additions but required some additional setup to get working right. Some old mutations got some balance changes as well and a few bugs fixed.

Also worked in a new system for skins which will be added once we finish testing it, which is a theme system, which will give different color pallets based on those themes, for example, Forest theme will focus more on greenish pallets of colors. Dinos may have several different themes to choose from.

And of course, bug fixing.

See you!


[h2]Ariel - Programmer[/h2]
Most of my time this month was spent working on updates for the pteranodon, the first of them being the dive roll. It’s just something fun the players can do without it really “doing” anything, but I think it really adds to the character of the dinosaur. Originally it would activate whenever someone tried to fly downwards, but that resulted in players being locked into the dive for a short duration even if they only wanted to make small adjustments. So it was changed to activate when double tapping Ctrl (crouch) instead.

The second feature is something that has a much bigger impact on its gameplay, adding a new way to turn sharply. With the pteranodon being a small, nimble animal we wanted to improve its mobility without having it suddenly snap in different directions when turning. This one’s a bit difficult to explain, but first we tried a version that would automatically change your turning behaviour based on your speed and turn rate. It didn’t feel completely intuitive at first, but after some getting used to I’d say it already worked well. The second version is what we have now, which is making it tied to air brake, giving players better control over their movement. This way braking and turning quickly are done with the same key, which made it a bit more difficult, but I think I found a good point where both can be used comfortably depending on how quickly one is turning.

Other than the usual bug fixes and balance changes I’ve also been looking at the austroraptor a bit, setting up some animations and reorganizing some existing code to fit the austroraptor’s needs.


[h2]Tapwing - 2D Artist[/h2]
Recently I’ve been working at narrowing down the basic colour palettes for all dinosaurs to create some quality control for the colour combos that can be made. For example, an animal might look good in either green, red or blue, but making all those colours available in one set creates the potential for some truly eye-bleeding colour combos.

This brings me to the second part of my recent tasks, which is creating a number of alternate colour sets for the roster. This way we can offer a more expansive range of colour sets on animals like Tenontosaurus or Omniraptor, who are currently restricted to their respective brownish colours with the basic set, but might also look good in a set themed around forest greens or sandy yellows.

We’ll be able to add greens on an otherwise default red dinosaur without having to worry about how and IF those greens are going to work with those reds.


[h2]VisualTech48 - Environmental Artist[/h2]
This whole month has been (mostly) dedicated to building the labs.

A massive facility that spans over 110m in length and is one of the largest locations above ground. It consists of over a dozen different room types, spanning from the known Lab Hub that was incorporated (RIP GUTS), towards a plethora of new areas, such as the armory, all new offices, administration, containment, and some others I can’t speak on yet. It is a multi story building and gives access to a lot of explorable areas, in which only a handful of rooms currently are not accessible. The building has numerous ways in and out, and not unjust from the front door. Most areas have two or more connections to prevent players from getting stuck, or worse, cornered.

This whole facility has been one of the most exciting pieces I wanted to show you and here you are, the only thing missing from the piece is the final weathering and satellite structures:



Besides that I’ve created two habitation buildings that are used for housing and R&R for staff that was on the island, featuring a separate kitchen, bedrooms, and various lounge rooms, and a small supply closet. All that’s left are a few independent models such as beds (no more just cots) and some rec room items.



That is it for this month, besides the usual bug fixing and minor new stuff that I’ve added this month.

See you in the next one.


[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
This month started with us wrapping up the finishing touches on Allosaurus with some testing leading to adjustments to some of its audio and fixes to any bugs that we were made aware of along with any other audio related bugs that need to be addressed for the impending patch.

After that our focus has been on Kentrosaurus, which has come together swiftly. We have been exploring multiple angles within its audio palette, and have landed on a variety of sounds that have a diverse but cohesive range. It pulls a little from Stegosaurus, keeping it in the family with a different syntax and then incorporates shrill bugling, bovine honking and hoarse shrieks.
We have a large majority of its adult sounds completed with only a small handful left, and a decent chunk of the juvenile sounds designed as well.

Austroraptor has had its final batch of sounds implemented and with the new vocal animations being created a lot of attention has been put into getting the synch and age scaling of the vocal calls just right so they sound their best at each stage of growth.

In addition to the new sounds for upcoming creatures I have done some more work on footsteps, with additions of missing sounds in the large dinosaur footstep suite (and terrains that hadn’t been covered yet such as gravel and snow) as well as replacing either place holder footstep sounds or sounds that were starting to show their age. These have been implemented into the existing sound cues so the sounds could make their way into the game quickly. However more work has been done on a new footstep system that will correct any scaling issues with footstep sounds over the increase of growth as well as give us more flexibility in control over the various parameters so we can have pin point accuracy on every aspect. This will need more rigorous testing after being implemented before making its way into your hands (or feet).

