We have released 1 update this week to Boundless and it is great to see more items rendering in GUI and in the worlds.

We’re holding back on switching the C++ version of Boundless across to the default version for all players until we’ve been able to resolve the 2 outstanding Mac OS X issues that some users are experiencing. These issues are proving to be a hard nut to crack! We are hoping that we can fix these issues and do the switch ASAP within the next 2 weeks.

As mentioned in the previous Weekly Dev Update, the majority of the engineers are working on larger features: Dual Wielding, Storage (containers), Locks and Machine Crafting are coming along quite well. The basics of Dual Wielding and Storage are already functional in-house and we are still on track for an initial release for ~mid June. The remaining work is to add a GUI for players to interact with the features. If everything goes smoothly, we hope to include the Lock functionality so that you can secure your storage. As with Machine Crafting , the foundation has been built and basics are working but the GUI is a bit more sophisticated so it will not ready until early July.

Code

This week we’ve continued with the World Builder work, speeding it up so it is now x10 quicker for generation of a world and a similar speed up with the visualization. This will allow faster iteration to generate more cool (or hot) worlds.

The GUI has added a new radial control for selection of number of items and some additional styling.

The Storage has been added in game, with the items held in it displayed in the world. We want to add locks before release so people can’t take your gear. We are working on adding in more of the 3D items in game (so creatures drop ‘meat’). The machines continue with the work now on the furnace.

The dual wielding is continuing apace and working for most cases now. There are some extra animations required (for the grapple hook) and general polish still to do. As part of this seeing characters looking up and down has been added.

We’ve worked on the Mac OS X bugs people are experiencing and should hopefully have fixed one of the issues.

The analytics evaluation has reached an initial conclusion on the best solution and we’ll be adding more data to see that it all works as expected.

Design

This week has all been about analytics. We have settled on using Google Big Query to store our data, and Chartio for building our queries. We still need to do some more investigations into the cost of accessing the data to make sure the amount of queries we want to do won’t make it too expensive.

There are a couple of big outstanding pieces of design that we’d hoped to get in front of the community this week (Beacon Persistence and Guild Beacons), but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Sorry about that. @olliepurkiss is away next week on holiday, so it’ll have to wait until he returns.

GUI

No exciting icons this week, we’ve been working on creating assets and implementing designs shown in previous updates. In the next update we hope to have something to show in game.

Art

This week has been another busy one for the art team.

We’re wrapping up the tools and weapons concepts:

We’ve chosen a new grapple design.

Designed a gem spanner to use in maintaining your crafting machines.

Finalised the material progression language for the Lance which we will be propagating as progression concepts across all the tools and weapons.

We’ve continued working on the Protectors concepts exploring a number of alternative approaches to give these crazy stone automata some character. We’ve got a core design we’re pretty happy with and will continue with some more exploration of minor details before sharing on the forum.

3D work on items has continued:

Ancient technology fragment, component and device items done.

The art team has now switched over to the C++ version of Boundless and now have full access to the latest Maya shader network which supports tinting so we’ve made the plants and flowers and all items tintable . This tinting tech will be used to aesthetically colour an object relative to the world it is spawned in (or crafted with). We’re also very close to having the new flowers in game and released. Code are adding the motion component used for the grass and then we will release.

The art team have also provided support for the code integration of storage.

Animation

We’ve integrated a simple but efficient animation blending system that uses the player’s camera position in 1st person to drive the up and down angle of the 3rd person character’s torso. The advantage of having this working is twofold:

It means it is now clearer to other players on the height direction you are focusing.

It also gives the characters much more life and a feeling of sentience.

We’ve implemented the dual wielding system so now you can equip any tool or weapon or item in any hand. More information on this to come.

We’re also nearly there rigging our latest creature the multi-tentacled Cuttletrunk. We’re using AdvancedSkeleton a really neat auto-rigging tool. We intentionally chose one of our more complex creatures to test the robustness of the tool and have worked closely with Oyvind Nostdal the tool’s creator. He has provided fantastic support and didn’t falter at all when we identified some critical issues which he promptly addressed.