faq Archives - Fractured Veil

Logging Lahaina and Breaking News

As we come to the end of sprint 20, the web team remained focused on adding improvements to the Veil News Network (VNN) feature, and squashing bugs. Scrolling across the front page with test data currently, VNN will provide players with near real-time news about the most important events going on in the game. We plan on adding filtering features allowing you to see news specific to you, your friends, and your House (providing your a member of one), in the near future.

Jared worked on the news story templates to make them clearer, and added some more to cover all the different kinds of stories we plan to include. We discussed at some length different ways to ensure that the automated system randomizes language sufficiently. We want to avoid the feed getting bogged down with repetitive stories and alerts. It’s a nontrivial problem, and we came up with a few ideas to improve the service. We have a way to go before it’s working as well as we’d like, but it’s off to a good start.

In addition to the functionality work, Jesse did a lot of work on the newsticker look and feel. He adjusted some of the text size and color to make things more readable to old eyes like Chris’s. He also adjusted the speed of the newsfeed so even non-speed readers will have a chance to read the alerts. Of course with every new project a few bugs pop-up, and VNN isn’t any different. We found a few overlapping/rendering issues that Jesse should have fixed soon.

The spawning area got a lot of attention as well. With the first pass at an underground spawning area complete, we talked at length about improvements, and the look and feel of the next iteration. The art team showed off a few concept drawings for a future restart area. We discussed what that place should look like, and what should be available for players before they return to the wilds of Lahaina. We looked at a number of variations of the technology that restore players physical bodies, the Nuuskin machines, too.

We continued work on adding new slides to freshen up the look of the front page. A few new callouts will be added to explain some of the more complex systems in the game, and highlight important features. While everything you need to know is in the FAQ, we want to make everything as easy to understand as possible.

Finally, there’s some good news for everyone likes to sleep all night and work all day. Your Lahaina lumberjacking dreams can finally become a reality. The animations for chopping down trees is done, the harvesting system is working, and we’ve worked out our lingering wood bug. Previously, when a player tried to chop down a tree, every tree in a huge radius would produce wood. While it was great for clearcutting enthusiasts, it wasn’t exactly what we had in mind, and was ecologically unsound. As you can see from the shot below, there is no shortage of harvestable wood and vines for your arts and crafts needs, providing you know where to look.

We’ll be back with more updates, pictures, and the latest logging news later this week.

March 13, 2018

Hold Music and the Cost of Money

As we near the end of the week, the web team is pushing to complete the last of their work on the Community Page. The push on House customization is done for now. There’s a new prominent callout for Houses with links to the FAQ explaining what they are, and how they work. House founders can: load images, design banners, create charters, manage member roles, and pick a color scheme. Players will also be able to see when their friends are online, and what House, if any, their friends belong to. Friend requests and House invitations are now more prominently displayed. Jesse updated Bootstrap and did some refactoring work to keep things neat and tidy as well.

Work on increasing performance by sectioning up the map, and replacing old buildings with structures created with the programmatic building system continues. It takes a while, but the positive impact on gameplay will make it worth it. The last thing we want is for your GPU fan to kick into overdrive everytime you explore the ruins of a subdivision. A few last touches were added to the Thorcon plant interior too. Here’s a look at how it looks inside.

We talked some more about how the Veil News Network (VNN) would work in the game, and how best to display information on the website. We came up with a few new ideas regarding how we’re parsing the data coming in from the news API, and some additional templates for various types of stories. We discussed how we want to tie notifications into the VNN system to make sure it is fun and useful, without players feeling like our news drones are spamming them with weather reports.

We went over the last few items we need to finish up in regards to merchandise, namely challenge coins and Manimal cans. One of the requirements for our real-life Manimal distributor is that we have a business number on the can. So far, nobody has volunteered to use their personal number for the official Manimal info contact, but we did have quite a lengthy discussion about an appropriate hold message and music. Metal seems to be the consensus as far as music goes, but we didn’t decide on a specific genre: death metal, black metal, deathgrind, or other types of distorted screaming. If you have a suggestion we’d love to hear it in the Forums.

