Lighting Archives - Page 3 of 9

Building a Safe Zone

A new sprint started this week and we’ll be focusing on finishing up a few systems that didn’t quite get finished from the previous sprint, more drone improvements, audio support across the map, building out five more world tiles, quests, and a number of AI updates.

The team fixed a handful of drone bugs and made some upgrades to the flying cameras that travel around the island filming anything of interest. We fixed a bug where the drone would get stuck flying backward while trying to fly a long distance towards players. We appreciated how impressive it was to go all that way in reverse but it looked silly. We fixed an issue where the drone would drift away from the refueling station before it was fully charged, and a problem with it crashing when a target was being scanned and died. We worked out a problem with it rotating in the wrong direction and smoothed out the camera so it’s less jittery when changing targets.

We’ve turned the lightning back on so players can enjoy a good light show in the sky again. We’ve also made some lighting improvements to torches, added some new animations, and updated its stats as a weapon, for all of you angry mob enthusiasts. In addition, the team fixed some issues with arrows not being attached to skeletal meshes properly or disappearing when hitting a surface too close to a player that fired it.

This week we added some fencing around the perimeter of the social hub of the game, the Thorcon Power plant. The fence marks the border of the safe zone inside where players can take a break to do some crafting without interruption, or just take respite from the struggles of survival. Below you can see a couple of shots of what the first pass of the fence looks like from the plant entrance.

If you enjoy staying on top of our development process and would like to see what we’ve done on a daily basis versus a bi-weekly one, check out our new Daily Update Twitter feed and see what’s happening every day of the week.

June 11, 2019

The Sounds of Survival

It’s the last week of the current sprint, and we’re working hard finishing up goals and adding a bit of polish to current systems. We’ve fixed a bug that was causing footsteps to play the wrong sound or no sound at all, so there won’t be any ultra-light-steppers in the game anymore. We’ve also added a new drinking sound so you can really enjoy the noise of a Manimal being slurped down.

Speaking of wet noises, the team has been focusing on giving Big Bob, our cannibal leader, his own voice so to speak. We’re working out his combat roar, his disapproving harrumphs when being shot, and all the other little smacks and gurgles his ample belly and twisted anatomy makes. If you’d like to read more about our inspiration and motivations behind which sounds we’re using, check out our latest Medium post about the sounds of survival in the world of Fractured Veil.

We’ve been adding plenty of sights to our sounds this week as well. We’ve improved our fire and smoke effects and added some new torch animations. Campfires have never looked better. Players running through the wilds should be able to see smoke more easily now, so they can join others in a song or sneak up quietly, and act out their favorite scary campfire story.

Our automated road system got some polish too. We’ve added more “road-side attractions” so players will have plenty to rummage through or take cover behind if they run into trouble. They may not be as involved as a Mystery Spot, or as iconic as the world’s biggest ball of twine, but the streetlights and other items alongside our roads help bring in a touch of realism and can be useful for players trying to survive. Here are some day/night shots of a couple of freshly completed roads.

Finally, our GPU giveaway ends in less than a week. If you haven’t entered to win an XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB yet, you still have a few days. There are multiple ways to enter including letting us know your five favorite features in survival games.

June 6, 2019

Having “The Talk” With the Drones

As we approach the end of sprint 34 the team continues making audio updates. We’ve added new tree falling sounds, audio support to doors in the game’s social hub, the Thorcon Power Plant, and gave the noise produced by the drone engines some tweaks as they change speed. In addition, we made a list of possible headshot alerts and narrowed down a favorite audio cue for hitting the sweet spot with the help of the public.

We increased the radius of torch lights to help players get a better look at their surroundings, and spot the dangers lurking in the darkness a bit sooner. Players have a new source of water, as we made puddles drinkable. We’re not saying the water is always going to be safe to drink, but you can give it a shot if you’re really thirsty. It needs a little bit of improvement yet, but we also added the ability to burn bodies. In addition to helping keep the landscape clean, burning a body will help players avoid attracting the attention of cannibals, and others, and bears, oh my!

