Hey Exanimates,

We're now in the last steps of putting together everything we've worked on, seeing how it functions as a whole and building a release. We should begin testing soon, with a hopefully brief period of closed testing before opening it up to everyone in the testing branch, when we're at least clear of any major issues. We still have to add new content and features that are near completion or just don't require much work, but there have been so many major updates and additions to almost every part of the game and engine that we think we should update the main branches. We know our updates cycles are long and our priorities might seem weird, we focus on big complex features that maybe only pay off in the long term over low hanging fruit that add lots of perceived value with relatively little effort. In terms of development goals we're now close to a complete Exanima, but we still have big plans for the future, beyond the 1.0 release, and we're constantly working in the background to make those happen. We're secretive with those plans, we know too well how expectations grow in the community, and how we'll do our best to meet them no matter how wild they become, but let's just say that a finished Exanima is really only the beginning.

Recently we talked about how to better support roles and emergent behaviours we felt we had to make important changes to how emotions, personality traits and relationships drive character decisions. How characters perceive hostility and decide to engage in it or avoid it is a big part of this in Exanima, as encounters aren't simply friend or enemy. This is quite difficult as AI must judge these things based only on what they observe, and companions must also quickly judge the player's intentions and try to match them rather than just act of their own accord. This was previously driven by raw emotional responses, which also drove combat decisions, which could make AI feel quite stupid. Now we have more complex and specialised decision making, which makes it even less suitable for low level combat decisions. Improving this has been on our to-do list for a while, but now it's a requirement and so we expanded our combat tactics AI to make smarter decisions and broader evaluations of everyone involved and nearby. As we want AI companions to feel legitimately smart and useful and plan to increase the density of encounters going forward, this is quite important.

One part of these improvements allows AI to choose to engage in or avoid conflict based on many new factors including what others around them are doing and what their relationships or relevant social dynamics are. Once engaged in combat, AI will prioritise targets based on mostly tactical decisions, with especially smarter AI doing things like rapidly switching between multiple opponents to defend against different attacks or take attacks of opportunity, such as hitting someone in the back to help an ally. We can now easily further expand on this with more factors, such as identifying priority targets who represent a specific threat or helping allies who are in tough or spot or requested help through dialogue. This should all immediately make AI feel much more intelligent in combat situations and it's a solid foundation to build more combat behaviours and advanced tactical and strategic decisions.

We finally completed the updates to our absurdly complex apparel and armour system. It's extremely satisfying to see it work as well as it does now. It was very ambitious when we first designed it, it literally allows wearing any combination of items of any shape, covering any portion of the body, in multiple layers, tucking and tightening things in to fit, and generating procedural materials for the combined result, all this without any restrictions and in an efficient way. This is a lot more complex than modular armour systems typically seen in games, and as our items grew in variety and numbering in the hundreds, it was getting out of hand, often requiring us to make hundreds of meshes for a single piece of clothing that were dynamically combined into even more variations. Even so, we still ran into issues with unique item designs adding new requirements that we weren't able to properly satisfy. It took us years just to gradually piece together various ideas of how the system could be improved to solve more complex cases and without increasing the already excessive overall complexity. We just finished overhauling every part of this system and now we have something that is more powerful, far more intuitive and easy to work with, producing better looking and more optimised results, as well as new tools that make the production of character assets take a small fraction of the work they did before.

There will be one more related update to characters at some point in the future which will also increase their resolution and overall quality, but that will be just a matter of updating assets and not the systems and tools driving it, which are now decisively complete and far better than we ever imagined they could be. When we do that, we will add more items, with a particular focus on clothing.

We already had to rework many character assets for these changes, and this includes about 30 new or completely reworked items, many of which are the most core and common ones, coming in new variants and with new material and colouring systems and some general quality improvements. This adds up to a very significant visual update to characters. Until now we'd been developing the new systems and new assets in parallel, without being able to finalise and test either one until we could put it all together. This is now done, but we did run into some unforeseen problems when finally doing it, which led us to another addition to the system, which solved our remaining problems and actually further streamlined our process while also improving the performance of characters even more.

In the past we've told people to not report issues with worn items clipping, because properly solving those problems would require an overhaul of these systems. Well, that overhaul is done and the time is now, you should report any clipping or similar issues you encounter after this release. Also note that in an effort to preserve arena saves we have tried to patch your existing items into their new versions, but a direct translation may not always possible as there are significant differences.

We wanted to briefly respond to some of the feedback we received on the last diary. It was long and technical and probably hard to follow and we fully expected that some people would question why we were seemingly working on improving graphics, which did indeed happen. It's important to understand what making graphics for a game like Exanima involves. We are an incredibly small team, with literally just 3 people working on all of the game's graphics and environments, but we are committed to a certain level of quality, complexity and consistency. Making high quality art is genuinely hard, this doesn't mean it just takes longer, it also means wasting countless hours simply failing to produce something satisfactory, and having to continuously iterate until it finally looks good and consistent. A lot of this is simply caused by real time rendering limitations, artists spend inordinate amounts of time trying to patch the holes left by those limitations and making things look good despite them. We also take performance very seriously, and these problems are not easily solved without just throwing it away. We talked about features that hugely streamline the process of achieving high quality results, with intuitive methods instead of laborious workarounds, that are performance efficient, highly scalable and leverage procedural methods. That is the point of these efforts. We are far from done with producing original art for our game, and our productivity has always been founded on good tools, procedural methods and dynamic rendering features, we simply do not have the manpower to do it any other way. Anything that changes the way we work and what we produce should be done sooner rather than later.

Best,

Bare Mettle