Updates & an Upgrade

Hello Friends!

After about 5 months, I’m back with a new update for Colony of Souls! A large amount of improvements have been made behind the scenes, but quite a few things are more immediately noticeable.

Engine Upgrade

For one, the project has moved up to engine version 5.4.4 from 5.3. This brings a lot of performance improvements as well as experimental ray tracing support for the Vulkan Renderer. It is likely that we will stay on this version for compatibility and stability reasons moving forward.

Background Loading

More assets and game data are being loaded and set up in the background in order to improve loading times. The goal is to load as many things as possible before gameplay in order to have everything as seamless as possible.

AI

The AI in the game is still in the long process of being overhauled. For right now, the melee enemies all move together once the player has been detected. It is a known issue that the enemies crowd around and can make it hard to escape. This will be adjusted as it makes for difficult maneuvering.

Stretch Goals

With the async changes made to the loading of data, two potential features are in consideration: a Randomizer Mode and support for Crowd Control. I personally have always been a big fan of randomizers as it can be an ever evolving survival challenge once all of a game’s other challenges have been conquered. Crowd Control is along similar lines where a streamer is at the mercy and whims of their audience. It’s not being implemented at this time but it is in mind throughout the development process.

Undocumented/Misc Changes

The in game UI has been streamlined in order to take up as minimal space as possible. In addition, various menu options have been changed/removed due to deprecation or feature revamp. I’m sure there are several other changes made but I don’t remember all of them, I’ll have to keep this in mind for the next update.

That’s it for now. I’m aiming to have another update on Wednesday to clean up some other issues as well as make some tweaks that were cut for time in this update.

See you next time!