Development Recap 2019 Recap

Luna

Phoenix Lead Director
Staff member
Developer
Phoenix Lead Director
Programmer
Level Designer
Aug 14, 2017
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새해 복 많이 받으세요 (Happy new year)
We’re kicking off this year good with a free copy of the game available for everyone to play.
For those that haven’t yet, you can download it here: https://discord.gg/xRMKUx5

As you might’ve noticed, this build is far from complete.

Part of that is because we’ve been stuck in the gameplay department. But a bigger part is because well, deadlines.
I had the choice to either delay this for another few months, or just remove everything that was throwing errors (kind of like our April fools build) and I picked the latter.
Speaking of Errors, we’ve deployed a hot-fix which should address the performance issues people have been seeing. As well as fixing up a few loose ends that were throwing a lot of errors.

So, where are we going in 2020?

Well, for starters, we’ll be migrating the project to Unreal Engine 4.24.1. This process should take a few months to complete, but our main reason for doing this is the new quixel/megascans support unreal added to 4.24.1. As well as resolving a few performance issues, adding raytracing support and a few other perks.
(the current build already uses a newer engine than what we were working on, 4.20 was the normal version, but darky worked on 4.22 for some reason, which also broke a lot of stuff…)
After that we’ll be going on a slow phase, adding collision to the social space, adding some of the gameplay stuff, adjusting the animation libraries etc.

All these changes will also be published to the public and closed alpha branches, so you (yes you dickey) can play around with them.
We’re also intending to keep the debug features turned on for the time being, we know some of you enjoy playing around with them so we’re keeping them on.


As for Feature updates:
We’ll keep the public alpha open to everyone, and we’ll slowly be adding back in some of the features that broke when trying to release it.
We don’t have an ETA for when the multiplayer servers will go back up. But, we’ll keep things in single player mode for the time being.

Now, lets look back to the last few months of the project.
First of I’m happy to announce that we’ve successfully migrated to our new hosting provider.
You might’ve seen some discussions floating around, but we’ve went with Hetzner.
They’re one of the few hosting providers that were able to meet our demands, and we’re rather pleased with them so far.
I’ve worked weeks on end migrating everything over and patching things up, and I’m happy to say that it’s all working great now.

Second, Darky has put in quite a lot of work getting the social space polished.
Adding materials to buildings, polishing things up, adding particle effects, and well, making things look rather nice. (as you might’ve seen in the public build)
The light up sidewalks were his idea by the way.

Additionally, some of Finn’s props and Rider’s texture work also made it into the game, the vending machines look amazing, and thanks to Rider’s work, I’ve also managed to make this fun advertisement:
(And yes, I did get it proof read)
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Aside from those 3, Alex and Justin also worked hard on a discord plugin for unreal that extends the number of things we can do on discord. According to them, something about hosting lobbies and achievements. I didn’t pay much attention when they were geeking out.

And lastly, Cormacnoah has released two new tracks, check them out on the soundcloud right here!
https://soundcloud.com/nekrova%2Fsets%2Fnekrova-winter-update
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