Vapourware Sui Generis + Exanima Early Access

[Technomancer]

11/10/21

We're still mostly working on tournaments, but also a few other features and mechanics, as well just fixing and polishing some things for the release.

Something we wanted for tournaments is better equipped opponents. The variety and randomness of equipment worn by NPCs in arena is fine, but in tournaments you're up against the best, they should be able to afford basic equipment and choose it intelligently. We've made a smarter outfit builder and included another useful feature: the outfit can follow a predefined colour scheme with colours clearly contrasted on different body parts. Each company competing in the tournament will have its recognisable theme.

A feature we've put work into already and hope to introduce soon is dyes. We did get a bit stuck on how to represent these visually as items, we tried some shader tricks before to colour the bottles, but it wasn't very convincing. We had another go at this, aiming for something more realistic and versatile that we can also use for alchemy and general world building. With the new effect we can put varying amounts of different looking liquid in any glass container. It looks quite good and interacts well with the physics.


The bottling

A liquid in glass effect that we implemented for dyes, but also alchemy and other future features. It can do translucent or opaque liquids at various levels and interacts nicely with the physics.


There's a few other arena features in the works, mostly core but simple changes that could have quite an impact, as well as better support future additions. But more on that later.


Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

18/10/21

The tournament system is just about done, just a few details left to wrap up. The mechanics of the tournament system are quite complex, you enter fighters up to a week in advance, choose weapons for specific rounds, rival companies and fighters compete with or without you, results are tracked, there's multiple reward tiers and so on. Keeping things quick and intuitive was quite tricky. There's also some other features we're working into this related to the passage of time, economy and company management.

Last week we mentioned some new NPC outfit generation for tournaments, but there's quite a lot more to it. We've been building towards this with the new procedural itemisation, smarter and more powerful outfit and item generation is a useful world building tool, it's useful for AI in various ways, but we've also been looking at using it for more randomisation in story. The basic idea here is that some special encounters in story would be recognisable characters with a theme, yet have randomised items. These currently represent some static gear upgrades, so this would make both the encounters themselves and other items more interesting.

As we near the big release and test things we've also been looking at some general quality of life stuff, fixes, core gameplay issues and performance for some systems. There's some sticky pathfinding we're fixing and we discovered a foot collision issue which can cause characters to drag their feet or even stumble on uneven terrain. We have a big list of QoL stuff which we think is really important, but right now we're looking at some of the common things that can cause a bit of frustration.

All that aside, we're just integrating and finalising some new assets and content, there's new arenas, updated environments, new items, some more procedural weapons, new or remastered music tracks and so on. At this point we've been through quite a lot of general changes and fixes, and the tournament rewards have been split with the season system, so we're thinking of doing one last beta branch update to test everything again before the full update with all of the content.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

25/10/21

Madoc had some things to do this week so we did fall a bit behind compared to where we hoped to be this week, but still things are getting done. We fixed our issues with character ground collisions and pathfinding that we mentioned last week, we've made progress on some other QoL stuff, but the main thing we were hoping to improve was object movement and some tricky issues remain which would take some time to resolve.

One of the things that was left to do for tournaments was a system for resolving combats happening elsewhere or in the background. Tournaments have lots of fighters competing in multiple events with often multiple rounds and we need to know who won what, how much damage they took and so on. Eventually we'd like to make all arena fighters persistent characters so this functionality will be essential there too, and has other applications as the scope of the game grows in general.

We've completed the last procedural weapons for the main release, which should now cover every weapon in arena except flails which need some extra features in the system. We've also made some general improvements and fixes to the procedural weapon system and adjustments to individual weapons.

Hopefully we'll be able to wrap things up for the last beta release some time this week so we can get a final round of testing done, and after that there really isn't much left for the complete main branch release.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[mkultra]

I'm always exactly on the verge of installing this, but then i see another update is in process...

3 years later.....

 

[Technomancer]

We are going to do a lot of cool stuff with clothing, promise. But before we really do much, we want to do some work on the clothing systems. We got some nice manly tights incoming.

 

[Technomancer]

1/11/21

Madoc is still dealing with some personal stuff so we're still a little behind. We are very close, but we did want to get the core tournament and some other mechanics in at once so we can test and get feedback with the proper context.

One thing we wanted to do before the release is solve some performance issues with the GI on many low and a mid-range systems, especially in large open spaces. One of the new arenas also promises to be the most demanding yet. We were planning to introduce a low resolution GI mode, but a new promising idea came up involving dynamic updates based on visible space. We've implemented this now and it works really well, without sacrificing quality. This should make a huge difference for those low end systems, but we've even measured improvements on the high end and it just solves the problem for any scale of environments going forward.

