inventory Archives - Page 2 of 5

Building Better Roads

As the week and sprint 30 come to an end, we looked at a number of decals and concept art for the Thorcon Power Plant and the surrounding areas. As the social hub of the game, we discussed at length what survivors of The Great Fracture would have done to the area, and how they would have taken advantage of existing features like parking lots, onsite apartments, and the building itself. We looked at a number of possible living quarters, defensive measures, and quality of life improvements that survivors could have made in the years after the cataclysm. With all those things in mind, the Thorcon will get a lot of attention in the near future. We’ve also completed the planned zipline from the Communications Tower to the Thorcon, making travel a little quicker and safer.

We’ve made a number of player improvements as well. We did some work on inventory persistence including: Inventory ordering, loading in with persistent items equipped, and automatically setting items to equipped in persistence at pickup time when applicable. We made a few campfire improvements ensuring that you can enjoy your post apocalyptic smores, and we completed the game’s starting harvesting tool/weapon, a shark toothed pan. A tongue-in-cheek homage to the shark toothed (leiomano) weapons in the game, the pan isn’t the best weapon or tool, but is better than nothing in a pinch and is properly seasoned and non-stick.

One of our goals while working on the game is to use the actual geographic features of Lahaina as a guide, including the roads. We take a few liberties in some areas where we’ve changed the land, and to keep players flowing across the map, but for the most part, the trails and paths in the game are where roads really are on the island. They say “getting there is half the fun”, but creating a transportation network for players can be daunting task. So, we’ve been working on a tool to help quickly build these roads, and easily show the toll of time and weather. Below you can see a few examples of that work, making main roads that still hint to what existed before, and those that have disintegrated into nothing but dirt paths.

January 10, 2019

Directing Drones and Seeking Shelter

As the week gets started the web team continues the front page facelift, and navigation update. Jesse has completed images for all of our social networks, and is working on a few custom overlays for streamers, as well as layouts for upcoming contests and announcements. We’re combining site navigation all in one place to streamline things, and help users find what they’re looking for more quickly. A number of minor improvements like new modal windows, and an easier to find download button are in the works too. Jared is still working on getting the drone footage to display properly, and it should be streaming live footage of the wilds of post-fracture Lahaina soon. In the meantime, you can always watch on our YouTube page.

The tech team is putting out the last of the fires caused by the UE 4.20.2 upgrade, but we’ve worked through almost all of the problems the update caused. Terry has worked out the issues with trueSKY. Beautiful clouds, oceans, and sky are right around the corner. We fixed a number of other lingering bugs, including tracking down an issue that was causing certain types of loot to spontaneously disappear from your bag. Nobody likes disappearing bullets, no matter how easy they were to find.

We’re making a number AI improvements focusing in particular with firearms and our Trophy Collectors. We’re adding some situational awareness to our plague-ridden body part collectors. We found their actions, (especially in groups,) to still be more chaotic than we’d like. The team is focusing on adding some cunning, and improving their battle tactics. In addition, we’re teaching some of our NPCs, like the cannibals, to shoot first and eat players later. They’re learning things like: laying down suppressing fire, herding players into groups for melee combatants, and not switching their machine guns to full auto until they’re close enough to not worry about accuracy. Lahaina is about to get a lot more dangerous.

The first iteration of a player bank is nearing completion. Soon, players will have access to a self-contained inventory to stash away the things weighing down your pack, or that you can’t quite bear to drop on the ground. Our drone cameras are getting some love this week too. In addition to upgrading them with the newest geographical info to keep them from gliding through the ground, we’re putting in a lot of work teaching them what to film. We’re improving their audio detection, so that they will recognize things like a fight, stop, and film the action. We’re also teaching them when to move on, so they don’t get stuck on someone determined to chop down enough trees to start their own lumber company.

We’ve made some “quality of life” improvements to help make the game more fun to play, and even have a new starting tool/weapon in the works for players to use when they spawn in. We discussed making sure that crafted items had more “health” than items found in the rubble, and ways we can encourage players to experiment with alternative ingredients when hard at work at the crafting table. We’re not encouraging people to try to make glass rifles, but we want to reward those who think outside the box. We’ve made some improvements to the bow and compound bow to make them look and sound more realistic as well.

