Development blog
This is our development blog! We have been maintaining this blog with updates for over 1000 days now, starting June 10th, 2013. Here you can read about the work that goes into making a game as complex as Brutal Nature:
2016 May 13th
Fixed issue with turning off the GUI rendering not hiding the mouse if it was enabled, resulting in strange effects if GUI was closed then turned back on.
Added ram consumption limit to limit ram consumption to physical free memory on X64.
2016 May 6th
Fixed some quest callbacks still being called after a quest was skipped.
Fixed gamma correction for particle effects to compensate for the new gamma correction of the game.
2016 April 29th
Ok so it turns out Photoshop's Nvidia DDS export plugin does not correctly export 3dc compressed textures as it messes up the mipmaps badly.
Figured out a new image export chain using 'The Compressonator' for 3dc export.
2016 April 22th
More messing with normal maps. Found some strange bugs related to 3Dc normal map usage that I am investigating.
2016 April 15th
More work creating new normal maps for the terrain and sorting out terrain assets.
Added detection of normal map format for models and using the correct shader path. Engine now supports uncompressed and 3Dc compressed normal maps. as well as R8G8 format and a few other similar formats.
2016 April 8th
Optimized terrain normal mapping.
Fixed some bugs in terrain normal mapping.
Fixed bug where game would ignore errors in terrain vertex/pixel shader.
Added support for 3Dc compressed normal maps.
2016 April 1st
Terrain normal mapping now works. Looks pretty good. More tweaking needed to normal maps. Some optimizations needed as well.
Researched normal map compression techniques. 3Dc seems the highest quality.
Improved DDS loading code to handle all DDS loading for the game instead of relying on D3DX functionality as RGBA normal maps where not being loaded correctly by D3DX.
Applied proper gamma correction to textures/lighting/framebuffer. This was a side effect of writing my own DDS loader is I had more control over how textures where loaded. Some tweaking had to be done to make the game look similar to how it was before.
2016 March 25th
Started work on adding normal maps to terrain. Will require a slightly different approach then models as the terrain is triplaner projected.
Fixed bug causing willow trees not to show up.
Fixed bug where some campfires would not cast light if user logged in next to a lit one.
Fixed sprinting failing to work at low FPS.
2016 March 18th
User contacted me this week about the game not running on their computer. Found out why rather fast via the logs, apparently their built in video card reports 0MB dedicated VRAM. All VRAM was actually shared VRAM. Now the game uses dedicated+shared VRAM when the game detects <512MB of dedicated video ram.
Also, I softened lack of VRAM warning to be non fatal.
2016 March 11th
Finished adding normal mapping to models. Added normal map textures for most of the models in the game.
Game looks a lot better now. NPC's and avatars are much more detailed. However VRAM requirements have increased again slightly and game is bigger now.
I may need to add graphics options for texture quality and normal map quality soon.
2016 March 4th
Models now support normal maps and quite a few models have had normal maps added to them.
Most NPC's and all avatars now have normal maps.
Tweaked the NPC's weapon attachment points. Not really happy with the differences in hand sizes and such between avatars. May need to do more work on this, or redo the avatars.
Fixed bug where some objects would bounce up an down in use.
2016 Febuary 26th
Packed up and released a new version of Brutal Nature this week.
Fixed treasure only spawning on one corner of the island.
Started work on adding normal maps to the game. This should help improve the visual quality greatly.
Released: 0.60
2016 February 21st, Brutal Nature 0.60 is now released:
- Fixed all known bugs
- Added 1st person animations for one handed melee weapons and pistols.
- Added sword, pickaxe, knife and pistol weapon models.
- Added new flags to smsher import.
- Added muzzle flash
- Added new health bar graphics.
- Added ability to add custom data to models via smsher scripts.
- Added engine feature to mix multiple animations on the same character.
- Added user edited map by Globalny-Chaos as default map.
- Improved smsher and model rendering code.
- Changed GUI textures to a black and gold flat theme.
- Changes to model format: Models now inverted on the X instead of Z.
- Changed compiler from MSVC2010 to MSVC2015
- Reduced server map generation time by 95% (2000% faster)
- Reduced spider walk/run animation speed considerably.
- Fixed spider model animations.
- Fixed cached chunks causing world corruption by increasing the hash to 64bits.
- Fixed scale and offset to no longer apply twice to non animated models on import.
- Fixed tunnel generation failures caused by not taking into account region distortion noise when picking starting chunk to generate tunnel.
2016 Febuary 19th
Getting ready to release a new version.
Final tweaks to muzzle flash, Bullet, Table and a few other effects.
Took a long overdue look at map generation. The old method for caves/tunnels was taking too long to generate tunnels/caves. It turns out the radius for the region search when creating caves was a little too wide and the method of adding branches to be checked for tunnels/caves was rather inefficient, adding a lot more branches then needed.
End result is map generation is now 20 times faster, making it much more practical for users to generate their own maps instead of the default included map.
2016 Febuary 12th
Added ability to add custom data to models in the import scripts so I could add attachment data and then decided to put it into Avatars.as instead so it could be tweaked by 3rd parties if desired.
Added a new system for entering/tweaking values in the program to help with setting up attachment point data. This should help me finish up the attachment settings.
Fixed a strange bug with zippers on Maria and Deon avatars.
2016 Febuary 5th
Ran into a fun problem today that by shifting the camera forward to fix the arms clipping into your legs while running and jumping, that you could look through walls by walking up to them, so had to move the camera back where it was.
Instead I found a trick using the depth buffer to always render arms correctly even when they are physically clipping into other things
Added a system where only parts of a model can be rendered, depending on what bone is the primary deformation bone.
Added a new feature to smsher where animations can be tweaked on a per bone basis by the import script to help fix up the pistol animations.
Decided the 2 handed pistol animation didn't look good enough and went with a 1 handed animation instead. It was too hard to get the fingers of the left hand to line up properly with multiple avatars all needing individual adjustments.
More tweaking of weapon attachment points... Never ending tweaking.
2016 January 29th
A few people have been suggesting I move to a flat GUI like most modern games use, so this week I redid most of the graphics used by the GUI to a new flat black and gold color scheme.
I think it looks pretty good. Most of the health bars have been replaced by solid color variants as well as a number of people did not like the rainbow style health bars.
2016 January 22nd
Keep finding little bugs in Smsher and having to change how it works.. then I have to reimport all the models only to find several broken and fix them.. then I find another bug while fixing the models, fix that one and it changes the models again.
2016 January 15th
Fixing up all the model import scripts for the new way smsher handles things.
Added a bake first frame of animation flag to smsher, for static objects that only draw correctly when their animation data is used.
2016 January 8th
Finding and fixing new little bugs in smsher. Changing how it behaves to resize and rotate objects.