Mar 2019 Status Update

One of the really important things that happened this month is the finalization of the event system. This system is taking a very important role of making your life on Namalsk a living hell (most of the time). If you have seen the teaser trailer, you may have been wondering – was that snowstorm is just a trailer thing or is it something that you will experience too? Well, wonder no more, its a real game-play thing and the event system makes snowstorm along with other events possible.

Event system is running on server and roughly every 10-15 minutes it will attempt to run an event. Each event has some conditions that have to be met in order to start (usually requires weather to be at certain state) so it may be possible to predict what will and what wont happen by observing the environment visuals. Once an event starts, it usually takes 20-40 minutes to complete after which things will return to normal. Each event consists of Init, Mid and End phases, each having effects on both client and server.

There will be 4 different events in the first Namalsk release, so lets go through them.

Aurora Borealis
Being very close to the polar circle, I could not miss the opportunity to introduce such spectacular nature phenomenon. It took me quite a lot of time to figure it out, but really glad how it did end up looking. Visually looks quite close to the real one and it also has two separate animations, which makes the overall effect very dynamic. Other than making completely clear skies (and thus decreasing base environmental temperature), this event does not have any other impact.

Extreme cold
Lower overcast values can bring up an extreme cold weather event, which is visualised by an increased blue tint. This event can add negative 10 to 20 degrees of Celsius to the current environment temperature. Definitely recommended to have your winter gear in a good shape or just make a fire inside and wait until the cold wave fades out.

Snowfall
While it may sound a bit odd, experiencing a snowfall is actually the best thing that can happen during your survival attempts on Namalsk. This event can activate when there is a bit more clouds than usual. This event calms the wind, which is one of the more prominent factors that affect your overall heat-comfort. It also greatly increases the overcast value, which decreases resulting temperature (clouds are good at stabilising environmental temperature). You will still need to look out for your clothes though, because getting wet increases chance for getting frostbite, but more about that some other day.

Snowstorm
As already mentioned in the beginning, you can also witness a snowstorm, which is probably the hardest event of all available. This event can activate when there is a bit more clouds than usual and can bring base environment temperature by negative 12 to 22 degrees of Celsius. But not only that, it will also bring strong wind, heavy wetness multiplier and lowered visibility. The movement outside is recommended only in state of an emergency. It starts and ends with a standard snowfall event, so you may not immediately recognise if a snowfall or snowstorm is coming.

Hopefully this sounds exciting to you. I have had a lot of fun with events so far during game-play tests. I seriously hope this can spice the game-play for everyone and bring some unique encounters.

Other than the event system, I have also focused my attention on the question of limiting Namalsk-specific features to selected terrains (topic I have talked about a bit in last status update). I have a good news here as I was able to implement a solution that ties majority of Namalsk-specific things to a selected list of terrains, which means that having an active Namalsk mod should not hopefully be that annoying if you just want to use it sometimes or perhaps as an asset package for other terrains.