Exanima

[Asid]

Company Emblems
13 DEC 2021

The new company creation screen for arena. A wide selection of backgrounds and designs with colouring provide a lot of choice and variation.

The emblem generation will also be used for designs on procedural shields, banners and tabards in future.

[Asid]

Exanima 0.8.3
Sun, 19 December 2021



Procedural weapons, massive update to arena mode, new graphics, new user interface and much more.

The game has undergone extensive changes and received many updates on the beta branch over the past year or so, but it's finally time to bring it all into the main branch again. There's really a lot to cover here even if we just focus on the big stuff, so please bear with us.

ITEMISATION CHANGES

Exanima for all its physics and realistic approach to armour and weapons is still an RPG, itemisation is important, and loot is the carrot in a game with a lot of stick. But the usual approach of ever increasing tiers with unlikely bonuses has no place here. So what can we do to keep us interested in finding new items, to make them feel special and us invested in them?

We have been finding ways to make items as unique and mechanically interesting as possible while remaining grounded in reality. Procedural methods and detailed properties to guide them allow us to do that. This has big gameplay implications, and can also be leveraged in many ways to create a much more realistic and immersive game world.


PROCEDURAL WEAPONS



Every weapon that was previously a fixed item like "the poleaxe" is now being replaced with a "factory" that can generate a certain type of poleaxe. This is a large collection of different hafts, langets, bolts, axe heads, rear spikes, top spikes, guards and queues which can be randomly combined to make a unique poleaxe with unique qualities and features.

This alone can generate sometimes billions of combinations for a single weapon, but that's just the start, there are also variable deformations. The same haft type can vary in length and thickness, spikes can have varying lengths, curves and tapers, an axe head varies in the angle, curvature, width and length of the blade and has different hole patterns cut into it and so on and so forth.

These things give every weapon a unique shape and characteristics. These have important implications with physics, both in terms of collisions and inertia (how the mass is distributed), which is very noticeable. They all handle and behave differently.

That's not all. Each item is made and textured with unique generated materials. Different parts of the same weapon might be made from different metals, woods etc. The quality of those materials also varies, and so does the condition.


All these weapons are generated from the same one handed falchion factory:



The end result is that there are practically infinite weapons, each has its own characteristics and varies in quality, condition and appearance. Part of our objective was also to make weapons more realistic, and indeed the new weapons both look and behave much better.

This already makes weapons so much more interesting, but there is a lot we can do now. We are working on giving each weapon different grips and orientations it can be used in, giving more purpose to its unique features and more meaningful variety for weapons in general. We are actually building weapons from individual components now, this is detailed information we can use to improve how they behave too.


ITEM GRADES AND QUALITY



Much of the new procedural itemisation doesn't only concern weapons, but everything else too. Previously items could vary in colour and had a few fixed modifiers such as "rusted" or "superior". Now all items use procedural materials and factors like quality and and elegance affect the choice between different types of fabrics, leathers, buttons, coatings, paints and finishes. All materials have varying quality with visible differences.

Build and material quality are accompanied by traits, which may be material specific. These are things such as heavy, light, reinforced, hardened etc. which further modifies the item's base properties.

Finally you have a third independent factor, which is condition, adding wear and rust to items and affecting how they perform in various ways. Condition does not degrade over time, however in story there is now a way to improve the condition of items you find. This means that the many old rusted items in the game which were previously all junk, might now be diamonds in the rough, worth taking a closer look at. Items of particularly good quality and having desirable configurations or traits are something you can invest resources in.


NEW RENDERING ENGINE

You're probably wondering, but why? The game looked fine, this was a truly massive undertaking and not something we wanted to be doing at this stage in development. There were various things we had to or wanted to improve, but individually they did not justify making a totally new rendering engine. However, already deep into the work with procedural items, we started running into serious problems we had no control over, and with great reluctance we finally accepted that if we didn't do this and do it now, we'd just be wasting time and energy and the game would have an uncertain future.

We're going to explain the problems we've solved with the new renderer, as well as some important benefits that came with a fresh design and take on every part of rendering.

