We're sorry for such a long delay between updates. We've been making a lot of changes under the hood, getting the project more organized, and on the right path toward releasing out of early access. Overall you should notice much better performance in this update, as just about everything has been heavily optimized (still not perfect, but getting closer).
Let's go over some of the new features in this update!
Oculus Touch Support
Oculus Touch is now supported in Island 359. Forward facing and roomscale should both work fine with the inclusion of bump turns and reach assist (more details below).
AI System Overhaul
The entire AI system has been rebuilt from the ground-up to be more modular and expandable. This was a massive feat, and while it's still not 100% where I'd like it to be, it's a pretty awesome system. Dinos should be a little more predictable, clip into the player less, get stuck on things less, and generally feel a bit smarter. Raptors also have jump attacks now! What's most important is that it now has the "hooks" built in to easily expand their behaviors going forward.
One note on this - I still need to put "hearing" on the dinos and improve the stealth gameplay a bit more.
Menu System Overhaul
After playing some more recent VR games, we noticed most are using a "laser pointer" style of UI for their menus. We felt this was more comfortable than our system so we adapted. Instead of completely scrapping our physical button pressing, we kept that same functionality but also added the ability to select with the laser pointer as well. All menus by default will now be laser pointer style, but if you get close to the buttons you can still press them the old fashioned way.
We've also scrapped the "bubble" style buttons in favor of text boxes. We feel like this cleans up the look, but from a practical standpoint it also allows us to fit more buttons into an area. (The exception to this is the tutorial level, which still has the bubbles and in general needs an update pass, but that will come a bit later).
The Settings menu has been organized into categories that will allow us to easily extend and add options as they become necessary. It's now very simple to add more options and categories if we need to.
Automatic Settings Adjustment
This feature is flagged as experimental (the whole game should be LOLOL) but we'd like your feedback on whether this feature is working appropriately for you. We are reading your graphics card and choosing a default quality level based on it. Ideally a 970 should do OK on low, and a 1080ti should be good on epic
PLEASE LET US KNOW if you think these auto-settings work well for your graphics card or if you have even more room for upping the resolution/SS in the settings and we can change that to be more accurate. Make sure to leave your hardware stats (at the very least your graphics card) when you post.
Reach Assist now Available
We added this feature for Touch, but decided to also make it available for Vive as well since it's a nice accessibility feature. We may make bump turns available on Vive as well if there's a demand for it.
Run Toggle
For those of you who prefer to use the trackpad locomotion, we’ve added an option to the controls settings to either toggle run or press/hold to run. This was mostly for Touch b/c it was much harder to hold the Touch joystick down to run than it is the Vive touchpad.
Also cleaned up the “hack” you could do with sprinting while trackpad running and extending your stamina by a lot. Now it’s one or the other and stamina drains equally from both.
Performance improvements
We updated the project to Unreal 4.15.1, and somewhere along the line we appear to have lost a good deal of our performance overhead. I'm still not sure what caused it, but we've spent an insane amount of time trying to get the performance as close to a solid 90fps on 970s as possible (which is always the goal, but we're actually almost there). Working without reprojection on has been a big help. If you use async repro you should have a great experience. Right now it seems that the AI are the biggest problem for performance, but we're discovering new tricks to get their performance cost down as well.
There are also a couple random hitches that are likely CPU related, but seem to only occur in the build, which are difficult to diagnose (and therefore fix), but we’re looking into those as well.
Less Fog & Art Pass on the Jungle Environment
While still probably not final, it’s a much prettier game now, with less fog overall and longer viewing distances, more natural-looking foliage growth, and some extra set-dressing. I still want an actual environment artist to take a crack at the levels someday, but we’ll see how things go. It should feel like a whole new jungle so get out there and explore it!
Before/After
Loot Drops Mission Added to Beach
We added a somewhat simplified loot drops mission to the beach map. Improvements will come to this mission later on, but for now hopefully it's a fun change of pace for the loot drops style mission. I imagine this mission will get more fun when more dinos are added.
MORE TREX
With the AI overhaul came a lot of improvements for Mr. Rex, and we're pretty confident he'll be ok out in the wild. Look for him as you reach higher levels of loot drops and big hunt. We still need to add his boss fight to the other Arcade levels as well (only in the Valley so far).
Other Things We've Been Doing
- Fixed up the dinosaurs materials and removed the annoying shimmering effect they had
- Built the functionality of a global inventory saving system to allow you to have a personal "armory" in a future update and take your favorite customized guns into battle with you
- Got a good start on the 4km² survival mode map. This map feels huge in VR, but will take some time to art up. I've got it "natured" about 80%, and then we'll need to go through and add some civilization to it.
- Developing full-body tracking tech for use with HTC's Trackers. This will hopefully result in torsos with arms and actual ammo vests for the final version of the game if you don't have any trackers. If you have one tracker, put it on your hips and we will get be able to track your torso better. If you have two, put them on your feet and we will approximate your hips and give you a full body avatar, and with three trackers place two on your feet and one on your hips for the best looking full body "virtual self!"
WHAT'S NEXT???
We feel that under the hood, Island 359 is in a good place to make a sprint toward launching out of early access. The coming months will be all about creating as much content as we can. Getting more dinosaurs in the game is first on my list, while Steve is heading up the full-body tracking tech. After that, it’s finishing the Arcade modes/Level-Up/Progression systems, and any other big ticket game mechanics, and then finishing Survival Mode.With the inclusion of new dinos, the survival mode, and polish to arcade mode, we hope to to launch the game out of early access in the next couple months.
Enjoy the update and please report any bugs you encounter to the bug reports forum.