We’ve kept our ears to the grindstone this week and have added a ton of new audio in the game. We’ve added new sounds for jumping, and harvesting, as well as increased the ambient noise along the beach. Players will be able to hear when they’re starving or dehydrated, and firing or interacting with weapons has never sounded better. We also fixed a bug where footstep sounds would play twice if a player was in third person view. There’s plenty of things running around the landscape for a person to worry about, without adding the paranoia of an unseen assailant following your every step.
The team made a number of UI improvements too. We’ve added a favorite button to the crafting filter list so you don’t have to search as long when you’re trying to make another pile of your preferred hat or weapon. We’ve improved ammo counters and encumbered alerts so a player knows when their backpack has reached hoarder level full. We’ve changed our gun equipping animations and nabbed a bug where falling damage was being applied twice to players. If you’re going to jump off the top of the Communication Tower there’s no sense in dislocating your legs and crushing your spine more than once.
Speaking of the Com Tower, the zipline center got a little love this week. We’ve done a bunch of performance work on our “hero” buildings, but up until this point most of it has been focused on the Thorcon Power Plant, the game’s social hub. Not only have we made the tower more performant, but we’ve started to add more “lived in” touches to the building. We’ll be making similar touches to many of the game’s structures to highlight just how important these still standing structures are to those who survived the upheaval of The Great Fracture. Below you can see some of the improvements to the outside of the tower and the ground level. We’ll have some shots of the upper levels next week when our designers are finished adding the right amount of post-apocalyptic chic.
