Tag: new version

No comments

Update 22 live! Music and More

  By development, updates

Update 22 consists of bug fixes, more items added to the world and the addition of new music created by composer Christopher Goering.

Find Christopher’s music at his new youtube channel Shards of the Portal

12 new tracks by Christopher have been added to Windstone. Each play in specific areas and different situations including different biomes, within villages, while underwater, when near a campfire and during certain times of day. The battle theme, originally composed by Threshold Seven, has become a collaboration and has been altered by Christopher. More collaborations and original tracks will be added in the future.

Changes and Additions:

More resources have been added near the starting areas in the Snow Biome.

Many more trees have been added to the Snow Biome and its landscape has been slightly altered in some areas.

Around 500 more objects in the main land have now been added to streaming levels. This may help performance on some systems.
Note: More objects currently in the world will be added to streaming levels in the future to increase optimization. (Objects in streaming levels are not loaded into the game (or your RAM) unless you are in close enough proximity.)

Dragon Egg locations are now marked on the Map

The map should now more precisely show your position in many places.

The main starting screen has been changed slightly.

Bug fixes:

The mouse cursor should no longer disappear when clicking on certain elements in the craft menu.

The craft menu should now be able to be opened after closing it without completely closing and reopening the inventory menu.

An issue has been fixed where the player would start in the center of the mainland even if a different starting zone was chosen.

Some visual glitches have been fixed on the landscape in the Snow Biome.

Some visual inconsistencies in water have been fixed.

An issue has been fixed where the player and wildlife would hover a foot or two over the frozen lakes in the Snow Biome.

An Issue has been fixed where the player would not take damage while in lava.

Starting menu music and intro text music should play correctly when starting a new game.

Starting menu music should NOT play when opening the options menu from the pause menu.

Pausing the game should no longer reset custom volume changes.

Thank you for playing Windstone. Any feedback and bug reports are very helpful and much appreciated.

 

 

Originally posted @ itch.io.

No comments

Update 19 coming soon!

  By development, updates

Update 19 is coming a little sooner than expected with a major version upgrade to the UE4 engine. Windstone will now be using a more recent and stable version of the UE4 Engine, Version 4.19.  Version 4.20 and 4.21 have major known issues that conflict with Windstone but transitions to newer versions will happen periodically once these are fixed.  Because of the many changes that needed to happen to bring Windstone to 4.19 (all the way from 4.11)  it needs extensive testing before it is safe to continue with development.  Although the underlying changes are massive, add much more functionality, improve performance and increase visual quality, this update will not have many changes immediately apparent to the player. There are some changes including the addition of the female character while mounted on a dragon as well as visible weapons and armour on the dragon rider that change depending on what you have equipped. A handful of other bug fixes and minor changes have also been made which will be listed in the patch notes. I hope to push Update 19 before the end of the weekend.

Originally posted @ itch.io.

No comments

Update 14 is here!

  By development, kickstarter, updates
This is by far the biggest update so far. I wanted to make sure it contained significant additions which is why it took so long.

To help continued development, a price of $5.00 has been added to Windstone.
Many hours of gameplay can be had with update 14 and I now feel comfortable taking it out of the free category. I appreciate all those that have already played the game for many hours and given useful feedback.

Main Changes and Additions in Update 14:

3 New Biomes have been added: Desert, Volcano and Snow.

The Desert area serves mostly as a place where certain resources are abundant (agave, thorns and poison herbs) and as an area that must be crossed to enter the Volcano Biome. Within the Volcano Biome you will find buildings with loot, obsidian harvesting nodes, dangerous lava flows and most importantly the Red Dragon Keep, which houses the Red Dragon egg.

The Snow Biome covers nearly the entire northern quarter of the Island. Many pre-built newly modeled stone structures are scattered around the frozen land. Temperatures are always cold, resources are scarce and only Antelopes currently roam the wild as the cold-blooded Formicans and other native creatures stay south. In this biome, survival is truly a struggle of Makaran against himself. Within the Snow Biome, high on a mountain range is the White Dragon Keep. Wolves and Bears are stirring in their dens, awaiting a future update.

The separate island south west of the main island is now fully populated with resources and wildlife and also is home to the Green Dragon Keep.

