Last week we wrote about what we call domestic animation sets and how they enrich the simulation. As before, the Cariblin is our go-to species to test these out, so we've been developing a few of these to let organisms visually communicate when they're performing simulational activities. They gesture things like "come here", "look at that" and more. These work-in-progress animations are simple but add a lot already!



More work was done on the data LODing, which some of you asked about after last week's blog. It turned out to be a pretty exciting field of development that we made quite a bit of progress in. It's now at a stage where it serves the simulation well and we're excited to enrich all organisms with this system.



In this example gif we see how it works - at the highest level of detail, we engage with the organism in a 'normal' way - the body is rendered, animations play, behavior and genetic data are loaded. But if we desire so, we can bring the GameObject to a lower level of detail, where we don't draw anything and actually even remove the GameObject, while the organism and its logic are still active. We keep their positions and states active.

This is a heavy optimization when having to simulate the ecology, as species on the other side of the island can still be going about their daily lives without us having to be concerned with the visual output.

Apart from data LODing and domestic animations, we've done some more work on one of the Outfindings in the game - the soaring sail! You might have seen it in the trailer before, but we're smoothing out the process of grabbing and gliding away.



This week we also did a ton of things that are harder to show:

• We've written the full third sidequest that will feature in this fall's Pine demo. This allowed us to explore writing in general, set up systems for dialogue and localization.


• We've designed all required components to let Unity's new Timeline feature work with our organism systems.
  Now onto building that!


• We've discussed a lot of our plans on items, resources, gear and weapons, to see how we can best approach developing them and categorizing them.


• We've textured and rigged our new critter - animations soon!


• We've added Gamepedia links to the website, which you might have noticed - they go to the official Pine wiki!


• The Fexel village is coming along nicely - sculpting separate parts first and then assembling them in their houses.


• Some more simulational work on Cariblins moving around villages and getting food from sources.