Aloha Thrivers!
We’ve made some huge changes to the game with the help of our first 2 waves of Kickstarter backers and testers.
FRV’s starting area, the Thorcon Power Plant, got a huge facelift and content update. The main room is filled with vendors buying and selling everything a player needs to survive, and the respawn area is almost unrecognizable compared to just a few weeks ago.
We’ve added a fresh coat of grime to the sewer dungeon, made big improvements to the siege system, and updated the mutant’s movements, and battle tactics to make them more dangerous. However, The most exciting new feature for this update is probably the introduction of the talent system.
Designed from the ground up with the direct input of the community, the first iteration in the game right now allows players to explore four categories of specialization for their characters. This is a huge step forward allowing you to tailor your gameplay into what role you like best or explore other options you normally wouldn’t.
Here’s a look at everything we’ve added to the game.
Thorcon Power Plant Update
Every part of the game’s starting area has had a major facelift.
What was a fairly empty respawn room is now filled with everything a freshly restored player needs to start surviving.
The locker room next door has changed quite a bit from our early concepts.
It’s now almost as vibrant as the jungle outside.
The work we’ve done in the main room however is probably the most striking.
This huge open space is now a multi-level area filled with vendors, shops, shrines, and places for players to group up. Here’s a before and after video that highlights the huge changes inside and the starting area’s incredible transformation.
Sewer Dungeon Renovation
The Thorcon wasn’t the only renovation we took on, the sewer dungeon got a lot of love recently and some expansions.
We take a lot of pride in making our jungles lush and vibrant and wanted to put the same effort into making one of our favorite dungeons a foreboding place to explore.
In addition to the twisting wet corridors, we’ve added defensible positions for players who need some cover from the mutants lurking around inside.
We’re still working on building out some of the lowest levels, but there are already plenty of places for players to explore, loot, and fight.
Talent System
All of these renovations make a huge visual difference but our new talent system has a huge impact on gameplay.
We built the talent system hand-in-hand with our amazing community. We asked for ideas about builds and ways they’d like to specialize their characters while keeping in mind that we wanted to avoid anything that would give an unfair advantage in PVP.
Here’s what we came up with after listening to your input. Right now we have 4 basic roles you can explore: Builder, Hunter, Stealth, and Support. We still have some UI and balancing to do but this is another huge step in allowing players to customize their characters and work better in groups.
Siege and Totem Improvements
Building a base that is big enough to attract a horde of angry mutants (or starting a siege yourself) is a lot of fun, and we’ve made a ton of improvements to the siege system.
We updated how totems work for singular and combined bases ensuring that endless waves don’t appear for larger complexes and made sure a siege ends once all of the base’s totems are reduced to 20% or less health. The siege manager now keeps proper track of contributing players and we fixed bugs that would cause massive server lag when a siege was started manually.
We added animals and beasts to the cast of characters that can show up to tear down everything you’ve built, made improvements to AI pathing so the horrors of the jungle don’t get stuck, and made sure the siege manager prioritizes ranged AI if a base is hard to reach.
More Content, Improvements, and Features
We’ve been hard at work making a huge number of performance improvements and fixing a bunch of persistence issues that popped up with all the work we’ve been doing, particularly inside the now bustling Thorcon Power Plant. We’ve even reduced the game’s build size by over half. There’s a ton of new content in the game and we want to make sure it is running as smoothly as possible by the time we bring in Wave 3 of our Kickstarter backers. Here’s a look at everything else we finished or fixed since the last update.
VOIP Improvements
- The VOIP system now keeps a weak pointer to the active world to reduce redundant looping when mapping players to their VOIP Talker
- Increased the VOIP attenuation distance
- The “VOICE Enabled” option in the settings menu is now functional. This currently defaults to off
- Increased the VOIP sample rate
- Fixed the VOIP system failing to apply its voice settings during initialization
- Fixed the spatialized VOIP Talker failing to initialize correctly
- Fixed a bug where respawning could cause the VOIP Talker to get stuck on the previous pawn
- Fixed a bug where VOIP Talkers were muffled when speaking
AI Updates
- Improved the tracing functionality of the poison clouds to more reliably hit nearby players
- Adjusted the AI threat values to have AI more reliably attack players that are attempting to interrupt their sieging
- Disabled trophy collector damage to sleeping players
- Fixed Ranged AI occasionally getting stuck in place when pathing towards a forcibly added enemy
- Fixed Ranged AI throwing their projectiles at the ground if their current enemy had never been in their line of sight
- Fixed ranged and melee AI not properly attacking movement blocking actors such as players during a siege
- Fixed a bug where the Trophy Collector’s poison cloud could occasionally get stuck inside walls and other objects
- Fixed AI getting stuck on certain construction actors
- Fixed AI not attacking placed crafting machines that were set to block movement
- Fixed players not taking damage from AI
- Fixed crash when killing AI
- Fixed a bug where AI would fail to deal damage to actors when the actor was blocking their line of sight but not their movement
Gameplay Content, Improvements, and Fixes
- Updated the coconut grenade model and increased the damage
- Thrown weapon improvements
- Added hints to the exploration menu
- Stamina will last 2.5 times longer while sprinting and regen starts at 3.5 seconds instead of 5
- Fixed an issue with sleeping players not using the proper animations
- Added buff stat information to the talent screen
- Added bonus fall damage height of 200m per level to the parkour talent
- Altered the construction integrity checks to more easily allow placing walls on overhangs
- Set third walls to be allowed to be placed anywhere, regardless of the integrity
- Updated code for traits, attributes, wounds, and broken bones
- Fixed Big Bob’s rock projectile not being visible to clients
- Item recycle amounts have been updated to take item durability into consideration
- Added tech level adjustments to crafting various weapon and tool types
- Players can no longer shoot or aim down sights while sprinting
- Fixed logging out while dead making the player unable to spawn properly on next login
- Fixed containers spawning floating off the ground
- Added Autorun, Pressing “Q” will toggle auto-running
- Plants are now harvestable by pressing the use key rather than holding it
Community
As usual, we’ve fixed a mountain of bugs with the help of our amazing testers since our last update. The team has squashed over 150 in a couple of months getting things ready for Wave 3. Join our discord server and check out the patch-notes channel for a complete list of fixes.
