Vapourware Sui Generis + Exanima Early Access

[Gumsmith]

Beta got updated.

If I'm not mistaken the polearms do seem to be behaving better. Easier to plant the blade into someone's head rather than whiffing over it.

Off the top of my head:

Exanima 0.8.3p Beta

-Controller support

-Controller bindings for all gameplay functionality

-New aim control mode for combat targeting

-New camera controls optimised for controllers

-Several new input mechanics optimised for controllers

-Dilated interface and icon hitboxes

-Partial (WIP) interface controls

-You can now select a power to use with a single key press

-Improved greatsword handling

-Characters control swing height to avoid swinging to ground or over opponents

-Improved how characters position feet near obstacles

-Added smart selection for small world objects near cursor

-Fixed new global experience not applying on continue

-Fixed numerous input system quirks

 

[Zariusz]

I wonder what number will next update have, are we finally going over 0.8 or maybe some 0.8.6 gay shit

 

[Gumsmith]

Definitely closer to the latter than the former, too many bits and pieces floating around that need to get put in first.

 

[Technomancer]

14/2/22

We just updated the beta branch with swing height limits, greatsword improvements, the new thaumaturgy controls, some other gameplay and QoL tweaks and controller support. While working on controller support we discovered a number of input system quirks and made various general improvements. We're still tweaking a couple of things, but this should be on the main branch soon too.

Controller support still needs a couple of additions and tweaks, particularly for UI navigation, but was already well received. It makes for a very different, but surprisingly fun gameplay experience.

The Steam Deck release is imminent and there's a handful of specific things we still want to do for it, but we're mostly done there too. Our next priority is dyes and weapon flipping, the latter comes with a bunch of updates to how weapons are described in game which is the first step towards more functionality and various improvements to mechanics.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

21/2/22

Madoc's been wrapping up Steam Deck and controller support. Mostly this was making all UIs easy to use with a controller, which with the number of complex and totally different UIs the game has, turned out to be quite a lot of work. It certainly makes the whole controller experience a lot smoother and more comfortable though.

Something we did this week is develop a new tone mapper. Tone mapping is what takes the pure mathematical colour output of a renderer and remaps those colours on to your monitor in a way that usually tries to mimic how that image would look on film or to your eyes. How this is done exactly can drastically change the look and mood of an image. We had a couple of reasons to do this, we wanted to improve and potentially control how things look across very different environments and we wanted to add a user brightness / gamma control that won't quite completely ruin the game's graphics. This will be included in an overhauled options screen.

The team is busy making content, there are some nice additions coming to arena soon, new armour sets, new weapons, new arenas, and of course a big story update in the works that includes not only a large new area to explore but various other additions and updates to existing content.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Nice controller support, bro. Now consoles can play vaporware, too.

 

[Technomancer]

28/2/22

We finally finished adapting Exanima for the Steam Deck. We definitely spent a bit longer on this than we thought we would, but as you know when we do something we like to do it properly. We really think the Steam Deck could be an important development of PC gaming, and for Linux too. Making the game's complex UIs and systems work well in this format without dumbing anything down was an interesting challenge, and we felt we had to prove something here. This is also a good opportunity to flex just how incredibly well optimized Exanima is.

We already had a pretty good controller setup for gameplay at this point, though there's potentially improvements we can make down the line. Since then we've put some serious work into user interface. If you're not a developer this might seem quite simple, but rich and complete UI systems become incredibly complex mechanically. Every UI can now be navigated and used with the controller and this complements and synergizes with cursor interaction instead of conflicting with it.

The latest version which includes full Steam Deck and controller support should go live today, and now we can fully focus on other things again. We've laid down the groundwork for a whole lot of changes to weapons, we want to migrate everyone's saves to this new "weapons platform" as soon as possible, then we can incrementally introduce and test changes and new features. Flipping (some) weapons and support for us to do more with and expand procedural weapons will be the first, but there's a lot of mechanical and other changes that we're eager to play around with.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

7/3/22

We've been building the new weapon format and trying to cover everything we might need it to do. This potentially includes quite a lot of things affecting not only itemisation, but combat and animations, world building and more. These are not all features we're going to implement now, but in order to support them we need to to have a good idea of what they are and how they will work.

By now you probably know about planned grip changes and weapon flipping. This means things like using a longsword one handed, or holding a poleaxe with a wider grip, or flipping it around so you hit with the hammer or spike on the back of the head instead of the axe blade. Not all weapons can be used with different grips or flipped, some can do both. This means introducing some totally new combat motions, and we'll probably introduce new grips incrementally. A somewhat related change is the introduction of bashes and some related mechanics, holding alternate attack will be used not only for thrusting, but also bashing with the right mouse button. For longer swords and some other weapons this will result in a "half sword" grip while held, also changing how you defend.

