Xing the land beyond обзор

Обновлено: 04.07.2024

That's right, now you too can be a proud patron of the arts by owning a glorious copy of XING's soundtrack to go along with your excellent taste in games. If you haven't had the chance to play XING yet, you can also save some serious dough with the now available bundle, featuring both the game and soundtrack with a nifty discount.

Thank you again for all of your support, and as always, happy XINGING!

Skate across the ice! Impress your friends with your puzzling skill! You even get a canoe!

As a thank you to all current and future players, we'd like to present an extra
free experience included in XING: The Land Beyond. You'll find this story in the forest behind the guardian - make sure you have gathered at least 8 runes and have beaten the third level. For those of you who have completed your adventure, don't worry! You can simply continue your file and you'll start back in the center area, ready to explore.

We would like to announce that in less than a week (February 12th), we will be updating XING with an small additional adventure for all to enjoy.

This is by no means a coincidental content update to go along with our PS VR launch. Oh, no no no. This is a FREE DLC! Free for all you noble supporters of XING.

After the update on the 12th, take a look in the forest behind the central guardian - you may find a story previously untold…

There already is a lot of content in XING, but we couldn't resist adding just a little more for our fans. Seeing people enjoy the game is still gives me a powerful feeling of satisfaction. Seriously, I know this additional experience is a far cry from a proper DLC (or sweet jesus the thought of a sequel) but I do hope you all enjoy just a little bit more XINGing.

Happ 503rd, with many more to come!

Yoo hoo!

We kinda missed making an announcement for our one year anniversary on Steam, but Halloween is cooler anyways so here I am. Happy Spoopy!

I’d like to again drop a big thank you to all of our supporters over the years. 2018 has so far been a big one for me personally, and our successful launch has really made an impact on my life.

Nothing crazier than that! I’m just here to release a small update today to fix up a few odds and ends found by the community here.

PS: I switched around some source control stuff, so now I'm on version 18? I guess? Who knows. Fun one man development going on over here.

Fixed a weird input issue where left and right mouse input was getting processed twice, resulting in mismatched input sensitivity.

Nothing too specific - basically snooped around for slow functions and made some improvements. The game is running better than ever thanks to driver optimizations and SDK improvements, so I’ll take it!

Added a “Height Offset” feature in the VR menu.
This is a bit of a weird one, and mostly comes down to playing XING sitting vs standing. The HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, when properly calibrated, automatically “know” how tall you are. Unreal takes this information and orients the camera on a “floor” basis: basically puts the camera on the floor, then offsets its position based off of the HMD’s real position. This means your avatar in XING is exactly your height in real life - pretty good, right? We specifically designed the interactables in the game to be accessible across a variety of heights, so you shouldn’t ever be physically unable to reach anything. Except…
What if you are playing while sitting? Well, it turns out people would rather be at standing height in VR even while sitting. How do we detect this? People are generally the same height while sitting, but there are a lot of variables we don’t know. How tall is the chair? What if they get up? And perhaps more importantly, what if the player is using a headset that doesn’t have any height information? (wink wink) Ultimately I’ve found the best solution is to just let the player manually offset their height in a menu. It’s not super clean, but it gives a very adjustable method to correct a variety of issues that can arise from different play environments. Again, if you are using Rift or Vive while standing and you have gone through their setups, you shouldn’t need to touch this setting!

Retimed the title screen to come in a little earlier for optimization.

Fixed an issue where you could go out of bounds by abusing the way water works.
There was one unique section near the second area of the beach where you can wade out a ways before drowning. This is intentional, and the drowning mechanic worked as intended once the player went out too far. However, the player would then respawn back in the water, still at an ok height. If they went out into the water again at this point, they wouldn’t drown! This is because since the player never actually left the water, the drowning mechanic flipped the bool saying they did leave (because they teleported) but never reset it back to saying they are touching water because they never technically left (wow that didn’t really make sense). Anyways, it is fixed now - I just moved the spawn back onto the beach instead of halfway in the water.

