Hi everyone!
We just wanted to give you an update on where things are at with Island 359’s development since we’ve been a little quiet lately.
We’re still hard at work, but the new year has brought a lot of opportunities for CloudGate and we’re doing our best to manage 359’s production while also following up with these possible leads.
Steve has been exploring full-body awareness in VR using lots of Vive controllers (and a second HMD plugged in to track them).
First Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYCRDZJkSRk
Second Experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNNR_Ab15Bs
The implementation is still in the prototype phase, but we’re laying the groundwork for full-body avatars in 359 when the Vive trackers become available to the public in Q2 later this year. We’re designing the system to take advantage of the trackers if you have them, but also not be dependent on them. Ideally, you will still see your arms/torso without feet trackers (we’ll also be looking into chest holsters with this), if you only have feet trackers we will track your full body and try to solve your hips position, but if you also have a hips tracker, we’ll use that as well for the most robust solve possible. This is still a ways off from being shippable, but since we’re all waiting for the hardware anyway, by the time the trackers are out we should have an amazing full-body rig ready for you.
I’m presently a couple weeks into a major AI overhaul for the dinosaurs, it’s been a significant undertaking (and I promised myself I wouldn’t rip the game apart like this again but too late), but it’s becoming a really elegant and expandable system that will hopefully allow us to create more intelligent AI for 359 and future games. In addition to being a single system applicable to all AI (and allowing changes/features to get propagated to all dinos), I’ve tried to make the targeting more generic and allow for AI to interact with each other in various ways. Examples of this include more intelligent raptor communication and predators threatening/attacking prey.
We’ve also got jumping attacks working for raptors now, which is pretty intense. I’m still figuring out solutions for letting raptors attack you when you’re elevated and also need to get to jump onto objects and climb the towers, but this system should make that easier.
Figuring out behaviors and state changes based on the navigation system status has been a huge challenge but it's paying off and a ton of the old issues we were seeing are already resolved.
I have a few dinosaurs in my queue to put in the game, which will add a ton of variety, but I need to finish the AI system first. As soon as the new AI at LEAST reliably back to what is currently in the game, we will probably roll that out and then expand the system with new features in mini-updates/patches.
We’re also in the process of getting an Oculus Touch build working. Thanks to everyone volunteering to test. We’ll let you know when this is ready to go.
We appreciate your patience!