Survive the Wild late April update

Hello folks! The last 2 weeks have been very busy and things have gone extremely well in regards to Survive the Wild development, and the staff team and I are beginning to get very excited! I’m happy to say that we have completed 2 of the major tasks mentioned in previous posts, and I will describe those and more to you now.

The tracking system is now usable!

Wow, that took a lot longer than 1 day to accomplish, but it was very much worth doing! The amount of remaining elements to the tracking system that needed heavy brainstorming was much higher than I thought, making things very difficult. It’s a lot easier to code something if you know exactly how it should work ahead of time while coding it! I thought I did, but it became clear shortly after starting work on this a few weeks ago that my original plan for it was very flawed and was missing the solutions to several large issues. The need for brainstorming got bad enough that I ended up working on this for a few hours at a time before moving onto other things for a while so as to make sure I continued being productive rather than stuck in my mind for long periods at a time trying to figure out how this complicated system should work. I finally figured it out and coded just about all of it, before realising during testing that I’d forgot yet another element during the brainstorming that required me to have to spend at least a couple more hours redoing a significant portion of the code. The difficulty on this one was much higher than originally anticipated, but I am confident that every player is going to find it extraordinarily worth it once they have learned and warmed up to the powerful system.

Take every suggestion or idea involving animals making a constant beeping noise. Add the suggestions regarding animals making a sound if you are directly facing them. Next include the suggestions or ideas about how it would be cool if you could get items to make beeping noises on the ground when you approach them. Oh of course we can’t forget the ideas about how it would be cool if objects could speak updates when something about them changes. Now add a healthy dose of originality and multiply all that by a few dozen at least, and you’ve got Survive the Wild’s new and awesome tracking system!

Make fruit items on the ground sound different from wood or metal ones. Make a single berry on the ground sound different than all other berries on the ground. See where objects are with a hover or focus sound positioned in HRTF as you arrow over the object, or even check what tile an object is located on this way. See what objects are around you and get information about every single one right from the game keyboard area. Make the player John have a different beacon or lock indicator than the player Joe. You will be able to do all this and much more with this awesome tracking system, which we all can’t wait to show you!

Since the system was completed there were a few very good suggestions from beta members which I may implement before the release to make the tracking system experience just that much more enjoyable for all, but even if I were to not touch this system anymore sans fixing maybe one minor bug I can think of that could cause annoyance, this system would still be fully usable just about exactly as it stands, and so I pretty much consider this task complete, as it is no longer even near broken enough to prevent us from releasing the update!

Automatic daily backups established!

There is more I want to do in regards to backups, but I’m very happy to say that there are now daily off-site server backups that are automatically taking place via a cron job on the system that hosts the game and my website. This backs up all webpages on that server, any sql databases, every single bit of important and even some not so important data regarding Survive the Wild, and several more valuable bits of data on that machine which we don’t want to lose. Now that this basic though secure and effective backup infrastructure is set up, we no longer have to worry about our game data getting any more than 24 hours behind in the worst case! As for the stability of the backups? I have this thing automatically uploading compressed, incremental and securely encrypted/signed backups to actually Dropbox of all things. I’ve had pro since before I had STW, so why not? I have all this unused space just sitting here available to me, so I may as well use it. Also, I can share the folder containing the backups with anybody I trust, thus creating copies of the data on several computers around the world in a secure way, since even though I can give the data to several people, none of them will have the keys to decrypt it. That actually brings me to the things remaining which I’d like to establish regarding backups.

So as I said, if I give these system backups to administrators (which I will do for data safety), the administrators cannot decrypt the data. While it does appear I myself can pretty easily restore single bits of data from these backups, this is still not very convenient and will not help if the administrators need to access a bit of older data from within the backup should such a thing be required (though hopefully it should rarely be due to increasingly robust logging systems). Still though, I wish to establish a second, on-site, much more easily accessible backup encase something goes wrong with a single file and we wish to restore that without accessing large off-site compressed backup files. I wish for staff members to have the ability to initiate such a backup from the game, or even a full off-site one as well and be able to determine the last time such backups were made. However, since the crucial task of keeping our data automatically safe in at least one off-site location has now been achieved, the remaining improvements I wish to make to the backup infrastructure are now officially much lower priority and can be attended to post release if we wish or if it becomes clear that they would take a lot of time to implement.

