Sprint 29 is coming to an end this week, and we’re finishing up a number of improvements to our drones. Our goal is have a number of autonomous eyes in the sky that stream live footage of the island, broadcasting a number of things ranging from: beauty shots of the landscape, animals in the jungle, and players shooting up the place.
We’ve been working hard to make them as intelligent as possible. The team has added: nightvision, search patterns when they are flying long distances, the ability to change FOV based on what the drone is filming, volumetric shadows to their spotlight, different max view distances based on day vs. night and nightvision vs. spotlight vs. nothing, and panning movements. We’ve also smoothed out their camera work.
In addition to those improvements, we’ve fixed a few issues and bugs that popped up. We solved a problem that was preventing the drones from exiting one state and entering another. The drones will now avoid flying into the sides of buildings and structures, and they will no longer travel too far out to sea. There is still a little work to do on the drone HUD, but the cameras should be broadcasting the beautiful but deadly wilds of Lahaina soon.
Speaking of beautiful landscapes, a good way to appreciate how much work we’ve put into the environment is with a brand new AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB, and we just happen to be giving one away. You still have time to get your entry in by the cutoff date of December 15. There’s multiple ways to enter, but time is running out for your chance win.
We’ve made some animation improvements this week too. A number of third person animations got upgraded so shooting your M1A or bashing someone’s head in with a club is much more pleasing to the eye. We made a pass over all the the weapons in the game to balance their statistics and make them more realistic. All the game’s firearms now have updated statistics for: recoil, range, rate of fire, and damage. We worked some more on thrown weapons, and played around with throwing tools as weapons. Here’s a shot showing just what one motivated individual and their pickaxe can do.
We’ve completed our crafting system tier 3, adding some new recipes, and incorporating resources like leather and energy. 127, the element that made veil travel possible, will be one of the most important sources of energy for players, and we’re working on a 127 detector for them to use. Eventually this craftable device will ping the map with the general location of the element within a certain radius of the player.
Finally, we took to imgur last week to talk a little bit about animals in the game. More than just another enemy to watch out for or a source of food, the animals in Fractured Veil help make the island and the wild places come alive. We’ve put a lot of time into animal AI to make them feel like a natural part of the game, instead of just mounds of leather waiting to be harvested. Our wolves call for help when they discover prey, bears are attracted to the scent of blood, and our prey animals flee in random patterns when they’re being hunted. This week we made a couple much needed adjustments. The bears have been beefed up to make them much tougher and fitting of their place in the food chain, and we discovered that our squirrels needed nerfing. It turned out that the squirrels had more health than most things in the game, including some of the mutants. We decided to take some of that vigor away before they took over, and demanded a no cat policy on the island, and regular acorn tributes. Below you’ll find a couple screenshots of our animals in the wild.
