August 2024 Recap

Unfortunately we weren't able to create a monthly recap post last month as most of the content we wanted to show wasn't in a presentable state yet. However, this has changed and we're now back with another monthly recap post, covering our progress on the PaintSquad 3.0 update and Xenyria over the last two months. We're very excited to show off some of the things we've been working on and hear your opinion about it.

Before we talk about what we've been working on the in the last two months, I'd like to first note that any audio files, buildings depicted in screenshots or other material published in this post is still being worked on and is likely going to be changed in some way before the 3.0 update is released to the public.

With that out of the way, let's get started!

 

Updating to Minecraft 1.21.1

All of our plugins and tools as well as our internal staff mod have been updated to 1.21.1, allowing us to take advantage some of the new features of the latest Minecraft update. We also made several changes to optimize our workflow for updating Xenyria to newer versions of Minecraft, decreasing the required amount of work required whenever a newer Minecraft version is released by a lot.

 

Work on PaintSquad

Although the code for PaintSquad 3.0 is still in a very early stage, we already made various decisions in regards of how the code will be structured in order to avoid all of the issues we've had in earlier versions of PaintSquad. Unfortunately, we still have a long way ahead of us, but we're confident that we will be able to finish the 3.0 update before the end of this year. We've also made the decision to add a few more goals to the 3.0 update based on the results of our PaintSquad Player Survey we conducted back in April:

 

Reworked maps and layouts

We've decided to make a lot of changes to the way of how we deal with all of our existing maps and layouts. Up to this point there has been a significant difference in build quality & level design across all maps. Some maps like Urchin Underpass had very confusing layouts for some game modes, other maps did work quite well with PaintSquad's gameplay but were lacking in terms of looks, some other maps just didn't work on a conceptual level.

 

In the past, we always tried to create a special layout for each map for every game mode. However, this approach is simply too much work considering our current team size. For this reason we want to focus on having around 6-7 maps available for every game mode on launch. While this may sound like a downgrade at first, it allows us to focus on a smaller set of layouts but with significantly better quality. Also, keep in mind that PaintSquad will still receive additional feature & content updates after the 3.0 update is released, so the available map pool for every game mode will continue to grow in the future.

 

Reworked replays 

Up until now, replays were always locked to the Minecraft version they were recorded in. This mostly stems from the technical implementation of how replays are being recorded on the server. Back when we added replays we went with an approach that was fast to implement, essentially just consisting of recording all the information that is sent to the players during a match. However, this also means that as soon as the game version was changed the replay file becomes basically unusable. Now that Mojang is releasing more updates to Minecraft in quicker succession, it came apparent that we need to reconsider this approach and go with something more robust instead.

 

Lastly, there's also the problem that replays were only ever recorded for Versus matches, completely leaving out all matches played in the Invasion mode. This decision was made on purpose due to the required amount of storage. Since all replays record all the data that is sent during a match, this also means that each replay contains a copy of the map it was recorded on, leading to a lot of redundancy and wasted storage space. However, we're working on resolving all of these problems in the future.

 

More regular events

Although PaintFests have been a fun experience in the past, we realized that only having one type of event every couple of months gets boring quickly. Although we could host PaintFests more frequently, we feel like that this would come with the disadvantage of making them less special. Our solution to this problem revolves around hosting more events of different types in shorter intervals. Don't worry, we will still continue to host more PaintFests in the future.

 

A word on latency...

One of the largest problems in PaintSquad is lag. To be more precise "input lag". Back when PaintSquad was still publicly playable, you've probably noticed some sort of delay when performing certain actions like firing a charger shot or moving in swim form. This happens because all actions in the game occur on the server, meaning your game first needs to tell the server that you're performing a certain action and then wait until it gets the result from the server.

 

Although we can't change anything about this behaviour without introducing a mandatory client mod, we think that we might have found a completely different solution for reducing input lag significantly, especially for players that connect from the US or other places in the world that are located far away from the physical location of our servers. This is by far the most crucial change we're gonna make to PaintSquad on a technical level and it will take additional time to implement, but it allows us to make the entire game a lot more fair, even for players that encountered issues with high ping in previous versions of PaintSquad.

 

Please note that we haven't been able to do any in-depth testing yet and there is still some chance that our idea doesn't work as expected. However, we already tried out a few other methods of improving the connection quality for PaintSquad and Rush and got very good results out of it, so there is at least some kind of improvement expected for when PaintSquad returns.

 

Spotlight

During the last two months we focussed on getting Spotlight into a state that allows us to actively work with it. If you haven't checked out our last dev blog post, highlighting some of the new tools we have worked on, be sure to check it out here. The most important additions include a revamped UI, model viewer, 3D world preview, biome editor and a tool for managing music. 

 

Speaking of music...

I think it's time to take another look at the audio side of PaintSquad 3.0. Enjoy this short preview of one of the new songs, made by our artist YellowPurple:

Of course we won't spoil where this song is going to be used yet, so feel free to speculate.

 

Taking things to a new level

Let's address the elephant in the room. You might have already looked at the cover image of this article and thought that it somehow looks familiar.

Over the last few weeks, we've put a lot of time and effort into getting a majority of PaintSquad's maps onto a even level of quality. Although we don't want to spoil all of the changes we made just yet, we've decided to only publish some screenshots of one of the maps we've already finished:

What do you think about those changes? Feel free to share your opinion with other players on our Discord server.

 

A word on our current pace

At the moment we're slightly behind schedule. We're currently expecting to finish our first functional prototype of PaintSquad in October. However, we're not changing our estimated release time window at this point in time. If this should change in the future, we're going to announce it in a future blog post.

 

And with that we have arrived at the end of this monthly recap. Although we still got a long way to go, we're confident that we can keep progressing at our current pace. Who knows, maybe we will even have some more in-game screenshots in the next blog post?

If you're interested on what happens behind the scenes, stay tuned for upcoming development streams. We'll post an announcement in our media channel on our Discord server when we will be live.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more updates! 👀