VITA: Observa.Momento.Adservo. · published
Hi everyone,
This update is a more technical look at some of the work happening inside VITA.
Recently, I’ve been concentrating on the systems that connect exploration, wildlife, scanning, menus, animation, and the VITA OS. Some of this work is immediately visible in the screenshots. Some of it lives beneath the surface, where it determines whether everything continues behaving properly as the game grows.
As always, these are development captures. You may see unfinished presentation, diagnostic information, or systems that are still being tested and refined.
The VITA OS is becoming more than a menu layered over the game. I’m developing it as part of the machine itself: a way for VITA to interpret the environment, report its own condition, and communicate information without breaking the feeling of being out in the field.
That includes systems for presenting things such as thermal pressure, terrain load, machine condition, scan modes, contextual guidance, and queued system notices.
A large part of this work is deciding how much information should be visible at once. I want the interface to feel precise and useful without filling the entire screen with permanent meters and icons. Information should appear because it matters, remain readable while the world is moving behind it, and then get out of the way!
[Functional UI - Outpost Menu - Overview screen]
[Functional UI - Outpost Menu - Customization Screen]
One of the larger technical projects underway is a new modular animation-layering system for wildlife.
Previously, an animal’s locomotion, actions, awareness, and smaller movements could become too tightly connected inside a single animation path. The new architecture separates those responsibilities into layers and semantic channels.
At a high level, the system can resolve:
Base locomotion such as idle, walk, trot, and run.
Full-body actions such as feeding, drinking, lying down, sleeping, and getting back up.
Awareness and posture responses.
Smaller additive movements and glances.
Appendage and breathing motion.
Optional terrain and foot-placement corrections.
The important part is that these layers remain presentation. The animal’s brain decides what it intends to do, the movement system remains responsible for where the animal actually goes, and one animation driver translates that information into the final pose.
The first major production target for this work is the White Tail Deer Doe. Its core locomotion, posture and action layer, awareness behavior, smaller cosmetic layers, appendage movement, and breathing system have all been brought through different stages of implementation and testing. This is also laying the foundation for later fauna families without forcing every species into exactly the same movement model.
VITA contains a lot of connected systems. Wildlife animation affects observation. Observation affects scanning and the database. The database connects to menus and progression. Menus have to survive save/load and travel. All of it has to communicate through an interface that still feels like it belongs to one peculiar machine.
That means some development periods are less about adding another isolated feature and more about making the existing pieces agree with each other.
The recent work has been about establishing those foundations:
More modular and species-aware fauna animation.
Better-defined action, awareness, and locomotion layers.
Continued foot-placement and terrain-response testing.
Clearer HUD and VITA OS presentation.
More reliable cursorless navigation and input routing.
Better internal tools for validating how these systems are connected.
There is still tuning, integration, and Play Mode testing ahead. In particular, foot placement and some of the more advanced wildlife transitions are still active development areas rather than finished production features.
Thank you for continuing to follow the project. I’ll keep sharing both the visible additions and some of the technical work that makes those additions possible.
— Blake
Collaboration Games