New World Details Season of the Guardian's More Dynamic Combat and Animation System Overhaul

In the upcoming Season of the Guardian, New World is not only adding new content, the team is overhauling and improving a few things. One of those overhauls is coming for the old combat and animation system, and the team has a preview of what this all means.

In a new devblog from Tech Lead Kevin Christensen that blends the techy side and the fun side, we learn what this means for New World. The new system is known as “Slayer Script” and is designed to respond dynamically to enhance performance and to be used to update scripts. Slayer Script is C++ based, and it seems like a powerful system capable of many actions, from responding to events, like a player death or a room change, to cause events, like enemy spawns or playing the right sounds, to playing animations, and controlling movements. 

During development, their original scripting system worked well enough, but after launch and the time since, the game grew and changed, and so they began planning for this upgrade. Now it's almost here and they've converted more than 400 actions into the new system, with goals including reducing memory cost, improving scalability, and to be easier to debug. Out of those goal, scalability is something Christensen notes they will continue to stay on top of and work on, but those other goals are on target with the change.

There are still challenges with Slayer Script, but it is clear the team feels that it’s approaching ready to release. 

The PTS for Season of the Guardian is on, and the team is looking for feedback there, so if you haven’t tested out the new build yet, this is your chance to see what Slayer Script is like before it’s in the full game.

See more over at New World.