The team spent the weekend making refinements and improving the automated building system introduced last week. The system now has a number of pre-saved templates for buildings to choose from, and a batch build button so you can create multiple buildings of similar characteristics. You can adjust square footage, add a porch, and move doors and windows around. Stairs now have bannisters and railings, where appropriate, rooms have windows, and chests/containers are being placed in rooms. While they are generic containers now, they will become room specific soon: refrigerators, dressers, stoves, medicine cabinets, that sort of thing. We talked about figuring out some scarcity rules for loot placed inside, and some optimization tricks to speed up the building process. While it’s not 100% automated yet, it’s getting there. Soon we’ll be able to quickly construct whole neighborhoods of houses like this.
We added a bunch of new wildlife to the island this week as well. Evidently, the Lahaina Zoo’s breeding program was far more successful than their security measures. Many animals escaped during the fracture, including bears. Being large enough to protect themselves, they did the second most common thing bears do in the woods, and the population grew. Out of respect for San’s affinity for Fred, his neighborhood’s friendly trash panda, we added raccoons too. Rats, chickens, rabbits, squirrels, foxes, and humpback whales round out the new members of the animal menagerie. We’re working out some animal animations yet and audio/sounds too. We want to make sure people know that despite what cartoons led them to believe, rampant obnoxious rooster crowing is not reserved for the crack of dawn. We’re even making sure that the chickens lay eggs, because nothing is better for breakfast than free-range eggs, especially during the apocalypse. The biggest issue we’ve found so far is that the animals have a tendency to run straight into the ocean when they’re trying to escape, which makes collecting hides hard.
Since we’re wrapping up sprint 16, there was a lot of polish and last minute bug fixes as well. We talked about fixing the rain system to make it more realistic. Terry is doing some lighting work, and we changed the color scheme on the crafting and inventory screens. Inventory item persistence work is wrapping up, but we found a bug that crashes the game whenever you open your inventory. We’re working on a fix right now. The team is finishing up some paper doll work as well. We made some layout changes to the crafting and inventory screens and the crafting queue now includes a timer.
Lastly, San continued his camera work and improved the API. He showed it off to a few people this weekend and found that they spent most of their time using it to watch sunsets, landscapes, and the occasional frightened raccoon run straight for the deep end of the ocean. This got us talking about using the system for some sort of flying cam that would sweep the landscape, following a set path, before making it available for tactical/security purposes. We talked about how we would implement such a thing, and how we could incorporate it into the web page. We still plan on providing specific cameras for base defense and tactical purposes for Houses, but you might see a sky cam on the webpage capturing scenes like the one below, sooner rather than later.
We’ll be back later this week with the latest updates.