Finally, we took to Imgur this week to talk a bit about the progression of buildings in the game, and the importance of seeking shelter. The Great Fracture not only wiped out most of civilization, it also had a lasting effect on global weather patterns. Maui was no stranger to the occasional severe storm or hurricane, but after the accident, the weather became much more unpredictable. Finding decent shelter is just as important as gathering food and water. We looked at some early concept art and talked about the progress we’ve made. As you can see from this shot below, having a cold drink on top of the Communication Tower, is a much different experience than collecting rainwater in one of the ramshackle huts along the beach.

October 23, 2018

Building Decals and Disappearing Skies

The team has made a number of inventory improvements this week. We have a completely new ui on your inventory screen. Things have been streamlined and rearranged to make better use of space, and make it easier for players to quickly change gear and grab items. Information about each item is easier to pull up, we have new selectors for the inventory and quick bar, and everything is semi-transparent. You now have a chance of seeing a creature charging at you, if you stopped somewhere to organize your hat or knife collection.

The art team put together an extensive decal library to quickly age and mark up buildings, especially ones made with our procedural building system. We have decals for wood, concrete, stone, and metal, covering a wide variety of things like: scratches, dents, mold, moss, rust, water streaking, and even dulled colors. This should allow us to add the right amount, and specific type of weathering, to any building and save some artist time in the process.

We took a look at a few refinements done to our newest batch of mutants. We talked about what models and items we need for the areas we’re building out around the Thorcon Power Plant to make them complete. We dug deep into our old model and art folders to start an unused asset inventory. We found quite a few things that were put on the back burner for one reason or another, and planned out where these items could be used in game. The team made a list of what models were ready to go and which still needed a little work before being game ready.

The web team remains focused on putting together promo and game videos. We’ve been hard at work cutting up and editing existing videos for GIFs, and spent a fair amount of time coming up with captions. We discussed a number of possible videos in the future: highlighting important aspects of the game, differentiators that highlight the beautiful danger of post fracture Lahaina, and things that are just funny to watch.

In addition to putting together blooper reels and getting glamour shots of some of our most horrific mutants, the web team is working on the upcoming achievement system. Jared is setting up the backends and compiling a list of web specific achievements ahead of ingame ones. Jesse has been working on layouts and the ui, as well as designing reward badges for each achievement.

We’ve fixed a number of bugs discovered while running around shooting things that moved in the jungle, and each other. Medkits will now heal virtually any status effect that your player gets, including poison, but you’ll still need to make a fire to get yourself warm and dry if you’ve been standing in the rain, or went swimming. Ammo boxes will have ammo inside them, as one would expect of an ammo box. You will no longer find that some crafting recipes are empty, leaving you to wonder what items were supposed to be there. Double click looting should work soon as well, so you can quickly strip everything of even remote value from a corpse or bag. This should be very useful if like me, you’re a loot hoarder, and only begrudgingly drop items once you can barely walk from the crushing weight of the junkyard on your back.

Our march toward UE 4.20.2 hit a bit of a snag last week when the staging build suddenly found itself without any sky. There’s no doubt that it makes the game look much more ominous, and might be a good storyline for an alternative world down the line. However, one of Chris’ mantras is always that we make things look more Hawaiian. While a skyless dark world is scary, we didn’t really see a Hawaiian connection. In fact, none of us could remember ever seeing a picture of Hawaii with the sky a dark formless void. It’s usually pretty sunny. We’re working on bringing the blue back currently, but here’s a shot of “Dark Lahaina”.

October 10, 2018

Upgrades, Updates, and Points of Interest

As the week comes to an end, the team remains focused on the upgrade to UE 4.20.2, and is making good progress. We’re also upgrading trueSky, to fix some lingering fog and cloud issues, and moving all of our audio over to the latest version of Wwise. With all these different updates and upgrades, Terry and crew have been busy putting out fires as they appear, and working on documentation. In the midst of this flurry of updates, upgrades, and documenting, we briefly discussed server stress testing down the road, once everything is stable.

While the web team worked on fixing a few bugs that popped up with the new front page navigation, we talked a bit about some marketing ideas and options. We discussed a number of possible contests and giveaways for players in the closed beta, and further along in the game’s development. We’re putting together some videos, making sure we capture the best of game play, as well as the stuff that didn’t go so well, which to be honest, can be a lot of fun to watch.

We’re collecting feedback on all areas of the website: the account creation process, purchasing items and packages, as well as joining a House, from people who haven’t seen the website before. We’re hoping the fresh eyes will be able to spot areas of improvement and anything that is too confusing, that we’ve overlooked. So far it’s really paid off, and we’ve started a list of refinements to make all areas easier to use and more intuitive.