Fixed an issue where the rising platforms in the 4th rune puzzle would become “desynced” after saving and reloading. Essentially the platforms’ positions would be saved but the accompanying ball dispensers would not, potentially ending up with a situation where it would be difficult to reach the ball dispensers during the puzzle. It is supposed to be challenging, not frustrating!

Wowzers! You’ve been waiting, and now it’s here. It’s a XING update, and a big one to boot! We got a LOT of new updates coming out. Updates like these are the reason XING is the coolest cinematic gaming experience there is. You don’t know the half of it, that is, you won’t until you read the wonderful patch notes below.

Pre-emptive TL;DR: VR comfort features (and sprinting!), cleaner interactions with motion controllers, CPU and GPU optimizations, and a whole lot of bug fixes.

The “Exit Level” option in the pause menu that appears when the player visits a previously completed level is now accessible via gamepad or keyboard.
Exiting level is now available on the final level after completion.
Fixed a hilarious bug where the player could use a jump assist pad while in the menu, causing them to shoot up into the air.
Audio now correctly fades both in and out when switching levels
Runes are now easier to pick up in general (most noticeable when using a gamepad)
Fixed a bug where runes received for 100% poetry pickup were very difficult to grab with a gamepad.

Overhauled the occlusion query system in Unreal. Systems with slower CPUs (cough) were getting easily overwhelmed with draws despite my attempts to keep things as lean as possible. With a lot of diagnosis I found out the dynamic occlusion system provided by Unreal has a substantial amount of overhead on the render thread for our large levels. Augmenting the system with the precomputed system helped surprisingly little - maybe a 0.2 ms improvement on a 5 ms problem. Splitting the level up into separate streaming levels would fix the problem, but that would entail completely deconstructing every level and rebuilding them with streaming in mind. Ultimately I came up with a hybrid solution. I sectioned out the level into multiple zones using volumes. When the camera is within the volume, it hides and unhides predefined sets of actors. Essentially it is a super simplified manual precomputed visibility. In certain scenes this can reduce the render thread down by 4 ms!
Limited the spawn rate of Muse item prompts, fixing a potential performance issue if a player with motion controllers decides to rapidly flail items in and out of a Muse. You can thank my cousin for finding that one!
Modified texture resolutions at low quality to help performance for video adapters with slow texture memory (I’m looking at you, Intel)
Reduced the number of dynamic point lights in low quality mode for better fill rate performance.
Recoded the wind turtles to be far more CPU efficient.
Fixed a potential CPU hitch when a new location title displays.

You can now sprint in VR! OK, OK, you could always sprint if you used a gamepad, but now you can with motion controls. Simply double tap the movement button to start sprinting, just like in Onward. I’m eagerly awaiting to see some VR speedruns!
Added an “FOV Filter” option - this smoothly restricts FOV with a gradient while moving as a nausea mitigation technique, probably most famously seen in Skyrim VR. For now I’ve set this to be off by default, but it can be enabled in the VR menu.
Fixed a bug where the blur effect when picking up poetry would also affect the poetry itself. This happened only with motion controllers as it required some shenanigans with trying to pick up the poem with both hands.
Fixed a super weird issue when if the player tried to pick up a poem with both hands it had a chance to become “unhinged” from the pedestal and simply drop to the floor, becoming completely unusable.
Setting snap turn to 0 now works with Touch controllers in addition to gamepads.
Addressing the “Oh no, I fell through a bridge, the collision in this game sucks!” posts that have been cropping up: The collision is fine! The issue is depending on their VR setup sometime people don’t play in the defined center of their play area, resulting in a desync between the players collision and their actual HMD location.
Before launch, I tried actually hard locking the collision with the HMD, meaning wherever the HMD went, the player collision followed. While this did solve the desync problem and allowed a few cool situations, it created a myriad of problems. Primarily, since it’s basically a strict rule to always sync the HMD location with the actual camera in game, there were issues with the player physically moving their body somewhere the collision would not be able to go. You could do things like walk off of a cliff in roomscale - not the most pleasant experience. Chiefly, it ended up being a major distraction and did not work well with our game design, so I shipped XING without really addressing the potential desync.

