This week was a sad week. A civilization was wiped from the Boundless beta version but we are very excited to see a new civilisation rising from the ashes using the new blocks and slopeable block types. Thanks to new boy @AndyD we also managed to get emotes into the game (resulting in an excited @gerryjacobs).

As mentioned before, we have been working on Machine crafting so that you can craft loads of goodies. We have also started working on storage (chests), and we are hoping that we can release a first version in July. The main features will be ready before then, but @ben’s shiny new GUI will take time to implement.

Also coming along nicely are the updated World Builder and Resource Generation. If everything goes well you will be able to play with it sometime in June. At this point we’re going to start making “final” worlds, and we really hope you will help with that.

Finally, we are thinking about making the development (C++) version the default version on Steam, thanks to the community’s feedback on the question.

Stayed tuned for more updates.

Code

This week we worked on three releases of the development branch on Steam, with bug fixes along with the new features.

The machine work has hooked together the power cores and pipes. The GUI for the machines and crafting continues. For the GUI we are also working on adding the 3D meshes in place of the text. We have also begun work on dual wielding.

We are continuing the shader pipeline work, with DX11 and OpenGL working and PS4 in progress. In the back end we are also updating some of the server software to for future deployment. We also completed a task for persistent entity relationships.

Design

This week was mainly wrapping up the jobs of last week. The recipe data is now being exported into the game using the proverbial big red button. Also the design for how creatures will be generated and spawned is pretty much done. The creature generation and spawning takes into account variation and difficulty for different worlds, so by setting a “threat” level for a world we will get an interesting set of creatures spawned that match the desired level of threat. Of course this is all paper design at the moment, so the coders are yet to get their grubby mitts on it – there’s nothing more likely to break a good design than someone trying to implement it…

Also we’ve been trying to nail down the high level design for Protectors and the other player races, so that @Minyi can start concepting them. We’re early in this process, so there’s a way to go before we have final concepts, but they’re key parts of the game and it will be fantastic to see them coming together in the coming weeks. Watch this space.

GUI

This week sees the GUI art blossom from boring flat assets into bevelled slabs of stone. Functionally, this more complete styling helps increase contrast and readability. Stylistically, it helps make the UI feel more solid, weighty and tangible, adding that final bit of visual polish without any noisy texture effects. Here’s a mockup (as always, don’t read too much into the content):

Art

This week we’ve worked on the block types for Ancient Corruption, Tangle and Thorns.

We’ve integrated these emotes: yes, no, shrug, point, salute, wave, mexican wave, clap, slow clap, laugh, facepalm, insult, intimidate and sit. See them all here:

Emote Animation - Gif Collection (warning - large post) Devlog Hiya everyone, Here’s a visual progress update on all the animated emotes done since my christmas gifs I posted in december. Since you all seemed interested in the gifs - I’m uploading more for you all to see how they’ve been turning out. Basially I always test them in-game so that the assets are game ready for when it’s their turn for hooking them up in code. I’ve therefore taken a few gifs as I’ve tested them in various locations (just cause I wanted to really and it was fun) alon…

We’ve also produced concepts for:

The Guild Control prop which symbolises all the knowledge and history of your guild.

The Mannequin where you can display your wearables collection and enjoy some light customisation.

The Location Signal which you place as a marker on the map.

More to come on the forum regarding all these soon.

Concepting tools and weapons has continued – we’re now happy with our basic tool set, slingbow, grapple and the progression language concepts to follow.

We’ve also been looking at how technically to produce our special materials - Oort Stone, Blink, Dark Matter and Rift.

More on this soon.

We’ve also been providing animation support for the integration of the dual wielding in 1st person. Can’t wait to show this off.