We also made some improvements to our “Points of Interest” map to make it a better design tool. Containing all the places and structures mentioned in the game stories, and a few other surprises, the POI map serves as an aspirational guide for building out areas, and the placement of buildings. We’ve added a few new layers to represent areas the art team have already finished, the places that are playable in the game currently, and different “loot zones”.

Distributing items and gear across the map in a way that makes sense, our loot zones provide players a dependable area to look for certain items they need for crafting or completing a quest. For instance, a player looking for shark teeth should check beach areas, and someone in need of some food or refreshing Manimal will have the best luck searching one of the many ruined neighborhoods. We talked about some refinements we could make to the system as it currently stands, and how best to adjust it in the future.

We also spent some time discussing crafting. With only a few minor issues remaining, like working on the ui for splitting stacks of items in your inventory, our first pass at the crafting system is just about done. We talked about new recipes and creating a tiered model for resources with items like smelters, various types of machines, and lab equipment. We have quite a few decisions to make for the next iteration, but we’re off to a good start.

Lastly, performance improvements continue on the Municipal Veil Station. The future social hub of the game is a huge building that the art team is busy making material improvements to, for better performance. At the same time, we’re marking up the outside to show the toll time and the fracture have taken. Below you can see some prefracture and postfracture shots.

September 28, 2018

The Distribution of Loot

The team is finishing out the week by focusing on a few ui improvements. Currently, it can be hard to see in the heat of battle what items you have selected or equipped from your inventory. The last thing we want is players mistakenly splashing mutants with a canteen, instead of filling them full of lead. We’re adding improvements to better outline the stuff you want to use. We’re also working on hitmarker improvements so you can line up your shots more accurately, either on the fly, or after a measured exhale.

While Terry and crew continue to manage the UE 4.20.2 and trueSKY upgrade, we made a few improvements to the map. We found some areas are too resource poor for our liking, especially when it comes to metal and minerals. The team is adding more rocks in these areas, allowing players the ability to smash stones until they give up the goods. We also talked at some length about points of interest visibility on the map. We’re making some improvements to better highlight places that are important for quests, might hold valuable loot, are fun to explore, or just act as landmarks and rallying points.

We’re just wrapping up final touches on the next round of mutants to chase players around Lahaina. These gruesome creatures will offer players new types of challenges to overcome, through different tactics and attacks than the Trophy Hunters do now. The group has been focusing on improving ranged AI this week too. We’re improving the tactics employed by ranged attackers like: taking cover between shots, focusing on certain targets, and funneling players into the teeth and claws of waiting melee fighters. After some discussion about what types of mutants would still retain enough of their minds to use complex weapons, we started working on gun tactics for specific creatures.

We’ve been moving all of our audio over to Wwise, and making some improvements as we go. Every area and building has its own specific noises, so those who’ve spent a lot of time exploring could theoretically tell where they were just by listening to the background noises. We’ve made some improvements to reloading sounds, because the noise a shotgun makes while being racked can be a great morale boost before combat, or a warning that something really bad is about to happen. We’ve made some other minor audio changes too, like slightly delaying the sounds of doors, and adjusting the volume of footsteps on different types of surfaces.

One of the biggest projects this week has been making improvements to the loot system. We’re creating all new loot tables based on “regions” on the map. While players have a chance to pick up any kind of loot anywhere, we want certain items to be rare in certain areas, and more plentiful in others. For instance, if you’re looking for shark teeth, you might find them anywhere, but beaches will be the best places to look. The mountains and dense jungle will turn up more harvesting tools and raw resources. Ruined neighborhoods hold more provisions than other areas, and downtown is the place to look for weapons and ammo. We’re also working on adding visual cues to help players see where a loot drop scenario is happening, and adding the same for quests.

Finally, we continue to work on improving performance issues with the Veil Station and our procedural building system. While we’re making progress on turning the station into the future social hub of the game, the team is also building out neighborhoods surrounding the Thorcon Power Plant. We’re still making performance and materials improvements to the automated building system, but as you can see from these shots below, the neighborhoods that we can build on the fly are looking pretty good.

September 20, 2018

Grungy Buildings and Ricocheting Bullets

While Terry kicked off the week poking the monster that is the UE 4.20.2 upgrade and updating trueSKY, the rest of the team was busy switching over audio to Wwise. We’ve made a number of audio improvements across the board. The amount of noise a player makes when doing various activities has been adjusted (there’s no quiet leaping from the top of a structure), and we’ve made improvements to some other environmental sounds too. You can now occasionally hear a bullet ricochet, (a strangely pleasing noise when firing a weapon), and we’ve added a little flying blood when you successfully cause damage with a shotgun.

