The team is busy making improvements to the group play system, and working out any remaining issues with integrating Houses and Friends in the game. While we want players to enjoy exploring the jungle, and ruins of Lahaina on their own, we want to encourage the idea that survival is much easier with a group. Like the proverb on the Community page says, If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We’re fixing a bunch of bugs to make finding friends and House members easier, and allow players to know when their friends are online.
When you’re battling strange creatures, hungry animals, and a secretive cult of homicidal dancers for survival, you’re going to get injured, and those injuries can quickly lead to death if you don’t get the proper medical attention. We have a number of ways to heal yourself currently in the game, and are getting closer to having a working party healing mechanic in place. We’ve added a few new items to help you patch-up your friends, and are working out the kinks involved with stabilizing a party member on the move. We even talked about adding a way to heal a buddy by throwing a consumable healing agent at their face.
We’re making improvements to how weapon attachments work, and adding a couple new options to aid in your survival, and make your gun look cool too. We have stability mounts, suppressors, and a variety of special sights available for the discerning gun owner. We ran into some trouble with a few sights being oversized, and not lining up on lower profile firearms properly. In addition, there was a major issue with ADS (aiming down sights) jiggle in some weapons that made us have to redo a bunch of work. We’re putting in fixes now so it won’t feel like you’re at the epicenter of an earthquake when your looking down your sights, and making good progress.
Our map work continued this week too. As we fill in different sections of post-fracture Lahaina, we are focusing on performance, and building on already existing construction and topography. There is a ton of open source data about the landscape, shore line, and mountains of Maui. We’re using that data to redo our height map of the area, making the game world more accurate and realistic. We’ve also imported all the roads and trails, and are working on integrating the major thoroughfares to keep players moving across the entire map, and leaving hints of where smaller paths once ran.
We’re making improvements to AI as well. We’ve fixed the trouble we were having with the birds in the game. They now avoid plunging head-first into objects, getting caught inside buildings, and hovering like tiny blimps. Our creature AI work is making progress, and we’re working on wave attacks logic that will keep them from running in straight lines, or in easy to target bunches. We’re adding a number of new animations to make them more realistic as well. We found a bug that would cause a monster to levitate and get stuck in the ceiling. While that made it much easier to avoid the teeth, and loot, it’s not ideal. We’re fixing that major issue, and few minor problems currently. Our goal is to have a creatures with lots of surprises, and good battle tactics down the road, but for now we just want them to avoid as many bullets and arrows as possible when attacking en masse.
Lastly, our lighting, weather, and environmental work marches on. We’ve made great improvements to the brightness of stars and the moon at night, as well as building illumination. This shot of the top of the communication tower at night shows off our progress so far.
We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.
