Vapourware Sui Generis + Exanima Early Access

[Technomancer]

21/11/22

We are still mostly working on the new pathfinding system, though we're touching on various other things to try to get a test build ready before long. There's quite a few important technical challenges with the pathfinding, and we want to make sure we get things right now so as to not have to revisit this again later.

At this point we're mainly concerned with optimisation, both in terms of memory usage and just general AI and physics performance. This is an important part of a number of things we're trying to do to dramatically improve the simulation performance, so that we can support more active characters and increase the simulation rate. This will result in generally more accurate and stable physics. We've already begun tuning things to this higher rate and started on further optimisations as this is a really important change that we'd like to take advantage of as soon as possible.

Besides the new pathfinding system itself, we've also been improving pathfinding behaviours. Not just for AI, but also how the player and controls behave. One important change we're making is to add a degree of pathfinding to basic movement controls, so that when you try to move and the exact path is blocked the movement will be automatically corrected rather than leave you stuck in place. The new pathfinding is also generally much more accurate, so you should get less moments when movement feels artificially blocked.

Our original goals didn't include all these requirements for pathfinding, but as the game evolves and we listen to the feedback and desires of our community it has become clear that we were being limited here and that it can make the game better in many important ways. Accepting limitations is something that never seems to survive the process. It is a bit of a development hurdle, but it will be worth the effort.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[somerandomdude]

While team is busy cooking up the update, 3D artist works on other things. Old ass thigh boots got a face lift.

Was:

Will be:

I hope that some pants are included with those boots, because the SC on top looks super gay.

 

[Technomancer]

because the SC on top looks super gay

On top is the one being replaced.

 

[somerandomdude]

because the SC on top looks super gay

On top is the one being replaced.

I got that much, but is it still gonna be a pair of thigh boots with skin showing? If so, it'll look gay as well.

 

[Technomancer]

I got that much, but is it still gonna be a pair of thigh boots with skin showing? If so, it'll look gay as well.

Don't really see the problem, clothing is layered in the game. So skin in this case only shows when you avoid wearing pants under for some reason. And that area is nearly always covered by coats you put over gambesons anyway.

 

[Dadd]

They look like they're wearing booty shorts

 

[BruceVC]

I have spent 120 hours on this game and Ive basically completed most of the maps and defeated most of the main enemies like the Golem president and now I have the effective and superlative Golem Armor

My views on this game are the same as my previous posts, its very positive for several reasons that include

• it has the most realistic and exciting combat in any action RPG I have ever played
• its the most difficult but worthwhile game I have ever played. You really celebrate when you find level maps and green health crystals which are extremely rare

I did use save scumming and I recommend that to newbies or most people unless you master combat which I still havent done but my combat skills are vastly improved. I am not sure if Sui Generis will ever be released but I hope it is because this game has unique and "hardcore " action RPG mechanics and the full version will be a grand and worthwhile gaming experience

But well done to the indie developers for this gem

 

[Haba]

Remember the sunlight, men?

Remember the grass?

They promised us sunlight and grass. Instead we've spent 10 years in those dungeons. 10 fucking years, men.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I have a team of 4 masters in arena. Cash is still tight, but my arsenal is respectable. I wish there were a better way to manage equipment between characters. I tried the dungeon campaign. It's been a very long time. I breezed through the first area. The RNG gods were kind to me as well, and I had pretty good gear. Only problem was when I fell down the 3rd pit trap and died, lol.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Remember the sunlight, men?

Remember the grass?

Don't speak of those things during November.

 

[Technomancer]

28/11/22

Yep, you guessed it, we're still not done with pathfinding. We've actually got the new pathfinder integrated into the game, it's dynamically creating multilayered 3D maps, efficiently applying dynamic updates that can create new paths, bridge layers and all that. At this point we're working on the AI side of things, the new pathfinding is more complex and requires more AI logic, and here we also need to strike a balance between what's possible and what we're actually willing to do, at least for now. We've already gone well past what were our pathfinding requirements for this update and all in with many improvements that were more of a wishlist.

This and other AI work has at least for now taken precedence over a number of things we've been thinking of including in this update. These mostly fall into the category of relatively small, but important things. We've been laying foundations and refining core gameplay, building content based on lore and the game world and pretty much ignoring other gameplay features and considerations unless they happen to interact closely with some of these things. For some time now though this has been quite a big focus for us internally, finding ways to take advantage of these foundations and adding features to make the gameplay experience more diverse and rewarding.

Gameplay features in the context of Exanima are not easy to develop. We're subject to a lot of restrictions from lore and world design, the physics based gameplay and generally avoiding things that feel gamey. Sometimes we like to take elements of games and reimagine them in a way that is realistic and logical, which can be interesting, but is limited and often requires a much bigger effort than just adding some numbers and inexplicable "magic". Procedural weapons and everything that came with it (and still to come) is a good example of this, we couldn't just add ever increasing stats and unrealistic abilities, so we made generated weapons with diverse physical features, mechanics and realistic qualities.