Hope everyone had a spooktacular Halloween!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

8/11/21

Today Madoc's life returns to relative normality and we should be able to wrap up this beta update soon.

Something we've been trying to complete for this testing release, but we might just add in another smaller update shortly after, is a new expanded management screen to support some new and future features. This includes a daily company report, results, information about earnings and costs, when the tournament starts and just any events. In future this would include things like traveling merchants and caravans. This would also bring the introduction of upkeep, having to pay wages to your roster, and a choice for how many matches to participate in a day, balancing costs against earnings and the passage of time.

There's been a few general improvements and fixes, as well as finally the reintroduction of facial hair. The beards look a lot better, and this is now designed to easily support more styles, with short ones being easy to add, while also providing a good graphical blending layer for eventual longer beards.


Beards are back and better
Finally got facial hair back in the new graphics engine. It looks and colours better, and we've built support to easily add more styles.


As this update is nearly complete and we're not developing or designing anything new for it, our attention has been directed towards what will come after it. There's a lot here, but rather than major development goals they are small but important gameplay and quality of life improvements. We want to add the remaining skills, complete the thaumaturgy mechanics, various additions and improvements to combat, and lots of other mechanics to enrich and enhance build diversity and gameplay.
That's it for now, hopefully you'll hear from us again very shortly with some release notes.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[agris]

Have they discussed their plans to accurately model the growth of facial hair as time passes and in response to stressful events? I hope they're accounting for the fact that different genetics can give rise to different hair textures, colors, and densities.

 

[Technomancer]

15/11/21

We're just about ready to release the tournament update, there was a surprising amount of added complexity to the arena and general game systems to accomodate it all, but we've been testing it internally and things are looking good. We're basically just adding in all the company outfits and some of the new weapons at this point.

We've been getting through more fixes and QoL improvements, these are a growing priority now and we try to get through them inbetween other things. One of the things we improved is dragging bodies, and for the first time we managed to get some promising results for dragging any larger object that you can't just lift up. This would be quite an important feature that we've had difficulty introducing so far, so hopefully we can add it soon. This release will include the new facial hair, with 6 different styles to choose from.

We're hoping to get this beta update out sometime tomorrow, or very soon after.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

Exanima 0.8.2.7 - Beta Branch


This should be the last significant update to the beta branch before we move everything over to the main branch again. This is now basically feature complete, the arena tournament system is introduced, the conversion to procedural weapons is as thorough as it needs to be, facial hair works and is improved and there's a host of other improvements and fixes.

Changelog for version 0.8.2.7:

• Arena tournament system introduced (see details below)
  
  
• New procedural weapons:
  • One handed mallet
    
    
  • Two handed mallet
    
    
  • Maul
    
    
  • Voulge
    
    
  • Pitchfork
    
    
  • Bar mace
  
  
• Facial hair is reintroduced and improved
  
  
• Six different facial hairstyles (only short styles for now)
  
  
• Significant global illumination performance improvements
  
  
• Improved ground-foot interaction for smoother movement and less stumbling
  
  
• Improved procedural weapon deformations
  
  
• Improved effect of weapon deformations on stats
  
  
• Cursor colours and cursor size can now be changed in the ini file
  
  
• Improved generated character outfits
  
  
• Improved drag interaction (bodies)
  
  
• Fixed incorrect procedural weapon stats in story
  
  
• Various pathfinding fixes
  
  
• Fixed incorrect framerate limit behaviour
  
  
• Tokens now work even while stored in containers
  
  
• Fixed death of arena characters causing death or injury of others in roster
  
  
• Fixed bugged items on reserve opponents after they win a round
  
  
• Fixed weapons dropped by characters not having collision sounds
  
  
• Some combat motion adjustments
  
  
• Numerous small fixes and tweaks

TOURNAMENTS

Tournaments are here, or at least mostly. While in beta we will not be introducing the season rewards (tournament armour sets) and other new content such as new arenas, new music and other new items.

In tournaments you will be competing in a series of 6 events with escalating ranks against other fighting companies. You must win at least 3 events and more than any other company to claim the tournament prize. All fighters in tournaments must be of master rank. NPC opponents in tournaments are better equipped than typical arena opponents and will wear contrasting colours to represent their company.

Some tournament matches will require using specific weapon types. You will be able to select a weapon for the event from the match board. You are given 6 days in advance to prepare for the tournament and enter your fighters. On tournament day you will no longer be able to enter fighters or change their weapons. If you do not meet the requirements you are disqualified from the event. A day passes each time you participate in a match, though this is due to change in future updates.


INI CUSTOMISATION OF CURSOR COLOUR AND SIZE

As we're not quite ready yet to overhaul the settings screen with many new options, but we have implemented all the functionality to change cursor colours and scale, and this is a frequently request feature, we've added the possibility to change these with the ini file.

