Sprint 17 is finishing up at the end of the week. In between waking up from their tryptophan comas, and avoiding becoming tech support for visiting relatives, the team finished up as many things as they could. Our new crafting screen is ready, and we have a working armor system in place as well as a basic clothing system to help players stay warm and dry during the cool Lahaina nights. We’ve reworked the inventory screen, the quick bar, and have alerts working too.
Jesse showed off some House banner mockups and did some work on a Veilcorp logo for use in the game. Jared has player wallets just about buttoned up, and learned a valuable lesson when doing some testing on PayPal integration, don’t over-use your personal credit card. After an afternoon of bug hunting and placing orders, he went out to eat, and found that his card was frozen due to fraud concerns.
San talked about incorporating a global game news system. We discussed having a ticker that would give notifications about where combat is taking place and other noteworthy game events. The team talked about how we’d incorporate a flag on certain events that a player could watch live, using our drone camera system. We went over a few other features we could use with the Lahaina News Network feed, like a character timeline with clips of the character’s kills or marvelous deaths.
Persistence work continues, and the team is looking into a few performance issues. We continue to refine the programmatic building system, and we’re tightening up some issues we’re having with empty spaces within buildings. The item spawning system is working as well, and is placing items inside the automated houses. Both systems are going through major testing and bug hunting right now.
We’ve finished adding the new AI to all of our various animals, so the days of wolf-like behavior in deer, and squirrels that launch themselves into the sea at the slightest noise are over. New character animations are in too, although we still need to work on some 3rd person animations. Terry continued to bang his head against the shader and Lightmass issues that we’ve been having. Chris is proud to have learned the term ‘z-fighting’ as it applies to weather.
The team is working on a cave/underground/sewer system for characters to explore, because everyone knows that’s where the scariest clowns and best loot is kept. We talked about having protected spawning points to make sure characters can avoid being ganked 3 seconds after joining, and maybe making them in protected areas under the loamy, earthy, beauty that is Lahaina.
Finally, as you can see below, the last of the Communication Tower work is done and it looks fantastic. It’s now the perfect place to sit out of reach of marauding creatures, and enjoy a cup of coffee above the radiation clouds. The elevator door animations are complete, and the only thing left to fix is the audio when you press the up or down button. We’ve been using wolf noises as a placeholder while we finished the detail work, and I’d be lying if I said we won’t miss the growling when using the elevator.
We’ll be back with more updates later this week.