Improvements regarding pathfinding/npcs/lag

So as many of these improvements were made literally earlier today, our testing data is a little sparse still and the degree to which improvements in this area are required at this point is going to remain somewhat unknown for the next couple of days as we test. However, today significant efforts were made to improve several issues regarding npcs getting stuck, and in doing so I was able to fix or at least improve this issue where npcs were getting stuck at waterlines near barriers, or really near barriers in general (I think one particular waterline barrier caused a lot of the getting stuck though thus far). I’m pretty sure though that we did succeed in our mission for today which was to get npcs to stop freezing sometimes when attacking, as well as some issues regarding finding food. A couple days ago we also removed some laggy npcs from a test area where they were left with only themselves for food, which had been slightly messing with our statistics and more to the point, the amount of lag on the server. If you remember in the last post I mentioned fixing our profiler so that we could see how long certain functions were taking to execute. We saw that the code that made npcs fall through the air was taking way longer than it should to execute, so we finally recoded this the way we intended using an event based broadcasting system to tell objects when tiles disappeared, rather than the timer we were using before that was checking the npc’s current tile every few hundred milliseconds. I’m not entirely sure why the pathfinder can request hundreds of tiles a second and not lag and then the npc falling code can take so much time to execute only checking tiles every 500ms, but it’s a thing I guess for some reason I don’t yet fully understand and so we recoded that falling logic with noticeable improvements. It’s hard to exactly measure stability as a whole, but there is 0 doubt that it has improved between the last post and this one especially when considering the general lag improvements mentioned in the last post!

Other minor improvements

As always, there were a bunch of smaller things improved upon that don’t require their own section in this post. Actually the amount of these things continues to get higher each time both because getting closer to the release simply makes them higher priority, and because the new bug report and suggestion tickets are doing absolute wonders.

We again have made improvements to the user interface for staff, I imagine this theme will continue to repeat often. As mentioned many times the old administration system on Survive the Wild was a mess putting it kindly, and we want to make absolutely certain we do it right this time which of course requires making it as easy as possible for staff members to perform tasks. This time though it’s not enough to deserve it’s own section. In this case, the only large staff UI improvement I made was the edition of a comprehensive statistics menu, which at some point may be available to players in some form with a few of the more private statistics redacted. These statistics can be anything, from something as simple as the real world date/time of the server machine, to something as useful as the amount of ram the server application is taking or the amount of space remaining on the server’s drives, to things that are just nice to know such as the total number of objects/npcs/maps/areas in the game. This statistics menu includes functions to use the profiler I mentioned above and so there are no more slash commands for that either, yay! The other 3 improvements for staff UI are indeed tiny. If you remember, I previously mentioned generalizing some dialogs regarding script editing in order to make the same dialogs work for maps and other data. It seems I broke the script rename button when I did that, and this was resolved a few days ago. Actually while writing this post, a master discovered something that didn’t work in the character administration panel regarding updating inventories, so I fixed that quick. Other than that, the only thing I can remember doing for staff UI is adding another convenient method by which characters can be manually unjailed.

Aside from the staff UI stuff, we’ve just got a giant list of random smaller fixes and improvements. You guys are about to see the effectiveness of this bug reporting and suggestion system, I have enough items here that I may as well put them in a list instead of a few wordy paragraphs. Well lets go, in the order presented to me by the new resolved bugs and suggestions menus in the game.

  • Pressing ctrl+g on a player’s name in the online players list was not creating a group chat, but was instead bringing up the new go to list item dialog where you can enter the number of a list item you wish to jump to. Now the keystroke for creating a group chat takes higher priority again like it should.
  • If you dragged items into a fire, the game would tell you there was no longer anything to drag like 2 minutes after the fact. Now that happens instantly as intended.
  • You know how you can press control+several different keys while in the online players menu to perform actions? Staff members have a few additional keys they can press on a player to make their jobs easier, such as opening the character panel for that player. Accept if a player pressed one of these keys after pressing f6, they would be silently returned to the keyboard area instead of nothing happening. Now clients aren’t even made aware of such keys unless they are needed by a staff rank, which is how it should be.
  • The suggestion was proposed that players in jail should be able to see the time remaining until they were released rather than having to calculate it based on the jailed and release dates, this was pretty easy so I decided to goahead and do it. It now hsows that info if somebody in jail clicks the why am I in jail option in the main options list.
  • In the past, if a player lost health or was attacked and then went offline very shortly afterword, their client would exit normally, but their character would be left frozen online for a short time. This is a measure to prevent someone from going offline to avoid a dangerous situation, as we don’t want that happening here. Now if you end up in such a situation and try exiting, you will be told that you shouldn’t exit now because your character would be stuck online for a short time, but you can press shift+escape if you don’t care and want to do it anyway. So to be clear the behavior of freezing characters online if going offline in a dangerous situation has been a thing for years, but now it’s visible as it should be.
  • If a player clicked on an offline staff members name in the find staff members menu to copy that staff member’s name to their clipboard, it would prepend a backslash to the name (an internal menu item delimiter used there). This little issue was quickly resolved.
  • There were improvements with trees, they weren’t regrowing properly if partially damaged and that was fixed, and a large breakthrough with rotating tiles makes branches much more visible and fun than they were before.
  • If a baseball hit a tree, it was getting destroyed instead of spawning next to the tree. That was fixed.
  • If a player accesses the support tickets menu, they are now separated into 2 sections (one for open tickets and one for closed/resolved ones). Previously it was all in one giant list sorted only by modification date.
  • If a support ticket, bug report or suggestion is modified while a player is offline, that player will now finally get alerted automatically when they come online that there have been changes. Staff members with permission to respond to all tickets will get alerted about any new tickets that are opened as soon as they come online, thus making it that much harder to miss support requests!
  • And several other little fixes for systems and items I won’t spoil here.

