This week the team remains focused on performance improvements across the board, and work on tools and systems to make the game experience as smooth and engaging as possible. First, we tackled houses and building interiors. We’ve reimported all of the houses on the map and improved the LOD on the procedural house meshes to make them more performant. We’re putting on our apocalyptic interior designer hats, and roughing up rooms adding holes, cracks, and grunge to spaces, ensuring a trendy beat-up look to every abode.
Our work hasn’t just been targeted at the indoors however. We’ve simplified the foliage system and added solely the foliage necessary for gameplay temporarily while we work out some kinks. The team has improved foliage LOD transitions and are looking at ways to increase game performance while players are running through our wild places. We added tint to rocks allowing players to see that they contain harvestable ore, and fixed a creepy bug in which bamboo didn’t cast a shadow, leaving you to wonder what kind of supernatural thing was disguising itself as bamboo groves.
We continue work on the drones, improving their eye and decision making ability. While trying to teach them what things are worth recording or following, we discovered that they aren’t fans of mass combat currently. They’re pretty good at recognizing mutants, players, and animals and staying on the tail of a lone player, making their way through the map. However, in one of our play testing sessions, seven players were shooting each other, and anything else that moved, only to have a drone move away to film a nearby deer. We’re working on improvements to make them fans of shoot outs and the bloody fields of combat.
The team also made a number of crafting and inventory updates. You can now move around items in your inventory while crafting, and we added better support for switching between pause menu screens. The crafting screen now puts items that you have the ingredients to make at the top, so players can see what they have, and what they still need to harvest more easily. We also squashed a bug that would leave players unable to unequip weapon attachments, and one that was affecting some world containers not accepting drag and drop or double clicks reliably.
Speaking of world containers, we’ve completed the design to our Alohagistics boxes. Old packages from the crowd-sourced delivery company that promised to “Get There Eventually” will be replacing some of the more generic looking crates and containers over the game map. Below is a look at a stack of well worn packages ready for looting.