We do have a big list of things we want to add to the game still, and fortunately these don't tend to require the kind of effort to implement that something like procedural weapons did, but they can still be complex to design. Many are indeed just small features and additions, or just using what we have to create more unique and memorable moments in the game. We don't tend to talk about these because we're not sure when they will make an appearance or if they'll even make the cut, but we do think that these smaller additions will collectively have a very big impact on the whole game. These last couple of updates before the game is "finished" is when we want to finally focus more on the gameplay side of things. Looking beyond Exanima, we do also have some quite large gameplay systems that we can see making an appearance in updates to Exanima beyond version 1.0.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[agris]

this team is going to work out FTL travel before they release a finished game

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Went through the portal. I am far better equipped than the last time I made it this far years ago. I'm glad the music has finally changed. While that droning note is good for tension, it gets old.

Last time I was able to beat the creature by getting skeletons to fight it. I am wondering if I will try that again. Also, the skeletons are far more difficult than I remember. These guys are now like aggressive masters tier combatants from arena mode. I am also curious how the golems have changed. I don't think I ever beat them before. I am nearly full health and have only used 1 of my 3 potions, so I think I can do it this time.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Fought a bunch of demons (not sir) those were new. They have good AI. They go for help and attack in packs. While aggressive, they're not terrible hard if you're armored up, which is easy to be at that point. That they are pure flesh also helps. Fight off 4 at a time is really hard though, since they rush and keep you off balance. What's worse is a combination of demons and ghouls. The demon swarms you while the ghoul hits hard. I am absolutely loving this game. I'm trying to improve some of my techniques, and I found a video of this badass.



Does anyone know how he does this? I think I figured out part of it. It's a continuous feint with tiny micro swings when in proximity. I have no idea how he's doing that footwork though. Some crouching obviously, but the overall fluid "juke" is beyond me.

 

[Technomancer]

5/12/22

After a not insignificant series of technical challenges, we actually have AI making use of the new pathfinding. It's also very, very fast, hugely exceeding our performance expectations and we made some extra upgrades along the way. There are still some refinements to make and some player quality of life improvements we want to add, but it works, it's solid and that's a huge relief. We had some pretty ambitious goals for it and knowing that this major overhaul was eventually due had been nagging at Madoc for quite some time.

As we're transitioning to the new pathfinding we're quickly realising just how much of an advantage this gives us. Not only does it support depth and layers in the environment, creating dynamic paths that even AI can understand and all sorts, but it completely removes frequent technical issues and limitations in level design. These were causing problems despite our efforts, getting rid of them really streamlines important aspects of content creation and removes so many hassles.

Our goal for now is getting a new test version out, before the full update. There's a few things to wrap up and test after changing various major game systems, but we can be pretty flexible with this and iterate rapidly, fixing and improving things based on feedback, and perhaps introducing more new features as they're ready. This is also the time when we try to catch up with some older bug reports.

We're in pretty high spirits as we've overcome all the big technical hurdles and unknowns for the update and we can focus on the fun stuff. We'd like to squeeze a few more things into this update, and there's more force powers to add, but at this point nothing should be particularly challenging or time consuming.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Skdursh]

Does anyone know how he does this?

Pretty sure they got gud.

 

[Technomancer]

12/12/22

As mentioned last week, with our major development goals for this update being done or very nearly, we're wrapping things up, putting in some final touches, doing some initial testing and so on.

We've made some further improvements to the new pathfinding beyond our base requirements. One tricky problem that came up during testing is that while the pathfinding itself is very fast, dynamic updates to the map when there's lots of objects moving across a large zone could be quite expensive. After exploring various optimisation strategies we finally got this running 150 times faster, so that's solved.

Something we mentioned we wanted to do in this update and we're working on now is improving player movement. This is actually something we've been wanting to do for a very long time, because we think it's important and will make the gameplay experience much smoother. In most games when a character tries to move past a wall or an obstacle they will basically just run on the spot and slide along it, but this doesn't work with our physics so the characters must slow down and stop. This can make walls and other barriers feel almost sticky, sometimes forcing you to turn and wiggle the mouse around to start moving again. It also means being unable to perform that critical dodge if your inputs aren't angled just right.

Our solution to this is to try to find a slightly corrected path for the movement automatically and also try to determine if the character may be able to attempt the movement even if strict pathing data doesn't agree. This doesn't mean it will make major course corrections for you, but just small adjustments and concessions that should make movement a lot more fluid and responsive. This is not quite as simple as it may sound, and needs to be well optimised as it must work for AI characters in the same way as players, each of which need to evaluate thousands of potential movement options every second. We figured it was time to finally tackle this as it should be a huge improvement to core gameplay.