I’m really excited to see how much less buggy the game gets in general after a couple months of the players using the new bug and suggestions system, you can now see how successful it has been just from those bullet points above!

I just have to mention the stw earthquake situation

Ok so if you’re short on time or are just looking for serious content, feel free to skip to the next heading. But before we get into the tasks in progress and tasks remaining sections, I wanted to pause for a not at all serious but hopefully amusing interlude.

I was working on fixing rotating map objects in the game about a week ago. These could be anything from trees with branches that rotate at all sorts of angles, to a vehicular device that takes up physical map tiles but turns, or even just to a structure that a player places at an odd angle. I mostly made a huge breakthrough, er… I thought I totally did at the time. So I published the patch to beta members and went to relax for a bit. When I came back to check on things a few hours later, what I found was absolutely hilarious, and beta members thought so too! I’d accidentally made a slight miscalculation when working on rotating objects, managing to cause all of the maps to separate by one tile. Samvil city just flat out fell into the ocean and disappeared! At least mostly, you could actually fall through a big hole in the ocean right into the sewer system, and we all started joking about how the lost coin was no longer the biggest missing item in the ocean, now it was the lost city! This little failure quickly became fondly known as the STW earthquake, as it really did look like how one beta member funnily put it, that the tectonic plates of the world had shifted apart! Animals and players could just fall forever between the gaps at the edges of the maps, such as the empty space that existed between the mainland and the ocean. It’s certainly one of those experiences we’re all going to remember, especially since it was an issue long enough for several beta members to discover it and because it’s one of those unique bugs that are actually quite funny.

A similar thing happened in 2021, while we were testing the new system that let us link all the maps into one giant map. It was one of those times where I was talking to administrators and updating the beta client every 5 minutes so we could all test changes. Nearing the end of that day me and one other admin were the only ones left in the conference, and were just sitting there on the game with the latest client when the admin took a few steps and suddenly fell through the map! We were on the mainland near the pond, so this in itself was already funny because when does anybody ever fall through the middle of the island mainland of all places. But then when we began investigating it with the camera, the shear randomness of the gaps and holes we saw all over the map was absolutely eye-wateringly hilarious. The mainland didn’t look much better than the Windywolf valley bridge! There were just strips of grass or pond or whatever every few tiles, with random platforms here and there particularly near where we were standing when we logged in. It was… amazing. But the cherry on top was that we found out that all we had to do to make the mainland magically return to normal was to just move the camera more than 200 tiles backwards! We were cracking up over that one for many minutes, that one admin and I were the only ones to ever see such a thing. Never before while developing STW do I remember such an amazingly unique map bug like that appearing during development. There was an issue with the tile caching, so it was truly random seeming and awesome. Of course when it’s hard to fix, any bug is seriously annoying. But when it is pretty easy to solve, some special bugs in the map engine can tend to be unforgettably hilarious, I think because the map has so much to do with how the game world is rendered and so the broken map just flows into and entertains ones imagination quickly, naturally, and usually in a more than comical manner depending on the bug.

Anyway, this latest fluke in the map engine seemed like a perfect opportunity to share a few quite entertaining moments from behind the scenes with all of you quick. If you guys liked this, I can throw stuff like this in more when it happens or from the past, such as when an admin’s old computer caused us to spend a day finding the really obscure reason that they couldn’t run the game in March 2022. Just let me know! Some bugs are a learning experience in the end, some are so small they don’t matter, some are just flat out rage inducingly difficult to figure out. However just a small, tiny rare few like the ones mentioned here are downright unforgettably hysterical and are worth sharing, for those who are entertained by such things. 😀 Right, so now that a fair few of you have hopefully gotten a small chuckle or grin, lets get back to what you all came for.

Tasks in progress

These are the things being actively worked on at this time, or things that we have already started on and intend to finish very soon.

