Virtuverse Alpha 7. A year on.
Over the last year of development, Alpha 7 has come a long way. Nonetheless, there’s still just as much left to do, and today we hope to shed some light on some of the latest developments. So without further ado, here are just a few things we’ve been working on these last few months:
Procedural weapons & new weapon types
Between Early Access 1 and 6, Virtuverse only had one type of a weapon — energy rifles. While we had the systems in place to support different types of damage, those were largely limited to bracers. Furthermore, a limited selection of weapons was artificially expanded using the quality system, where entirely by chance a slightly better weapon might be crafted. While on its own this is fine and something we might keep, albeit improve, moving forward, the few weapon options remains a problem. This brings us to procedural weapons, an idea we’ve been exploring throughout the summer. This involves hand crafting several dozen variations of each part of a weapon: barrel, optics, body, stock, and so on, and joining them to create potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of unique combinations.
As part of researching this, we’re getting closer to the point where we’ll be able to start slowly fulfilling backer rewards for those who wish to create their own, and in this case entirely unique, weapons.
Last little bit of detail is the new weapon types we hope to implement. Going outside the limits of the sci-fi energy rifles, we want to see more satisfying-to-shoot physical damage guns, better grenade launchers, and delve into other types of damage such as void, fire, acid, and so on.
Procedural level design tools & more
Throughout spring we’ve worked on the main menu map, as a training ground for the new tools in Unreal Engine 5. In retrospect, doing so was a blessing in disguise, as we discovered several critical bugs in the engine, that on occasion halted development for weeks. Eventually, after upgrading to the release version of Unreal, main menu, along with its UI, was complete.
While exploring the tools to create new weapons, we took a stab at creating procedural buildings, and many, many other level design tools that would, at the cost of a very lengthy initial setup, would speed up level design by months. This is not to say that the map will be procedurally generated, but rather that the buildings, props, pipes, roads, walls, and even NPCs will be procedurally generated. For reference, the mercenary outpost on Temrance island took about a week to create; placing every pipe, wall, window, door, and bit of roof by hand. With a map several times larger than Temrance, and ideally many more outposts, creating and decorating every building by hand becomes infeasible.
For much of the late summer, we’ve been exploring the endless possibilities of Houdini and Houdini Engine for Unreal made by SideFX. Spending a few weeks developing the procedural tools will allow us to create larger outposts and make the map far more detailed in a matter of days, where otherwise it could take a few months.
Chat & coming to Linux
Every playtest thus far has garnered a few colonists to explore the idea of running Virtuverse on Linux. The main obstacle was the use of a chat client that was only available on Windows. This chat client enables cross-server player communication, allowing you to talk to your friends in the overworld, while you’re exploring the dungeons.
If platform incompatibility was the only issue, we might not have started working on our own solution. However, the chat is undoubtedly one of the most volatile features in the current game, half the time not working at all, and requiring an equally unreliable fix in hopes of finally connecting to the server. This is largely why we decided to work on our own solution, creating a simple, yet robust chat client. In doing so, it enables us to finally release a Linux build.
End of LUI
Recent alphas introduced a framework for developing third party user interfaces using LUA. LUI, as we like to call it, is LUA User Interface system we spent a fair bit of time working on it as we intend to use it as the primary tool for creating in-game UIs. In other words, we hope that one day the entirety of user interface, with the exception of main menu and settings, would be moddable. Unfortunately, that is not likely to be true for alpha 7. While we’re not abandoning the system entirely, it has become the number one obstacle in making further meaningful progress in the development of the next update.
Other developments
There are, of course, a good number of smaller new developments that don’t warrant their own paragraph. These include health and health regeneration, fall damage, status effects, ambient level events, birds, day/night cycles and time management, player movement controller (with ragdolls when you die!), and better developer tools. We also won’t go into detail about the new crafting, mining, and hunting system redesigns we have in mind, or the story writing as that would spoil the surprise :^)
Next steps
As the summer approaches, our next big step is blocking out the main world the player’s will explore on. We have experimented with medium to large scale map level design over the last year to better understand the possibilities that Unreal Engine 5 enables and feel ready to finally start doing it for real. We hope that as the level design picks up momentum, so do the updates and backer previews on Discord as we will have lots more presentable and visual content to share with you all.
But without getting ahead of ourselves, we’d like to thank everyone who stuck around, kept interest and poked us on the Discord over the last few months. Your excitement for the game has kept us motivated to tackle upcoming obstacles and share more information about our work.
— Donathan & the Virtuverse team.
