Hey Exanimates,
There's a lot of different things in motion at the moment, but mainly we're trying to get the new AI and role features ready and in a playable state. We're past design and feature additions, so it's mostly technical implementation details now, though lots of things do branch out into new aspects of AI as we broaden what it can do. The most laborious part has been AI understanding what things are and interacting with them, there's a lot of nuance to every decision and doing things that only the player could do before, and do it co-operatively. There's some technical challenges here and things that touch on various core engine functionality, some of which also represent building blocks for eventual multiplayer features and simulating the running of a larger scale world. We're trying to be very thorough and get everything to that point where we can build features in a content driven-way, that is it becomes mostly a matter of designing new role based interactions and dialogue using our tools rather building on engine functionality. To this end, we are also already writing new dialogue and revisiting a lot of the existing dialogue.
We have also been doing more work on the apparel and character model systems. Besides replacing various core apparel items with much better ones, we found that though we tried to make the new system backwards compatible, in some ways it ultimately wasn't. This means there's a few more items we need to at least adapt to the new system, and one more step we need to take now towards our "human 2.0". The issue is with removing parts of character models that are hidden by layers of apparel and clothing above them. The very freeform and layered armour system means there can be 5 or more layers of 3D model stacked on top of each other. With character models being particularly expensive, this is not good for performance, especially as we're working towards increasing character density in both future and current content.
It became obvious pretty quickly that efficiently removing parts of models with all the different layers and shapes, the chain of dependencies between visible parts that need to match, the different "races", and respecting the countless shape variations that need to be applied for layered items, was a very complex problem. Indeed we did have some version of this before which was not efficient and prone to many issues. We're no strangers to complex systems, but the problem isn't just the complexity of it, but also making it easy to work with despite it. This apparel system overhaul was not just about improvements and fixes, but most importantly about greatly streamlining the workflow which was very difficult and confusing. It took some figuring out, but again we managed to come up with something which works very well and simplifies the work even further.
Both the AI and role systems and the apparel updates need to be ready before we can begin playtesting, we're getting through this at a good pace, and fortunately updating apparel is now pretty quick with our new methods, but there is still some work to do. We'll be adding more role interactions throughout testing and once we have a clearer idea of how everything is working and get some feedback we can see what else we might be able to squeeze into the big content update. For now we're keeping our options open while we continue to work on a few different things.
Best,
Bare Mettle