This week has seen a lot of UI work across many different areas. We’re finishing up some documentation, and adding the ability to drag and drop items in the inventory. The latest pass at a complete HUD update is finished, and a complete fullscreen UI update continues. We’ve added an alert whenever you drop an item, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally dropping your ammo like a newb, and we’ve reskinned the settings UI. We still need to add shadow/light scalability settings, but everything else is in place and ready to go.
Our ongoing work to increasing performance marches on. We’ve finished our map breakdown, and replaced almost all of the old buildings in the map with better performing structures using our programmatic building system. It’s a good idea to slow down, and carefully examine the ruins when you find yourself in the middle of an old neighborhood, but we want that to be a tactical decision, and not one made by an overworked GPU. The team is adding audio support in numerous areas to make things sound as good as they look. Terry has finished trueSKY integration and is still hammering away on Wwise.
The Web Team has the first pass at a Veil News Network (VNN) ticker up and running on the front page. Jared has it updating every 10 minutes currently. Jesse did some refactoring work, and is fixing an issue with icons not displaying properly. It’s using test data now, but soon players will be able to see major events, announcements, and news about the game in near real-time.
There are a few features we need to add yet and some bugs to work out. We plan on: adding filter and rollover options to adjust the scrolling speed, working on performance, hunting down a bug that causes the newsticker to stop when changing tabs, and working on readability. With the first pass done, we talked a bit about future features including video alerts, and the potential ramifications of an ingame crime reporting system. Until we work out some sort of island-wide witness protection program, reporting a crime could be dangerous to your health.
Lastly, we’re doing a little AI work this week. Some animals continue to charge into the ocean when you get near, and as we talked about before, sometimes the bears demand a good belly-rub before they attack. The underground respawn area is done for now as well. It offers a perfectly damp and dirty place for you to get your bearings, and pick up some useful basic equipment before you go charging back into the fray. We finished up some much needed animations too. Here are a couple shots of what it looks like when you go prone, and assess a situation with different versions of your Haikili rifle out.
That’s it for now. We’ll be back later this week with more updates and screenshots.