Turns out most people have no trouble with the current system of just assuming the player is in the center of their play area. However, there certainly are a good number of situations where the player might not be in an idea location and the desync will occur. I implemented a “Reset position” button in the VR menu to account for this.

Two problems with this: One, many people never open the menu or don’t know that they might need to press it. Two, it was deliberately not resetting position on SteamVR, only orientation.

The first problem had a relatively simple solution. Whenever the screen fades out in any way (level loading, teleporting, drowning etc) I reset the orientation and position. The game basically resyncs itself transparently throughout gameplay - you can still get off, but assuming you maybe missed a jump because of the desync, when you respawn your sync will be perfect.

But oh boy. Resetting position on Vive is not straightforward. Unreal, for whatever reason, resets the position on SteamVR based on the floor. This kind of makes sense, but what ends up happening is that the camera resets to exactly the base of the character - ie foor level. I could artificially move the camera up, but at that point I’d lose the calibrated floor height data from the SteamVR data. Even worse, if I reset position, it’s permanently reset until I restart SteamVR, meaning that without some major edits the camera is way off with no way to get it back to its original calibrated location.

Fixed an issue where the screen would not fade in properly on lower end machines.

Replaced a static jump helper with an active one (whoops!)
Made some improvements to jump helpers near the second puzzle door.
Improved rain occlusion in the center temple area.

The main puzzle doors now display their corresponding talisman piece instead of always showing the first quad.
The freezing waterfall near the intro now correctly breaks again if it is thawed and refrozen.
Fixed some LOD meshes near Miki’s house.

Added a rock in the third puzzle door area to prevent players from getting stuck near a palm tree.
FINALLY fixed the weird floating raft issue in the middle desert area where the rafts were raising too high - turns out the meshes were rotated strangely and Z direction became Y direction, meaning instead of moving tangentially with the water they moved in parallel, increasing their height. This was combined with them literally being attached to the wrong river. Wow me.

Optimizations - I was presented with an unusual problem with optimizing the final level. Given it’s vertical nature, it lacks the snake like shape most of the other levels abuse for occlusion purposes. To combat this, I actually looked towards one of the oldest tricks in the book - fog. I added a “cloud” layer between each of the 3 puzzle zones, limiting visibility on lower end machines. The cloud layers are only visible when environmental detail is set to low when the level is loaded - you can experiment with them if you’d like by turning the setting to low and restarting the level. I think they look pretty cool, though I prefer the level with full visibility enabled. Let me know what you think if you have an opinion on this!
Fixed an issue where the level would not load properly on low end systems.
Merged some structures together to save on draws.

Съдържание за тази игра Преглед на всички (1)

Рецензии

“Breathtakingly beautiful and fiendishly logical, XING: The Land Beyond will spark your ingenuity and kindle a keen delight as you trek its entrancing pathways.”
4.5/5 – Adventure Gamers

“It’s apparent that White Lotus Interactive has taken a good deal of inspiration from the much-loved Myst series, and XING: The Land Beyond feels like a carefully-crafted love letter to the franchise.”
A – Nerdy but Flirty

“… honestly, it is one of the best looking VR games I have played to date.”
COG Connected

Относно тази игра

You died. Welcome to XING.

Spirit Journey

What if you had the power to go up to a gravestone, read the epitaph, and transport yourself into the lives of the departed?
Your body may be gone, but your life has just begun. In death, you will find yourself on a journey across a series of mysterious lands, an afterlife filled with the thoughts and personalities of those long lost. Follow these forgotten stories, collect artifacts, solve puzzles, and discover secrets as you make your own adventure through the mysteries of The Land Beyond.

Is death without legacy something to be feared?

What happens when we do not realize what is most important to us?

Do we choose our own destiny, or is it chosen for us?

A Puzzling Place

XING: The Land Beyond is a fantastical, non-combative, spiritual journey through the afterlife. Along the way you are challenged to solve a myriad of puzzles which require logic, creativity, and the mastery of environmental control. In this peaceful afterlife, puzzles can be solved at your own pace. Through your journey you will learn to harness the power of the sun, the rains, the snow, and more.

