Tag: audio

Sprint 40 comes to an end this week and the team is wrapping up new systems, adding some polish, and nabbing bugs as they arise. Much of our time has focused on AI improvements. Future Maui’s monsters now move better in a group and keep pace with leaders in our effort to “Leave No Mutant Behind.” We created a new passive AI module that allows AI to make random sounds while idle. Now, all the mutants gurgle, growl, sigh, and rumble when they aren’t hunting players, making it easier to know when they’re around in the bush.

That proved to be very useful this week when we ran into a bug rendering all AI invisible. Players found themselves being ripped apart by unseen assailants anytime they ventured out into the world. While navigating around the island only by sound did add another layer of difficulty, we fixed the bug because we’re not interested in making a sequel to The Bird Box.

The team fixed the interior audio state for the top of the Comm Tower, made improvements to audio in the main room of the Thorcon Power Plant, and implemented a “crafting completed” UI sound so players will know when they’re weapons are done cooking. Speaking of kitchens, we fixed a strange bug that would sometimes create kitchens with no doors in our procedurally generated buildings. We might have a quest at some point where players have to find their way into a forbidden kitchen, but that time is not today.

Lastly, we continued our push to complete the player construction system. We added FX support for placing construction pieces, fixed a crashing issue when trying to place triangle foundation pieces, and added UI sounds to the construction radial menu. You can see the fruits of our labor in these interior shots of our thatch building design below.

We continued our work on AI steering this week, making sure our beasts and terrors move more naturally while chasing players and avoiding those straight-line paths that make them too easy to hit. AI can now “head track” their targets if their targets are behind them and rotate in place if their target is within an acceptable range. The team adjusted their deceleration curve to improve how they look when blending out their movement. The cannibals will soon shamble with the grace of figure skaters when they’re out on a liver run.

We also fixed bugs where the steering AI’s movement direction and movement speed were frequently returning incorrect values in their animation blueprint and one involving UE4’s native “Braking Deceleration” functionality causing the steering AI to stop short of their intended destination. Nobody likes a monster who stops short. We’ve worked out most of the bugs with the deer and wolves. Bears and other heavy hitters are up next.

We addressed many audio bugs too. Uzi’s make the proper sound when being reloaded now. We also fixed an issue where 2d impacts were being heard by all players, a problem causing multicast sounds (reload/equip/etc) to play twice, and a bug where thirsty and poisoned sounds would never play if a player was hungry.

Lastly, we’re adding the finishing touches to the thatch materials for our player construction system. We added stair meshes this week as well as adding some polish to the overall form and function. As you can see below thatch buildings are looking amazing.

This week we continued our progress on the player building system and made some big additions. We fixed rotation snap points for floors and foundations so walls will always face outwards or inwards because walls are most useful when they are at right angles. We added window planks to the construction menu and added glass penetration to building windows. Very few things are more satisfying than shooting out a new window, especially after the collapse of civilization. We fixed a bug with the building totem health bar not showing in the game and added a recipe for the construction tool to the craftable items list so players beside us can get in on the construction craze that seems to be sweeping what’s left of Lahaina.

We added a couple of bits of audio and nabbed some weapon bugs this week too. We implemented audio alive/dead state switches for WWise and low health audio events. Bleeding out, the strangled gasps of the poisoned, and death rattles have never sounded better. The team fixed a bug with weapon sights showing camera meshes in-game. We also fixed a bug where ADS’ing with the shotgun made all pellets hit the center point, making bird hunting particularly difficult.

Most of our time this week, however, was spent on AI steering. Our goal is to make the AI run and move more naturally when tracking players. Instead of charging or running away in straight lines, we’re striving to round out their pathing showing that there is weight behind their movements and making it more realistic. We fixed a bug where AI could get stuck on corners if two nav path points were generated too close to each other, and one where AI enemy tracking modules could cause an AI to lose their enemy in certain cases.

We’ve mostly focused on deer and wolves while we work out the kinks, but plan on improving the mutant’s lurching in the near future too. Below you can see a video highlighting our steering work and comparing AI pathing before and after.

We spent a lot of time this week fine tuning our player construction system and fixing bugs. The team worked through some issues with construction persistence not loading health values properly, and a problem with triangular pieces not playing well with square pieces when putting together your cataclysm cabana. We discovered that foundations and foundation stairs had some overlapping problems making basements less than ideal, and we fixed a bug causing a client side crash when destroying certain walls in a building. We made some audio improvements to the construction process too. Now players can enjoy the soothing sounds of a construction site along with the crashing waves and birds singing in the jungle.

The audio improvements don’t stop with construction pieces however. We worked out a problem with campfire sounds not posting to the correct actors and a great bug that would cause all players to hear the player death UI sound when someone died. While it was funny the first few times, hearing every death on a busy server would drown out all the audio work we’ve done so far, not to mention how creepy it would be. We also fixed the impact sounds made by thrown weapons and objects. Torches and axes now make a satisfying noise when smashed against a head or other object.

Wolves got a new attack sound and we made some improvements to aggro sound attachments to various AI. The terrors of the jungle have never grunted or snarled better. The team fixed an AI clipping bug and we adjusted the number of AI spawned in an area including the small passive creatures that make such adorable targets for our more aggressive players. Deer can now randomly spawn in groups, making collecting meat and skins much easier and wolves can now spawn in groups adding to the number of fangs to avoid while you’re out exploring.

Lastly, with the increase in overall AI and audio improvements to thrown weapons there were a lot of torches tossed on the island this week. While most of these throws weren’t particularly noteworthy, we had a few for the record books. First we have a well placed shot into the mouth of one of the tiki idols making it look like it was enjoying a fine cigar, and better yet a physics bug that created one of the greatest inventions since the fall of civilization, The Lahaina Disco Torch.