We’ve been polishing the area where our first quest takes place, fixing bugs, and doing some general UX work. The shot below shows you what the neighborhood surrounding the Communication Tower looks like as you approach, looking for quest items.

A few of the bugs we fixed already this week include: Medkits will now heal poison effects. Sometimes a player would start to lean to one side like they had just maxed out their credit card on mai tai’s, at Beachcomber Bob’s Tiki Tavern. We made sure everyone now stands up straight. Occasionally a mutant would refuse to climb stairs, so we worked on their confidence, glutes, and quads to make sure they could run stadium stairs with the best of them. Lastly, we fixed a problem with crafting recipes turning up empty.

While we were working on the crafting bugs, we also put in some UX time and addressed a number of layout issues on the crafting screen. We nabbed a lingering bug with the player inventory grid, added some improvements to the queue, made rollover info for items more clear, made some navigation improvements, and added subtle changes to the color scheme to help differentiate items actively being worked on, and those waiting for repair.

The web team made some changes to the front page, including upgrades to the slides, colors, and navigation layout. We talked about incorporating a badge/achievement system to encourage players to explore the page, and all the various social tie-ins available to them. Jared started work expanding our notification system so players can get alerts every time something new happens in their House, or to one of their friends. He’s also making sure there is a setting for those of you who don’t want to get notified of anything those people are doing, so long as they’re helping you shoot things in the jungle, and bandaging hurt limbs. We discussed the need to give the VNN drone the updated geographic information of the new map, so it will stop traveling through the Earth while making its path around the island.

Our SEO work is starting to pay off and we talked at some length about user flow improvements. We’ve addressed some of the confusion our packages page had inadvertently caused. After some initial feedback, we learned that some wrongly thought they’d have to pay a monthly subscription to play the game, instead of a one-time fee. We’ve addressed the problem, and updated the page to make it clear that a player doesn’t have to pay every month to play the game. We discussed offering some sort of game bundle which would allow a player to buy multiple copies of the game for their friends at a discount. We looked at a number of examples other games were using, and are deciding what we think would work best for us.

Being the temporary social hub in the game, the Thorcon Power Plant is getting some minor touch-ups, and we’re building out the surrounding areas to make sure there is plenty to loot, explore, and fight. However, we plan on moving the main meeting point to the Veil Station in the near future. The art team is hard at work making all the performance and texture improvements necessary to make that happen. The shots below highlight the building’s exterior transformation from normal wear and tear, to what 60+ years and The Great Fracture has done to it.

That’s everything for now. I’ll be back with more updates at the end of the week.

September 18, 2018

Ziplines, Buildings, and Bears

The team made some good progress on streamlining crafting and improving ui this week. We added some improvements to how drag and drop works, highlighting items selected, and fixing a bug that offset where your gear got dropped in your inventory. We cleaned up some of the navigation on the crafting page to make things a little less cluttered, and made some upgrades to how scrolling works. A bug that would occasionally break scrolling was fixed, and we are adding a few context menus to help you sort through your gear and compare items.

We plan on working on a queue layout the rest of the week. This will allow players to see what they are working on, and help people playing at work determine if their gun mods will be done before their next meeting. We added some animations, and looked at background options to make the whole crafting experience look more authentic.

Terry continued his work on builds, and the East Coast mirror is up and running with a couple of us using it. Git onboarding continues with only a handful of contractors left who need to move over. We made a number of audio improvements, and discussed what still needs to be done, including a Wwise update. Chris had some concerns about our patcher, so we discussed its size and various ways we could handle it differently down the road.

A number of bugs were fixed this week in the game. The rain now actually makes a player’s clothes wet, and is visible no matter what your body position. We weren’t really feeling the 2D dry rain on the island. We also discovered a bug that sometimes makes party members flicker in and out of existence. While most of us are big fans of bouncing between worlds, it’s really hard to fix someone’s arm when their physical body is manifesting across the multiverse. At least with a traditional splint anyway.

Our new and improved campfire is almost done, with only some ui work left to do. Players will now need to feed wood to the fire if they want to: keep it burning, dry their clothes, grab a bite to eat, warm up, and talk about their day. We discussed the proper rate of burn to strike that perfect balance between having an ever-burning log, and allowing players time to do something other than harvest wood.