Here's an example that changes the non combat cursor to ivory, the combat cursor to orange and makes cursors 50% larger:

CursorInt = ffeeddff
CursorCom = ffb050ff
CursorSize = 150

The size is a percentage value, the colours are RGBA hex codes, where the final 2 digits represent alpha. If you're not familiar with hex colours you can use an online colour picker like this one here:

https://rgbacolorpicker.com/hex-color-picker

You can find the Exanima.ini file in %APPDATA%\Exanima (paste this into the run box or file explorer address bar).


Thanks and have fun,

Bare Mettle

 

[Smashing Axe]

Thank god they implemented new facial hair, the game is totally unplayable without it. Hopefully they haven't neglected to include real time beard growth mechanics as well, otherwise my sense of realism will be utterly destroyed.

 

[AdolfSatan]

I need to know that if I remove all headgear and zoom 5x of what's actually usable for gameplay into the model, I'm gonna see properly designed follicles. Thanks, Madoc! I'm so glad he isn't wasting time on useless shit like fixing the UI.

 

[Technomancer]

22/11/21

We released the tournament beta update this week, which included a lot of changes, and thanks to our top notch Discord community we were able to quickly fix issues. Things are looking good with only some small additions left now for the final main branch release.

We're really happy with tournaments, they can be fairly challenging even for experienced players, they added much more structure to arena, with goals and an end-game. There's actual reasons to build up your roster and arsenal and new ways to acquire high end items, especially once the real rewards (the armour sets) are added.

We've also made some important performance improvements and we've been working on compatibility with some GPU drivers, particularly on Linux.

We're going to be mostly just adding in the new arena content now, which is done, but needs a final quality control pass. There are a few more nice features we'd like to introduce that are at various stages of completion, but we anyway plan to do another smaller update soon after the main branch release.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

When this game kickstarted, Windows 8 had been released for one month. Windows 11 has now been released as of a month ago. We should create a betting pool on what Windows version will be out when this game is released.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

When this game kickstarted, Windows 8 had been released for one month. Windows 11 has now been released as of a month ago. We should create a betting pool on what Windows version will be out when this game is released.

14

 

[axx]

They are persistent, I'll give 'em that.

 

[Technomancer]

29/11/21

There's quite a few new items in this next release, we've been fixing issues with them and doing some quality control. Unfortunately this can be an extremely time consuming and tedious process. The various and varied layered armour, shared procedural texturing, morphing etc. leads to many conflicts and problems that need to be found and resolved. Items need many combination variants to interact properly. Every little fix and adjustment requires the items to be baked, rigged and skinned all over again, in-world and icon versions of the item need to be created and all sorts. Of course Zeth's latest complex armour designs also had us scratching our heads trying to figure out how to make them work at all.

This is a horribly cumbersome process and always a daunting task. For a long time now we've been discussing ways to streamline this process and also solve some of our most common problems. We recently decided this would be our #1 priority once we get this update out, as we'd also like to update many older character assets and add more clothing. However, with various items being worked on right now and a certain amount of groundwork done in node based mesh tools for creating procedural weapons, Madoc decided it was time to do something.

Just a few days later and we have a new workflow based on our node tools, our skinning has some notable improvements and is far easier to work with and some problematic common cases have good reliable solutions. Now with a bit of prep work the entire bake, rig, skin and export complete assets process is accomplished with just a couple of clicks. Making changes and adjustments is so easy that we can immediately test them as we do them. For some items we can even generate the standalone objects, with better results than we could get doing it by hand. This is a massive improvement to our workflow that saves us so much time and energy.

There are some more specific things we will want to look at when we revisit our character assets, but anything we do with characters, clothing, armour or creatures is greatly simplified already. This is a very exciting development for us.

While the most important thing, it's not the only thing we had time for this week, we've made progress on the few remaining arena features we want in this release, a bunch of the new content is properly finalised and we're getting very close to being able to finally release it all on the main branch.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

Exanima 0.8.2.8 - Beta Branch

We've managed to implement quite a few additional arena features that we weren't sure would make it into the first main branch release. These are things that have quite an impact on progression and balance for arena, so we decided to do one last beta update to get your thoughts and feedback early. So yeah, let us know what you think of the changes.


Changelog for version 0.8.2.8:

• New company management screen
  
  • Interactive daily logs and notifications (double click items)
    
    
  • Daily financials
    
    
  • Increased roster size of special characters
    
    
  • More in future...
  
