Ardarians!

The v0.1.2 is here!
The biggest feature of this version is the auto-build !
Aim, click, aim and click. It's already built!

It's a self building house to let you discover what can be done with the procedural building system.
The house size is adjustable before spawn, and of course, you can edit it as you wish once you spawned it.

In the future, improvements could be achieved by randomizing the height, the shape of the roof, the materials used and even spawn lights and furniture inside the house.
But for now, it's your builder's job!

New features:
- auto-building tool to create a house in 2 clicks
- dynamic footstep sounds for grass/wood/stone
- regen wall when removing a window/door from wall (gap will be filled)

Changed:
- can now use NON-procedural pillars to create walls
- added a particles effects at the aimed location to get a better building feedback
- added a particle effect to plot borders to better understand where are the borders
- added UI sounds to the SFX volume controller
- added a text on screen to remind the key to display keys (it's

)
- disabled the motion blur to improve performances
- reduced volume of birds
- changed the forbidden sound when you can't place an element
- hide FPS counter
- add some missing icons
- update the tutorial with simpler instructions
- fixed the controls appearing in an unpredictable way

For future versions:

We noticed FSR 2.0 introduces a lighting bug with flashing lights. It only happens on certain camera angles and as it still improves performance, we think it's a good idea to keep it.
Regarding the update to Unreal Engine 5.3, we are waiting either for FSR 2.0 to be compatible or for FSR 3.0 to be released as a native Unreal Engine plugin.
Upgrading to 5.3 might be skipped as substrate materials will be stable as of 5.4 and 5.3 broke the procedural generation of the forest anyway.

- improve floor and roof placement feedback with snap points
- better drag&drop experience for placing many objects at once
- fix camera when reaching down/up limits
- some prefab spawned on the map to show what the building system is capable of
- export buildings to JSON to be easily shared
- fix the display of the rotation axis which should be world for Z but local for X and Y
- a setting to adjust the colors

Have a good building time!
JB

Ardarians! It's time for an update..

YOUR FEEDBACK has been precious and we acted accordingly to what we have been asked by the community.

The 2 main topics are:
- settings for the volume, music and SFX.
- improved performance by enabling FSR 2.0

In the future we will add more settings, especially the ability to adjust colors (not all of you like the saturated colors) and the motion blur, as it can helps with performances.

The game now starts automatically on medium settings, which means lumen are disabled by default.

While lumen gives a cool feeling to the game, it's also a pain because of the performance impact and the procedural meshes which can't benefit from global illumination. This makes the lighting unconsistent in the buildings.

We hope the unreal team to improve the dynamic meshes render path so it can also benefit from lumen.

We also are waiting for AMD to release the FSR 3.0 plugin for Unreal Engine 5 as it seems extremely promising in term of frame rate improvement.

We are working hard to identify annoying bugs with the community in order to make Ardaria a better experience for you all.

Cheers!
JB

Dear Ardarians,

MATERIAL UPDATE

We just released the 0.1.0 version of the base building prototype on Steam!
You can see the update in action on youtube, right here -> https://youtube.com/shorts/ZIDB0w075NM
Ardaria Prototype is a base building tool which let you create a house of any shape and any size + decorate it with 300+ props and 40 materials.

What you must know about this update:
added 40 materials for procedural walls, floors and roofs, you can all find them in the material tab of the inventory
smart align system and drag&drop components on the map, build anything faster
crash system report so we know when you have a problem
a timelapse mode to render nice videos of the best community creations

Due to the addition of the crash report tool, the update size is around 800MB.

And some smaller features:
a new type of wall cut: the arch
toggle coordinates text helper with L
Procedural pillars can be placed anywhere on the plot, no need for beams anymore
echap will now let you close the inventory and menu
save character orientation
free build camera will keep character orientation when enabled
you can delete a saved game


Additionally, we fixed some issues:
roof pattern now follow the underlying mesh slope
some pivot fixes on some meshes
the game now launches in "medium" quality by default
AZERTY support
lowered the birds
fixed orientation of doors
save corruption issues when new elements won't be saved in the build

We believe the base building system is now ready to be used at it's full potential, we still can't find the limit of the engine regarding the amount of meshes you can spawn and the size of the build you can make.
Here is a video of the biggest build we made, it's a fortress on 15,000 square meter.

The future update will be focused on fighting hordes of ennemy, and to crush them in a cloud of blood.
Stay tuned Ardarians !

JB

Dear Ardarians, we just released an update containing few features and quick fixes.
We hit 2000 downloads on the demo and 200 wishlists for the first 3 days on the store, it's encouraging!

Due to a mistake on my side,
YOU MIGHT HAVE TO VERIFY FILES INTEGRITY IN STEAM LAUNCHER

- Outline shader in XIII style
- Fast rotation by default
- Add slowmode (C on keyboard) to reduce free build camera speed and rotation
- Display current rotation axis
- you can place procedural pillar anywhere
- moved the coords text box, but it's not better... sry
- snap to grid (20cm) - can toggle with G
- reset rotation with R key
- add snap point component to easily use procedural elements
- update tuto control

Enjoy the build!
JB