Curious how do they defend themselves in the game from predators?
Can trex kill it one bite?
Curious how do they defend themselves in the game from predators?
Can trex kill it one bite?
How to describe the trex appearance of body and appearance?
So Saurian has released a new update. At first glance, not too much added. A few toggles basically. Beyond interesting wind effects on plants, there is also a auto-walk toggle, a shadow culling toggle, and a dynamic spawn toggle.
Personally, all of these additions are useful and add something to the game, which is perfect. The wind effect is noticeable, but not too violent, so you can see the plants moving around just enough to understand they are not static models, and with the added dynamism in sound, you can feel the plants and the trees bending in the wind, as audio of leaves, twigs and trunks bend around. This helps a lot with ambience. Other toggles surely do help in minimizing performance issues, which have been a bugger for a lot of players, including myself, so these also help.
The addition of the auto-walk toggle became surprisingly more useful than I expected. No longer you need to keep pressing W to walk. You can just press T and you activate the auto-walk toggle. This is extremelly useful, specially when you are walking around without doing much, following your parents, siblings and/or herd members, with only slight adjustements required to change your route when needed. This really does also help for you to specify a route for you to auto-walk, and that allows you to keep walking while moving your camera around to see your surroundings, so that is also very cool, specially when you have to be on the lookout for predators. And predators, funnily enough, are much more of a danger now with this patch.
For the better or worse, the most striking feature of this patch is, by far, the dynamic spawn system. The dynamic spawn system can be toggled off if you want, but I really think it adds something to the game. Its hard to judge which types of AI spawns are "normal", in the sense they aren't part of this dynamism, and which ones are dynamic (i.e. not very common and very specific that it would be complicated to reproduce in normal spawning conditions). However, you can take some guesses, and I personally saw my gameplay become even more challenging (for the better). Predators appeared with more frequency, however not in a way that affects the gameplay in a heavy way. It just means you have to be on a more attentive lookout, and I personally find this slightly more stressing and makes your survival, specially as a young animal, much more exciting. As a young Dakotaraptor you have to be on the lookout for other raptors that might show up. I was surprised that my first gameplay in this patch ended up with me being killed by a juvenile Dakotaraptor. As a young Triceratops I was shocked on how I was peacefully grazing with my parents when I turn the camera around and I am quickly engulfed by the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus, dying in the moment, after a successful ambush made by the theropod. You can really observe how the environment responds to you with much more attention, and that is very satisfying for a player. On top of that, however, dynamic spawn systems are not just based on the frequency of predators but also on certain animal combinations that wouldn't occur so easily naturally. Some of these animal combinations aren't easy to discern from naturally made combinations, but sometimes they are quite obvious. For instance, as a young Triceratops, while walking along with my herd, I was delighted to see a rare occurance of a subadult Dakotaraptor hunting a Pectinodon. Just these small hints of a living environment makes the gameplay much more worth it, and the added challenge gives you yet another stronger motivation to keep moving forward in your growth into adulthood. So overall, this patch is a clear step in the right direction for the game.