Progress this week has been a little slower as Monday was a bank holiday (or public holiday) in the UK and a few of the team have been away on holiday. We didn’t release any updates publicly but we are planning to release the C++ / JS switch over next week. (Originally proposed and discussed here.) The switch will include a new world to explore and a few new features.

We have started to work on the GUI for Dual Wielding and Storage. We’re still working towards an initial release mid June as they are looking super good. We also started adding support for Locks on Storage to safeguard your belongings for the release.

We have also been beavering away to get the new World Builder update and Resource Regeneration ready for their initial release between mid and end of June.

Code

We have added support for inverted slopes to the world builder, so the underside of caves can now be smoothed out. The settings are per block type to allow variation so areas can still look more faceted or smooth. The result is more naturalistic looking environment.

The World Builder first analyses the environment to work out which blocks are candidates for automatic sloping. The different colours here represent the different slope types.

A scene before and after slopes are inserted.

The Dual Wielding has been polished up, fixing various glitches and starting the radial menu GUI for it. The GUI engine has been working on reflow so it formats well on various screen sizes. The Machines have been tested for various scenarios and profiled to make sure they don’t impact the game too much. We added some of the item meshes, eg for meat and grass seeds. We have also been fixing some glitches when you go through portals.

The updated shader pipeline is finally being integrated into the game and updating the shaders to work on the different platforms.

For the servers we have been updating some of the deployment to allow us to test with some different hosting solutions.

Design:

There’s been a fair amount of discussion on race abilities recently and we thought it would be a good idea to address these concerns and explain our approach for character differentiation and skills in more detail.

We’d previously thought of race abilities as a way of allowing players within the Boundless universe to have a ‘speciality’. We thought of this a little bit like classes akin to something you might see in games like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch. Upon exploring this further we decided races as character classes wouldn’t be the right approach Boundless for two main reasons:

A character race is something you’ll choose before even playing the game, how do you really know what abilities are right for you at that point?

and…

Skills and abilities are really important to Boundless, and we want to do more than just a few sets of abilities.

For those reasons, we decided a full skills and progression system was more interesting and appropriate. We decided we’d keep races as they offer great visual and thematic variety. We’ll still allow players to choose a race (and one of the four cultural belief systems) and customise them to a high degree, but that we wouldn’t tie skills or abilities to those appearances.

The skills and progression system we’re planning, Professions, is many times bigger and more impactful than anything we’d talked about before to do with race abilities. Each of our 9 Professions - Explorer, Gatherer, Hunter, Defender, Trader, Builder, Miner, Crafter and Founder - have their own skill tree. Some of those trees have up to 50 different skills, with some of those skills having up to 5 levels of upgradability. Players can choose up to 3 skill trees (Founder is a freebie), meaning there’s technically 56 different ‘classes’ in Boundless. We think this is a much more flexible and impactful way to deliver abilities in Boundless.

On top of that system we have the Forge, where weapons, tools and equipment can be imbued with potentially 100s of different of stats. If we deliver what we’ve planned, there will be over 75 million different stat combinations. These combinations can have with wild and unpredictable results, especially when stacked onto Profession abilities…

So, skills, abilities and progression are incredibly important to Boundless. We have a lot planned here. And whilst saying “no” to character abilities might seem like we’ve taken something away, it’s more a case of refocusing our resources in an area where they’ll have more impact.

I know you’re probably thinking: “Hey, you know what’s better? Races abilities AND Profession abilities!”, and hey, you’re probably right. But the crushing reality of time and resource really only gives us two choices here: focus our efforts delivering one really awesome system, or split focus and risk delivering two mediocre ones. We’re choosing to focus on Professions, and we hope you’ll love them when they’re out the door.

GUI

This week has seen some in-game progress on the new GUI:

There’s still a fair way to go, including adding icons, a 3rd dimension and getting the scale to respond to various screen sizes/resolutions. As with everything our plan is to get it into your hands as soon as it’s functional (and we’re sure you all want to play with storage…).

In addition we’ve been looking at an entity focus HUD interface. This is designed to provide you contextual information based on the entity you’re interacting with. Entities in this case could include players, creatures, machines and locations. In many cases this HUD will be what you see above an entity when you look at, interact with or attack it. There’s a table of permutations with varying complexity based on a number of different factors like: your distance from an entity, if you’re looking directly at it, if you’ve attacked/healed it, and so on.

Art

It’s been a short but productive week for the art team.

Concept has finalised the tools and weapons progression language.

We’ve gone for a nice and simple elegant approach that ensures the material progression is easily readable. Will post on the forum soon. We’ve also finalised the Protector concepts. These automatons will defend Temples and Titans from player attack. Next week we start exploring concepts of the character races.

We’ve modelled: Cog, New Sap, Tallow. We’ve also iterated on the Mould block using the foliage layer tech.

Animation

We’ve been creating Cuttletrunk animation tests to see how the tentacles will move. Also continued with the character wearables idle and continued supporting the code integration of dual wielding.

I’m off to slide around the World Builder slopes