Hey everyone!

Welcome to Devlog #11, where I will be giving you some insight into what the team has been working on since the last update.

I don’t often do this but let’s kick off by talking about me! Well… not so much me but at least what I have been up to.

In the last update we introduced a way for players to create their own custom maps that can be uploaded to mod.io for everyone to play. With this in mind, I have been learning some basic modding and creating a custom map that is available now in-game. I have then gone on to use this map as a template for a custom map tutorial video which can be found on our YouTube channel.

Check it out if you fancy making your own map.

For any queries and help with map modding we have a very knowledgeable modding community over on our Discord server that will be more than happy to help.

For those that would prefer to wait for a map generator, it will come before the full release, in fact, over the last couple of weeks, Ben has started work on an early prototype for a procedural map generator.

Moving on to Vincent, who also hasn’t been mentioned in a recent devlog, but for good reason, as he has been hard at work on job outfits for villagers. This has been no small task with multiple job roles for both female and male villagers.

You can see a few examples below of the new outfits:

More recently Christopher has also been working with Vincent on villager outfits, though for Christopher he has been looking at the villagers themselves and allowing for the integration of all the new outfits as well as hair styling. Alongside this, he has been working on some performance optimizations for villagers which should hopefully see some fps improvements in the future.

I know this one will make you happy… one further thing that Christopher has started initial work on is the possibility to force villagers to move home!

Having done some great work on the new workplace animations in the last update, Michaël has also been working on the villager job outfits, in his case he has been looking at skinning the new outfits on the 3D villager models.

Needless to say, the villager outfits are coming together well.

Claudine has begun work on some visual research for new environment biomes, creating mock-ups and sample textures for visual reference. Here you can see a couple of mock-ups of how things might look:

She has also been looking at a ways to improve and polish some of the current in-game assets and textures, such as improvements to trees, water and ground textures.

Some time ago we teased the Brewery and now we have a Tavern but no beer. Never fear though, Loup-Gabriel has been working to complete the brewery as well as working on the hop farm.

Loup has also been working on a new production chain but there will more info on that in a future news update, however he has also been working on some new decorative items that will work with the new production chain, so I’ll leave that one to your imagination for now.

Maxime has been continuing work on improving performance for low-end systems, as well as general optimizations, when generating models, and improving LOD generation.

He has also been working on ways to provide pathing feedback to players when placing buildings and creating the dev tools required to configure this in our Hurricane engine.

Nicolas has, as always, been thoroughly testing improvements and gathering information from the community regarding any bugs and feedback.

As well as this he has been working with the engine programmers investigating possible performance optimizations, one of which was released in a hotfix patch last week to improve performance for larger cities.

Talking of large cities and performance, Phil has been looking at ways to improve villager needs efficiency. This, tied in with villagers moving home will see some major improvements to your overall village/city efficiency in future updates.

Finally Léo has been looking at many aspects of the Hurricane engine, working with and helping the team.

In no particular order he has been looking at

• Improvements to our shader system
• Improvements for our skinning system (new villager outfits)
• Investigating RAM usage with an eye to improve memory allocation tracking
• Undertaking performance analysis between updates
• Prototyping terrain improvements that support more ground types and vegetation (Biomes)
• Improving the dev tools including the in-house Hurricane editor. For example we now have a new Asset Preview allowing the team to easily explore game assets.

I hope you enjoyed the read! We have a lot of improvements coming and work is well underway for the next update but there is still much to do.

Until next time…
Cheers!
-Ash (Community Manager)