Documentation

This is both worldmaker documentation as well as documentation in general. I mentioned that we added more scribes to the team in the last post, and am happy to say that the documentation library is filling out great as a result! There are still some topics that could do with extra detail and/or a couple that scribes can’t right yet because they are missing some information required to do so, but generally finishing up the public documentation is going great so far!

As for worldmaker documentation, I have already spent some time properly documenting the scripting interface that worldmakers use, however there is still quite a bit to do there. I need to write function remarks for I think like 200 functions? I have like 50 of them done so far (these are very rough numbers). Luckily a worldmaker was able to write a script to print out some of the general structure of this function reference, so now I just need to finish filling in the blanks rather than writing the same structured text above each function over and over again. Another worldmaker is also working on more general documentation, however they must juggle that with their main rank of worldmaker (actually working on the game), so that’s why this isn’t complete yet. However it’s an ongoing process that gets closer to being done every day! Really, the public documentation is the only thing we must for sure finish before the release, finishing the worldmaker documentation ahead of time may just make things go faster because then more worldmakers can understand the full extent of the system’s they are working with. Since writing this blog post is flipping my brain from c++/angelscript mode into English mode, I’ll probably pound more of those out right after I finish this post before delving back into coding. In general, I’m satisfied with the documentation improvements that have taken place over the last 2 weeks!

Script conversions

As I mentioned in the last post, we are planning to save most of what’s left here for a couple of binge coding sessions near the end, and so with that said there are still several scripts that need converting, mostly having to do with cooking using spits, maybe a few food items and a couple others that I can’t remember the function of right now. We did get a couple things working (though not specifically RTig conversions), for example the cassette player used to be part of the hardcode so that I’d have to restart the server to change it, and additionally the thing just quit working anyway after the old server crashed since the audio files for cassettes used to be streamed from my old web server. As such the cassette player has been rewritten in the shared scripting engine using the much more modern audio streaming system. Also dropping 25 wood to make a wood tile for example or any other similar item drops was broken for a while and also used to be in the hardcode rather than in the shared scripting module, so that was recoded too and is now working again. Though these 2 little steps aren’t specifically about converting RTig scripts, they are very similar (instead I’m just converting from the hardcode of the server application to the shared scripting engine). As such, I figure the reports on those fixes may as well be put here considering that in the end it’s all about converting all the game items to the new scripting engine, whether they were originally sourced from RTig or not (it’s just that most of them are). A worldmaker did convert 1 or 2 of the remaining food items though. The same statement from the previous post continues to be true, I expect that this task is just going to randomly disappear in one day when we decide it’s finally time to tackle these remaining scripts.

libgit2 for tracking the changing of scripts

I’m on the fence as to whether this should be a task in progress, or a task remaining. This is because I was almost certain I was going to work on this over the last 2 weeks, but as you may be able to see by reading this post, I ended up getting a lot of other random and important stuff done instead such as backups and the object tracking system. As such, I haven’t managed to touch this one since the initial step I mentioned last time about getting the shared scripts to compile for transference between servers. I’m only keeping it up here instead of in the tasks remaining section because again the same from before continues to be true, my expectation is that I’m going to continue working on this again very shortly following the blog post. However the new bugs and suggestions system is so useful that it’s quite easy to get distracted fixing the bugs I find there, which can then lead into all sorts of random though needed areas of development. Thing is though, this one can’t be put off much longer, because soon it’s going to be the highest priority task that actually stops us from releasing the update, leaving me with nothing left but to attend to that and then a slew of random bugs. I’m not sure we’re quite to that point yet, but I think we’ll reach it extraordinarily soon. With any luck, I’ll have a much more happy update about this task in the next post.

Tasks remaining

Wow you guys but this section is getting really really hard to write! While that would be bad for literally any other section, it’s very very good for this one because it means that we’re running out of tasks remaining to write about! In fact, to write this section we must look at the remaining unresolved bug reports and suggestions submitted by beta members, meaning that once libgit2 is completed we’ve officially jumped all of the absolutely huge hurtles and almost only have small things left! The only thing I will take an extra second to mention because it’s a bit more important is the ability for administrators to subscribe to log updates. In the past, when several player events would take place (think the server releasing somebody from jail after their time expires or similar), admins would get a buffer notification called an admintell, and such events were poorly logged. Now such events are logged amazingly, but admins are not automatically notified of the events. So now we need to combine these 2 systems so that if a new log entry gets created, an admin can set it up to receive a notification instantly when an event takes place and is logged. The administrator should be able to disable and enable the notifications for certain game events based on what’s useful at a given time. So that’s really the only really important thing that’s come up, it would probably be wise to get that system working before the release. Other than that, lets see what we have here in the unresolved bug reports list, mind you very few of these are crucial or update breaking but I may as well mention them here.

