update · March 15, 2024

Wild Life Update Adds Characters and Navigation Fixes

The latest Wild Life development report details progress on character assets, canyon meshes, and pathfinding code.

The development team behind Wild Life has released a progress report detailing recent asset creation, animation work, and code updates for the sandbox title.

Code and Navigation

Code updates improve AI navigation when NPCs move outside processing range. Crowd avoidance has been replaced with RVO avoidance to streamline movement. Routine destination interaction for players also receives improvements, while the animation editor now supports event system tracks for sending events instead of changing settings on specific objects. Additionally, the sandbox prop settings code has been restructured to improve performance and maintainability.

Environment Assets

Level design progress includes work on the rock material, which is now arranged onto new canyon rock meshes. Developers continue to iterate over Adûn village houses and are replacing cliff models with final meshes. The Adûn quarry blockout V2 is finished, leaving only one cave remaining.

Characters and Animations

Character work has begun on Alo, a Bol-based lumberjack from Umbar. Flint, Micco, and Denna have been implemented alongside ongoing work on outfits and hairstyles. On the animation front, Max's threesome minigame is finished and ready for the engine, and routine animations continue to transfer to all NPC skeletons.

Why this patch matters

This progress report outlines backend and asset updates for Wild Life, focusing on code maintainability and environmental blocking.