Major New Features:
Animation Overhaul Part 1
• Advanced Locomotion: We have re-created all the locomotion animation clips and built an advanced new system for them.
Now the character can traverse with three types of gait: walk, jog and sprint. Walking and jogging only reduce stamina recover rate, only sprint will cost stamina. This largely increased the traverse speed of the character.
Furthermore, the moving speed now can dynamically change depending on the character’s situation: when carrying heavy items, or moving in water, the max speed you can reach will be reduced accordingly.
The character now will move with jogging gait by default and sprint when “Running” key is pressed, but you can use our new “Switch Walk” key (left ctrl by default) to change it to walking.
• Advanced Lower Body Stances: The character used to choose his/her standing stance by the item’s type in his/her hands. As a survival simulation game, we defined quite a lot stance according to real-life situations. But that system required a full set of locomotion animations for each stance, and a huge mess in our animation controlling state machine.
So we made this new stance system to simplify the structure, reduce animation amounts (less memory required in runtime), and build a flexible yet solid foundation for future features.
Now we only have 3 stances for the character: Neutral, left side forward and right side forward. These stances can cover all lower body movement situations, and let the upper body to have more forms to blend with these stances.
• Advanced Upper Body Forms: Now the character can have separated forms for his/her left and right arms when carrying items. This is enabled and empowered by the former two systems. Uses far less animation clips but can create smoother look and much more combinations for different items in hands.
For example: now taking an item that requires the “Holding” form, it used to force the character to turn into a battle stance(that stance needs 16 extra animations just for movements), but now it will only turn into the battle stance if the item is a weapon. Better, we can check the weapon’s length and which hand is it in to determine whether the character should turn his/her left side forward or right side forward (spear in right hand is left forward, but hatchet in right hand is right forward), and all these dynamic changes only takes 3 extra animations for the upper body, the lower body will still use the same stance movement animations from the former two systems.
With this robust system, we now can easily add any new carriage forms for new items or change form with conditions: we’ve added a bowl carrying form for opened water collectors, and a torch holding form for torches that only got lit.
• New Pick-Up Animations: We’ve made more than 20 new picking up animations to replace the old “Force Grab” animations. Now the character will bend down to pick things up if they are much lower than his/her waist. Also there are special dedicated picking-up animations for two-hand-carry form and shoulder-carry form.
• New Pass-Fire Animations: We’ve replaced the old pass-fire animations with new ones. And modified some logic in the motion to further avoid burning by fire when trying to light up something.
• More animations will be reworked in the next update, including jumping, sitting, sleeping, crafting and attacking animations.
Water Transfer:
• Water containers no longer got cleared out when picking up due to our new “Holding-Bowl” form. You can now take water containers with you and put them elsewhere.
• We also added new animations, particle effects, sound effects and interact buttons on water containers for you to take water from one container to another or pour water out.
• Now water containers that can be carried by a single hand can be drink from by pressing mouse buttons, just like eating other food or drink from coconuts.
• Any water container that got lower than sea level will be filled with sea water, you cannot directly drink it but it can be processed into fresh water in future.
Terraforming:
• The stone hoe just got upgraded into next level! Now use the hoe to attack on ground can dig a bit of it down, and digging to adjacent areas of it can flatten the ground to the same level (though if the adjacent area is 1 meter higher, it will not be flattened). Making this function a great method to form a building base, also can be used as farm land in future.
• In addition to the ground flatten function, the amount of dirt piles you can dig up is calculated by the depth of the terrain you’ve dug, so there can be multiple dirt piles generated from one spot on ground. Also, there is a small chance to find clay pieces by digging the ground, making non-mangrove-forest areas also can produce clay.
Minor Changes:
• Added water splash effects for step in water and wade in water movements.
• Added water wave and splash effects for swimming
• Changed tutorial side windows’ position
Changed files in this update