Disclaimer: This update constitutes an overhaul of roughly 90% of our game's core source code and is a large change to the underlying systems of the game. Many of these changes are not aesthetically apparent. Over the next few updates we will be fundamentally changing the game's world (terrain, environment, etc), Core Gameplay, Rendering System (Lighting), and NPC behavior. This update, while rough in some areas, offers a new basis for the future development of Sierra Madre: The Wild West. The important thing is that this new core empowers us to provide more features in a much more manageable way.
Changes:
Improved Character Controller
We have fully switched over to an advanced event-driven character controller. This character controller is more modular and is a huge improvement from a developer’s point of view. There are some rough edges. Animation transitions and blending require some tweaking and polish. These issues will solved in a future update. This controller is used to control the main character, NPCs, and horses. We will likely extend it to wildlife in a future update as well. This makes it easier for us to write behaviors that both the player and NPCs can utilize.
Improved Animation System
We started this project as a first person shooter and as a result offered poor parity between first person and third person mode. To solve this we have introduced a new animation system that allows us to use the same animations between the first person and third person perspective. This new system also lays the groundwork for character customization (character customization is NOT in this update) by allowing us to easily swap out the rigs being used for the first person perspective. The third person and first person perspectives should now behave very similarly.
Improved Gamepad Support
We have integrated a third party native control system that allows us to support many different gamepads. Most gamepads should work, but we have primarily targeted Xbox One controllers for this update.
UI navigation has been improved for use with gamepads. The map UI has been tweaked to be controller friendly, but will be overhauled completely in a future update. The inventory UI has been completely overhauled. It has been designed with gamepad support in mind and has an acceptable amount of usability with a gamepad, but definitely needs some tweaking.
Menu UI has been tweaked both aesthetically and to better support gamepads, but some settings menus do not play nice with gamepads. The current Menu UI will be replaced in a future update.
New Inventory System
We have overhauled the inventory system and replaced it with a robust, categorized inventory. The inventory now tracks all player possessions including weapons, ammo, horses, etc. The inventory can now be filtered based on category and can be used to call horses, access camp craft tools (bedrole, campfire), eat food, drink water, and equip weapons. Food and drink have been converted from using calories and fluid ounces as measurement units to being based on items. Where you used to have 64 fluid ounces of water, you now have one unit of water. Where you used to have 2000 calories of food, you now have 1 unit of meat (either raw or cooked). We will be expanding food groups to include more individual food items in future updates.
New Interactions
New Interactions are discussed in this development blog.
New Horse and Wagon Mechanics
We have replaced our old horse and wagon mechanics with new ones that are designed to require less direct steering. Horses and wagons will now try to avoid obstacles on their own. Instead of having to hold down a key to keep horses and wagons moving forward, you adjust speed by hitting the forward and backward movement keys (or moving the movement joystick in the forward or backward axes). This new system does have some issues on rough terrain, but this will be resolved when we overhaul our game world (which is one of our main focuses and we hope to have in the next feature update).
Horse Breeds
We now have different breeds of horses which can be bought at trading posts (will be moved to being bought at a livery stable in a future update).
General Changes:
-
Replaced tent with bedrole.
-
Towns people now say greetings when approached.
-
The player character now verbally indicates when they are hungry / thirsty.
-
Added a Scoped .45-70 Breechloader.
-
Added a Livery Stable to the tutorial.
-
Improved blocking rain while inside buildings.
-
Rewrote weapon mechanics.
-
Temporarily removed bullet drop.
-
Temporarily removed hiring of lawmen.
-
Added aim assist that automatically activates when a gamepad is in use and deactivates when the keyboard and mouse is in use.
-
Added control hints that show which controls map to which functions. This can be disabled in the gameplay menu.
-
Simplified gameplay settings options.
-
Tweaked how long it takes to get hungry / thirsty.
-
A direction indicator now indicates where attacks are coming from (only if cross hairs are enabled).
-
New control remapping UI.
-
New FPS arms model.
-
Updated Tutorial to reflect changes.
Known issues:
-
Horse speed and stamina values will show up with dollar signs in the inventory.
-
Horses will buck and rear when ridden on unstable terrain.
-
Horses can start bucking uncontrollable when on really rough terrain. Dismounting the horse when it is in this state sometimes results in death.
-
NPCs will sometimes become unresponsive. Sometimes NPCs will be found floating in mid air while on horse back.
-
NPCs may become stuck on the edge of steep cliffs.
-
Shadows will flicker when near the edge of the map (this will be resolved with the new world system).
-
At certain times of day, faces that are not in direct sunlight will appear completely black (this will be addressed with the new render pipeline).
-
Attempting to mount a wagon on the side of a cliff can result in the player becoming stuck. Rapidly hitting movement keys and the use key can sometimes unstuck the player.
-
Exiting the inventory can sometimes result in the cursor being stuck on. Going back to the inventory and hitting escape to exit will resolve this.
-
If you have the resolution of the game below your monitor’s native resolution, the native resolution may be restored when changing scenes. This may or may not be indicated in the graphics options.
What’s next?
We will now being focusing our development for the next feature updates on four key areas:
-
Core Gameplay
-
Fixing NPC behavior
-
Upgrading to using the Scriptable Render Pipeline
-
New World System
Changed files in this update