1. June 2021

What has happened in May

Some different things have happened in May, so let’s take it from the top!

At the start of May, the Vivanox team had decided that we could finally upgrade HoE to a newer version of UE4!

It has been a challenge encountering a lot of bumps in the road with this new upgrade.

Before we could properly upgrade to a newer version of Unreal, we had to clean up the project.

And some might think this could be simple, but some aspects of an upgrade can make it tedious and challenging.

In preparation for the upgrade, we updated the Heralds first, including updating the skeleton rig for our Heralds.

This also means that our Heralds now have a face rig! Which makes working with the characters much more exciting as now we can see the potential of the character’s facial expressions.

In addition, a lot of the stuff in the project that we didn’t use was removed. This has raised the possibility that future playable versions of HoE should be smaller, this has not yet been confirmed, but if our assumptions are correct, this will be amazing for the players and the Vivanox team.

It was no easy task, upgrading from our old build UE4.22 and up to 4.25.

Normally, a lot of people would have switched directly over to 4.25.

But in our case, we had to upgrade to each version manually.

So that means from 4.22 to 4.23 (testing 4.23), which then moves over to 4.24(testing 4.24), and then finally moves up to 4.25 which also includes testing.

Some of you might ask, why didn’t you move all the way up to 4.26? And our answer for that is very simple, as things are right now, we don’t need any features in the 4.26 version. But who knows, we might change that in the future, but for now, we are fine with 4.25.

All the upgrading was done by Sarr, and we thank you for your amazing work.

But the main thing is that we have a functional and upgraded version that works and is just as stable as the old one.

We are planning on making a new playable release of the game, with the current update.

And because of this, the release should be happening in the next couple of weeks.

We were hoping that we could start to upload some of the new UI this month, but sadly that has been postponed for the next two months. We are not even sure if it will be ready after two months, but we will do what we can to see if we can get it done, but again we must try our best to manage with unexpected circumstances.

However, we can tell you this much, we are working on a learning level for you!

This learning level will teach new players how to navigate the map and allow players to experience their Heralds. But this is also where we need all of you to give feedback because as the learning level will be used as a  tutorial, we need to know if the level is easy to navigate and is a good space to test out the Heralds.

The more we can fine-tune that section, the better and easier it will be for everyone to start playing HoE.

And that’s about it for this month!

That was it for this time

Zee Yaa next month