There are quite a lot of core weapon mechanics that we also want expand and improve. Something we definitely want to do is have more precise and consistent "damage zones" for weapons, the new component assembled weapon system gives us a lot to work with here. We still want it to be fairly forgiving, but improved. We also want to give different parts of weapons different impact sounds for better feedback and immersion. We also would like to model slash damage as hewing (think axe) and cutting (think sword), to improve it mechanically. The upcoming Draw skill technique also deals specifically with cutting, or for other weapon types hooking, which needs its own weapon properties and mechanics. Another thing we're looking at is improving Remise, possibly with new weapon properties defining how likely a weapon is to bind on impact or glance off to allow a remise.

With the introduction of procedural weapons and orbs we wanted weapons you find to feel more special, and to have an investment mechanic for your gear. Feeling like your items are special and something you've worked towards is one of our favourite aspects of RPGs. Procedural weapons are great, and they still have a lot more to offer, but while the orbs are a nice addition, we don't feel we're there yet. We're looking at ways to further enhance or customise your items to make it feel more meaningful. We're also looking at more special abilities, mechanics for socketed items that tie into customisation and sets or pairings. We always try to approach these things as versatile systems with a greater scope.

With procedural weapons there's some things to finalise. One of the key changes is making it so that individual weapons store information about how they were generated. This allows us to not only generate random weapons, but also design specific weapons by hand, as well as create similar weapons that might have been mass produced or are part of an outfit, but still vary a little. By extension this allows us to keep expanding the weapon factories by adding new components without compromising existing weapons that players own. We want to add more materials and more randomisation of materials, as well as the ability for players to apply dyes and other agents to weapon parts.

We also want to add more detailed and varied descriptions for procedural items, possibly describing notable traits and maker's marks. On that topic, we want to use the procedural item system to give specific smiths their own styles and regional trends.

There's a lot to cover here, but we think we've gone into enough depth with everything to commit to something. Our goal is ultimately to have the support for these features in place so that we can develop them without breaking compatibility with existing content and save games.


Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

Looks like weapons flip feature is coming very soon.

 

[gurugeorge]

Looks like weapons flip feature is coming very soon.

Now that actually looks quite snazzy and desirable

 

[agris]

the PC's left pinky is clipping through the handle.

the only reasonable thing to expect is that the game will be delayed for another 7 months to ensure that the hand's 27 bones, 34 muscles and over 100 ligaments and tendons are properly simulated.

 

[Technomancer]

14/3/22

We've implemented weapon flipping and a number of related mechanics that are also needed for grip changes. You can flip a weapon around at any moment with a key press, the weapon will then remain flipped in that equipment slot. There's some new toggles in weapon description windows that allow you to view the stats for when the weapon is flipped or held in an alternate grip.

Because we're introducing visible and functional stats for the reverse side of a weapon we're currently focusing on the new mechanics for weapons stats and damage. We considered a lot of approaches here as it gets quite complicated with more detailed interactions for the different features of weapons and upcoming mechanics like the draw skill, hooking and bashing. Ultimately we settled for classifying weapon features in a way that allows us to implement and refine specific behaviours rather than just relying on lots of numbers. This also helps with AI understanding how weapons should be used.

In other news Exanima is now Steam Deck verified. We put a lot of effort into optimising controls, user interface and various other things for the Deck, so we're happy it was recognised.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

the PC's left pinky is clipping through the handle.

the only reasonable thing to expect is that the game will be delayed for another 7 months to ensure that the hand's 27 bones, 34 muscles and over 100 ligaments and tendons are properly simulated.

If only! Madoc pretty much ignores clipping issues for now

 

[ERYFKRAD]

the PC's left pinky is clipping through the handle.

the only reasonable thing to expect is that the game will be delayed for another 7 months to ensure that the hand's 27 bones, 34 muscles and over 100 ligaments and tendons are properly simulated.

If only! Madoc pretty much ignores clipping issues for now

That's rather sensible, surprisingly.

 

[Technomancer]

the PC's left pinky is clipping through the handle.

the only reasonable thing to expect is that the game will be delayed for another 7 months to ensure that the hand's 27 bones, 34 muscles and over 100 ligaments and tendons are properly simulated.

If only! Madoc pretty much ignores clipping issues for now

That's rather sensible, surprisingly.

Big coder guy thinks big. Rather than fixing them one by one he decided to do a "system rework" later.

 

[Technomancer]

21/3/22

We've finalised our new weapons format which includes lots of changes for weapon mechanics and procedural weapons. The most fundamental change is how weapon damage will be applied, this supports new and future mechanics like flips and grip changes and draw/hooking, but also just more accurate and realistic interactions for weapon impacts.