Our talk about merch led us to a discussion about rai, our in-game money. We discussed how other games handle money after you die, and how it affects your encumbrance. San brought up a couple interesting ideas about how players could manage money, especially very large sums, in the game. We talked about possible vault or banking systems, loss of money after you’ve been killed, and how those features could impact things like theft or extortion between players in the game.

Finally, with all the new weapons introduced recently, we’ve been pushing to include some body armor options for protection. Below you can see one of the latest iterations of a high-end armor to protect yourself from the slings, arrows, and bullets of outrageous fortune while running around Lahaina.

February 15, 2018

Better Houses and Power Plants

To finish out the week, the art team has been hard at work completing the new underground spawn area. Designed to allow players a safe place to respawn, away from itchy trigger fingers looking for loading characters, the place is coming along nicely. We’ve added a few shelves, tables, and a ladder leading up to the surface. If you added a guy skipping class while obsessively playing Mario Kart in the corner, it could be a picture of my first college apartment.

We found some issues with our shipping system this week. Shipping to certain areas was broken, and we ran into some eyebrow raising shipping estimates. Jared fixed the API so everything is now working as it should, and we’re adding tests to ensure it doesn’t happen in the future. The web team is digging into a few other problems that popped up with the shopping cart as well.

Jesse and Jared are finishing up the last of the work on House banners. They look great, and most of the work is focused on editing tools, and making the customization process for Houses and banners as streamlined as possible. This led us to a discussion about making easy to understand, step-by-step tutorials to explain the more complex systems in the game. While everything is covered in the FAQ, there are a few things that could use an additional clear explanation.

Jesse worked on a green screen streaming overlay for the game. After watching a show from their office for a while, we discussed ways we could use it other than embarrassing Jared. We covered possible Veil News Network (VNN) uses, other possible marketing applications, and a number of Jared based spinoffs.

We discussed a few new weapons coming down the pike, firearms in particular. We want to have information about each weapon that matches as closely as possible with their real life capabilities. However, the reality is that many firearms have numbers that match very closely, particularly with guns of a similar style and function. We talked about the possibility of slightly tweaking some statistics to make a hierarchy of weapons in the game.

Lastly, after a lot of detail work the Thorcon plant is going into the game. Below you’ll find a couple of the latest shots of the interior. This place is huge and should be a blast to explore.

We’ll be back next week with more updates.

February 1, 2018

Bows that Boom and Seeing Blue

With our planned Friends and Family Alpha release getting closer every day, a lot of polish work, bug squashing, and styling continued this week. We wrapped up some loose ends with our ability system, and introduced some really fun craftable items. The game now has grenades, claymore mines, and camping lights. The beach may be full of booby traps and surprise grenades are being tossed from the treeline now, but at least everything is very well illuminated. Our first craftable item, a bow, is mostly done too. It looks pretty good and has decent range, but it has gun audio hooked up to it, so every arrow shot is accompanied with a big boom. Personally, I think the gunshot sound should be an available upgrade but we’ll see what happens.

We fixed some layout issues with how images are displayed on the website, and moved some links and tags to the bottom of the page for easier navigation. The team made it easier to navigate to specific sections of the FAQ and fixed a bug so that sectional stories only show up in the proper section. The almost endless work on making the environment look better continued. As you can see below the jungle just keeps looking better, but Chris noticed that the shadows are a bit blue.

We are also working on a bug that locks up your inventory, and made some improvements to the AI so our mutants stop moving like their legs are asleep. A higher density landscape was imported making the map as smooth as silk. Not only does it look a lot better, but you won’t get stuck on a rock while running for your life anymore. There was some more amazing work done with fog, dew effects, and underwater refraction. As you can see below, it’s not perfect yet, but if you’re a fan of dramatic shooting, soon you’ll be able to burst out of the water and and mow down your enemies like a mid 80’s Chuck Norris.

