Still on-schedule!

Over the past week, we brought all of the “Highwire” areas into the main game exterior, and placed them within their respective streaming sectors.

This included all of the fence tops, as well as the utility pole network that we finalized a couple of weeks ago.

Note:  The white solids that are obscuring the buildings are the revised building colliders made temporarily visible, so that Laura can do the precision placement that the climbable ivy demands.  It turned out to be a bit more demanding than we anticipated,. but in a couple more days, it will all be Beta-Ready!

Taking into account the golf carts, the climbable hedges & ivy, and accessible rooftops, and the high-wire highway, We have added more accessibility for the cats in the past two and a half months, than we did in the previous two years.

While Laura finishes that, I’ve turned my attention to the biomes - we still have rocks and trees that cameras and cats can move through, and that sort of stuff is unacceptable for the Beta.

What is more: during that collider review, we found some WACKY stuff!  The guy we brought on to ensure all buildings, furniture and staircases had their appropriate colliders did a good job on about two-thirds of what was entrusted to him - but after a certain point, he apparently thought it was just fine enough to place a box collider on every object, and call it “job done!”

This included putting a simple box collider on a log cabin that was at a 30-degree angle to the foundation, meaning the house was effectively surrounded by a huge invisible wall.

What was doubly confusing was that on the structures where he DID place the colliders correctly, there were as many as three duplicate colliders, on the same object!

However: we anticipated all of this.  We knew that in the end, it would be up to Laura & Myself to make sure everything in the game world worked properly, because no one is as familiar with the game world as we are.

Consequently, we budgeted time for this in advance, and were able to repair all of these issues during our reviews. What is more:  Now that the engine has thousands of fewer objects and colliders to track, performance is improving - and only due to get better as we ditch superfluous LOD objects, and get things batched as efficiently as possible.

Lance has been doing a lot of great work, as usual: Aside from coming up with a FAR more efficient way to handle external lighting, and getting the geese to flock in a far more organic manner, he worked on refining the character controller - fixing the “Ledge Grab” action, and finalizing the pre-beta version of the stat mechanics.

This was something that we knew would be challenging to implement, because from the very start, Laura and I wanted each cat to be unique.  We thought the idea of allowing the player to develop their own methods of keeping all cats fed and happy would add an extra element of challenge, as well as foster a stronger connection between the player and each of the cats.

(More about that in an upcoming “Members Only” update!)

Right before I began writing this update, Lance assured me that he’s working on a new “stalk jump” functionality that will allow you to target certain objects, from the cats’ point of view.  This is exciting, as it will add an extra layer of immersion, and more player control to the game - I’m really looking forward to seeing how things look!

BTW: I am still streaming Peace Island dev just about every day.  I alternate daily between my personal YouTube and the Peace Island Twitch channel.  I cannot promise that they are the most exciting of spectacles, as they are typically just a stream of me working on one of the more mundane elements of the game.  However, I do enjoy chatting with fans & supporters of the project, so consider checking that out!

I’ll see ya’ll next week - by that time, the final reviews will have been completed, and we start streamlining the workflow of bringing in the story & quest content that is at the heart of the game.

Thanks SO much for helping us make this happen!