Dashing Through the Snow

Описание: We’re digging deeper into winter verisimilitude, which means that deep snow is coming to WolfQuest in the next patch! Snow so deep that animals make tracks as they move through it!

I’ve wanted to add this feature to the game for a long time, but the devil is in the details, creating many complications with animals of different sizes and various objects like meat chunks and collectible objects all needing to respond differently to deep snow. So it’s always been far down in the priority list. But this summer I brought in Raul Turcus, a Unity developer in Romania, to help with some things for the upcoming Lost River DLC -- and after finished that, I asked him to tackle the deep snow. As always, it was again more complicated than we’d thought, but it’s really coming together now. Today’s video shows how it looks -- in the game and under the hood.

Deep snow uses a technique called tessellation, which subdivides the triangles on the terrain, creating a much denser grid, which allows more detailed deformation of the rendered surface. Drawing so many more triangles does have a performance impact, and so deep snow will only be enabled on higher graphics quality levels (with several quality options to chose from on those).

EDIT: Deep snow will slow down animals and drain their stamina faster. The deeper the snow, the harder it is for them. Whenever there is fresh snow in the game, higher graphics settings will show the tracks (and the new running animation for the wolves). If you are playing with lower settings, you will still get the speed/stat effect (slower and stamina drain), but not these new visuals. So, everyone will be evenly matched in MP.

We’re still working on tweaks and polish but deep snow and animal tracks will be included in the next patch, v1.0.8p, which we expect to release in a few weeks.

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The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will turn our attention to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.