With more players running around soon, we discussed the state of our servers, some of our options, and how fast we’ll need to get more. We talked about time scaling between day and night and how long our ingame evenings should last. Crafting trees and recipes were discussed and we talked about how transparent we’d be with recipes. For now, it looks like you’ll have to do a little experimenting to discover them all. One thing we decided should be more clear though, is where we are in our sprints and what each one is focusing on. You will be able to see that soon.

Finally, our communication tower continued to be the building of focus for the art team. The interior is looking great and soon you’ll be able to walk around inside. While, the elevator looks great with the sun in the background as you can see, it’s going to be a while before the “out of order” sign can be removed.

August 9, 2017

The Lights Are Low and the Pants are Off

We’re starting a new sprint next week so we’ve been busy smacking down bugs, finishing up systems, and adding a bit of polish to a variety of things.

We cleaned up and reorganized some of the navigation on the website, added a search field to the right hand nav and fixed a lingering scroll bar issue. Our basic quest system was completed. Players will now be able to gather various goods for money and experience, as well as explore the jungle with a purpose instead of just mindlessly shooting all day. Don’t get us wrong. We expect you to mindlessly shoot a lot. It’s really fun! But sometimes you need to take a break and accomplish an objective.

Speaking of mindless fun, we’ve made a lot of progress on the inventory UI and character models. Drag and drop is now working on almost everything from the inventory. You can apply bandages quickly and easily, but more importantly, the post-apocalyptic dressup portion of our game is complete. Players can now swap out and remove clothing. Many of us consider the ability to shoot boars along the beach in brightly colored shirts and underwear, a milestone.

Work continues on the crafting and cooking system and we’re working on skills as well. We’re putting together our FAQ and buttoned up some of our social APIs. One of our guys learned how hard it was to test out inventory UI in the game when you’ve wandered off the path and are being eaten alive by Trophy Hunter mutants. On the plus side, he got a chance to work out some AI bugs and went to watch Dunkirk, which he highly recommends, when he was done.

We want to focus heavily on group play in the game, and talked at length about the work we’ve done on our party system, and what needs to be done yet. We’d like people to be able to set up groups outside the game and spawn together regardless of whether or not they usually play on the same servers. We talked about what ACLs we’d need for ad hoc parties (like leader promotion and kicking members from the group) and our goal of creating a party messaging system including Voip and shared telemetry information.

Finally, the art folks added a lot of lighting and shadow work to their mountain of blending and texture endeavors. You can see just how good the sun looks now shining through the Communication Tower windows below.

The lighting and shadow upgrades look great outside too. As you can see below, the shadows in the sand and behind plants is looking terrific. The jungle at dusk and in the morning is looking amazing as well. We’ll have a lot more for you soon.

July 27, 2017

Making Things Secure, Crafting, and Perfect Plants

Chris got a new SSL certificate and banged his head on docker for a while, reminding him that the awesome thing about getting punched in the face is how good it feels when it stops.

We started working on an outline for the FAQ to answer all of your serious and some of your not-so-serious questions. We talked about putting together a trailer and what improvements we’d like to see in the look of the game before we’d be happy showing it off to a larger audience. The team also started working on the game ui for the crafting system. Cross stitching and making cordage out of plant fibers are hard enough on their own. We want to make sure the process is as easy and intuitive as possible in the game.

Our welcome to Lahaina sign got another facelift and is starting to look really good no matter what angle you look at it from.

A bunch more environmental work was done and we talked about the importance of making trees and plants of varying height. This helps create a nice sense of depth as you’re running through wilds of Lahaina, provides places to hide or wait in ambush, and makes the foliage look more real. We discussed at length what it would take to create a system to stomp plants, cut down trees, and ruin lawns. The effort and time needed to make a good looking and completely damagable environment is not a small one.

We went over blending techniques for the areas between the plants and the ground and discussed how we can make their union seem less abrupt and more natural. Even though we’re still not 100% happy with that yet, the shadows from trees moving over the foliage is looking great as you can see from some of these in-game shots below. We’ll keep working on making the plants more perfect and get some more screenshots up in the media section soon.

July 6, 2017

Tag: faq