Good morning community, Happy Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos, Samhain, and Diwali! This month's update is a progress report. Since our last post, the team has been hard at work. As the progress continues with the new container and inventory system, we have also been able to identify a lot of issues that have plagued The Repopulation and opened up some of the bare bone causes for inventory bugs in the game. This allows us to compare the old/current system to our new systems in development now, and those being designed. To make sure we are able to learn from the mistakes of the past team and our own and make The Repopulation even better.
So let’s dive right in, and show you what we’ve been up to...
CONTAINERS:
There has been significant progress with the container and inventory systems. This is thanks to the hard work of our engineer and the support of our testers. The testing process uncovered both expected and unexpected issues as well as positive forward motion.
When the systems are implemented players can expect to see two distinct changes to their personal inventories. Each player will now have 100 default slots. In addition to their main inventory players will receive 8 expansion bags/tabs, each with 5 default slots. Giving the player a total of 140 slots. In the future, we’ll introduce tier levels to allow players to expand their slots further. This will come once the containers are fully implemented.
WORK PROGRESS ESTIMATION:
We estimate the system to be between 80 to 90% in completion of its first stage for patching. This puts us on schedule to release the first push to test in the next few weeks. Our agenda currently includes identifying and resolving bugs, and non-associated items for conversion. This is a somewhat tedious process as there are around 3,750 items currently in-game. We are continuing to test and fix these items as they are identified, but realize there is a possibility there will be more to fix/update that we missed. Due to this players can expect smaller updates or hotfixes to follow as we fix them.
IMPLEMENTATION WORK:
In this phase of implementation, players will find that the sort function has temporarily been removed as a system feature. Its removal is due to the different levels of complexity of both the Item System and the “sorting/compressing” feature. However, the function will be reintroduced once the new Item System is in place. This strategy is being deployed in this order to reduce workload redundancy. If we were to implement a newly revamped sorting system at this phase it would not work with the new item system and would require removal and replacement once the system is in place. Rather than do this we have opted to wait until the system is complete so that sorting will work with the new indexed item system.
NON-INDEXED ITEM PROBLEMS:
Currently, items in-game are not properly indexed. The existing implementation exists in multiple applications. Because it is not a solitary application it causes conflicts with its versions and the new system. It was found that due to this some items became unusable, or invisible. These phantom items were found to be associated not with the system but the player's character node. We’ll continue to sort through all the items with the testers in search of any that appear to be buggy in nature. From there we’ll trace, fix, and convert them to the new system.
BONES:
In more calcified news testing unearthed an interesting find. While investigating an item related bug we found the NPC character models have a few more bones than we expected. When we say bones what we are referring to is one of the basic building blocks of a character. Bones can be used on a character to mark a position for things such as Sound nodes, Particle nodes, weapons, and effects.
The existing character models have a bone count that exceeds 80. While it isn’t unheard of to use this many bones we’ll be reducing this number somewhere around 70. This will be implemented when we address the character models. You may be curious as to why we’d reduce the number. In our case, it is to improve performance. When you exceed 70 bones you can run into issues. These include issues we’ve seen present in The Repopulation. Listed below are examples.
BONE RELATED ISSUES:
- Items that seem to disappear.
- Offset Items
- Clipping
- Odd movements of body parts.
- Odd bends in body parts.
- Reduction in animation quality.
BONE USAGE AND LIST:
The usage of these excess bones increases draws and rendering times for players and NPCs. Listed below are some of the bones we will not be used in the updated models. These are examples of bones you wouldn’t typically see in a model, exceed the average number used, or are paired with bones where they typically wouldn’t be. There is one we aren’t quite certain the intended use of as well.
- 2 bones for eyes
* (Eyes-l, Eyes-r) - 2 bones for eyelids
* (Eyelids-l, Eyelids-r) - 6 bones for brows
* (Brows-l, Brows-l inner, Brows-l-outer, Brows-r, Brows-r inner, Brows-r-outer) - 6 bones for mouth
* (Mouth-r-Corner, Mouth-low-r, Mouth-top-l, Mouth-l-Corner, Mouth-low-l, Mouth-top-r) - 6 bones for forearms, this includes two elbows.
* (L-Forearm, L- ForeTwist, L- ForeTwist1, R-Forearm, R- ForeTwist, R- ForeTwist1) - 32 hand finger bones.
- 1 SpellChest bone
- 2 clavicle bones (on top of the chest+spine bones) Generally not needed with spine+chest
INTERNAL TESTING:
As you may have gathered from earlier in the article we are now in a phase where testing moves down the chain to the internal testers. Our QA members are currently testing all the inventory containers. Their focus is to identify all items that are broken due to there being no indexing, naming rules, or associations in the original systems.
As they find and document these items our engineer will continue to work to correct them. I’d like to thank all of them for their hard work and for supporting the game.
As we move closer to a patch date we will continue to keep you updated, and release an official patch article and build notes. As always we look forward to your feedback be it positive or other. We appreciate the continued support from our community and welcome those interested in our game to join us. You can find us in our Discord channel, and the main The Repopulation forums. Stay safe, and have a spooky Hallows eve.