Construction Archives - Page 2 of 4

Construction System and Material Updates

The end of our system updates is right around the corner. In truth, we’ll be testing and building for many months to come but the window allowing us to let new testers in the game is almost open. As always, a big mahalo to our testers who help us find bugs and provide great ideas for the game. We love your feedback! Here’s a list of everything you found and we fixed since the play session last week.

Aazlor – issues with upgrading the L stairs from thatch to metal, shape/direction changes.
After server crashes multiple issues with players until killed.
Server Crashed when attacking building.
zaccsi, Schism3110, and scud – Can’t place foundations, intersection issues.

You can learn more about the game and get all the latest updates by going to our Discord server or checking out our Steam page.

There’s no doubt that building something is one of the best parts of a survival game. Whether it’s a bridge, a look-out tower, or a communal base for stashing loot and security, a good construction system can really draw you into a game. We’ve done a big overhaul to our construction system recently, and this week we completed metal, the last (for now) of our building material options. Below are some shots of our latest and greatest construction option.

July 24, 2020

Reading the Signs

Our test sessions are a lot of fun! If you’d like to travel to Lahaina in the year 2120 and try out your survival skills while helping us test the game we’d love to have you. Click the link to join our discord and we’ll give you a key and get you set up in the game. In other exciting news, we launched our Steam page. Head over there and check out the latest screenshots, trailers, and news about the game.

We addressed several bugs this week, including a few that we found during one of our play sessions. We fixed issues with the spawning of player-owned items and the removal of spawn beds. Players can now choose their character’s gender and we fixed a “female-only” bug on staging. Rivers will no longer put players in an erroneous swimming state. We finished persistence for totem energy and put a fix in for permission issues when placing a totem.

The team has been working on our diorama system for quite some time now. Our goal is to make the roads, paths, and trails in the game feel as real as possible by including cars, boxes, and the other trappings of a recently collapsed society. This week we added improvements to road foliage, material grunge, and some road decals. We let the grass grow into the streets to give them the right feel and added a few abandoned bus stops along the way. As you can see from the shots below, our work is paying off.

April 24, 2020

Speed Adjustments and Base Upgrades

If you’d like to try out your survival skills and help us test out the game we’d love to have you join one of our testing sessions. Click the link to join our discord and ask in our “testers” channel. We’ll give you a key and get you set up in the game. See you there!

This is the first full week of Sprint 46, and our main focus will be on bugs, usability, and playtest integrations. The big features this sprint will be the player construction system, world map updates, onboarding, and steam friends.

A number of bugs were fixed this week including foundation stairs ignoring collision checks, construction pieces not being recyclable, a problem with players able to build stairs through totems and totems not always updating proper claims. The best bug award, however, goes to an issue we ran into with our dead AI practicing social distancing and moving out of the way of living AI. We cleared it up so the quick and the dead are clearly delineated again.

The team updated wood meshes, imported metal wall meshes, and updated the decay system for new formulas and materials. We adjusted the time it takes a body to attract cannibals, updated the attack range of our traditional Hawaiian melee weapons, and increased the damage done by your starting weapon, the shark-toothed “Killet.” We increased your base walking speed, the max initial speed of arrows, and made sure that our wolves could outrun players in a straight line. The game’s social hub, the Thorcon Power Plant, recently got a little polish and attention. Players will be spending a lot of time inside the old plant and as you can see below it is looking better than ever.

April 17, 2020

Weapon Paint Overs and Mutant Steering

Would you like to run around the wilds of Lahaina, build bases, shoot mutants, and help us work out the kinks? We’d love to have you in one of our testing sessions. Just join our discord and ask in our “testers” channel. See you there!

As sprint 45 winds down and the team adjusts to working from home, we continue our push to refine the player construction system. We added torch attachments outside of windows offering plenty of light to deter bandits, introduced sleeping bags for an authentic end-of-the-world slumber party feel, and added weapon damage and decay modifiers to construction pieces. Many bugs were fixed this week too. We corrected issues with some construction attachments showing 0 health when they were full, arrows not dealing damage to pieces, and a problem with pieces not rotating properly when placed. We squashed a bug that was keeping rivers from being intractable as well. Players can now build bridges and drink their fill from Lahaina’s pristine creeks and rivers.