To end the month, the time has come to dig up an old concept I had designed a few years ago for an exciting audio component that will be making its way into the isle soon, the first of many additions to help breathe life into the sound of the island. More to come soon.


[h2]hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
It’s been a busy month for QA as we close in on our last few updates of the year, with us tackling the remaining Tyrannosaurus and Elder System issues, as well as taking on the UI overhaul and Allosaurus character all in one go. Our current focus is testing server performance, ensuring that it’s up to standard for the evrima branch, as we’re using the Debug 5X Growth servers on the hordetest to identify any remaining crashes or stuttering that is occurring.

Tyrannosaurus had the unintended feature of becoming a home invader, capable of crushing a burrow and eating its inhabitants, despite them not being visible.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Sparring between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops still had some issues lingering as well, which was mostly caused by the crush into spar interaction. When a Triceratops’ legs were almost fractured and received a crush on its head, it would break the sparring for the Tyrannosaurus but the Triceratops would still see it occurring, so it wasn’t replicating properly. This would lead to all sorts of weirdness, like the two becoming permanently locked up or the Triceratops strafing on their client while moving normally for others. This could also result in the Triceratops player looking in the complete opposite direction for each player as well, which made it look like you were attacking from behind while in reality you were hitting them from the front. We will be continuing to iron out these problems over the next few builds.

With your feedback, we decided to change it so that elders would no longer have an increased growth speed when they had received diets. This has allowed players to continue to enjoy their adult (and elder) characters for a longer duration before eventually reaching the point of entombment.
Speaking of which, entombing has had a continuous issue of resetting the player’s skin and swapping their sex since its implementation. With the help from community bug reports (which you should all be doing! 😊), we now believe to have located the source of the issue and are currently in the process of applying this fix to our upcoming hordetest patch. No more losing your beautifully crafted camouflage.

There are still improvements yet to be made to the Elder System. Some characters, such as Deinosuchus, Troodon, and Hypsiloophodon have an especially difficult time achieving prime status. This is something we are aware of and will be addressing in the near future.

You might not have thought about it, but the programmers replacing all of the assets for the UI took up a fair bit of QA’s time, with text fields breaking, buttons becoming non-functional, colours being mismatched, and menus extending beyond the user’s game resolution - just to name a few. Even now, we are still finding some more minor issues, such as the nutrients not scaling properly on the HUD.

All of our new UI had to go through extensive testing. Can I type into a box where a number should go? Can I open the character menu while the game settings are visible? Can I exploit existing systems with the new menus? The latter proved to be true, where players were able to invite others to their nest via a code and spawn them in before their eggs had even finished incubating.
Server queuing will be making a return and is expected to be brought back to all servers for the update to evrima. This is currently only present on one of the HT servers to see how it fares with our new server caching system.

One strange example we ran into is the new admin panel deciding to break whenever the teleport button was highlighted.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The first implementation of the Allosaurus latch allowed them to stack on top of one another, creating a potentially endless chain of them. We were sensible and stopped at three but just imagine the potential!



Allosaurus has been experiencing an issue where it gets kicked from servers if it uses its pounce ability when it has attained prime elder status. This is expected to be fixed in our next patch to hordetest.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a complete devblog without mentioning whatever the latest fun our AI has decided to bring us this month.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Sometimes, I have no words…

It is known to us that the Diabloceratops AI have been fattening up the Tyrannosaurus groups, making their growth far easier than it should be. These AI will be more evenly distributed across the island and improvements to them are constantly being made by amarok to make them less of a free meal.

We’ve been putting a big focus on making direct changes to the game based on your feedback. For example, we’ve made it so that the Beipiaosaurus, Dryosaurus, Hypsilophodon, and Troodon characters no longer become infertile when they reach 100% growth. They would grow so quickly that they did not have ample time to create a nest, including all of the other usual challenges that they face. So, this has now been addressed and is present in our latest hordetest builds. Justice for the small playables!

Lastly, Don has been making balance changes to the majority of the roster, fine tuning the damage, knockdown thresholds, and fracture modifiers of the larger species. Stamina is also being adjusted for these characters and has been temporarily put on a level playing field in order to find some more appropriate values for them. These changes should make them all feel fairer against one another, as opposed to the Tyrannosaurus breaking a Triceratops leg in 2 crushes and winning. Allosaurus went in with its maximum bleed values and has since been brought back down in line with the rest of the roster, though further tweaks may still be required. It is also suffering from a bugged delay to its movement when dismounting from a latch, resulting in the target being able to get a free hit on the Allosaurus.

Let us know your thoughts and keep that feedback coming; now is the most vital time to do so before we commit this update to the evrima branch.

