This week the web team is adding the finishing touches to our initial ecommerce system and putting a bow on top. The last of the receipt and order history work is being completed, and the last of the lingering bugs are being squashed. With a few more days of styling work, we hope to have our shopping cart rolling before the end of the week.
We ran into a number of old and new issues with the Friends feature this week. Currently, the system isn’t displaying relationships with current friends correctly. It will let you add friends you are already friends with, it doesn’t show connections properly, and sometimes friends aren’t showing up if you have a large list. Jared and Jesse will be digging into the issues over the next couple days to straighten everything out.
Speaking of friends, we received the first draft of some of our portraits for the about page that tested the boundaries of good-natured ribbing. Jared appeared to be suffering from some sort of facial paralysis, Jesse looked like he evolved from a subterranean race, and my eyes looked like they were copied from a 12-year-old anime character. Strangely, the artist did a great job with Terry’s portrait. We asked for revisions and questioned what it was about Terry that made him so easy to draw. We talked briefly about building a Careers section, but decided to have more human looking portraits first, as to not scare away potential co-workers.
Like last week, much of our time was devoted to talents. We worked on a basic layout and talked over design options for displaying attributes and skills. Jesse made layouts showing what the talent page would look like. We looked at and discussed options for showing how talents would buff skills and attributes and vice versa. We have a collection of talents to start, and the team is working on integrating them now.
There was a lot of work on inventory and crafting screens, as well as the quick bar too. We made some adjustments to the crafting screen to clean it up and make it easier to navigate. Crafting will soon be a much less cluttered process. We’re cleaning up parts of the old inventory system as well. We worked on attachments for all of your tactical light and bayonet needs, and looked at a layout of how the system would work. We’ll be doing the same with the Settings menu later this week.
After much consternation and banging our heads against walls, brick or otherwise, we have moved to UE4.17. In addition, Terry finished up Wwise and TrueSKY source integration. San spent most of the weekend focusing on camera work, and has a really cool tactical camera system up and running. We discussed some future use cases and options, but it works great already as a security camera for a base, or to see snippets of what your House members are looking at.
We have almost all of our persistence work done with the exception of item persistence. We discussed different options and how much equipment a player should keep after they die. The team is finishing work on the building generation system, and are adding some editor tools before moving on to completing the core materials and item spawning system. We’re testing the materials system now on foliage. Shooting a tree will give you wood, and one day soon you’ll be able to smash rocks to get minerals. As you can see below the building system and foliage are looking great inside and out.
We’ll be back later this week with more updates and screenshots