We also worked out a few kinks with the island’s mutant population this week. We discovered that the AI spawn managers were spawning one additional AI beyond the intended maximum across the map and spawning huge groups near the shoreline. We love a bloody beach as much as anyone but there were so many mutants there that you barely had room to lay down a towel after combat. The team worked out some navigation issues keeping AI from going up and down stairs or going through doorways and corrected Big Bob’s charge attack. Nothing is sadder than a mutant overlord reduced to simply plodding into combat.

With more mobile opponents here, we’ve been working on some weapon paint overs with some great results. Below you can see our touch on the Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle. We’re particularly fond of the design work on the SCAR’s stock.

April 3, 2020

Building Homes At Home

This week the team spent their time working from home improving homes in the game and the construction system overall. We improved placement rules for all construction pieces and foundation placement checks. We fixed round stone foundations having the wrong health, and as cool as it was, we made sure foundation pieces could no longer float over the landscape.

The team added construction frame pieces for all 4 materials: thatch, wood, stone, and metal. We fixed an issue that would cause a crash when more than one object was resting on a construction piece that was destroyed and a bug where players could overlap claim areas and take over ownership when they shouldn’t be allowed to. Fractured Veil in no way endorses claim jumping even in these difficult times.

We added placeable beds to the game because everyone has to sleep eventually, and added health and destruction support in case burning beds is your thing. We fixed an issue with the placeable chests in your base vanishing after you took items out of them, and a bug that would allow you to build chests in window frames. In the future windows are only for cooling pies and shooting out of.

The player construction system is getting really close to completion and the results so far look spectacular. Below are a few shots of a sprawling base we put together in the game.

March 27, 2020

The Bridges of Maui County

A new sprint has started and for the next month we’ll be focusing on performance, usability, and playtest integrations. We’ll also spend some time finishing up the player construction system, AI sieging, the diorama system and integrating steam friends and player surveys to help us gather feedback.

Things got started with some AI fixes. We discovered an issue with AI being unable to hit a totem if it was covered in foliage and a problem with melee AI getting stuck in place if they had a constructed wall blocking their path. Both are fixed now, making the mutants properly dangerous to your base. We also tweaked the amount of resources players get from trees slightly and the cost of a few basic items.

Most of our work this week, however, went into the doors in the construction system. We fixed some air gap issues and a bug with doors not playing the closing sound when auto-closing. We discovered that construction doors were not taking damage from bullets, and players could go straight through them by walking backward. Both aren’t physical qualities that you’d normally expect from a door, and since the fractured world we built is filled with enough of the unexpected already we fixed the bugs.

After fixing the door madness we needed to get out in the jungle and focus on structures with a bit more of an open feel. Below you can see a beautiful stone bridge we built across a stream. As you can see our stone material is looking great.

March 17, 2020

Stone Walls and Siege Improvements

With sprint 44 coming to an end this week, we’ve been focusing on nabbing bugs and adding a bit of polish to existing systems. The team has added new upgrade and repair tools so players can fix their damaged buildings in style. We also created new loot tables, groups, and container assets so the loot can flow across Lahaina.

Many AI improvements were made this week as well. We fixed bugs that would cause AI to ignore open paths when sieging a base, ignore a base’s totem if they were standing too close to it, and a bunching problem that would cause Trophy Collectors to pile up in doorways and get stuck. We adjusted the maximum AI counts that could occupy a base and a system for despawning AI after a totem is destroyed and there are no players nearby. Everyone knows that company, fish, and mutants begin to smell after a few days.