  • There is some small issue where you can get stuck in a dialog if you lose connection to the server while the dialog is open. It’s minor because you can just open a different dialog to close it, but it would still be good to fix quick if I can figure out why it’s happening.
  • This one is a bit more critical, corpses appear to not be spawning items properly when someone dies. I tried to look for a few minutes today while writing the post, but have not yet discovered the problem and so I need to figure that out.
  • This one will take a grand total of about 30 seconds to deal with, but the home and end keys in sliders are doing the reverse of what the arrow keys are doing. Left arrow decreases the slider but home increases it. Obviously not vital in the least.
  • It would be nice to improve the rewritten cassette player a bit more, though it does work perfectly as it is.
  • If you jump and then sit down/bend your legs while in the air, the tripping sound should play upon land rather than the footstep landing sound.
  • The feature where you can have the game repeat characters as you type them in text fields is a little bit broken and could do with a bit of work.
  • apparently some items are not spawning in the proper location in the windy wolf forest, but are instead spawning underground! Oops? We’ll figure it out I’m sure.

So as you can see, we’ve got that thing with log subscriptions which may take a couple hours to work out, and since there is still quite a bit left regarding this task I’ll mention libgit2 here again. After scripts can be tracked and transferred properly though, we just have to resolve those few bug reports you just finished reading and take a little bit of time to generally look over all of our work!

so… so close…

Well everyone, that’s about all the updates I can think of for you right now. As you can see, the last 2 weeks have been extremely productive and loads of progress is being made. We’re almost to the point where it’ll be time to bring up the main staging server! Right now all work is being done on the beta server which is a completely separate environment than what the players connect to. Very soon though, we’re just about to reach the point where we must actually spin up the server that everyone will be connecting to so that we can then begin preparing that server for public beta! This will involve for example making sure that no beta commands work on the main game, checking to make sure that everything is secure, we’ll have several beta members using fresh characters on this main staging server to make sure one last time that the game is fully playable for everyone etcetera. And when we’re ready, we’ll then release the client that connects to this main staging server to everybody, and that will be the official public beta!

If you’ve been keeping up with these posts, you can see just how little we have left to do now when compared with previous ones. To say that we’re getting excited is an understatement, we absolutely can’t wait to see everyone on public beta soon!

58 Comments

  • Pentaholic says:

    I’m really excited for the public beta! Also, yes, I’d love to hear more about those hilarious bugs! Just imagining the one about the STW earthquake makes me laugh 🤣

    • RachelK says:

      Honestly I thought he was going to say that he has implemented earthquakes into the game. LOL That would be amusing and perhaps an interesting idea.

      • GOLDENWARRIOR says:

        me to actually, I thought that there were going to be earthquakes implemented in the game, but how ever. i loved that bug story.

  • RachelK says:

    Wow, i have been reading with much enthusiasm these past couple of posts. I am so excited for this update! It all sounds out of this world (pardon the pun).
    Well done Sam and staff! This will be indeed highly worth it!

    Rachel aka RachelK (Australia)

  • TheSilverDragon says:

    sounds amazing to me Sam and yes I would like to hear more funny moments in the past so I am also excited for the new updateso I will be waiting for the next post for the next 2 weeks also take care Sam

  • Muamal says:

    Cool!
    But what about the watch system?

    • Sam says:

      Ah indeed in all that stuff I was writing about I completely forgot to mention that, unfortunately that still belongs in the todo list though I imagine not for very much longer. We just need to find a calm moment where several beta members can be online for a couple hours and tackle it, I am hopeful that this will happen before the next post.

  • Pedro Dias says:

    Hello Sam. I already descovered a lot of fun bugs on STW and others softwares. It usually is a something to laugh in future. I on private guess it really fun so: if you wanna share more, please, do it! I’ll laugh a lot thinking how this was funny to explore, lol!
    Now, congratulations to you and to the team that are working at full steam to turn possible the new STW. I’m waiting full of expectation about it.
    So close but so far, it’s what I think after read it. I continui waiting with expectative to new release!

  • Very excited for the new update — it is very much amazing the work you do to make the experience a good one!

    Related; I wish I had even a quarter of the coding energy you have. I /can/ code (I think…) but I just don’t have the energy most of the time. A shame too, since I have ideas. Haha!

    Anyway tangent aside I think it’s awesome the work you are doing; and it is really cool to follow your progress as you make your own scripting engine and such things.

    Oh random reminder; you did mention you would put your BGT stuff on GitHub that first post. Not sure if you wanted to wait until after the update (fair enough) but if you wish to do something else (trust me; I know how it goes getting board and wanting to do something else because breaks are important) that is a thing.

