This week we released Testing 32 and then Live Release 153. These contain a small collection of features, most significantly support for intra-world warping. You can now easily go home after a long journey in the same world but at a financial cost. The releases also contained updates to the network libraries and made some changes to tackle the lagging issue. Please try setting the latency limit and letting us know how this performs for you. There are more details about the bandwidth requirements in this FAQ entry.

Next week, we are targeting to update the game with the following:

Further tweaks and bug fixes to the grapple.

Location markers and HUD navigation so that you can easily mark places visited whilst traveling.

Further visual / usability improvements to the compass.

Tweaked 3rd person tool/weapon animations

Additional features added to warps.

Next month, you’ll start to see the following:

Start of 1.0 GUI skinning.

Player progression improvements

Roadrunners in the game.

Improved creature combat, AI and animation.

Portal crafting

Code

This week we’ve updated the game to v153. There is still some work ongoing on the Grapple to fix issues, such as it not always attaching when it impacts and improving the prediction logic.

The HUD has had the Landmark feature added, to allow you to select a Location to go to and then see the marker on the Compass and in world when near by. We continue to optimize the GUI and HUD to remove the choppiness when it changes.

The Warps and Portal dynamic costs have been updated so it will depend on the number of planet hops involved. The player created Portal work is in progress.

In the back end we’ve update the network libraries and reworked how it is polled to help address some of the lag issues people are experiencing. We’ve also continued work on bot testing for server stress testing and the database deployment.

Design

This week @olliepurkiss has been mainly working on planning out the future large milestones for Boundless (using his favourite piece of software: Hansoft ). He has also started some work on balancing the grapples, although that hasn’t made it into the game yet.

Rob has been carrying on with work on the Guilds screens, and started on the intro flow to the game.

@luke-turbulenz has been focused on the beginning of the game, as well as the objectives and how they affect progression.

Art

The art team has been busy supporting this week’s release with the new grapple and VFX.

Creature concepting has continued with the giant worm’s larval stage: the dreaded Block Parasite.

Dom’s been working on a scalable explosion system. Here’s his exploding ice shard test for the Chill elemental effect. This is black and white but will be coloured blue:

@jesshyland has completed Hunter tier 2. Here’s a WIP image. You can see the bigger head and the beginning spread of armour down the arms and tail.

She also made a new shard base item. They will be used as part of the Portal system