Compatibility and driver issues
became a serious problem, particularly as we worked on our new procedural systems. Exanima has a unique and unusual rendering engine, and the things we were trying to do just weren't being properly supported by GPUs, and we couldn't expect them to. We really tried to find workarounds, but everything failed and a drastically different approach to rendering was the only fix.

Driver CPU bottlenecks
have always been a problem, but over just two years we'd lost a huge 30% performance to driver updates as they moved away from our less trodden path. With GPUs and monitors advancing very quickly, while CPUs mostly just get more cores, this was becoming a very serious problem. With our new rendering engine we were able to literally triple framerates or even better in the more CPU bound cases.

Our material system
, while competent, was very difficult to use. Artists were faced with choices that required a physics degree and a calculator. Complex materials were also resource intensive. In practice either due to complexity or for the sake of efficiency, things rarely looked as they should. Our new material system is much more streamlined, easy to use and efficient, it removes the uncertainty and makes high quality materials simple and cheap, with lots of support from our tools.

A hard light source limit
was an issue with our old renderer, particularly with multiplayer on the horizon, where we'd have less control over how many lights would be in one place at once. The new renderer is still a forward renderer, but isn't strictly limited in how many lights it can handle.

Global illumination
(GI) or indirect lighting is a fundamental part of rendering. Without it shadows would be black voids rather than just dark. Exanima's dark environments require at least a basic version of this, but our solution wasn't great. It didn't scale well to large open spaces, didn't support much verticality; while indirect light didn't pass through walls, it ignored everything else, even doors, resulting in very flat and weird looking areas of shadow. It also performed very poorly for moving lights, once again an issue for multiplayer and a limitation in general.

This is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. Baked solutions can't deal with dynamic objects and lights and are a huge burden on content creation; ambient occlusion only darkens corners, it doesn't deal with actual light and darkness; other solutions tend to be cumbersome and slow, with extreme hardware requirements.

We were able to come up with our own GI solution which solved all our problems and drastically improved the game's visuals. Our solution is completely real-time dynamic, blindingly fast and works in any situation, whether it's a dark little room or a valley viewed from a tower with the open sky above. It captures even small details adding lots of depth and doesn't care how many objects or lights are dynamic, it just does its job.

Here's what things would look like with no GI at all:



Read on: https://steamcommunity.com/games/362490/announcements/detail/5612046175808103529

[Asid]

Weapon Component Effects
Mon 21 March 2022

New detailed weapon properties allow us to give each part of a weapon more unique functional roles, diversifying weapons and their behaviour with impacts more. We're also introducing support for some important new combat features and skills.

[Asid]

Exanima 0.8.4
Sun, 17 July 2022



Big combat changes, general improvements and some arena goodies.

Since our last update we've made some major improvements to core gameplay systems and many incremental changes and additions based on feedback and our own goals. There's also some nice late content additions for arena. Our next update is entirely story focused, so we wanted to wrap all this other stuff up and get these very important changes out now.

The highlight of this update is the most major changes to combat yet, as well as some smaller, but still very important ones. The combat is faster, more responsive, more solid and realistic, many lingering quirks have been properly addressed. These are transformative changes and we're excited for what it brings to the combat and what it allows us to do going forward as we finalise more skills, itemisation and gameplay features.

We've been through a lot of major development hurdles, making our own engine, tools and complex unique game systems, exploring with players the implications of these fundamentally different approaches and how we can make the most of them. With the game being in uncharted territory it's hard to imagine a time when it won't seem like things should or could be improved, and constant community feedback and requests ensure our to-do list is always growing. The major content goals for the game are now few however, and our road map to 1.0 includes a whole lot of gameplay and quality of life additions, many of which we've now covered here. We will continue to improve the game after full release, but it's good to check some of those boxes.


NEW COMBAT MOVEMENT SYSTEM

Movement and footwork are the foundation of the entire combat and probably the single thing we've iterated the most on. Making the movement physics driven, reactive, somewhat realistic and responsive to the player all at the same time is something we've always battled with, without a clear idea of what might ultimately be possible.

