Ready or Not – Vol. 75 Development Briefing

Ready or Not – Vol. 75 Development Briefing

Attention Officers,

Thank you for joining us for the 75th edition of our Ready or Not Development Briefing, dated July 5th, 2024!

Today, we’re excited to present to you the teaser trailer for the upcoming Home Invasion DLC. Additionally, we’re celebrating the success of the UE5.3 GitHub community in completing our open-source modding tool bounties. We are also unveiling a refined 4-week schedule for our newsletter communications and outlining the community-centric events and updates that our returning Community Manager, Kaminsky, will be spearheading!

These development briefings are designed to keep you well-informed about our ongoing support for Ready or Not, but please note they do not cover every aspect of our work. Everything mentioned in this development briefing is a work in progress and subject to change.

Vol. 75 Development Briefing Key Highlights:
(not a changelog)

  • The teaser trailer for the upcoming DLC 1 “Home Invasion” is now available, spotlighting its storyline! (https://youtu.be/byt7k1z46QI)
  • The bounty for updating our Unreal Engine 5.3 open-source modding tools has been successfully completed.
    • These updated tools are beneficial for UE5.3 modding across the board and support RoN’s transition to UE5.3, with an official SDK as our long-term objective.
  • From today, our newsletter communications will follow a revised 4-week interval schedule.
    • In addition to the existing developer briefings, we will reintroduce community-focused newsletters, releasing them in staggered 4-week intervals so that a new newsletter is available approximately every two weeks.
  • Our returning Community Manager, Kaminsky, will be leading many community-focused communications and hosting events such as game nights, giveaways, and AMAs!

Home Invasion is on the Horizon

(Video below: DLC 1 “Home Invasion” teaser trailer)

— — —

UUUS76 MLLX 2246 NMSMIX

URGENT — WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE LOS SUENOS 07:52 AM PST

…CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE EXPECTED…

HURRICANE ANTONIO HAS NOW BEEN UPGRADED TO A CATEGORY 5 STORM. ANTONIO’S PATH IS UNDER CLOSE MONITORING, AND IT IS DEEMED TO BE A HURRICANE OF UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH… EXCEEDING THE INTENSITY OF THE SAN DIEGO HURRICANE OF 1858.

EXTENSIVE DAMAGE TO LARGE PARTS OF LOS SUENOS IS ANTICIPATED. SOME AREAS MAY BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS, POSSIBLY LONGER. AT LEAST ONE-THIRD OF WELL-CONSTRUCTED HOMES ARE PROJECTED TO EXPERIENCE SIGNIFICANT ROOF AND WALL FAILURES. GABLED ROOFS, IN PARTICULAR, WILL BE SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED. AN ADDITIONAL THIRD OF WELL-CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL FACE ROOF AND WALL FAILURES OF VARYING SEVERITIES.

[…]

ONCE HURRICANE-FORCE WINDS BEGIN … DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE!


UE5.3 Modding Bounty Complete

We’re thrilled to announce the successful completion of our bounty for updating Unreal Engine 5.3 open-source modding tools by GitHub contributors last week.

This achievement is pivotal for modding UE5.3 games and is crucial for ensuring modding readiness for the Home Invasion launch when Ready or Not will transition to UE5.3 from UE4.27. Refer to the Vol. 74 development briefing for more information!

We extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who contributed to updating these modding tools. We are currently processing bounty payments to the top contributors.

Special thanks to LongerWarrior and atenfyr for their outstanding efforts in reaching this milestone.

“UAssetAPI had already offered limited support for Unreal Engine 5 assets before the bounty was posted. The new fields added to exports were serialized, along with functional read/write support for “unversioned properties”—a more compact way of handling struct and class data used by some newer UE4 games and most UE5 games.

However, these features were filled with minor bugs and missing property types, and UE5.3 introduced a few changes (e.g., the addition of the DataResources map). Ensuring the software operated correctly on every asset in Ready or Not required meticulous attention, uncovering and fixing longstanding bugs and missing types that also affected older game parsing.

Updating UAssetGUI was simpler, as most heavy lifting is done by UAssetAPI; most changes involved adding new entries to the GUI, fixing sync issues with the asset data source, and correcting graphical errors, with new features such as .pak support added.”
—atenfyr

Nonetheless, our ultimate goal for Ready or Not remains to develop a dedicated official Software Development Kit (SDK) to further enable our modding community. We remain committed to realizing our SDK and undertaking the intricate work it entails.


New Newsletter Schedule and Structure

Starting today, we’ll shift to a 4-week interval schedule for our newsletter communications. However, you can still anticipate receiving some form of newsletter communication every bi-weekly. We will alternate between development briefings and community-focused newsletters during this period in staggered 4-week intervals.

Our returning Community Manager, Kaminsky, will also lead a significant increase in our community-focused events and communications!

This decision is aimed at ensuring high-quality communication and alignment with our post-1.0 development cycle.

In Early Access, communication tends to be more flexible and covers a wide range of topics. However, with the full release, we want to avoid scenarios where developers are still mid-implementation or testing, leading to potential miscommunication.

Additionally, developments like brand partnerships (e.g., including official gear or weapons in the game), DLCs, or other long-term strategies require precise timing before public disclosure.

Community-Focused Communications and Events

The amazing Kaminsky will manage the community-focused newsletters and various other exciting community plans!

Here’s a quick message from Kaminsky himself:

“Hello Officers! Some of you might remember me from my brief tenure a little over a year ago. My name is Kaminsky, and I’m the Community Manager for VOID Interactive. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other from now on.”

The in-depth community newsletters will highlight mods, artwork, and more, showcasing the talents within our community. Other community-related events include Q&A sessions with the development team, similar to our previous AMAs.

Look forward to community game nights and giveaways, and keep an eye on our official RoN Discord and community newsletters for more information!

We hope this approach will enable us to consistently deliver high-quality newsletters and cover a broader range of topics valuable to our cherished community.

Conclusion

With the Home Invasion release approaching, updated UE5.3 modding tools ready, a refined communication schedule, and the return of our community events with Kaminsky, we are excited about what this summer and beyond has in store.

This concludes our 75th development briefing. Thank you for joining us, and be sure to tune in next time for more development updates!

Follow Ready or Not on Steam here.
Our other links: Discord, X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook.

Stack up and clear out.
VOID Interactive


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