Forum > Games Discussion
Exanima
Asid:
Thaumaturgy Domain Wheel
19/06/2023
The new UI element which allows selecting thaumaturgy domains and shows your Potential and how much is invested in each domain.
Asid:
Exanima 0.9
Fri, 13 October 2023
Force, story content and many improvements.
EXANIMA 0.9
It's finally here, our biggest and grandest update yet. We go deeper still into the underworld on the heels of a recent disturbance to discover its source. Explore a huge new area to discover its secrets and face formidable foes therein. Unlock new powers as you traverse redesigned locations and seek out hidden places and new and updated items. New gameplay and storytelling mechanics and a slew of improvements provide the best Exanima experience yet.
FORCE THAUMATURGY
The Force thaumaturgy domain is here adding a variety of new powers that change how you approach the game. Force is all about physics which is Exanima's forte and we've worked hard to make this something special not just in terms of physics, but also effects, AI interactions and all those things that give Exanima that extra depth and unique gameplay.
With Force introduced there are now very meaningful build choices. Both domains are accessible, you can specialise in either one or be a hybrid, more skills are implemented and come into play both in terms of requirements and making the most of Force, with the balance of combat and mental skills also being more important than ever.
The thaumaturgy UI has been updated to support all this and other new mechanics. An important mechanic we're introducing is Potential for the scaling of powers, which while still not complete, already provides new story elements and objectives, and will support more build variety and strategic elements. There is also a new Mind power unlocked through the Revelation skill technique.
LOTS OF NEW CONTENT
A huge new area is included in this update, the largest one yet, packed with new and unique features and taking advantage of how our engine has evolved to support more complex environments. This is an important area in terms of lore, progressing the story and featuring some special new encounters.
The first 3 levels of the game have received a big overhaul, with lots of unique features, details and many new secrets to find. New items have been introduced as early as the first levels, and many items throughout the game have been completely overhauled and adapted to our procedural system. The procedural systems itself has also been updated and improved, important new materials have been added giving new variety to all items.
NEW 3D DYNAMIC PATHFINDING
We've developed an all new pathfinding system to improve movement, AI, support more complex level design with more verticality and layers and more interactions with the environment. This new system is dynamic and 3D, based on the actual shape of objects, this means for example a table is a completely different obstacle when flipped on its side, or could even be used as ramp. You can walk on any surface and create new paths that even the AI can understand, you can walk over and under things and AI can navigate complex environments with multiple layers.
Player movement in general is also improved, it is more fluid as there are no more artificial obstacles and everything is accurate to the shape of the environment and objects. You will no longer get snagged on corners or stopped in places that you should be able to cross.
IMPROVED OBJECT INTERACTION
There have been some important additions and improvements to how you're able to interact with objects. We know this could feel fiddly and unintuitive, and we've made many improvements to solve these issues.
Objects will no longer snap back to their original position when you try to place them in an invalid position, but rather will move to the last valid position you defined. You can still cancel the movement to snap objects back to their original position by pressing the right mouse button. Placing objects over voids is also much easier, it now always works intuitively without having to target something with the cursor.
There is a new way to move objects triggered by holding Interact when picking them up. This will physically drag the object with the cursor rather than select a new target position. This is useful for making smaller adjustments to an object's position, but importantly can also be used to drag objects with you as you walk using the movement keys. Dragging of bodies and now objects has also been made much more intuitive, accepting position inputs even if they're outside of your interaction range.
ENVIRONMENT IMPACT AND FALL DAMAGE
In a game with as much physics as Exanima, and especially with the introduction of Force, it was important that general impacts could deal damage, not just ones tied to combat actions. This was something we attempted before, but had to abandon because it behaved too unpredictably. This time around we've developed a stable and detailed damage system for general collisions and various core improvements to our physics engine support it well.
NARRATOR AND SCRIPTED EVENTS
A new, but long planned, feature we call the "narrator" is an important new tool in story and gameplay. This is of course text based, it provides information, feedback and special interactions to the player. It comes with various new important scripted events and lore exposition, but we still have many more uses for it in future.
AI SYSTEM UPDATES
Exanima features a unique AI system where characters aren't scripted to do specific things but are driven organically by emotions and other mental states. They can become distracted, curious, agitated, concerned, angry, scared, surprised etc. by varying degrees and can form specific relationships with every other character they encounter. So far this has all been limited to responding to other characters, but now we have rebuilt it on a new framework that allows AI to perceive, understand and engage with anything in their environment, with lots of new tools to guide their decisions and behaviour.
