Hello all!

Welcome to B<WDU#2 .

Here at Wonderstruck HQ we are happy to report that we are pretty much finished porting Boundless from the hybrid JavaScript engine to pure native C++. This was mainly done to allow us to support cross platform play between console and PC. It has the additional advantage of improving performance for everyone allowing us to cram even more features into the game and more simultaneous players per world. Any features that haven’t been ported yet we plan to significantly rework, so porting them as-is would have been a waste of time, for example the low flying birds are now gone. (No birds were harmed during this process.)

Next week, we will be making a small update to release some of the final C++ porting features, such as making fluids flow and creatures dropping items.

Thankfully we’ll soon have the entire team working on juicy new features for the next big update. The first step towards this is to release the world regeneration technology which is a crucial feature for an online voxel sandbox. In parallel we’ll be working on the machines and crafting system.

Code

We plan to release Boundless simultaneously on PC and PS4, this is extra important as all players, on all platforms will inhabit the same universe and worlds. The PS4 version is getting close to PC parity. To keep pushing in this direction, we have implemented some new low level PS4 renderer feature to help improve rendering performance as the game is generally GPU bound on all platforms. We’ve also done more work on the game’s shader pipeline that should also help with improving FPS and allow us to get the best out of each platform’s graphics hardware.

We’ve been doing some early secret experiments into getting the Boundless engine running with PSVR, this is in addition to the Oculus experiment we did last year. See our discussion here about the challenges of getting an open world game running in VR.

The world regeneration is integrated into the dev line for the team, but we’ll need to re-create and re-deploy the current beta worlds before we can update the game. The regeneration respects the beaconed regions and leaves them untouched. We also still need to implement the resource regeneration before this area of technology is complete. The resource regeneration is different to the world regeneration as the resources are redistributed following rules described by the World Builder. So they’ll be no camping of particularly precious seams of resources.

We are still fixing a few bugs in the C++ version and are porting the last few missing features, mainly the liquid simulation and our basic fx system. These should be ready for release next week.

We have continued to develop the basic wireframe GUI for new crafting and machines interfaces. We’re also putting in some of the groundwork for the machines so they connect up when you place the various machine parts down. We’ll share some screenshots soon in the devlog.

Design

This week has seen lots of creature design work, with many of us getting together to try and choose our 1.0 creature set, and design the systems that they are based on. This is progressing well, but there is still more work to do.

Design work has also continued on the world builder, and on other related world systems such as the rules for generation and regeneration. The hope is to get the tool ready, and then get it into your hands and start the process of making biomes for the game. Hopefully the community is ready and keen to help us create some super creative biomes.

GUI

This week we posted that we’ve been working on the more final GUI system, including a new widget and layout system, improved user flow and set of mesh-based item icons. We factored in a fair amount of community feedback into the development of this design, including switching to a single panel design for interacting between containers (as opposed to the old plan-swapping design).

Here’s some updated screenshots showing our latest progress:

(I always wanted to reverse leak @ben)

Art

This week we’ve been busy reviewing all the creature concepts and debating our favourites. In addition to all the feedback and preferences the community shared on the forums, we’ve also been picking our favourites. The meeting room is creature-tastic at the moment. We also completed and shared a range of concepts for the Fast Flyer and Large Livestock concept families. Make sure you share any feedback so we can include it in the selection process.

We’ve continued to design and modelled more items this week: fossils, dust, mixture, compact material. Many more items still to come. Checkout the updated items devlog post. These items will be held in player’s hands, sold in shops, and shown in the GUI, so they need to act like icons whilst also being in the main game world.

We’ve also done some visual exploration into how some of the most special materials used whilst crafting the tool and weapon progressions might look in game. We want them to feel really special and look ass-kick. We’re not quite ready to share these yet. You’ll probably get to see them when we share some of the tool progression concepts soon.

Character animation continues apace, this week focusing on the inventory interactions: players showing, throwing, discarding and consuming items. Once completed @gerryjacobs will share an in-depth WARNING - LARGE POST post that explains the plans.

Finally, we have also worked on some new prop concepts for the donation box, pay lock and location signal. We’ll share the concept soon.

And you lot had no faith we’d post this on time… < self high-five >