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Kenshi
Asid:
Kenshi v1.0.43 & v1.0.44 (Experimental Branch)
Tue, 7 January 2020
Out now on the experimental branch only. To opt in to the experimental version, right-click on Kenshi in your Steam games list -> properties -> betas tab -> then choose “experimental”. If opting in, please be aware of bugs and instability.
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
1.0.43
Bug Fixes:
• Fixed character editor crashing if character model fails to load from a mod
• Fixed interior layout editor mod tracking (level editor)
• Fixed crash with the restricted food tooltip for some mods
• Fixed restricted food tooltip potentially missing some races
• Fixed a few minor dialog bugs
Translations:
• Chinese updated
1.0.44
Bug Fixes:
• Hotfixed the recent character editor infinite loading fix breaking new games
• Added 'character limit reached' message when buying animals
• Fixed building town allocation when placing town markers
• Added error number to CRASHDUMP FAILED log message (description was garbled)
• A fix for animals walking into buildings
Asid:
December Community Update
Sun, 12 January 2020
Now that the holiday season is officially behind us and Michael Bublé prepares to return to hibernation, there’s a lot to look back on in 2019. It’s important to remember though with a lot of time away from the studio December was a slower month overall.
(If you’re just here for the latest Kenshi 2 gossip, scroll down a bit)
A Year of Updates
First and probably most importantly, in December 2018 Kenshi made it to version 1.0 marking the end of a long trip as one of the original titles in Steam Greenlight. As of writing it also looks like we’re fated to be the last to graduate.
Taking our place as torch-bearers for Valve’s first foray into pre-release support, we’ve pushed a huge number of post-release updates and continue to polish Lo-Fi’s first project. Last month, in addition to highlighting a
large patch, we touched on release frequencies – the gist of which is to continue liberal use of the experimental branch and periodic combined releases on the main branch when we’re happy with the stability.
Journey into the East
Another huge focus of last month was our attendance at WePlay as indiePlay awards finalists in Shanghai, China. Chris and Nat travelled across the globe to meet fans, translation partners, and gracefully accept defeat surrounded by a crowd chanting ‘Kenshi!’ right to the end.
Whilst we would have rather taken the crown, losing to Touhou, another game series with a rich history that started as a one-man passion project, feels somewhat poetic. Congratulations to ZUN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou_Project#Development for realising a high school design idea as an iconic game series and Team Ladybug for taking it in a fresh direction with Touhou Luna Nights.
A slow boat to Japan(ese)
As a final note on last month’s Kenshi progress, fans waiting for updates to the Japanese translation and localisation haven’t been forgotten. Initially we were optimistic that it wouldn’t take long to correct but unfortunately it required a lot more work than we realised. Meg, our Japanese community manager, has been putting a lot of time into this and currently estimates it to be about 80% finished. We’ll share more news when appropriate via the official Japanese Twitter to keep everyone informed.
Recast replaces Havok
Switching to a more modern engine gives us an opportunity to change things in ways that are otherwise difficult for Kenshi, first of which is the technology behind navigation mesh generation (or navmeshes). A navmesh essentially defines which parts of the environment a character can travel through, understanding positions for height changes, terrain types, and obstacles which is fed into systems for pathfinding.
Kenshi 1 used Havok AI™, seen elsewhere in several popular titles and made by the same team behind the well known Havok Physics™. Kenshi 2 will use a different system called Recast, it has a well documented integration with Unreal Engine https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/API/Runtime/Navmesh/Recast/index.html in addition to being open source allowing us a much greater degree of control and adaptability. Greater control of Navmesh generation is the first step towards better path finding in Kenshi 2.
Additional technical information on Recast can be found on the git project page here https://github.com/recastnavigation/recastnavigation
Level editor v2
As mentioned in our previous update, we’re not just creating brand new stuff – there are a number of important items for us to keep so that modding remains within reach of the wider community. Right now we have a functional version of the level editor ported for Kenshi 2 giving us time to define an appropriate feature set. This approach pairs well with more complicated functions such as terrain editing directly in the Unreal Editor. If this is a tool you use regularly it would be great to hear from you in the comments.
Game Merchandise.game
Also requested by fans, we have a small update on the status of merchandise. Before the holidays we caught up with the team at merchandise.game who’ve been working with us on our first drop of Kenshi gear. As we’re close to production there was some discussion about whether or not we should open pre-orders, in the end we decided it would be a better if we simply wait for initial stock and order more based on the sales. Assuming no issues with the paperwork Kenshi merchandise could be on their store and ready to ship as soon as next month.
We’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for an amazing 2019 and wish you all the best of luck with any resolutions you’ve made. To our fans getting ready for lunar new year at the end of the month, don’t forget to sweep before you enjoy the holidays!
Asid:
Kenshi v1.0.44
Wed, 22 January 2020
Bug Fixes:
• Removed the "Disable civilians in towns" option as it was causing some issues with things like Waystations being unpopulated, and no longer made a noticable performance gain.
• Fixed use cursor appearing on player built tables.
• Stealing backpacks from animals now correctly flags as stealing.
• Fixed building town allocation when placing town markers.
• Fix for animals walking into buildings.
• Additional fix related to previous ragdoll crash.
• Fixed translations, fonts and audio when kenshi install path contains non-ascii characters.
• Fixed restricted food tooltip potentially missing some races.