This was important for intelligent interactions with things like Force powers, and we made some core improvements along the way, but it is the foundation for many new AI behaviours that also extend far beyond combat situations. This is a particularly important step for Exanima's 0.95 update, which will focus on more NPCs with more complex behaviours.
There have been various other specific improvements to AI, high level tactics and importantly the ability to use special abilities and powers, which will feature more and more in the game. In general though AI is important to us as we think it's fundamental to a compelling and immersive experience. We will always continue to improve and expand on it.
AND MANY OTHER THINGS
We've hit some major development milestones with this update and as always we've added that extra depth and attention to detail with everything, which is what makes Exanima special. Exanima is built on our own custom engine and we have done much work on physics, AI, graphics and much more to support these new features and to provide an ever improving, more immersive gameplay experience.
We have polished a great many aspects of the game and we have worked hard to build and update systems that may not always add much immediate value, but support the constant evolution of the game and the many features we still want to add. The pieces are coming together and we are focusing more and more on content and features as this platform we've built becomes solid and complete.
Note that due to the very extensive changes, current story saves will be wiped. Arena saves will be converted and should result essentially unchanged.
Changelog for version 0.9:
Force thaumaturgy, with 11 new powers and more to come
Huge new area to explore, new lore, encounters and items
Big overhaul of first 3 levels
Over 50 new and remastered procedural items
Multiple thaumaturgy domain mechanics
New Mind power through revelation mechanic
New 3D pathfinding system with dynamic paths
Allows for multiple overlapping layers of depth
Walk on any surface without artificial obstacles
Create dynamic paths that even AI can understand
More fluid and accurate movement
General impact and fall damage system
New "Narrator" gives information, feedback and special interactions
AI can now use powers and special abilities
Important AI general tactics improvements
Many AI behavioural improvements
Improved object interaction
New drag object interaction mode
New procedural materials and item features
Improved item description systems
Item captions are now coloured to indicate quality
You can now play dead after recovering from unconsciousness
Big performance improvements
Core graphics engine and material improvements
New "ultra" shading setting with specular GI
Improved dynamic "death animations"
Various improvements to footwork and character motion
Important fundamental physics engine improvements
Greatly improved loading times
Greatly improved latency with vsync enabled
Improved selection and interaction with small objects
Brushes can now also clean weapons
Core physics engine improvements
Huge number of fixes
Best,
Bare Mettle
Asid:
Coffee Diary - November 2023
Mon, 6 November 2023
Hey Exanimates,
Welcome to our first monthly coffee diary. Until now we posted a weekly dev diary on the forums, talking about what we're working on and how development is progressing. We're switching to this monthly format now, and going forward we should be able to make these more interesting and maybe include media when appropriate. Keep in mind that we are always careful with spoilers and we prefer it if you experience things in game, so we can be a little secretive.
We have just released a huge update, so we've been pretty busy just getting feedback, making improvements and fixes. We're still tracking a couple of issues, but the game now seems to be in the best shape it has ever been. This is the time in the cycle when we properly assess our next major development goals and work on things like systems and tools to support our workflow. At this point though our roadmap is mostly things on a small or medium scale, mainly gameplay features and content rather than major engine or tool development.
Our one bigger goal and focus for the next major update is the "role system". We'll likely talk about this more in future diaries, but for now we'll give you a basic introduction. The role system is very broadly what gives characters identities, behaviours, relationships, memories and interactions. Characters might have hundreds or even thousands of active roles, acquiring new ones all the time as they experience things, meet other characters and engage in activities. Roles are often situational, such as "person in shop", through which relational roles like "customer - shopkeep" can be acquired. Any NPC can acquire these roles, they will remember the experience, be able to relate information about it and so on. There's quite a lot more to it, but we won't get into all the details.
It's a powerful system that is mechanically quite simple, but requires us to gradually add more and more roles to make the AI smarter and understand more things. We already have a version of this in the game, but with only a few placeholder roles that rigidly script behaviour, not at all how this is supposed to work. Exanima's AI is so far almost purely driven by emotional states and personality traits. This alone is almost enough to model a wide range of behaviours, but the roles are another layer providing much needed context. Essentially the intelligence to guide the emotions. Roles should not override core emotional responses, but rather just nudge them in the right direction and ultimately be driven by them.
This sort of thing is our true passion, we want to create a believable world, and to us that's all about how it behaves. We originally didn't make our game physics based because we wanted awesome combat, that was really a gigantic detour from our true goal, driven by feedback. The physics is there because we want things to be truly interactive and less artificial, everything should behave in an organic way rather than according to a simple set of rules and predefined actions.