For a while now we've been trying to figure out how to fundamentally change the movement so that it's not limited to a fixed step pattern and returning to stance before moving again. If characters could move freely and without pausing the combat would be much more dynamic, faster paced and responsive. Our plan looked promising, and we decided this was too important and had to be attempted.

These things don't always work out, we've a hit a few dead ends in the past, but this was a huge success on many fronts. You can now change direction, cancel movements or continue moving without waiting for the previous movement to complete and without pausing between steps. There is also more granularity to how far you move based on inputs. In order to support this we had to also work on the dynamic footwork and animation systems, making for better balance, control and cleaner animation under all conditions. These changes combined offer a level of control we previously didn't think we could achieve.

This is a massive change for combat, with huge implications. We have also had to do significant work on the AI to adapt it to this, and tried to make it more engaging and tactical in the process. It will likely take you some time to learn how to make the most of this new movement and everything it allows. As with everything, you do need to work in harmony with the physics and body motions. We've been having a lot of fun testing and polishing these changes with the help of our Discord community, they've been met with very high praise and we're really excited to see the combat evolve in such a big way.


WEAPON AND DAMAGE MECHANICS REWORK

We recently introduced procedural weapons, but this was an important first step of a larger itemisation and weapon mechanics overhaul. In this update we've got a huge rework of how weapons work, the damage system, armour mitigation, how everything interacts with physics and more. We've added a lot of detailed data to weapons to describe their features and how each part of a weapon should behave, there's many new weapon and weapon part classes and subclasses.

This allows a much more detailed model for how weapons behave and supports many new and future features. Weapon are more diverse and balanced with specific advantages and uses, various long standing issues with the damage system were properly solved, there's support for new itemisation features and skills and generally brings important improvements to gameplay and realism.

There was a big focus on more realistic physical behaviour of weapons, but always with the goal of improving gameplay and balance, playing to the specific strengths of different weapons, breathing new life into some underperforming weapons and categories. There have also been improvements to core physics, character animation and attack mechanics to support this. Some weapons can now also be dynamically flipped to strike with the reverse side, something which will be extended to more weapons and different grips over time.

Beyond the immediate improvements, this new platform with very detailed weapon data combined with component wise procedural generation allows us to do much more still going forward. The goals is to give weapons ever more mechanical differences, techniques, motions and gameplay features that distinguish them well beyond what stats can do.


CONTROLLER AND STEAM DECK SUPPORT

Despite the lack of proper support some of you were already using controllers and it's a frequently requested feature. Steam Deck support was also requested and we worked on Proton compatibility, special UI scaling, control schemes and various input and performance optimisations with surprisingly good results.

Exanima is a game that does not naturally lend itself well to controller input, some aspects of interaction by necessity remain cursor based, but we developed dedicated control schemes for all core gameplay and user interface. The game can be played fully on controller and it's quite a fun and different experience.


Cumulative changelog for version 0.8.4:

•   Weapon mechanics and damage system rework
•   New combat movement system
•   Two new arena environments
•   Remastered courtyard arena
•   Nine new armour pieces making two full sets
•   New procedural weapon: glaive
•   Velvet procedural material added
•   Detailed physics data for different parts of weapons
•   Specific behaviour and damage from different parts of weapons
•   Many new weapon and part subcategories with different behaviour
•   Haft types with different behaviour and sounds
•   Reworked weapon damage and armour mitigation mechanics
•   Major slash rework with hewing and cutting damage
•   Some weapons can now be flipped to strike with the reverse
•   Improved thrusting mechanics
•   Improved remise behaviour
•   Core physics engine improvements
•   Animation system improvements
•   AI combat improvements with adaptive behaviours
•   Smart overhead targeting based on cursor relative to opponent
•   Dynamic swing height adjustment, preventing very low or high swings
•   Improved edge alignment control
•   Improved greatsword handling
•   Added fading feature for objects obstructing the camera
•   Improved camera obstacle avoidance behaviour
•   Improved cursor behaviour for look function
•   Smart selection for small objects and inventory icons
•   Steam Deck support, performance, UI and control optimisations
•   Proton and Linux GPU driver compatibility fixes
•   Full controller support via Steam
  o   Dedicated movement and aiming controls
  o   Feathered object and UI cursor interaction
  o   Full menu and UI navigation and interaction
  o   On screen keyboard support
•   Controls to quick cast a selected power
•   The roster can be rearranged via drag and drop
•   The roster is now colour coded
•   Shop items are neatly and persistently arranged
•   Shop items displayed from newest to oldest
•   Shop stock rotation rate increased
•   Arsenal tabs can now be scrolled
•   Arsenal correctly scales to different aspect ratios
•   Brushes can now be used from inside the arsenal
•   Added a confirmation prompt for forfeiting tournaments
•   Performance improvements