• Fixed a few minor dialog bugs.
• Fixed texture loading error handling - with invalid textures (eg from file corruption or a broken mod) you now just get black, instead of a crash.
• Fixed crash with the restricted food tooltip for some mods.
• Fixed character editor crashing if character model fails to load from a mod.
• Fixed interior layout editor mod tracking (level editor).
Changes:
• Added 'character limit reached' message when buying animals.
• Added error number to CRASHDUMP FAILED log message (description was garbled).
• Cleaned up list of races that can eat restricted food in item tooltip.
• Backpack contents marked as stolen when you steal a backpack.
Translations:
• Chinese updated
Special thanks to 'Victory Forever' for spotting the issue around disable civilians and waystations.
Asid:
January Community Update
Wed, 12 February 2020
It’s a new month and I am once again asking you to read a developer update. In addition to pushing another sizeable patch to the main branch, we’re adding a new official language soon and sharing a small peak into what’s going on with Kenshi 2.
New language – Korean:
We’re now in the final stages of introducing support for one more language to Kenshi – Korean, which we expect to include in a patch toward the end of February. Adding Korean to Kenshi follows a hugely inspirational community effort to localise the game client, paired with the help of our external translators to see it through to the finish.
Huge thanks to Jeffrey Jeoung for helping us to officialise his translation mod, as well as BusanDaek, Byunghyun An, Son Byeong-gwan and all others who worked hard alongside him on the fan translation.
Korean players can follow along with the press releases onNewsWire and Ruliweb. Additionally, join us as we trial run our Korean social media channels for Twitter and Facebook.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel:
On the topic of new content channels, we’re also finally graduating from using Chris’ personal YouTube. You can now subscribe to the official Lo-Fi Games YouTube channel for video content directly from the studio and to ensure this tweet ages poorly.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzCkna5yBQVb2CyfYukkxPg
Merchandise – Not quite for sale:
As nearly everyone is aware, there have been a number of precautions taken to limit the spread of the coronavirus across the globe, particularly in China. As our merchandise partners use manufacturing facilities in China this has understandably lead to a delay in creating Kenshi products. We’ll have an update on the status of merchandise in a future post once things are back to normal.
The continuity teller:
Following the announcement of Kenshi 2 the speculative flood gates opened on feature lists and lore questions, specifically how various topics in Kenshi might be explained in the events of Kenshi 2. As before, our answers will remain limited allowing each user to explore the world and come to their own conclusions (unless we have to end any more astrophysics arguments…). What we can share is some of the thoughts behind it all, directly from Natalie:
“I’m currently working on the foundations of Kenshi’s story and content, which means a lot of switching between open world design and writing world lore (... I may or may not have ended up with my own endless encyclopedia of Kenshi lore at this point). First up I’ve had to map out the ruins which need preserving from kenshi 1, comparing three different timelines to make sure the layout and history are consistent.
This takes a huge amount of time, essentially working on two different world timelines as I go back and delve more into Kenshi’s ancient history. It all helps in keeping the explorable ruins nice and interesting, plus it helps to work out the evolution of its current factions, making for some really original cultures. So my working map right now has a bunch of overlays from the different timelines, plus the current faction’s territories, their safe(ish) zones, danger zones, wtf?!? zones, wildlife and enemy territories.
I’m constantly working back and forth between fleshing out the main faction lore, making a list of squads in that territory, mapping out the town locations, working out the individual town conflicts and stories, plus figuring out all of their gameplay roles, goals, motives, and traits. After a rough placement around the world, I’ve begun concentrating on a 1/6th of the map portion (one of the safer zones) and fleshed it out with any split off groups that may have conflicted with its main faction, any dens, bases and other more interesting POIs. Spider diagrams have become my best friend at this point :’)
It’s been a slow process. The map is… considerably bigger than Kenshi 1’s; it’s a challenge to fill it with interesting content as well as balance it for a desolate, wild atmosphere. I’m conscious of not filling the world with shallow or empty content, instead focusing more on the individual towns and their micro-cultures. Admittedly I have to keep reigning myself in from overcomplicating the whole thing - this is a sandbox game with subtle, environmental story-telling, not a heavily story-driven RPG.
It feels like I’ve had to scrap a lot of ideas so far but I’m starting to pick up some momentum as everything finally clicks nicely into place. World building and writing is a lot like sculpting a statue or painting, you have to constantly add, tweak, delete, repeat… it takes some patience but it’s all part of the process!”
For some additional musings on the inner workings of Kenshi such as NPC dialogue and world building, check out Natalie’s blog entries on Gamasutra.
The quiet sounds of progress:
Last month in addition to continuing our search for a tech lead, our programming team have been working on a number of systems to help in creation of the game. This includes everything from basic camera controls and map markers all the way to physics events such as building collision. As we’re still very early in development a lot of their time is laying the groundwork for certain elements of Kenshi 2 that are still under wraps, undoubtedly users will have a lot of fun speculating over this in the comments and we look forward to revealing more about this in a few months time.
Finally for any fans agonising over what to do for their special somebody this valentines day, why not tell them how to sign up for the Kenshi mailing list before treating them to a gourmet meal of the finest foodcubes and a glass of grog (assuming you’re old enough). If that doesn’t win them over then at least it should slow them down for when the skin spiders eventually turn up...
Asid:
Kenshi: English Trailer
Jan 30, 2020
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