We grunged up many structures, and roughed up a lot of ruined roads, but we still have a lot to go. We talked about some procedural building upgrades that should save us some time, and still provide different types of damage and weathering so all of our ruins don’t look like carbon copies.

The group continues to add the final touches to the underground spawn area. We made some lighting and texture improvements to make it look appropriately dark and slimy, but still comfortable. We added some new audio so you can hear just how bad the electrical connections to the jury-rigged Nuuskin pods are. The team briefly discussed the starting equipment available to players in this area, and possible tweaks to your beginning gear.

We began work on our first quest scenario for the game. While we’re still working out the specifics, it is going to take place in the area around the Communication Tower. We looked at some existing real-world features on that part of Maui, and talked about what we wanted to include, and what we’d like to add. We circled back to our zipline discussion from last week, and looked at our first semi-working zipline demo. There are a few bugs to work out yet, as San kept going straight into the ocean his first time down. He probably would have made it all the way to what was left of Japan had he not drowned first. Even with the bugs, fast traveling from the top of the comm tower is a lot of fun.

Lastly, we continue environmental work to make the jungle and beach areas look as realistic as possible. Here you can see one of the escaped bears taking a little nap on the beach. Unless you’ve come loaded for him, it’s probably best to keep your distance.

August 21, 2018

Putting Lahaina on the Map

The team’s push to make crafting and player inventory improvements continues. We made some improvements to the drag and drop on the crafting screen, and found a bug that was displacing items. Jared is fixing it now. We also have splitting and stacking working well for players who have trouble leaving anything behind that they can fit in their bag.

We’re updating item info on your inventory screen so you can quickly delineate differences in similar looking items. We added some tweaks to icons to make they stand out better, and talked about making them more stylized in the future. Jesse made some layout improvements to mobile, and squashed a few lingering resizing issues.

The web team added some dialog boxes to a few different areas to help players navigate the page. While help tips can be useful the first couple times you navigate a site, we understand how annoying they can be, so we’re adding a setting to disable them too. Jesse has been working on navigation improvements, and we looked at the latest layouts. We discussed some new menu options, and ways to make user flow and experience better.

We’re still working on the bug that has interfered with our Veil News Network (VNN) drone. While that issue is being fixed, we’re moving ahead with a few ui improvements to the HUD. Designed to travel around the play area highlighting points of interest, and capturing action live as it happens, the drone can provide some useful information to players. We want to make sure that information is a clear, and concise as possible.

We continue our performance improvements to our landmark buildings. The Thorcon Power Plant is huge, and a great place to explore, but not if your frame rate is cut in half. The team is adding audio support to these buildings, and we have some new sounds for weapons and players too. It’s not as easy to run through the underbrush without making a sound now, and racking a round into your weapon makes a telltale noise too.

We’ve been testing out our loot drop scenarios to make sure the bugs are all worked out, and so far so good. We have a variety of fun challenges to offer players a chance to pick up some valuable loot until we include some quests. We added some visual cues to help players better see where they have to go to get their rewards, or deliver items to access secret caches.

Lastly, one of the biggest projects for the last couple sprints has been the stripping down, and rebuilding of the old map. We took away everything, and built the game area from the ground up with topographical data of the Lahaina area, all the current roads, and existing structures as a base. We’ve replaced all the foliage for better performance, and to get rid of non-native plants to make it look more authentic. With much of that work now done in staging, we’ve been able to finally push the new map to production.

While we continue to fill it in section by section, we discussed adding a few new areas to explore. We looked at concept drawings for cliff communities, abandoned bunkers, sunken waterfronts, forgotten mines, and other areas perfect for ambushes, and finding loot. The team talked about other places, and buildings we’d like to see down the road, while we make passes adding in plants, buildings, and paths. Below you can see some of the new foliage from a birds eye view, and the mountains from a clearing in the jungle.

July 27, 2018

Lahaina Loot Boxes

The team did a lot of inventory and crafting work over the weekend, to make sure the arts and crafts scene in post-fracture Lahaina remains vibrant. They added some ui improvements, made some adjustments to the drag and drop between the inventory and crafting screen, and worked through stacking and splitting issues. We added a double press item deletion safeguard to make sure players don’t accidentally destroy an item when they are in a clicking frenzy. The team also expanded the official recipe list with a few new useful creations that will come in handy when exploring the wilds. We took some time to discuss mystery/experimental recipes as well, and how best to encourage players to experiment, and discover how to make things not written down

After finding and fixing a whole new round of weapon attachment bugs, we finally have the situation in hand. Scopes, stabilizers, suppressors, mounts, magazines, sights, and bayonets are all working as they should now. We still need the art team to make a final pass, ensuring that everything looks good, but the mechanics are working well.