Here's a diagram of how the new system can split and identify which parts of a weapon do what. This should vary a lot from weapon to weapon, giving each one specific advantages and tradeoffs and producing more varied and realistic effects. We also want do some stuff with sound here.

Weapon Component Effects
New detailed weapon properties allow us to give each part of a weapon more unique functional roles, diversifying weapons and their behaviour with impacts more.


There's been a lot of changes to how we edit the attributes of weapons, and more importantly how "factories" generate procedural weapons. Besides supporting these new features, we've also added more specific properties for various components so that they can all have some effect. Different langets, hafts, guards, thrusting points etc. can actually change the stats and behaviour of a weapon rather than being mostly cosmetic. All these changes combined means weapons will have a lot more significant differences beyond quality and overall size and proportions.

The changes to procedural weapons also include us being able to design very specific procedural weapons in detail and have fine control over what properties are randomised. This means we can use the system to create unique examples or groups of similar weapons when that makes sense. Other changes include new design parameters which we can use to coordinate the selection of more ornate designs against simple and functional ones as well as some randomised material choices. We plan to expand our weapon factories with some fancier designs leveraging these features.

We should start patching all the content and factories to this new format now, and then roll out a new version to patch saved games. After that we can easily introduce more and more of the changes this all supports over time.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

This thing is alive still??? Meeeeeeeehhh...

 

[agris]

Imagine if this team and the Hellish Quart team combined their efforts. So much of SG’s autistic development seems like it’s applied to an isometric fever dream of HQ’s combat.

 

[Technomancer]

Imagine if this team and the Hellish Quart team combined their efforts. So much of SG’s autistic development seems like it’s applied to an isometric fever dream of HQ’s combat.

Nice. Someday someone will fuse this and Hellish Quart together and we'll never need another game again.

Great minds think alike, eh

 

[Technomancer]

28/3/22

We've switched over and converted everything to our new weapons format and implemented patching for saves. Now we'll be finalizing some of the new features and start testing them on the beta branch. There's a tonne of support for new features here, so we'll definitely be doing this incrementally.

We've also finally figured out what to do with the slash rework. The basic idea is that slash damage will take the form of "hewing" for more impactful blows, and "cutting" for sliding hits. These will scale differently with slash values and different types of impacts. A somewhat related change we're considering is to also redistribute some slash into crush for all axe type weapons. Beyond being more realistic, the new slash damage system should interact nicely with the Draw technique, which we've also had some new ideas for including interactions with Remise.

With access to this much more detailed weapon data we are considering a lot of applications in terms of more weapon specific motions, behaviors and interactions. We've got a lot of new motions to design for all the new grips and as this is based on many new weapon categories it makes sense to further diversify weapons in general.

With all this recent focus on combat and animation, Madoc couldn't help taking a new look at some core animation systems. There's always room for improvement here, and whenever we succeed in making general improvements it also makes authoring easier, with less time spent trying to manually correct quirks and just leading to better results. One of the main issues we deal with is characters looking too floppy or "springy", especially with snappy motions or violent impacts. We put some new ideas to the test and one of these seems to be working very well. It's (thankfully) not changing how characters behave, but it does make movements and impacts look more solid and realistic.

At this point, we feel like footwork is the weakest part of character motion, and we've identified a number of specific problems that often make leg movements look less than convincing and cause some odd issues. We've been aware of some of these for a good while, but we took a deeper dive and got a lot more specific. This isn't exactly a quick fix, we need to start from the bottom and work our way up as the dynamic balancer and leg movement are very complex, but with some clear goals now it's likely something we'll look at doing soon. Footwork isn't just important visually, but is central to gameplay, responsiveness and what we're able to do with the physics.

We definitely want to put a lid on major development of combat for a while, but these were some foundational changes that pave the road for a lot of things we need or want to do in future. Some of these will make an appearance on the beta branch very soon, and we can gradually introduce more and more as we finalize them.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

4/4/22

We've had a bit of a slow week as Madoc had some of his time taken up, but we have been making progress with updating weapon factories and combat mechanics for the new weapon system. As hinted at before we've introduced many new weapon classes with the intent that we can add more specialized motions for weapons, similarly to what we did for greatswords. This gets a bit more complicated however with different weapon combos and various grips for each weapon, so we're introducing more functionality to mix motion sets at runtime.

Something else we've been looking at is how to improve physics and AI performance to support new features and more active characters, and potentially general improvements to the physics depending on how much of an improvement we see. When we first implemented our physics engine we were targeting CPUs with very low core counts, but now the hardware landscape looks different. It's not always as simple as throwing more threads at the problem, as in some cases this has diminishing returns, but we think we've identified some strategies to gain some great benefits with little or no overhead. The main reason we're looking at this now is because of some planned improvements to path finding, some of the new content we're working on features more complex verticality, and this would also solve some existing problems.