The next big update will include progress on this role system and include new intelligent NPCs and more dialogue, and also a new area to explore, which is very terrain heavy. For some time now we've been wanting to spruce up the visuals of our terrain, and we've already begun work on improving our tools for designing terrain and its surfaces. The ground is visually dominant in Exanima, so this is important. The updated terrain will feature better materials and many remastered assets, but it also solves many difficult problems that our level designers currently have to deal with. You will likely see incremental upgrades to the terrain before the major update, such as improved 3D grass which has been patched in already.
While we're hesitant to promise anything too specific, we are considering one or two smaller updates before the big one. One topic would be fully implementing Potential and other thaumaturgy mechanics, adding some new powers, improving existing ones and also the controls. Another thing that is high on our priority list is mechanics for saving progress in the late game. This will not be simple checkpoints as the game is no longer linear, but rather an optional system you will have to discover and engage with. We have been laying down the pieces for this for a long time, and with its introduction they will finally have a purpose and provide new objectives and interactions within the game.
We hope you found some of this interesting, and please let us know if you like this format (yes we will try to include some images in future). We'll see you here again on the first Monday of the next month.
Thanks!
-The Bare Mettle Team
Asid:
Coffee Diary - January 2024
Mon, 1 January 2024
Last month we mentioned we were migrating our entire engine, game and tools to 64 bit, as we really don't need to support 32 bit anymore and this gives access to practically unlimited ram and many big optimisation opportunities. This was a massive undertaking as our engine uses a lot of very low level (close to the hardware) code and we also took this opportunity to improve and optimise many core systems as we reviewed so much of it.
You may be wondering, the game already runs great, why optimise it further? First off, these are not rendering optimisations, as that's GPU territory, but in terms of everything else, and especially physics, these optimisations are extremely important. Unlike graphics which just runs at different framerates and different settings, physics always works in the same way, and for this to work and be any good in the first place, it must always do exactly the same thing at exactly the same rate. This means better performance isn't a matter of higher framerates and better settings, it's simply a hard limit on what we can do with the game.
Physics in Exanima isn't just for show, every element of gameplay, every interaction, every motion and outcome is a direct result of physics, no exceptions. Character motions are driven by virtual muscles and are made dynamically, even the slightest collision can completely change outcomes, everything has physics, everything is fully persistent. We never use simple shapes like boxes or cylinders for collisions, but always accurate representations, even when objects have complex shapes that are notoriously difficult to simulate.
All of this detailed simulation is expensive, which puts limits on things like how many characters we can have, how many objects, and just generally how detailed and accurate the simulation can be. Greater character density is an important requirement for what we have planned for the game's conclusion, but we also want more physics interactions to add gameplay elements and improve immersion which was the main goal of our fully physics driven approach. This includes things like cloth physics, plant physics, soft bodies, animated tentacles and water to name just a few.
This huge migration is now complete and we've also done lots of low level optimisation and a slew of improvements, especially to our tools. We've been using and testing things for a while now and it's all very solid and very fast. The results have exceeded our expectations, with physics performance being doubled, and collision performance specifically almost tripled with room for further improvement. Collisions are particularly important, because while things like character and other motions are expensive, they have a fixed cost, but collisions keep scaling as more objects are involved and the game doesn't place any restrictions on what you can do.
Most recently we've been working on cloth physics, which is really the technology which drives cloth, hair, vegetation and soft bodies, so this is a big important thing and it accounts for a very big chunk of our performance budget. We also use cloth physics to help generate models for clothing in our tools. We came up with a new method that produces much better results and is much less restrictive in terms of modelling. After some thorough optimisation, it's also up to 10 times faster than what we had before. This is a really impressive result which is great for all the things we plan to do with these features.
These kind of major engine and tool revisions are par for the course after a major update, and often involve many months of work. With this and our terrain system overhaul we're done and already back to focusing on content and gameplay features. The team is busy with major content additions for the next update as well as some nice improvements, as some existing content is gaining new importance with the introduction of new features. We plan to start insider testing of the updated engine and terrain (which affects all content) soon, and we should be following this up with a public update that includes some new features and content updates.
Have a great year!
Bare Mettle
Asid:
Coffee Diary - February 2024
Wed, 7 February 2024
For this month's diary Madoc made a video again.
We mentioned previously how we hoped to use more performance for more and better physics, and this is the result of those efforts. This gets a bit technical, but we think real time physics isn't a very widely understood topic that needs a little explaining.
These are some very significant improvements and additions to the game's physics that support a lot of things in terms of gameplay, world building and our development process. They make the very foundations that drive everything in the game better.
Best,
Bare Mettle
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