  • Hi there. How will this version’s lag be?
    Will it be less than the BGT version’s?

    • Sam says:

      Of course that is the hope, much work has been put in to trying to make sure this is the case. Usually right now if there is a lag spike, it’s because one npc is messing up and needs to be destroyed. Of course as time goes on we will rectify this situation as well, it is already very minimal much of the time. But as to things that previously caused lag, they should be very much mostly rectified, such as the fundamental element of only needing to scan objects nearby instead of having to loop through all items on the server in many situations.

  • Nico Alfaro says:

    Hello Sam, how are you? I’m following your posts and they’re really interesting! It would be interesting the earthquakes in stw and some other natural phenomena! Ask? Will it be possible to implement other types of transport in stw? Thanks in advance friend! And successes!

  • Shehryar Tariq says:

    what about that stripe payment thing though? also, just curious, but would stw have more weapons in the future?

    • Sam says:

      Weapons are an easy thing to add (the most difficult part is the sound design), so yes certainly I’m sure there will be many. Stripe works fine already, though I do still need to look at upgrading the PayPal integration to use their webhooks system instead of the older instant payment notifications that I’m using now, as they really aren’t all that instant sometimes.

  • Dusko says:

    Hi Sam. I just wanted to know what NPCs have you coded already and which ones are still waiting to be coded? I can also give you some advice on the behavior of some wild animals if you need it for example , in the previous version bears would keep attacking the player until they die but actually bears in real life are so powerful they can rip you apart in one or two hits,unlike in survive the wild you can’t get away from them by climbing onto a tree because they will climb after you and can you please publish another YouTube video on your channel to demonstrate what you have done since July?

    • jim pickens says:

      yeah, another audio demo would be nice, for the things you couldn’t demo before.
      as well as that, i’m sure there are many new things.
      also, a suggestion, could you give us a way to listen to the music beofe the beta comes out, something like the 403 page you have, but with a link to the music page.
      so it’d be something like this.
      “New Survive the Wild website coming soon, restricted at this time to beta members and staff!
      how ever, you can listen to the music used from

    • Sam says:

      We’ll be glad to consider any suggestions you submit about npc behaviors once the update is live, thanks! It turns out that we do indeed still need to reimplement the lions, that shouldn’t take very long though and will just be lumped in with finishing the rest of the script conversions basically. As for a new demo, the biggest problem is that those take a lot of time to produce, and it already takes hours to write these blog posts (I usually start one day and finish the next). It would be difficult to fit a demo into the list of things we’re already trying to get done and then on top of the blog posts. I think that the majority of players would rather I spend the time that would have gone towards a demo video on actually finishing up the game instead.

  • dawabsheh says:

    This is very cool, Sam. I wish you more success. Keep developing. You are a wonderful and very good person. Also, something wonderful and funny. What I read about above. It was a beautiful thing.

  • Logan Strickland says:

    Lol. Remember when the sewers took over the city and when you entered you’d just fall into the sewers? And when you moved to the wrong coordinate and fell from the mining area into the sewer? Lol.

  • Mister Santu says:

    hello Sam bike horn,, bysakel’x the horn seems to be playing please modify the bike horn

  • animal_killer says:

    Hello. I’m really excited for this update. But I have a question. Are there more npc’s added to the game i mean there are only wolves and bears and polar bears and bunnies and stuff like that in the game. I really want more npc to be added to this game. For example, things like chicken and sheep. I am tired of eating wolves, roflflfl. And the idea of ​​that town of Samvil falling into the ocean with all its stuff is very funny and interesting. It would be great if you write about them in the next post and we can laugh a little. I hope that in the next post, you will come with the news of the release of this game! yasser dolatkhah, nicknamed animal_killer.

    • aliiq says:

      Your words are correct. The problem is that wolf meat is not tasty. We want to eat chicken and sheep instead of meat for bears, wolves and sharks. Haha.

      • animal_killer says:

        looool And if a big and promising cow enters the game, it will be very good! I love eating beef in the bungalow shelter roflflflflfl

    • Sam says:

      Hi. Yes there are new npcs, and we can add more without releasing new updates after public beta goes live. However I’ve been careful to avoid mentioning too many details about the actual game content changes and intend to continue doing so, that way there are still some things left to discover!

  • Eliz says:

    Wow chicos Muchas felicidades por el trabajo que realizan nosotros continuaremos esperando la actualización
    English translation added by Sam: Wow guys Many congratulations for the work you do we will continue to wait for the update

  • aliiq says:

    My friend sam, I will be honest with you, we are starting to feel very bored without stw, so we are waiting for the final version to play again, we miss the days of hunting animals, especially the cave lion. Also to find players’ corpses and get items, we missed arenas and pk.
    best wishes

  • tunmi13 says:

    Got to love falling through the floor situations :D. Very excited for what is ahead.