Best, Bare Mettle

[Asid]

Procedural Copper Alloys
06 March 2023

Different qualities and conditions of our new procedural material for copper alloys like bronze or brass, finally completing our lineup of dynamic materials. Note that we're just using this armour as a spoiler free object to show the effect, but it will be used for various new remastered items in the coming update.

[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

[Asid]

Coffee Diary - March 2024
Mon, 4 March 2024




This has been a month of mostly wrapping things up and getting them ready for a release. There have been a lot of important core improvements that affect the entire game and content, so we want to get the game in testing and updated before moving on to other things. This includes the switch to 64 bit and optimisations to many parts of the engine, the overhauled terrain system and all related assets, improvements our physics engine and important new features, a complete graphical overhaul of the golem area, a huge rework and expansion of the Catacombs map and a few other smaller, but still important improvements. It's a lot.

Most recently we've been working on improvements and additions to our physics engine. These are things we've been wanting to do for some time and are extremely important for the future of the game. The core physics improvements are immediately obvious in gameplay, they make weapon interactions feel and function better in combat, they solve many problems and we're already noticing how they allow us to do more with level design and interaction. Last month we released a video where we showed what was basically a prototype version of new cloth and soft body features. This is something we hope to use extensively for things like clothing, plants, those creepy fleshy growths, sheets of paper and generally the many things that should be soft, flexible, floppy and squishy. This would allow a new level of immersion and interactivity. Dynamic physical interactions are at the core of Exanima's gameplay and immersive world, and this is something we want to extend to every part of it.

The key breakthrough we demonstrated in our video was a performant way to do polygonal collision on deformable bodies. While it's great that we're able to do realistic interactions between cloth and things like weapons, this provides a versatile solution for all sorts of soft bodies beyond cloth, where simpler methods could be considered sufficient. Since the video we've further improved our model, stress testing it and making it very functional and stable under many conditions and applications. We can drape cloth over objects, hold objects in nets and sacks and do all sort of tricky things that require a very stable and accurate model.

Performance is of course a major concern, we identified good, fast methods, but we still had to optimise what we showed then. We knew our prototype implementation could be made roughly 10 times faster, and we joked about making it 20 times faster, but that's what we did. Then we optimised it even more, and made it 40 times faster. This being physics, This being physics, it means a bigger performance budget for more cool things. Another important optimisation was making deformable bodies that aren't currently doing much and actively interacting with anything, or visible, or casting a visible shadow etc., go into an idle state where they cost virtually nothing. This is ultimately what allows us to have a huge number of these complex objects in an environment.

In keeping with Exanima's full interactivity, we also added the ability to move and drag cloth around with the cursor. Besides that consistent immersive feel, this has a number of gameplay implications that we're eager to explore. Another of Exanima's more unique features is perfect persistence of everything, this means that if you leave a piece of cloth draped over something in a particular way and exited your game, it has to be in the same exact position when you return to it.

We've also extended our development tools to support these new features and generally improve our workflow for all physics. We've been constantly making improvements to our tools and also making them more intuitive and user friendly, for eventual modding use and also if and when we expand our team.

There is so much we can do with these new features and we're very excited by the possibilities, but as usual much will be revealed when we add new content and gameplay where you can experience it fully first hand. Everything we listed up top and these core improvements are in the polishing stage now and we hope to begin testing in the next few days and get it all released for everyone soon after.

Best,
Bare Mettle