We've got a few more things to test and tune, pathfinding and especially AI are things that need to be tweaked to perform as intended, but we really don't expect any more difficult problems at this point. Once things are more or less on the right track we can get your help and feedback with this, while we focus more on the content side of things and some supporting little features.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[agris]

Looking forward to the Walls: How Do they Work? update

 

[Technomancer]

19/12/22

We've been testing these fairly big engine changes, we wouldn't need to do this if we didn't expect to run into problems, which indeed we did. We have tracked down and fixed some (older) bugs, but mainly we identified some problem cases with the pathfinding, these are rare, and sometimes more hypothetical even, but they exist. We could have worked around these for now or ignored them, but we decided to take the pathfinding through its "next evolution" which while solving these problems also supports some of the more advanced features that we planned to add later.

This isn't a huge change to how the new pathfinding works, but it does affect every part of it. We are basically switching to a more complete 3D map representation which gives us more detailed and accurate information about available vertical space and solid space. This not only allows us to solve our problem cases, but also improves AI pathfinding in many situations, supports using low ceiling restrictions (height restrictions, crouching to enter small spaces, eventually crawling etc.) and improves navigation during flight. We've also made some further qualitative and performance improvements to pathfinding in general.

We've been testing on AMD graphics too and managed to find fixes for some graphical issues with their newer drivers. We've heard reports of some rendering errors when Steam overlay is enabled, but we weren't able to replicate this. If you're experiencing this problem and have any details, please let us know. These issues aside, we're happy with how much these AMD driver changes have improved performance.

Hopefully it won't be too long before we're ready for some test builds, we want get the ball rolling while we finish up the new content and force powers. We have quite a lot of additional things we're currently working on in terms of gameplay features, but we're not sure yet when we'll actually introduce them. Force alone is probably the biggest gameplay addition yet, and we've been able to do some cool things with level design using new features, not only in the new content, but with some pretty big changes to some existing content.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Mightmagic]

The worst vaporware in the world. 10 years after, it's worst than star citizen with no news since many years for sui generis.

 

[fork]

And the scam still going. Amazing.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

While I was getting resentful over this being vaporware, I have calmed my emotions. After revisiting the dungeon mode after a few years, I was very pleased with the changes. Since this game has been my go-to when I'm limited on time. The area mode is very satisfying once you have a grip on the combat mechanics. I love trying out different weapons. While it is a slow grind to the top, it doesn't get boring after you get there. I thought the game would lose its luster once I started getting well equipped, but it hasn't at all. The combat in this game is pulse raising. The nuance is phenomenal. It's a far cry from the drunken flailing back in 2011.

 

[Talby]

Die by the Sword is better.

 

[Turn_BASED]

Die by the Sword is better.

Exanima doesn't even have breadsticks like DbtS does. Unplayable.

 

[Technomancer]

1/1/23

Between the holidays and Madoc dealing with some personal stuff we haven't exactly been at the peak of productivity, but we have made some good progress. In our last diary we talked about making some pretty big improvements to the new pathfinding to solve some problem cases and support more features. We had to make a lot of changes to accommodate this, but we've gotten through it all now and also made some other improvements we wanted along the way.

Hopefully we can now get on with testing and finalising things without immediately going back to making major changes. With the pathfinding, new AI framework and thaumaturgy system updates wrapped up we will have accomplished all the major goals for this update. We have also made some other important engine improvements, bug fixes and so on. Our plan is still to release some test versions in the near future while we finalise new content, some additional smaller features and more force powers.

Something we've been active on in the past months, but haven't talked about yet is some pretty big updates to itemisation. We've been gradually introducing key features like sockets, procedural item generation, orbs, weapon flipping / toggles and more, but the intent is to put all of this together with new mechanics, many new special properties, active abilities and even a degree of customisation for a much more complete and deep itemisation and loot system. In the context of Exanima this is largely to support better replayability, and to this effect we are considering only "unlocking" new randomised items based on key items found in previous playthroughs, maintaining a sort of "vanilla" item experience for your first one. Also relevant is more randomisation of items in the environment, randomised locations of chests, locked chests, new secret locations, less linear loot progression and various tweaks to item mechanics. This isn't exactly imminent in its entirety, but these are things we have been working on. Some will be added in isolation, but there is also a bigger picture.

We can never go into much detail with things without spoiling them, but with force and everything that comes with it, new level design features, new gameplay features and an expanded role system this should be an epic year for Exanima.

Have a really great year, all the best from Bare Mettle.

Have a great week!
-the BM team