Inside Unlimited Projects #17

Attack on Titan: Project

Last month the AOT:P New Module reached yet another milestone, with the full and final completion of the Beast Titan Mission & Full Mobile Support! This is a large step into finalizing the content for release. We spent the month working towards polishing existing content and missions, this resulted in another revamp of the titans with updated textures and new animations. If you are a Contributor you would have seen the issue with the titan eyes and mouths, these have all been resolved to allow for a fluent visual experience, and allow us to add our exciting Titan Swallowing Feature!

Besides our work on titans, as mentioned previously, we've finished the Beast Titan mission and are moving onto a very important and final mission, the Crystal Cave PvP Mission. This saw work from our animation team to bring up PvP to a new standard. Allowing players to dodge, block, and attack in close range. Alongside hook blocking, this will encourage players to get close and personal with the enemy, and should create very engaging combat. The combat will also include parrying. 

Alongside all of this work, we've finally fully implemented our achievement and badge systems, which rewards the player for achieving certain tasks and tracks your progress as you go throughout the missions. We've also added our statistics tab, which will be used in our journey mode and will be further added upon in the future.

Throughout our extensive testing phase, we found that many players we thought of as veteran and experienced titan killers ran into an extreme skill issue when facing off against the new titans. Therefore, we decided to make the Normal mode much easier for new players and veterans a like to stand a chance against the new dynamic titans. 

What we are creating with the New Module is to future-proof the AOT Genre for years to come, and we are beyond excited to release the Freeplay Mode, and then begin on the final features needed for our Journey Mode release. If you are a 3+ year veteran or have bought a gamepass within AOT:P, you can test the New Module right now by reaching out to a staff member in the discord!

Shinobi: Project

In the last month, work continued on the large 1.3 update. Two new world bosses were fully implemented and tested by our Wave 0 testers. We also finished adding collectable books, this will allow you to collect lore books in your inventory that are crafted by our lore team. These books can contain important lore information that no one else knows except for those who have the book. A rework to combat and combat animations was also completed, bringing up the visual quality of S:P to a new standard. 

A total network rework was completed which will bring significant performance increases in 1.3 which we plan to adjust based on data we receive from our live release. We also added new weapon handling that will allow you to swing your weapon and also perform Jutsu's at the same time, allowing for players to create more interesting combo's instead of clicking back and fourth between tools.

Bug Fixes
    - Fixed various NPC punch hitboxes being cancelable.
    - Fixed Dance of the Crescent Moon and Primary Lotus movestacking in major lag.
    - Fixed being able to slightly walk around in Water Predict.
    - Fixed being able to parry Water Vortex.
    - Fixed firebreath, waterbreath, Flame Bomb, waterfall, earth wall, Earth Spikes, Mud Floor, Earth Dragon Bomb, Wild Water Wave, Ice Mirror, Ice Mirror Scatter, Rasengan, Odama Rasengan, Wind Slash, Water Gun, Water Shotgun, Chidori, and other abilities not properly functioning in laggy servers.
    - Fixed Run animation and grips to be more responsive and accurate to the animation.
    - Fixed multiple memory leaks in various abilities (e.g., firebreath, waterbreath, Flame Bomb, Wild Water Wave, earth wall, Great Earth Spikes, Waterfall, Rasengan, Odama Rasengan, Crystal Spikes, Embers, Wind Slash, etc.).
    - Fixed Divine Wind not multi-hitting and Violet Whirlwind now blockable.
    - Fixed several stuns and iframes being removed early in laggy servers (e.g., Rising Wind, Youth Full Power, Adamantine Chains, Uzumaki Barrier, Sand Coffin, Sand Shield).
Balance Changes
    - Buffed Bears and Golems.
    - A Clan received a slight Chakra buff; Miyajima and Karatachi received slight HP buffs.
    - Divine Wind handsigns lowered from 5 to 4 but now blockable again; Lightning Blitz, Ice Mirror Scatter, and Ice Spike now have handsigns.
    - Lowered handsigns for Great Fireball, Fireball, and Blazing Meteors.
    - Water Vortex handsigns increased to 4; damage lowered.
Optimizations
    - Optimized multiple abilities, including Running Fire, Gale Slash, Leaf Whirlwind, Lion Stomp, Rising Wind, Ice Spike, Precise Crystal Spike Attack, Defensive Chains, Water Vortex, Thunderbolt, and Lightning Stomp.
Miscellaneous Updates
    - Shadow Cloak mas is now lootable.
    - Loot UI scaling fixed.
    - Auto PDs now begin when the server is 3 hours old.
    - Reverted Shiftlock Stun Change.
    - Increased default Rising Wind duration.

