With Thanksgiving coming up in a few days, everyone is pushing hard to fix last minute bugs and finish up items during a short week. Our item spawning system is getting a few tweaks. We’re working on making loot lists specific for containers ensuring that refrigerators are filled with food instead of ammo. We’re also making area specific loot tables, allowing us to have locations where players are more likely to find: crafting related items, hunting equipment, medical supplies, or whatever theme we want.
The team is incorporating that item spawning system into the automated building system and testing them rigorously for bugs. A funny thing happened when one of the team was generating some random buildings looking for problems. A building was created that had a long hallway which led to a small windowless room, free of any furnishings but a single rocking chair facing the wall. As everyone knows, the sound of a child laughing in an abandoned basement, a dog staring at a closet while whining, and finding an empty room with a single chair facing the wall, are all universal signs that something terrible is about to happen. We appreciated the accidental creepiness, but we need to replace the generic chairs with something more Hawaiian, like this before including punishment rooms in the game.
The web team is putting together the last of the images for packages and shirts. Jesse is finishing up the last of the logo work, box models, and is looking at some other shirt designs. We discussed our ongoing issues with finding quality Hawaiian shirts that we could customize for the game without having to buy thousands of yards of custom fabric. We’ve decided to table them for now, and replace them with some sort of allover style shirt design. Jared finished work on the last of the minor shopping cart issues, and is almost done with PayPal integration.
We finished some of the animal AI work, so they will act more naturally and stop running straight into the sea whenever a person walks by. Speaking of straight in the ocean, we have swimming animations done, and they should be up on production soon. Right now you can go in the water, but standing straight up when you’re cruising around looks weird and isn’t very hydrodynamic. The armor system is ready on staging as well and we have a clothing system in place to make sure players can stay warm and dry.
Finally, San and crew continued working on persistence. Currently, attributes and traits are working, and the inventory is almost done. We just need to include talents, wounds, diseases, and effects after that. While item persistence is on the verge of being completed, we talked about design options that would let it scale better in the future than what we have now. The art team finished up the last of the shading and audio work on the communication tower, and Terry fixed our latest trueSKY issues so hopefully the view from the top looks better. As you can see below, the tower has come along nicely but the scenery still needs a little work.
That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with more pictures and updates. For those of you celebrating turkey day, we hope you enjoy the holiday!
