Hey Exanimates,

Previously we mentioned how we'd been reworking many items, and how in future we want to add many new ones, particularly clothing, and make various improvements along the way. Adding more clothing as we expand on our world and content is important, quality improvements are also nice, but really more of a by-product of other things. The main motivation for "an overhaul of our characters" is that we desperately need to massively streamline and improve our workflow. We already made some important advancements here with our tools, but clothing is especially problematic because there's a huge number of different items of varying shapes that can be worn in any combination. Every combination needs to change the shape of clothing, and so something like a shirt needs to come in thousands of shapes. These are dynamically assembled, but even so we need as many as 500 3D models in very specific configurations. For one shirt. This part is all done by hand, and it can take weeks of confusing and tedious work, testing and adjusting. There are many things that can go wrong and they are slow and difficult to fix. Despite our efforts, we still have various issues like clipping and holes and sometimes have to give armours unflattering shapes in order to make them fit.

This proposed overhaul is something we've been talking about internally for a long time as "human 2.0". It's been kind of a distant dream, something we don't dare tackle until after a 1.0 release. We couldn't even consider such an overhaul unless we could solve the fundamental problem of how much work it takes to make just one item. Meanwhile, this is costing our artists lots of time that should be better spent elsewhere, for results that are still inadequate. Just recently, while trying to figure out how to make some items work, Madoc decided he'd had enough and put the role system temporarily aside to figure out what could be done. Even if we're not doing some big overhaul yet, solving some fundamental issues and streamlining the workflow was just too important.

Many curses and a few keyboards later, we have a new system and tools with lots of automation and a simplified workflow that turn weeks of work for one item into just a few hours. Quality character assets still take time of course, but the tedious, confusing and problem ridden part of it is basically gone. It solves a lot of problems, it's a huge relief to us and brings many benefits already. The way bodies and clothes deform for animation is better, things are far less prone to errors and issues like clipping, artists can focus on the real work, it's intuitive, it can be iterated on quickly, there's a lot of implicit future compatibility in assets and even loading times are improved. To really reap all the benefits we will eventually need to do our big "human 2.0" rework of many assets, but now we've already solved the biggest and most critical problems to support it.

This was a temporary shift in priorities, but a very important step that was well worth the time investment. We won't be adding lots of brand new clothes or generally upgrading characters just yet, but we're ready for it now. In the meantime you can expect some very nice visual upgrades to some of the most commonly seen items in the game. Updating these foundational items is how we solve our armour etc. fitting problems. We've also made more nice improvements to materials and randomisation. Here's some examples of some clothing type items that we're already reworked using the new system:

Despite this detour, we have made progress on AI and role features. Our approach continues to be to focus on the most difficult problems first and solve them well before we do many things with what we have. This will be the focus of initial testing, to properly identify what players notice most and any issues, so we can finalise the systems that will support more roles and interactions. There's practical elements here, and of course expanding AI capabilities has many gameplay implications, but we're mainly focused on immersion and lifelike NPCs. We really don't want any of this to feel like gamey features.

This means we're quite detail orientated, the little things such as how characters move and look around and how they describe what they found, that don't fundamentally change the functionality, but makes all the difference in our eyes. Dialogue in particular, with common and repetitive speech, has been quite difficult. We want to make it varied, flow from previous remarks and responses, while accommodating diverse grammar required by dynamic elements. This creates a large scope problem that needed new approaches. It does need care and effort, or we could break immersion rather than contribute to it. We might not immediately land where we'd like to be, there's always room for more nuance and variation, but the important thing is that we're building it in the right way and not cutting corners early.

It's been a very busy month, working on many different things besides and tying various loose ends. From here we should be able to focus on getting the role functionality ready for a test release, while we continue work on the next major content release.

Best,

Bare Mettle