[b]TERRAIN IMPROVEMENTS[/b] Last month we briefly mentioned we wanted to improve terrain and our tools. There are more improvements we could make, but this quite large body of work is done now. There's a lot to cover that's not easy to explain, so we recorded a quick video to show it better. [previewyoutube=Ijko1HMvXRg;full]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijko1HMvXRg[/previewyoutube] There's a lot here to help us push development forward and very obvious visual improvements that you should be able to see first hand in game soon. [b]STONEWORK TOOLS[/b] Basically all of Exanima's stonework, the walls and floors, are designed and created inside our tools. We generate very detailed 3D models with all the individual bricks or tiles, and then do a whole series of things to convert this into in game assets. This allows us to make very specific stonework with a very consistent style and results. This process and the quality of the assets has improved over time, but so far we've been limited to regular or simple geometric patterns. Now we've made new additions to these tools that allow us to generate irregular and more "organic" stonework as well. This allows us to make a wide variety of new types of floors and walls using the same methods. This is actually a really important addition to our tools and there's lots of things we plan to do with it. You can already see one of these irregular floors we created in the terrain improvements video. [b]64 BIT[/b] When we started developing our engine it was still important to support 32 bit systems, but at this point it certainly isn't. So we decided it's finally time to make our engine and Exanima 64 bit. This means access to way more memory and more modern hardware features for low level optimisation. The memory has mostly been an issue in our development tools where we work with many millions of polygons and many high resolution images, but with the most recent update we started to feel the limits in the game too. More optimisation is also something that we need for new features and content we plan to add soon, but this is a different path to more performance that should remove the need for that, while also multiplying with it when we eventually do it. Essentially we get to kill two birds with one stone, this had to be done eventually. Moving to 64 bit isn't usually a big problem, but everything in our engine is made by us, and it uses a very large amount of assembly code. This is code that deals directly with hardware level instructions rather than a more concise and human friendly language that a compiler converts to hardware code for you. The reason for using assembly is because we can write much faster code than the compiler. However it's very difficult to work with, and code written for 32 bit won't work in 64 bit. These 64 bit hardware features provide some great optimisation opportunities, and so does working alongside a 64 bit compiler that is based around the same more modern hardware features in general. Madoc has been working tirelessly on new 64 bit versions of our code and testing optimisation strategies. The bulk of the work is done, and while we still don't know what the final result is, early tests promise a very significant improvement in performance. Performance is a currency to us, which we can spend on more and better physics, and as this is a multiplier to other optimisations we had already planned, we're very excited about the possibilities. We should have all this properly wrapped up pretty soon and as a team we're busy working on many different things and making good progress. We are still looking at an intermediate update before the next big content release, but we're not sure yet about the scope of it. Check back with us next month for more. Thanks! Bare Mettle