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:
Released: 0.38
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March 13th, 0.38 is now released:
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2014 March 11th
Worked on the AI code to day and made NPC's able to wander about at random. Direction is randomly chosen but biased based on last direction and terrain slope. Did some adjustment on the sound code so sound drop off works a little better.
2014 March 10th
Gave AI factions and users now have relations with these factions. Faction relations reset on death. NPC's now also have a smaller aggression range with each NPC given a random aggression range in between the min and max aggression range for that NPC type. NPC types also have a sight range.
Killing NPC's reduces your relation with that faction and negative faction relations cause aggression range to greatly increase. The overall effect is NPC's more or less leave you alone unless you get very close, until you have killed a large number of them. Once you die the difficulty drops back down.
2014 March 9th
NPC's no longer spawn within line of sight of player. Improved version rejection message to include client and server version. Added client version to login screen. Tested tutorial quests to make sure they work.
2014 March 8th
Converted terrain texture loader to load dxt files.
Added Player Vs Player, Player Vs Enemy, Player Vs Object, Player Vs Terrain and Enemy Vs Player damage scalers to server.cfg.
2014 March 7th
Added 'Material: None' when selecting no material for placement. Added tunnel generation configuration settings to Server.cfg. Added Username and Password setting to Brutal Nature.cfg for automatic log on to announce. Added per object harvest endurance.
2014 March 6th
Fixed grass from showing up on fresh dirt when digging by making it a separate material from dirt and only generated on the surface. Placed gravel under riverbeds.
Fixed some spelling errors. Rotated the sky dome texture so the sun aligns with the reflections off the water.
2014 March 5th
More work on the water. Added fancy animated reflection shader to the water. Fixed up the shoreline of the water.
2014 March 4th
Wrote new shader management code to better support graphical settings that change how shaders are compiled and cache the results for faster load times.
More work done on the water. Water shader now works with and without multisampling.
2014 March 3rd
Lots more work done on the water. Its really starting to shape up. Added depth dependent transparency to the water, but due to reading the depth buffer it requires DX10.1. I'll look into ways of doing it with DX10.0 and adding options to disable it later.
Reduced number of chunks updated when destroying and editing terrain resulting in vastly reduced bandwidth and improved update times when editing terrain.
2014 March 2nd
More work and research into water rendering. Fixed bug that was causing water to ripple up and down incorrectly.
2014 March 1st
Made tutorial building objectives based on dropping the building, not making it. This way you can use a preexisting building if you have one to complete the tutorial.
Started work on adding proper transparent water to the game.
2014 February 28th
End of another great but short month! Got lots done this month. We are now on Steam Greenlight! Tons more bugs fixed and lots of little tweaks made. Added new tunnel generation to the game! Released a new version of the game with a quest menu and voiced tutorial. Also three new videos: Combat demo, cooking tutorial and particle effects demo.
As for today: Added alternate volume settings for when quest voices are active. Added settings for amount of time for CPU to sleep per frame while in focus and out of focus. Music player will no longer load songs when volume is set to 0. Changed ocean sound effect to have Z level of 0 instead of following the player.
2014 February 27th
More tweaking of cave generation code. Fixed minor bug in !pos command where spaces where missing from output.
Added 'Jump' endurance setting in server.cfg. Add 'zoom' factor to weapons info if it has a scope.
2014 February 26th
Lots more work on cave/cavern generation. Added distortion to caves and caverns. Greatly improved the quality of caves.
2014 February 25th
Fixed some incorrectly cleaned up Angelscript objects.
Started work on another type of cave generation based of Voronoi noise.
2014 February 24th
More work tweaking tunnel generation. Also did some research into what naturally caves look like.
Did some more play testing. Increased the area the flashlight covers to make the caves easier to navigate. I must say the caves are really enjoyable to travel through.
2014 February 23rd
Improved tunnel generation speed by 1000%. More work on adjusting the tunnel interconnections.
2014 February 22nd
More work on tunnel generation. Tunnels are now subdivided into many smaller segments with randomized midpoints to create a curved, more organic cave. Each segment varies in diameter as well.
Optimized tunnel generation code to be about 400% as fast.
2014 February 21st
Started work on a tunnel generation system. I am very excited to be working on tunnels.
Lowered tree harvesting volume from 0.6 to 0.4.