With all the add-ons working for weapons, we took some time to make sure there was something worthy to shoot at, and made good progress with creatures and AI. Our creature AI got an upgrade, and we have the first pass at wave/group tactics done. The horrors of the jungle avoid grouping up in tight areas like halls and doorways, they move at angles instead of straight lines, and they make use of cover as the run through the jungle. We discussed making stronger versions of our Trophy Hunters and looked at a number of potential improvements like: ranged attacks, poison, healing, and buffing as well as just making unsually tough or fast individuals.

We continued work on group play, finishing up the ability to heal others in your group. We need to add a little ui polish, and a round of testing, but we’ve worked out all the previous bugs, and have the system up and running. Now your best shooters can stay shooting as you patch them up, and players too hurt to move can get back on their feet in a hurry.

We’ve made some improvements to looting too. The time it takes you to empty a container in now based on its size, (bigger containers take longer to pillage.) We are finishing up the visual effects and map alerts for our loot drops to make sure it’s easy to find where gear and goods have appeared on the map. We want you to spend your time gripped in a life or death struggle for those weapons and resources, not fighting to find them.

Terry is completing documentation for the Git rollover, and finishing setting up the East Coast mirror. We scratched a few longstanding bugs off the list, and started work on drone camera documentation. We looked at some of the improvements and fixes included in UE 4.20 and discussed an upgrade strategy that would give us the most benefit, without chasing down a tsunami of compatibility issues.

Finally, our map rebuild and restoration took a few more steps forward. After a few setbacks last week kept us from pushing the new map to production, we plan on doing it by Friday. All the world map code support is finished, and we continue to fill in the play area section by section. Below you can see the framework of some ruins along the beach, just waiting for an apocalyptic makeover.

Check back later in the week for more updates.

July 25, 2018

Building Houses and the Roads Most Traveled

As the end of the week approaches, the team continues to focus on group play features. We’re making a few ui improvements to the inventory to better highlight what items you have equipped, or loaded in your quick bar. We’re making it easier for you to find online friends or House members who might be interested in running through the jungle with you. However, we know that not every match, or group is made in heaven, so we’re adding a way to kick members out of your team. In addition, we’re adding blocking tools so you won’t have to deal with them, or anyone else who is bothering you, again.

The team is pulling in some new audio elements to various parts of the map. We’re working on areas by the water to make sure the beach sounds great, and different from what you hear once you’ve crossed the tree line. A few of the game’s unique buildings have been placed on the map, namely the Thorcon Power Plant, Communications Tower, and the Lahaina Armory. We’re making sure each one of these structures has its own sound, so you can tell what building you’re in just by listening to your speakers.

Much of last sprint was dedicated to stripping down the map and rebuilding it. With that work mostly done, a large part of sprint 25 is dedicated to populating the map, and finishing the roads and trails. Below you can see a section of the map where the ruins of a neighborhood will soon go.

We’re using the automated building system we created to procedurally build the houses and structures that survived the global catastrophe, and fill out the map. The system allows us a wide range of customization so players won’t have to look at slightly different versions of the same 2 or 3 houses all over. Having already imported all the existing roads in Lahaina, we’re using a similar procedural path tool to make sure that any new trails are connected to the existing network, and don’t needlessly twist and turn. We still have to rough up the roads, and buildings to show the damage the fracture did to everything, but below is a shot of how good everything is looking already.

As you can see from above, we’ve made some improvements to weather and lighting. The rain and fog is getting some more attention, and we continue to work on our night time lighting, tweaking the brightness of stars, and making sure buildings don’t excessively illuminate the surrounding areas. We talked a bit more about giving certain creatures in a group different abilities and tactics, like being able to use missile weapons, or other ranged attacks, and we continue to improve their AI to make them more dangerous.

Everyone is finally moved over to Git, much to Terry’s joy, and we fixed a longstanding spawning bug. The web team made some layout changes, and did a little ui work to improve user flow. Lastly, the art team is busy making a 3D model of our repair/refurbish machine. Used to clean and repair clothing and armor, the machine saves players from the dangers of torn body armor, and the embarrassment of being killed while wearing dirty unmentionables.

That’s everything for now. We’ll be back next week with more updates and screenshots

July 19, 2018

Tag: inventory