The third diary of developers Anvil Empires will tell about blacksmithing, housing for players and technology of seamless world

The developers of Siege Camp, the creators of Foxhole, presented the third diary of the development of a recently announced MMO strategy in the medieval setting Anvil Empires, dedicated to blacksmithing, players’ housing and seamless world technologies.

blacksmith craft

If you read the previous article, you know that many activities in the current pre-alpha build are temporary functions that will be replaced by a more complete gameplay in the future. One of the first activities that will go to the stage of the experiment will be blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing is a process that includes a chain of tasks necessary for forging weapons, tools and other equipment. At first, this process will be slow and ineffective, requiring efforts to make even one sword. As the settlement develops and its infrastructure, the blacksmiths will become more effective and will be able to massively produce weapons for the armies.

The first part of the process includes the construction of an industrial zone in your settlement. To do this, lay the foundation, which will become a workshop where the anvil, forge, hardening station and other equipment will be located. These will be modular designs, so players will be able to place them in the workshop at their discretion.

To forge such a weapon as a sword, it is necessary to melt iron in the furnace, heat the ingots in the forge, give the ingot of the blade on the anvil, and then cool the blade at the hardening station. For different types of weapons (for example, blades of swords, axes, etc.D.) will exist different types of blades. In the current experimental version of the process, how you heat the ingots and temper the blade, affects the quality of your blade. Better QUESTIONS will lead to a better weapon. In future pre-alpha iterations, more advanced blacksmithing methods will be presented.

Housing for several tenants

Only one official pre-alpha test was held, but the developers have already received many reviews from the community. Most of them cannot yet be accepted to action, since the functions on which they are based will greatly change in the future. Nevertheless, one of the main reviews, which was quite critical and significant for taking measures, was the distribution of houses in settlements.

In Anvil Empires, each player must build a house or claim it to join the settlement. Although in the future it is planned to make this system more complex, even now it is the fundamental part of the gaming process, since you cannot achieve much without being part of the settlement. One of the problems that were encountered during the first tests was that at home they took up too much space in the settlements.

Several players can now accommodate the first step to solve this problem. If only one player can still accommodate in the basic hut, then in the straw house – two, and in wooden – three. Each player will have his own separate inventory for storing several personal belongings. In addition, the names of the residents are now displayed in the user interface, so it will be easy for players to determine who they live with in the same house.

Big world technology

While the current tests of pre-alpha are on a temporary test map, which is relatively small, the developers conduct the internal development of the rest of the world, which will be much more extensive. One of the most important elements of the technology that is working on is the ability to divide the world into "Regions" and transfer them to several instances of the R2 server for modeling. This is what will ultimately allow many thousands of players to occupy a huge world, covering a whole continent filled with seas, mountains, rivers, islands and many others.

In Foxhole, this technical problem was solved by creating several cards and stitching them together. A lot of time and effort was spent on ensuring that the edges of each map visually coincide with the edges of neighboring maps of the regions. When the player approached the edge of the region, a map of the neighboring region was loaded so that his landscape could be seen and the environment could be seen. At any moment in the time of the client’s memory, the region’s own map and one or more maps of neighboring regions were loaded.

Anvil does not have the concept of stitching individual cartographic assets. Rather, the world will consist of one giant map. The engine R2 Engine automatically breaks the world into a grid and distributes each cell to a separate instance of the R2 server for modeling and working on the network. However, from the point of view of the client, the world is one giant seamless map. This does not mean that simulation can occur smoothly around the world. As in Foxhole, the simulation will still be divided into regions divided by virtual boundaries, which means that you cannot arbitrarily shoot shells or interact with objects in different regions. Nevertheless, the presence of the whole world on the client gives many advantages, for example, the ability to freely move between regions without loading screens under appropriate conditions.

From the point of view of the work process, the refusal to sew cards gives the creators a lot of advantages in the development. If you need to change the size of the area modeled by the R2 server, you can simply change some parameters, and not force the level designer to spend weeks on changing the Asset of the map around the world. To imagine how it works, imagine a giant grid, superimposed on one big world, where each cell is modeled by the instance of the server R2. This grid can be dynamically increased and reduced in autonomous mode, creating more or less cells without the need to change the card assets. This will allow developers to easily experiment with different sizes over time to find the optimal ratio of the area and instance R2.