  • zumarrafi says:

    wow I hope stw will be released as soon as possible, I can’t wait to play, and of course sometimes you can’t wait to show players, hahahahahaha

  • lion_man says:

    it sounds that things are going great, i’m really excited to see the implementation of all those things in the game, but what about the story , will it be developed and has a updated as well or the game historical events / characters will stay unchanged, any ways really your efforts are so appreciated, keep the good work sam and the team, best wishs, stay safe all

    • Sam says:

      Actually the old audio story was removed in this update, because yes we do have increasingly large plans for redoing the story, giving the world a proper history, explaining all the weird things about it etc. This will be a long process though, I hope to make the new story an awesome movie length fully 3d audio production with actors, sound effects and music. Thus, it is not done in this update.

  • abd alrhman says:

    Thank you and for all the fun and creativity you provide for the blind. We are looking forward to the version that will be published to the public, and we are very eager to know what is new in this interesting and interesting game. Thank you for your effort and time, and my greetings to you.

  • the best says:

    hi sam, is it that on the side of the possibilities of the word makers, they will be able to have the possibility as with the maps, to edit weapons, because for example the maps, they can easily create them in external scripts, but are you counting do this also for weapons, it will be super easy then to add new weapons in the game, and there would be no need for you to do it manually in the code, well, I don’t know if my question is clear, but in any case I have to notice that this development is progressing, and that you are super efficient in pursuing and finishing a mission, gg to you, and please, tell us in the next post that it remains only to finish small details before the release of the game,

    • Sam says:

      Hi. Yes, weapons can be modified by worldmakers, in fact none of the weapons exist in the server’s hardcode anymore but are instead all using shared scripts and static data accessible to and modifiable by worldmakers.

  • Dawood tiyes says:

    Hi Sam how are you, I cannot wait for the next update

  • jonut says:

    good job sam i am very excited and waiting

  • Shelby Craig says:

    I loved the section about the STW earthquake. That must have been hillarious! That would be funny if earthquakes were one of the randomly-generated events. This is definitely a game I will be streaming more of on Youtube when it comes back up. Looking forward to playing with all of you! 🙂

  • the best says:

    hi again sam, i have a question about you nvgt engine, i dont understand why you choosed to use the angel script api and some cpp functions, then that you could directly to code in cpp, really, i am curious about that,

    • Sam says:

      The primary reason I stuck with Angelscript is because Survive the Wild has been written in BGT (angelscript) since it’s beginning. If I switched entirely to c++, I’d either have to abandon years worth of code that can be fixed, or spend as much time as I spent getting Angelscript working converting stw’s bgt code to c++. Since I already had that factor mostly making my decision anyway for me, I decided I may as well embrace it as it makes most minor server updates much faster due to higher level and quicker compilation than a bunch of c modules, and the fact that there is thus much less code I have to write and recompiles I must perform to update stw on different platforms in the future.

  • Dusko says:

    Hi!
    I just want to know, if the tracking sounds on the new tracking system will play all the time or only when the player is tracking an object, because if they play all the time for every object that can be tracked in the field, it can get really annoying, and can you please return the tracking keys as they were before , K for tile changes and objects, and M for items.
    I just don’t want there to be any confusion, so that when the game gets released I’mlike ooooooooh!!!! the tracking sounds are playing all the time and there is no way to turn them off. because it sounded like that in your post section that contain the updates on the new tracking system. and the reason why I said to return the tracking keys as they were before is because you said in your July demog so now if you press K, it will probably be M later..Best wishes and keep up the great work.

    • Sam says:

      As to your first question about everything playing beeping noises, that’s what I mean about this tracking system it’s all up to you. You get to control exactly what items do and don’t play noises both when you are and are not tracking objects. Of course the defaults are to have all beacon sounds disabled for all objects accept the one being tracked, but again you’ll be able to configure all of this to your liking so that for example when you are looking for fruit you can make the fruit beep, but keep all other items silent.
      As to your question about k and m? Those keys are removed actually, once you realize the customizability of this tracking system you’ll understand why. For example there are currently 7 different categories of objects to track. tiles, items, objects, locations, animals, characters, and players. As you can see, way too many options for k and m to just simply work anymore, so yes there will be that learning curve to adjust to (though it’s of course mentioned in the changelog). I don’t want to say too much more about the tracking system because it’s one of the things that’s been left relatively unspoiled, but you can rest assured that we’ve done all we possibly can to make sure that the system isn’t annoying, and that if you find a part of it that is, you have simply to change a configuration option in the system to resolve it.