[h2]Fred - 2D Artist[/h2][p]Since the start of the custom skin system, we had been using 1k textures for our creatures. Due to some troubleshooting during that process as we continued to update, I started making some of the skins in 2k in order for them to function as intended in-game. Since then, some are in 1k, some are in 2k. Now I’ve been tasked with giving everyone a 2k upgrade. During this resolution upgrade, I'm also combing through these skins and giving a few of them a subtle cleanup. Below are some examples. Hopefully the older skins will look on par with the more recent ones.



[/p][h2]Director’s Commentary[/h2][p]I gave the team two months of reprieve from having to write in any of these and you can see why Fred is the GoodNoodle™ of the team. This officially makes my entry director’s commentary and I don’t have to write a saga.

We’re going to start strong with bugs. I’ve been partaking in bug hunts this month that make me want to put my head in a bag of holding and scream until I’m dead or I wake up God. It has not been fun and it’s not even visually interesting so there’s no heehaws to be found unless you count the allosaurus (again). Are you starting to notice a pattern? If an animal ever deserved to be resurrected just to go extinct again, it would be allosaurus. Why does its foot shake? Why does it slightly glow? The Gods remain ignorant or indifferent to our pleas.

The UI is nearing completion with only a few screens and pop-ups remaining. After that, there may be a few additional tweaks to allow a bit more of a personal customization for the display but the theme is largely there with a secret or two already buried in it. After that comes all the additional information like hints and tutorials.

As testing builds have gone on this month, a lot of animal colorization options have been temporarily reset before being drastically reduced. The reduced color options are so that we can expand dinosaur patterns to have varying palettes. This will allow us an overall greater freedom for color choice that stays within an intended artistic vision without letting players run around as giant rainbow monsters.

(There is an option intended for player servers to allow all palette colors \[or possibly a color wheel] so you can visually do whatever you want. If I can’t see it, it can’t hurt me.)

Pteranodon flight stats were drastically changed this month as well with all the aerial stamina requirements lowered across the board. Pteranodon carries its momentum exceptionally longer in flight than it did previously as well. There’s one more turn functionality for its flight to keep it nimble, but otherwise flight is done and it's time to give it some terrestrial enhancements. Don’t forget, when we’re done with it this animal is going to have a violent ground game.

The animation team has leaned fully into the camarasaurus. This sentence is just to pad the paragraph since I’ll let the attached media for the sauropod speak for itself. Bryan is putting the finishing touches on the quetzalcoatlus rig, which now has dimorphism in the crest for females and an additional edit to the juvenile. After that, he’s on to oviraptor locomotion so it can be plugged up alongside baryonyx, kentrosaurus, and austroraptor. The animation team will remain with our sauropod until its complete, barring an occasional switch over to any austroraptor cleanup that may be needed during its testing.

That being said, austroraptor, kentrosaurus, and baryonyx have had their basic functionality, locomotion, and lifecycles put in. I know some of the images are already floating around the community, but I’ll get some more out there in Phase Three this week. The three of these animals have needlessly cute juvenile morphs that may make a player stay their hand for a moment before trying to kill them, so use this to your advantage when the time comes.

Since last month the sound team has burned through the austroraptor, with only a few juvenile calls left before its time for kentrosaurus. The kentrosaurus’s core vocalizations have been done, so this is just like the austroraptor from last month where they can smoothly move from one dinosaur to the next that has a core vocal palette prepared. In the interim, Will is tackling some foley audio for the large animals before we can change the way footstep audio is handled (Nothing too crazy here. Just having footstep audio dynamically change based on weight).

A myriad of other balance/bug changes have found their way in. In no particular order, just going to throw out some mentionables:

Tyrannosaurus changes went well with only one particular spot in the early juvenile life stage that was allowing tyrannosaurus to hit a little harder than intended. There’s a little more to shore up on making his crush initiate a spar, but he can no longer just pin and kill things in its own weight class (and paleo calls work).

Maiasaura thirst decay has been reduced. This animal will be receiving a bit more attention for CC on its attacks and how easily it can stagger/knockdown an enemy when defending itself, including a small grace amount on the standing shove. Maia also has a small hidden passive most everyone doesn’t know about that will also be getting a minor boost in performance to make sure this is truly known as the good mother lizard.

Omniraptor’s latch decay has been reduced to more effectively hang on larger creatures for longer.

Beipiaosaurus and herrerasaurus oxygen decay has been greatly reduced.

More of the larger animals have received growth curve updates so they have more overlap with animals of smaller sizes instead of linearly outpacing them almost immediately. As stated in the last blog, the times for growth have been slightly shortened as well and put on the end of these animal’s lives so that they spend more time in the elder phase.

Jace has been hard at work on Gateway, expanding the outposts with the new buildings I spoke about last month. Gabriel has been supplying him with shells of locations you’ve seen in the GUTS locales, including some that will be too large for the outposts you’ve seen. You can also expect a new sanctuary near the highlands soon.[/p][p][/p][p]I leave you with media, good tithings, and an update to the HordeTesting branch. See you on the servers and Happy Halloween ya filthy animals. [/p]