We still had a few things to figure out with the weapon factories as the new systems get very complex and we had to strike a balance between versatility and ease of use when configuring thousands of weapon components and their interactions, but we have found nice solutions and updated the factory system accordingly now. Hopefully we can start rolling the changes out on the beta branch very soon.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

11/4/22

We are still working on the weapon system update, the changes we've been having to make to support this are very extensive and as we've been making them we uncovered other things to eventually solve, like being able to punch while holding a shield, or holding a light source correctly with one, holding non combat items like musical instruments, unique creature attacks or abilities and various other small things or issues that need resolving. Diving back into this at a later time to make another round of changes would be very counter-productive, so we want to be thorough.

There are some other things in the works as our focus shifts towards the next story update. As we briefly mentioned before, we're working towards some improvements to path-finding that are important for some more complex level design in upcoming content, but also interaction with dynamic elements and general improvements. Another change that is important, at least from a gameplay perspective, is the thaumaturgy system which must now include multiple domains and a power level and investment mechanic, beyond just learning new powers. There is actually more still to the thaumaturgy system that didn't make it into our initial implementation, and this will add a lot in terms of build diversity and discovery. We're not going to go into details just yet, there's quite a bit more that needs to go into power design, but if you've followed development closely you might have an idea.

That's it for this week, we're pretty sure we've covered everything now with the weapons system changes to wrap it up and we've got various general fixes done too, so we're eager to get it all tested and things updated.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

18/4/22

Everything is up and running again with the new weapons system in place. This adds support for a large number of new features and improvements, for now we are focusing on basic weapon flips, but there's a few other things we want updated even if not yet fully functional so that we don't need to patch things again in the near future. We need to do lots of updates to our procedural weapon factories which include thousands of components, but fortunately these mostly don't require any patching.

We've also finally started taking a serious look at the AMD performance issues. The game runs far worse than it should on AMD and Windows (yet totally fine on Linux), we know this is an issue with the driver, and if we can pinpoint the issue exactly we may be able to work around it or work with AMD to resolve it.

We are still looking at doing one final fairly substantial arena update before we move on from all things combat and arena, but before that we'll be doing some smaller beta branch updates just to make sure everything works properly with all the back-end changes.

That's it for this week, we're pretty sure we've covered everything now with the weapons system changes to wrap it up and we've got various general fixes done too so we're eager to get it all tested and things updated.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

No devdiary today

Not much diary worthy this week, few things in progress for the arena additions, weapon flips for hafted weapons are fully functional, UI, persistence and everything. Working on some of the damage mechanics updates and improvements atm, which are great in general and should make the flips feel more meaningful too. Might still write an actual diary later if I find the time, but not too likely. Unfortunately my life is extremely complicated at the moment, I'm taking care of a family member who is extremely ill and it's gotten to the point where it's no longer sustainable and it needs to change, right now in this particularly difficult period and there's a lot of things to do.

 

[Technomancer]

2/5/22

As you may know from previous diaries, we recently did a big overhaul of the weapon system to support many improvements and new features, with the future in mind as well as the present. We are trying to move on from further improvements to combat, but there are some fundamental improvements here that felt too important with so much of the groundwork now in place.

The key improvement here is more precise and detailed behaviour for weapons when it comes to dealing damage, but also doing other things. The different parts of a weapon are now modelled much more accurately, rather than just having some general stats attached to some point on the weapon we can give precise parts of a weapon specific behaviours, which allows all sorts of more realistic and satisfying effects and can support new gameplay elements. Some weapons like polearms may feel less forgiving in the way they deal damage, but more consistent and realistic. There's also new sound feedback for collisions of hafts (of different types) or other parts of the weapon, which adds some nice variety and realism to the sound. Different hafts also have their own damage dealing properties, adding their own value to the weapon.

Slashing damage is also finally being reworked, with hewing and cutting mechanics for different impacts and weapon types. This combined with some other changes will make axes particularly devastating if somewhat more difficult to use, and bring various other changes that we'll need lots of feedback on. Remise is also receiving some initial changes and should already feel more consistent, but with possibly more involved ones to come.

We're still working through some of these changes that need to be tested and tweaked a little as we do them, and configuring the thousands of weapon components with these new properties, but with the mechanics in place it shouldn't take much longer.

Moving on from combat, we've got a huge number of changes planned for story, beyond some of the big ones you're probably aware of, which should add a lot of replayability and fun. This would be a huge info dump, so maybe we can tackle it in future diaries.
Have a great week!

-the BM team