XING: The Land Beyond has been developed with accessibility in mind, and conforms to color-blindness, deafness, and has no time-constrains in its puzzle design.

Virtual Reality

XING: The Land Beyond has full VR support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, with options to use either SDK, as well as a range of controller options, including tracked motion controllers and traditional gamepads.

Great care has been taken to ensure XING is an exciting and comfortable experience for all lovers of virtual worlds. We offer two distinct movement options for players:

Это дополнительный контент для XING: The Land Beyond, но он не включает базовую версию игры.

Информация о дополнении

The soundtrack for XING: The Land Beyond.

1. Adventure Awaits 02:24
2. The Last Journey 02:01
3. A New Beginning (Extended Soundtrack) 02:24
4. The Crystal Pool (Extended Soundtrack) 03:17
5. Alone in the Sky 04:11
6. Favored of the Sea 04:05
7. A Voice in the Air (Extended Soundtrack) 03:22
8. Sand and Waves 03:12
9. Moon Tide (Extended Soundtrack) 03:12
10. Iztali Point 03:42
11. Moon Over Iztali Point (Extended Soundtrack) 03:42
12. Another Farewell 02:13
13. Below the Canopy 03:24
14. Veiled Sky (Extended Soundtrack) 02:03
15. Shaman of Storms 02:49
16. Stormbringer (Extended Soundtrack) 02:48
17. After the Storm 01:21
18. Rebirth (Extended Soundtrack) 04:14
19. Regrowth 03:31
20. Nahele Rain 03:03
21. Moon Over Nahele Rain 03:03
22. High in the Mountains (Extended Soundtrack) 03:47
23. Spirit of the Snow 03:45
24. Moonlit Cabin (Extended Soundtrack) 03:46
25. Crystal Blanket (Extended Soundtrack) 03:46
26. A Child's Heart 05:43
27. Soaring Innocence (Extended Soundtrack) 05:43
28. A Child's Dream (Extended Soundtrack) 05:43
29. Stars and Snowflakes (Extended Soundtrack) 05:43
30. The Edge of Serenity (Extended Sountrack) 05:46
31. Hidden Temple (Extended Soundtrack) 05:46
32. Hyaku Lake (Extended Soundtrack) 04:11
33. Snow Falls on Hyaku Lake 04:12
34. Winter's Embrace 02:32
35. A River's Legacy 05:00
36. Twilight Journey (Extended Soundtrack) 04:58
37. The King's Burden 04:22
38. The Wind Blows Free 08:02
39. The Desert of Naar 04:08
40. Pillar of Light 05:05
41. Anamnesis 04:20
42. Go in Peace 01:23
43. The Land Beyond 04:57

44. Leaves of Every Color 03:36
45. The Captain's Expedition 03:00
46. Into the Maw 03:04

Written and produced by John Torkington

Tracks 13, 14, 22, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 36, and 38 are written by Gilbert Orrantia

There have been several discussions started regarding this puzzle, but none of them provide a satisfactory answer to the third drum puzzle that has 7 symbols on the totem. I have figured out the necessary sequencing, but every time that I launch the third object at the drums, it bounces off of the side of the central drum that is floating in the water. I have attempted to toggle my frame rate, and I have restarted the level, but neither has helped, and I cannot advance in the game without completing this.

Me again. I have tried for 45 minutes and it is getting old. I am in Nahele Rain Level and trying to jump from one pillar to another. I get on the first pillar ok. Then I jump to the next pillar. So I try to jump from the second pillar up to the building

Hello All, I just purchased XING because it looked great, had good reviews and high ratings and I really want to be able to play it because the graphics ARE actually awesome. But the “full motion” (please excuse me if that is the wrong term) almost immediately causes me to get motion sickness. Yet I am able to play games like Obduction and The Solus Project just fine where you “teleport” from one location to the next using a circle that you place on the ground and click to go there. I am hoping tha.

I finished this beautiful game a while back. SO I went back to the circular area and the forest behind the Guardian and the pool (through the gate), and looked again at every single area where you can travel to different mini-stories. None of them is labeled IceScape. Where IS this area? I'd love to play it.

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