The Blue Dragon keep remains where it has always been. All 4 dragons can be in your care simultaneously.

The Follow/Stay commands for the dragons have been modified to account for having multiple dragons. The Player must be close enough to their dragon and while looking at (placing the center dot on) the dragon press T (follow) or Y (stay).
This allows you to have one or as many of the dragons follow you as you wish. As of now, the dragons do not follow you if you are flying so be sure to put your remaining dragons on Stay if you take flight on another.

As a side note, the dragons are currently and primarily a mode of faster transportation and cannot die once fully grown. In the future this will be expanded, dragon combat mechanics will be added as well as quests that involve the dragons on your path to extermination the formicans and their Queen.

The in-game navigation Map has been updated.

When starting a new game you will begin in one of 12 spawn points at random. 5 are in the snow biome, 2 on the southern shore, 1 in the volcano biome, 3 in the central area of the main island and 1 on the south western island. All spawn points have different pros and cons. Some spawn points will offer a greater challenge than others.

Stone buildings have been added to the bushcraft menu which allows you to build new stone structures in the style of the newly modeled buildings that can be found in the Snow Biome.

Tutorial and quest objectives have been slightly altered for clarity and to accommodate new additions in update 14.

The model of the crafted well is modified and made unable to provide water if it’s placed on top of a foundation or other structure piece. It must now be placed on the landscape. (A structure can still be built around it but the well itself has to have bare ground directly underneath it)

Bug fixes:

Fixed an issue where the crafted water well could not be used.

Fixed an issue where ALL shadows would disappear. Shadows can now be seen much farther away.

Fixed an issue where ambient fog would cause concentric circles to appear in the sky at the center of the screen at night.

Thank you for playing and please leave feedback to help improve Windstone.

 

Originally posted @ https://threshold-seven.itch.io/windstone/devlog/50708/update-14-is-here which is also where you can get the latest version.

No comments

Update 13 is live

  By playtesting, updates

Update 13 includes some bug fixes and a simple but much needed change to the building system.

Building items that you place can no longer be accidentally picked up by simply pressing E. You now must double tap E to pick up a building piece.

A menu may be added in the future to give to option to pick up/repair/lock in place/etc. but for now, requiring E to be double tapped quickly to pick up a building piece should mitigate accidentally picking them up when trying to pick up other items such as a tool on the floor or when trying to open a basket. There is no indicator yet in the game that lets you know that you can double tap E to pick up a building piece, but this will be added as the building system is worked on.

Right clicking on a building piece will still move it and can cause accidental movement of building pieces when trying to move a basket or other item. This will be addressed in the next update.

The Dragon Hatchling should now spawn when hatched even if inside a building or something is overhead. It still may be safer to hatch outside, but hatching inside will help to find any more problems.

The Dragon Hatchling should now be able to navigate more effectively in player-built structures but this needs more testing.

The items that were left near the starting area in the last update have been removed (glider,raft and various weapons) These were placed there for my own testing purposes and I simply forgot to remove them. Kill those Antelopeees and cure their hides! 😀

 

Download it at itch.io.

No comments

Update 11 is live!

  By development, playtesting, technical, updates

Update 11 is live!

This update is primarily an optimization update. Nearly all models have had their poly count reduced dramatically and the landscape itself is optimized. The foliage has also been thinned out slightly to increase performance.

The result on test computers is a 30% reduction in RAM usage and 30% reduction in load times. Results may vary on other computers but this should allow a much larger player base to test Windstone as previously a relatively high end computer was necessary.

RAM usage should not exceed 8gb. It is still fairly high but much better than before and I will continue to work towards reducing this. The primary reason is that the entire world of Windstone is seamless. There are ways to keep the illusion of seamlessness while actually having sections of the island only load in when you are close enough to that area in a similar way that Ark: Survival Evolved works. As this version is being tested my primary focus will be integrating a similar “seamless” landscape loading system into Windstone.

One major bug was also fixed where if you loaded a game without ever saving (essentially loading the very first auto save which happens when you first load into a new game after the intro text) all loot baskets would be empty.

 

Originally posted @ itch.io. Download it here.