Hello again, everyone! We hope that you had a great holiday and new year!

The team has been taking a bit of a break this week to celebrate the holidays, but we are still making progress on Path of Titans.

Today essentially marks the end of the first year of development on Path of Titans. It’s been an amazing journey so far, and we are always really thankful for the support the community has given us. Through the year we have overcome a lot of tough hurdles such as building a working launcher, modelling and animating 18 unique species of dinosaurs, and consistently pushing out demo updates for our supporters to test and give feedback on. We have always been pushing ourselves to work hard every day and not get burnt out on development, and we are as invigorated as ever to work just as hard in 2020!

Quests

While we had some quest types initially implemented months ago, this week we made a second pass at improving quest functionality and expanding their features. All these quest types are made with modding in mind, and are completely modular. Modders will be able to use tools like placing down location markers, create quest items, and create their own chained quest types in order to build their own quests that are unique to their maps. We are excited to see what creative ideas modders come up with to help make their maps tell a story and follow unique themes.

In addition to exploration quests and kill quests, this week we have also implemented new collection quests and quest saving. Players can now search around the map for mushrooms and the server will save their progress and their earned Marks. Currently, you cannot spend your earned Marks on anything, but we will soon be adding an unlock system that will allow you to upgrade your character with new abilities and skins. This is the preliminary test for the collection quest type, and we will be adding more tasks over time.

Be sure to join us for our regular stress tests if you want to help us test this new quest system!

Server Optimizations

Thanks to the help of our awesome multiplayer testers, we have made some great progress in optimizing the server performance. With these new improvements, we are able to sustain over 150 players on the server without issues. That is a great improvement from our original testing that was struggling to handle less than 50 players at once.

Some of the changes that we have made include better memory usage for animations and locomotion. By ensuring that the server doesn’t use more than 1ms of usage dedicated to calculating animations it can use the remaining memory to evaluate other game-related tasks such as saving characters and players logging in. These animation performance improvements also increase the framerate of the game when in large groups, with dozens of dinosaurs surrounding you. This was a problem many people were reporting while playing, as dozens of players were all meeting up in the same place during the multiplayer tests.

We still have lots of performance improvements to make, but this good progress towards our 200 playercount goal. Next, we will be adding new mechanics to the game and increasing the complexity of player interactions with the server. This way we can iteratively add new content and optimize along the way.

Thank you for reading!