  
• New physician hired NPC
  
  
• New trainer hired NPC
  
  
• Daily upkeep cost introduced
  
  
• Match rewards increased by ~50%
  
  
• You can now do up to 3 matches per day
  
  
• Combat AI improvements
  
  
• New pole and one handed sickle weapons
  
  
• Various UI improvements
  
  
• Fixed various forfeit exploits
  
  
• Replaced all practice arena starting weapons with non randomised new weapons
  
  
• Removed random quality and condition from recruitment weapons
  
  
• Special matches now persist across sessions
  
  
• Fixed weapons acquired during eliminations not working correctly
  
  
• Fixed incorrectly low experience awarded for some new match types
  
  
• Fixed auto resolve sometimes deciding you won after forfeiting
  
  
• Numerous small improvements and fixes

NEW MANAGEMENT SCREEN

The new management screen provides a solution to various problems. We wanted to see results, information and receive notifications, with future special events in mind, without this being intrusive. This will also be extended with more features such a records for your company and possibly further management features.

You can double click most notifications to link directly to the relevant place to take action.


UPKEEP AND DAYS

Daily upkeep is now a real thing, with fighters costing more as they rank up and special hires having their own costs. Match prizes have been increased substantially, and over all making money should be a lot easier. There is also a massively increased starting capital.

You can now choose to do from 1 to 3 matches per day. This allows some control over the passage of time versus money earned, and makes low income matches more economically viable. You can also do multiple specials available that day if you like them.


TRAINER AND PHYSICIANS

Trainers significantly increase experience earned from matches, and can also independently teach the skill techniques they know to fighters in your roster each day. Note that this only works if your fighters are currently training one of those techniques. Different trainers come a varying amount of different techniques, so choose them carefully.

Physicians significantly increase the rate at which your fighters heal each day. Importantly they can also save fighters who would have been killed in match as long as the injuries aren't so serious that it was impossible.



Thanks and have fun,

Bare Mettle

 

[Technomancer]

A bit buggy right now. You better wait for a few days. Big patch next week that will move us out of beta. Arena will have new exciting stuff and all arena saves will be wiped.

Spoiler

 

[Technomancer]

6/12/21

We did one final beta update just yesterday which introduced quite a few new arena features, improvements and fixes. This includes a new management screen with more information and some nice quality of life features, new physician and trainer NPCs, the upkeep system and various changes. We weren't sure we'd get all these changes in for the main branch, but here they are and we can get some feedback and testing over the next few days while we wrap up the main branch release.

The current beta is pretty much what will be on the main branch now besides some new content and season rewards. We're adding in the last few bits of content, and we need to write release notes that cover a huge amount of stuff, but hopefully we can manage all this by the end of the week.

Soon we can start talking about what's next, but for now with this release imminent that's all.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[agris]

so this early access isn't really committed to being a game with a story, it's more like a revenue stream that the team needs to develop core pieces of a larger game? i.e. the team feels no compulsion to deliver a full game out of this EA thing, it just exists to keep them afloat developing subsystems that can be used for the actual game they want to make?

 

[Lyre Mors]

so this early access isn't really committed to being a game with a story, it's more like a revenue stream that the team needs to develop core pieces of a larger game? i.e. the team feels no compulsion to deliver a full game out of this EA thing, it just exists to keep them afloat developing subsystems that can be used for the actual game they want to make?

Yes, we payed for years of prototype development and an arena game.

Geez, what's the problem? Expecting an actual full campaign in 2016-2021? GET REAL DUDE.

 

[JarlFrank]

Have they discussed their plans to accurately model the growth of facial hair as time passes and in response to stressful events? I hope they're accounting for the fact that different genetics can give rise to different hair textures, colors, and densities.

I... I would honestly like them to do such a thing.

Simulationism to the finest detail ftw!

 

[Technomancer]

so this early access isn't really committed to being a game with a story, it's more like a revenue stream that the team needs to develop core pieces of a larger game? i.e. the team feels no compulsion to deliver a full game out of this EA thing, it just exists to keep them afloat developing subsystems that can be used for the actual game they want to make?

With the arena done production is switching to story content and 1.0 release. Next level is done but needs new assets. Madoc just shared a simplified "roadmap" on discord:

our roadmap for 1.0 now is basically force, ranged, a few bits and bobs and the rest is just content
this next one hopefully won't take too long, the new map just needs some more props at this point, all the environment is done (and it's quite a complex one)
0.9 force thaum + new area
0.95 extra role stuff + new area
1.0 ranged combat + final area

By bits and bobs he means misc stuff like monster-specific attack animations, alchemy system, procedural story underworld weapons and final missing weapon types like glaives, partisans, awl pikes, war scythes, spetums and two handed flails.

 

[Alienman]

Have they discussed their plans to accurately model the growth of facial hair as time passes and in response to stressful events? I hope they're accounting for the fact that different genetics can give rise to different hair textures, colors, and densities.

I... I would honestly like them to do such a thing.

Simulationism to the finest detail ftw!

Only if they do pubes too