Demon Slayer: Project

Over the past month, the combat has been migrated from a server sided, raycast based hit detection system, to a client based, spatial query based system on the client. The problem with the initial hit detection, is that as our hitbox timings are based on AnimationMarkers, the client was querying the server on when to begin, and end hit detection. Factoring latency into the equation, this led to innacurate and delayed hitboxes, and thus we had to make the swap to client based collision, of which the server sanity checks and processes all humanoid based tagging.

The SkillController and SkillService have been reformatted to allow for segmented skills, for example, a skill such as Waterfall Basin, would have a skill segment for the jump, and a skill segment for the land. It was critical the system was able to manage segmented skills, otherwise there would be no effective way to falicitate Server > Client > Rendering Clients communication, for an entire move, especially one which relied on further input to complete (such as a hold to charge, release to do)

The queues for footstep noises on movement has been optimized, utilizing an InstancePooler class which facilitates faster Sound loading via calling Instance:Clone() over Instance.new().

Dashing has undergone buffs to make it more viable in combat, aswell as base walking, of which has been reformatted from a very literal "walk", into more of a speed walk, to conform to the players expectation of a fast paced battle.

Combat has undergone a stylistic and mechanical revamp, following the dramatic failure of a more randomized and RNG based system, which utilized unpredictable combat patterns. The new approach is akin to Demon Hunter, Deepwoken, and JuJutsu Shenanigans in terms of reference.

Demon Slayer: Project is looking for particle artists! If you have any range of experience, please DM TaylorsRus directly via discord, with a link to your portfolio/videos of your work.

Clone Wars: Project

Last month the team reached a huge milestone in the development of CW:P. We finally completed both our gun system it's network rework to allow to scale to hundreds of players shooting at once. 

This development saw us do our first official stress test that had our testers face off against a diverse amount of AI. This test helped us collect important data to further optimize our game systems, mainly the enemy AI, which is what we'll be completing in the next month. 

The team also spent the month working on setting up skyboxes to match the stationed venators over each planet within the game. The skyboxes make the player feel like they are above the planet, and is incredibly immersive to be stationed in a Venator on top of such a high quality planet below. 

Alongside the stress test held for weapons and AI, we also completed our first stress test on our new starships, which simultaneously allowed our pilots to get used to the unique flight controls they'll be using to fight hordes of Vulture droids in epic large-scale fleet battles.

"I'm glad we did that stress test. I would probably have moved on to the other tasks otherwise which would have been an issue in the future as we wouldn't have noticed the enormous issues with performance we currently have and  modifying well consolidated systems"

- Happy, Lead Developer on CW:P

Due to the valuable information we gathered from our stress test, we will be hosting our next large stress test with BOTH the full AI Rework and the Gun Networking Rework once our Discord hit's 1,250 members! So if you have not yet joined, make sure to! https://discord.gg/U5vt44JkTq

Coming Soon

A Man Dies When People Forget Him

And that concludes this month's report! If you've ever contemplated joining the developers of Unlimited Projects to contribute to our ambitious endeavors, don't hesitate to reach out. We continue to make tremendous progress, and we want to give a huge thank you to both our developers, players, and staff team for making all of this possible. Together, we can continue pushing the boundaries of the Roblox experience to new heights. We're immensely grateful for your dedication.
We'll see you in our September Monthly report!

Credits

Drafter - Studio Lead                                                                                    

TheGuyYallKnow - AOT:P New Module Lead Programmer

WaySide - AOT:P Old Module Lead Programmer

Ser3rm - S:P Project Leader

K1 - [REDACTED] Project Leader

Happy - CW:P Lead Programmer

TaylorsRus - DS:P Lead Programmer

Virgil - S:P Programmer

Jaden - DS:P Project Leader

Peeler - U:P VFX Artist

Traveler - U:P Animator

Rainy - U:P Animator

LolguyRuski - U:P Animator

Trystan - AOT:P Builder / Cinematic Artist

PotatoBlockz - AOT:P Builder

Exactly - AOT:P Builder

Tia - S:P Modeler / DS:P Builder

Otto - AOT:P Builder

Vital - AOT:P Builder

Xaden - AOT:P Builder

nobodygivesacrap12 - AOT:P Builder

Orange - AOT:P Animator

Jork - S:P Lead Builder

XyPixel - DS:P Lead Builder

Clash - AOT:P UI Arist

Catalyst - S:P UI Artist

DisguisedDash - CW:P UI Arist

Lizardgucci - S:P Village Artist

Combine - CW:P Gameplay Advisor

AleisterCross - CW:P Gameplay Advisor

Ahmed - CW:P Gameplay Advisor

Prime_Slime - DS:P Gameplay Advisor

Zack  - DS:P Gameplay Advisor

Kerrissh - DS:P/S:P Modeler

Scrumptious - DS:P/S:P VFX Artist

Preadator - CW:P Vehicle Artist

Our wonderful staff team and lore team

Thank you to our Patreons!

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