      • OlegTheSnowman says:

        I’m glad I didn’t start translating the game into Ukrainian. It would have taken so long to retranslate everything into a new system, especially considering the syntax changes you mentioned while the game was still running. I’ll have to change so much in my short language project, though. Good luck to you and your team. I hope to see you all in the game soon!

      • Sam says:

        That depends on your language file, if it is older than 2021 yes you’d have to change a lot, else it’s syntax improvements I think more than dramatic changes, unless I’m forgetting about something that broke translations more than I thought it did. For example in the next version the syntax supports regular expressions to make string matching easier, but it’s a feature not a mandatory requirement, and thus is backwards compatible with language files that don’t use them yet. Again though this is all assuming I’m not missing some bit of context.

  • Tuxo do Brasil says:

    Olá, mal posso me conter de tanta ansiedade por poder jogar de novo. Este, sem a menor dúvida, é o melhor jogo que já vi pra cegos no Windows. Também já estou com medo dos perigos desconhecidos que estão por vir. Também estou feliz por saber que já está chegando a hora em que vou poder reencontrar os colegas online! risos, São muitas emoções! Parabéns Sam. Estou aqui na torcida pra que tudo corra bem e a gente possa ter nosso jogo rodando liso de novo. Aquele abraço.

  • Tuxo do Brasil says:

    Hello, I can hardly contain myself with so much anxiety to be able to play again. This, without a doubt, is the best game I’ve ever seen for the blind on Windows. I am also already afraid of the unknown dangers that lie ahead. I am also happy to know that the time is approaching when I will be able to meet my colleagues online again! lol, there are many emotions! Congratulations Sam. I’m here in the crowd so that everything goes well and we can have our game running smoothly again. hug.

  • blanka says:

    Merhaba. bende oyunu beta olarak deneyenlerden biri olmak isterdim.

    • Unknown_virus says:

      Direct translation is
      Hello. I would like to be one of those who tried the game as beta.

  • Adam RÃ¥strand says:

    Can anyone, please, translate stw to swedish, or any of the nordic languages? I can help you, with the translations, but, i’m so excited! Because, i’m going to buy a stw payd account, and, when i was locked up in jail, i was very imature back then, and i’m trying to understand the consequences of things, so that’s going well, togeather witth the game roflflfl!

  • Pedro Dias says:

    Hello, my f5 key is going to break from so much I press it. I’m waiting with live hope about the new news! Post a new post, pleaseeeeh lol

  • goldenwarrior says:

    I am so excited to be back on the game, I always check on these posts and the time is aproaching for the return of golden warrior haha. love that bug story by the way, and yes, keep them going. at first i thought that there were going to be earthquakes added to the game.

  • jazzyjennifer says:

    i am looking forward to the up date

  • Unknown_virus says:

    Yeah sam, are you planning to add disasters in stw, it’ll be fun

    • Sam says:

      Of course there will be disasters in stw, much better than before. That’s not here yet, but again one of the biggest things about this update is being able to just add new items and systems without even restarting the server, so you never know what may just randomly appear for the first time while you’re casually playing!

  • Dawabsheh says:

    Hi Sam I hope you are doing well sir when will you post the news, and when will you open the beta server or the main server as you think or it doesn’t look like soon

  • Pedro Dias says:

    Hello Sam. I think that you’re fed up of hearing:
    “When will you release the update?”
    We do this because we love the stw! It’s the best, super, blaster, ultra game of all times!
    I hope that you get be release’s Stw shortly! I believe that you’ll get it because you’re the best game’s programmer that I already hear talk abbout.
    Continui with your great work and we’ll continui asking when you’ll release the STW!

  • Leonardo says:

    hmmmm… I like earthquakes, there should be more of these lol!

  • the best says:

    hi sam, i am asking did you add a new interface element for the user interface of stw, did you change it or no, because lol, this interface it’s pretty nice, it looks like a dialogue form with button etc, other questions, did you add also the systems that you talked about them in an previous article on stw, i want say, the limit of the dfc etc, or maybe you will mak them after le publication of the update

  • Alli says:

    So I love this game. Thank you so much for all of the new additions you have added. I can’t wait to check them out. I was wundering. how do we recover our old account? I have not played for a while, but I do have an account on there or at least I did. I believe I still pay for the STW account for my character Kailey. However, when I try to log in, and or even import my old account by trying to go through the create account menu, I don’t have any luck. I have not receved any emails. So I was just hoping anyone could give me some pointers. Then I can continue playing this game with all of you survivers. Take care and thank you again.

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