Last year was an exciting year for Mercuna, with a growing client list, new team members and some fantastic Mercuna-navigated game releases. While we can’t believe it is already 2022, we wanted to share some of our 2021 highlights.
Ground Navigation Improvements
A big focus of our efforts was maturing our new ground navigation solution and getting it to the same level of polish as our 3D navigation. Over the course of last year we added several major new features including support for level streaming, a nav invoker system and navmesh modifier volumes, while also making numerous other small improvements.
Perhaps the biggest addition was our navmesh-based pathfinding for characters. Building on our detailed quad tree-based navgrid, we added a mesh-based acceleration layer to provide ultra high performance character pathfinding.
We have just released v2.4 of Mercuna – okay, okay, this was technically in 2022, not 2021, but it contains the final results of many of our labours from last year, and we are extremely happy with what we achieved and where Mercuna ground navigation is now at.
Mercuna Releases
2021 was also a year for great releases using Mercuna, including Deep Silver FishLabs’ space-combat shooter, Chorus, one of our most anticipated releases to date. Chorus was an exceptionally exciting title for us, as a love for space games was one of the big motivations for founding Mercuna and developing our 3D navigation technology. Our Christmas break was spent joyously weaving amongst asteroids and dogfighting Crows and Ravens, feeling both pleased and frustrated that the AI are much better pilots than us!
New Clients
We have signed some fantastic new clients for both 3D and ground, though as usual we cannot disclose all of them. However, they cover a wide range of game genres, on almost every possible platform (I don’t think we have any clients developing for the Nintendo DS at the moment). We can share that Tencent and The Chinese Room are just two among the list and we are very pleased to be working with them on some exciting games.
We’re also delighted to continue our work with incredible studios such as Funcom, Squanch Games and Blowfish. It is really inspiring to see our clients find new ways to push the limits of Mercuna in ever more ambitious titles. With a range of exciting new and existing clients and the forthcoming release of the incredible Unreal Engine 5, we cannot wait to see Mercuna in action in new projects this coming year.
New Team Members
After finishing his PhD, our Sales and Marketing Director, Grant, has sadly moved on from Mercuna. However, Mercuna continues to grow and we have welcomed some new members to the team. Jon joined us full time as our Junior Developer and focuses on improving our testing infrastructure, and Innes has joined us part-time to lead our marketing efforts, promoting Mercuna and making sure everyone knows how great we are!
The Coming Year
We have some very exciting plans for Mercuna in 2022, including adding an entirely new mode of AI navigation along walls and ceilings, alongside our current ground and 3D navigation. It is still at very early stages, so we can’t give away too much just yet, but keep your eyes out for our updates in the future!