October 2024 Recap

A message from the building team...

Let's begin with a message of our build team:

As shown in the last few blog posts, PaintSquad's 3.0 update will not only set new technical standards for Xenyria, but also improve existing game mechanics, maps and features. One of the most important task for the building team is to not only design new maps but also ensuring that every existing map is redesigned and built with all of PaintSquad's game modes in mind. Our goal is to have every game mode work as best as possible on every map by default, but in order to achieve this goal we had to make significant changes to the base version of all of our existing maps. 

Those changes include modifications to make existing paths wider, adding more space for special weapons and improving the overall shape of the map to prevent players from getting stuck and improving the general flow of the game. Of course there's still some work required to optimize every layout for every game mode. However, all of the new tools make it far less work than it used to be in the past, allowing us to test new designs more quickly.

Each map has been redesigned in a way to take advantage of PaintSquad's new features, be it cosmetic or gameplay-related. For example, full-block stairs have been completely replaced by either slabs, regular stairs or slopes so that players won't get stuck and keep their momentum. Obstacles like boxes have been placed in a more intuitive manner since their previous placement seemed random and unpredictable.

We've also taken care to ensure that certain spots on the map are easier to reach in a variety of different ways. For example, the swim form, gushers, ink and ride rails are all utilized in a way to create optional paths for the players to take. It's also important to note that all future maps shown in blog posts and those that have already been revealed will receive additional changes from playtests. With all of that out of the way, we would like to present something we've been working on over the last couple of weeks...

Oh, and it looks like they also attached some pictures labelled "Canyon". Let's take a look...

Hmm... *checks notes* Well... unlike last time it looks like we haven't seen this location before. What do you think about it? Feel free to share and discuss your opinion with other players on our Discord server.

New fancy effects

Our Shader development framework "Spectrum" has finally entered a state in which it can be used for developing screen effects & testing them in-game. In the following video, we've setup a very early version of the new PaintSquad HUD, consisting of the damage vignette and a old version of the shooter crosshair.

Keep in mind that this isn't final yet and will very likely change before release.

One important thing to note here is that we are constantly testing the performance impact of everything that is added to the game. This includes testing various in-game scenarios on low-end hardware to determine if certain features can be added without significantly reducing FPS and which areas of the game need to be optimized the most.

Back in-game!

Let's talk about the most important technical development of this month: A reworked version of our custom Minecraft server software "Orion". Why is that important you might ask? Well, all of our games are developed on top of our own server software. "Orion" essentially serves as a foundation for every game developed on top of it, similar to how a game engine works.

Although we haven't integrated most of our new systems into Orion yet, we've had great success in designing and implementing our new game server architecture. This effectively means that certain actions like spawning and updating entities, updating the player list & boss bars and many other things now work a lot more efficiently, reliably and intuitively. Additionally, we've also taken necessary steps to make sure that worlds are now properly isolated from each other. Although this might seem irrelevant at the surface, it's something that wasn't implemented properly in earlier versions of Orion which is also the root cause for why we had to put PaintSquad into maintenance.

Since Orion was the last major project that required a rework, we are now able to fully focus on developing the new version of PaintSquad again. In fact, we're currently expecting to have some of PaintSquad's base systems in a functional state as early as next week. Additionally this also means that future blog posts will feature new gameplay footage, so stay tuned for that.

Warehouse and dynamic resource packs

Since we're now actively working on PaintSquad's code again, it's time to start integrating all of PaintSquad's models, textures and sounds into the game. Players who have played PaintSquad in the past will remember that the team colors seem to be different from time to time. In fact, the color a team affects the textures of weapons, blocks and items.

Although this might seem trivial on the surface, this feature's hidden complexity becomes clear after realizing that there are many factors involved in generating resource packs for PaintSquad. One of the most problematic parts of our old system is related to generating colored variants for every weapon in the game.

While this might work fine for a single player it causes a ton of problems once the server has to generate new resource packs for a lot of players in a short time span. Our old resource pack backend struggled with generating new resource packs for PaintSquad, taking as long as 5 seconds per pack. Of course this also results in a noticable delay upon joining the server. In some extreme cases it can even prevent new players from joining the server in the first place.

In order to solve this, we had the idea to optimize our existing system and also take advantage of some of Minecraft's new technical features so that our resource pack backend doesn't need to do as much work as before. Additionally our asset management & resource pack generator tool "Warehouse" has been optimized for this use-case while also offering features for coloring textures to match the player's selected team colors, replacing ink textures depending on the current ink style (regular ink, PaintFest "glittery" ink) and a lot of other things.

Additionally we're also able to make optimizations PaintSquad's resource pack structure to cut down loading times and file size. We're also working on optimizing all of PaintSquad's existing assets to ensure that the game will run as smooth as possible, even on low-end hardware.

About a potential release date...

Although we've been making a lot of progress towards finishing PaintSquad's 3.0 update, we've underestimated how much work still remains before we can make PaintSquad accessible for everyone again. Given our current team size, this unfortunately means we will need to push back PaintSquad's expected release window by a few months, meaning that our new release window is Spring 2025. The additional time we gain by delaying the release allows us to ensure that all of PaintSquad's features, maps and assets are on a even level of quality.

However, you won't need to wait until next year before you can play PaintSquad again. We can't give away too many details just yet, rest assured that we're currently working on a little surprise. 👀

And with that we've arrived at the end of ths month's recap post. Although we still got a long way ahead of us, we remain confident that we will be able to show some new gameplay footage very soon.

Thank you all for your patience and enthusiasm as we work on making PaintSquad better than it ever was. From everyone on our team, have a happy Halloween. We'll hopefully see each other in-game again soon... 🎃