This is the first full week of sprint 43 and we have a lot planned. The big items on our list are improvements to our player construction system, diorama updates and completing the AI sieging system. We will also be working on fixing up older features, performance improvements, building crash logging systems, and fixing up any temporary art and bugs.
We finished optimizing the player section, player stats, compass, alert lists, and the map widget. Players need only press M to see where they are on the map now. We imported the latest female mesh and refactored water checks for better ocean vs river vs land detection. We also discovered that players who went for a dip in the ocean would sometimes get “stuck” in a swimming state. As much as we’d all like to swim through our day, the apocalypse is no place to walk around swinging your arms like you don’t have a care in the world, plus it’s really hard to aim a rifle when you’re doing the Australian Crawl. We fixed the bug.
The siege system got a lot of attention in the past week. We defined the sizes of bases that the Siege Manager should consider relevant for sieging. Bases can now only be sieged if the owner is online. We added debug chat messages that will indicate when a siege has started and stopped and the system now stops the active wave when the base’s totem is destroyed. We nabbed a few bugs that popped up with the system as well. We fixed a crash that could occur if a base’s calculated size changed during a siege, a bug where all siege functionality would stop updating if there were too many active sieges at once, and an issue where the wave spawner would sometimes get stuck before spawning the next wave. After all, a siege with only one wave of attackers isn’t really much of a siege.
With all the work we’re putting into launching mutants at player bases we thought we’d put a little time into making something special inside to protect. We started modeling unique containers to stash your stuff inside your base. Below you can see a design for a custom container perfect for holding all your extra equipment and loot.