Of course, the player construction system remains a major focus and we made a number of upgrades and material improvements since the last update. We fixed bugs with glass not scaling properly in thatch windows, full walls snapping to half-wall only slots, and stairs not properly persisting which made building a second floor a dangerous endeavor. We made rounded walls easier to place, added placed torches to the system giving your base warm lighting, and added missing sounds to all construction pieces. Lastly, we added stone meshes to the system so players have a third construction material option now including thatch and wood. Below you can see what the stone building materials looks like currently.

March 6, 2020

Wooden Bases and AI Fixes

We kicked off the week by working on everyone’s favorite thing, loot! The team implemented the spawning of containers with items in them and new loot tables sure to make all that harvesting, running, fighting and surviving worth it. We also added animation retargeting support to the male and female character meshes, retargeting support to first-person weapons, and updated some broken attachment locations. Nothing is worse in the apocalypse than a crooked scope on your rifle.

There were lots of other fixes this week too. We addressed an issue where melee AI was sometimes unable to attack a base’s totem depending on its positioning or deal damage to constructed walls. A problem where sieges would fail to start if there were no active AI in the world was fixed and we discovered a great bug involving our Trophy Collector mutants.

We found that if you killed one of our favorite head tossing Lahaina residents mid-throw they would leave some of their ammunition on the ground. While you might feel that a few decapitated heads lying around isn’t a big deal, we had to consider what happens after a few years when Maui is a meter deep in faces. We worked too hard on our foliage just to have it covered up so we fixed the bug.

Lastly, we imported and setup all wooden construction pieces this week and will be moving on to stone and metal materials. Here is a peek at a few of the last pieces we worked on and a great looking multi-level wooden base.

February 20, 2020

Stone Walls and Clothing Improvements

Sprint 44 started this week and for the next month we will be updating the map, finishing up a few art issues, and fixing bugs in preparation for our first set of players. The major goals of this sprint are completing our player construction and AI sieging systems, updating player animations and the diorama system, steam friends, player surveys, and buttoning up the crash logging system.

We started by giving our female character model some attention. We finished work on an opacity masking subsystem and updated her gear to keep her from busting out of her pants and boots like she has been. Surviving the apocalypse is hard enough without splitting your pants every time you move. We added render targets for blood to her skin material so she will bleed when damaged now instead of looking like some sort of undead thing. We also completed a party permissions screen for the player construction system.

Our ranged AI got a lot of love this week too. The team improved how AI trace enemies allowing them to more consistently hit players using partial cover. We fixed a really fun bug where AI projectiles would multiply the amount of damage they dealt by the number of players that were hit. Ranged AI will no longer stutter-step when behind other AI (and neither will their projectiles), and we allowed them to deal damage to constructed walls and totems.

Lastly, we continued work on materials for the player construction system. Below you can see the latest iteration on wooden materials and some designs for players who’ve learned from The Three Little Pigs and want to build their base using stone.

February 13, 2020

The Right Tool For The Job

Sprint 43 comes to an end this week and we’re busy adding some polish to a few items, finishing up some design work on our player construction system, and nabbing bugs as they arise. The team made some party improvements to start things off. We added player kicking support to parties so you aren’t stuck dragging around dead weight and the annoying, and we added party leader switching so your group doesn’t have to disband if the leader has to go do homework or take care of the kids.

Work continues on our siege system and this week we fixed several bugs that have popped up with the mutants. We worked out a problem where sieging AI would despawn when reinforcements showed up after the first wave of an attack. The team fixed a bug where mutants were not able to deal damage to constructed walls and found a bug where opened doors were blocking AI navigation. We also fixed an issue with totem permissions not respecting party members properly.

In addition to all the bug fixes this week, the team also added a few features and items to the game. We reworked the harvesting system. Better quality tools now harvest more resources per swing and hitting weak points doubles the amount a player gets as well as the damage to the item being harvested. We looked at many new sign concepts and designs, polished some of the door options we created last week, and imported a new construction tool. It may not come with a lifetime warranty but it’s just what the Kahuna ordered when it comes to putting together a shelter. Below you can see what the new construction tool looks like and the latest wooden door design for your base.

February 6, 2020

Tag: Construction