We fixed a number of crafting bugs including: a bug where players could craft themselves out of the server by trying to craft an overly large stack of items in a single request, a bug where being killed while crafting would cause the items that were “on hold” to be lost, and a bug with items being deleted when trying to equip non-equippable items.

Lastly, the drone got a little love this week and gave a little back in an unexpected way. We fixed a bug with the drone getting stuck behind targets confused about which way to go, updated the spotlight and other night time effects, and added multi zoom effects to the drone for zooming in on areas when far away. It was then that we noticed a problem. We’re not sure if it’s the hundred years of isolation and loneliness after the Great Fracture, or just that the drones are reaching the age where they start noticing animals in a different way, but they gained an obsession with deer rears. That’s right. They like big bucks and they can not lie. Below you can see a short clip of what happened to our innocent drones after implementing the new cinematic module this week.

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May 3, 2019

Building a Better Bob and Handing Out Beta Keys

The team is in the middle of a huge audio and lighting pass. We’ve made some improvements to torch and campfire lighting and we’ve added slightly darker borders around crosshairs to help players see better when aiming at bright objects. We’re working on directional sound improvements so players can figure out where bullets are coming from, and combat sounds are muffled if you’ve taken cover inside a building. We’re adding ambient noises to a number of areas like: buildings, the beach, and noises that differentiate deep jungle from scrub land. We’ve also upgraded: bullet impact, footsteps, jumping, and tree falling sounds to round out the noises of the week. Things have never sounded better.

We spent some time improving our favorite cannibal overlord and all-round bad guy Big Bob Abrmo. The Maui meat mogul turned ravenous mutant got a boost to his projectile throw rate and an increase in the speed of the things he throws. He may be no Nolan Ryan, but Big Bob is bringing some heat now, and will make an even better combat closer than before. It wasn’t just Bob’s arms that went through a revamp however, we also upgraded his gouty legs. We fixed his occasional stutter step issues, and his tendency to find a spot he liked and stick to it instead of wandering around looking for food like he should. We also increased his charging speed. Don’t let his size or cane fool you, in a straight line Bob is more than able to catch most things when he’s excited.

We made some improvements to Bob’s supporting cast this week as well. We’ve increased the speed of body parts that Trophy Collectors throw at players, and we’ve made it easier for mutants to move through their own kind instead of getting bunched up Three Stooges style when taking action. The team tracked down and fixed a bug where a mutant’s line of sight could be blocked by items such as arrows. This made for a fun bug that would make mutant navigation erratic if they had enough arrows stuck in them at one time. It was fun to watch, but unfair to the poor mutants running into trees.

Speaking of fun, we are in the middle of our next contest. Five winners will be drawn, with the top two winners receiving a brand new XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB and a Beta Key to Fractured Veil. Third, fourth and fifth prize winners will receive a Beta key for Fractured Veil (not that Beta has started yet). There are multiple ways to enter, but only 3 days left before we pick winners, so enter now.

April 18, 2019

Polish and Performance Improvements

Sprint 34 began this week and like the previous sprint, we will be spending a lot of the next 30 days focusing on polishing up current features, and hunting down any remaining bugs that are having a negative effect on gameplay. Specifically we will be improving AI capabilities and actions, adding more world spaces, adding some finishing touches to the drone, making performance improvements, installing a crash logging system, enhancing the game loop and making a player path progression that can keep our first set of players actively engaged for a few weeks of play.

The first tier of our pinging system is finished. This should allow players to ping various items like food or ammo to quickly communicate to others in their group the location and type of loot they’ve found. We plan on adding more features to the system soon to make communicating with others fast and efficient. We added a “hold F to eat” mechanic when picking food up off the ground so players can eat on the run if they need to. We also fixed bugs with containers not being able to be equipped in your inventory, and one that would keep you from looting a weapon with no ammo.

Our homepage got a big update this week too. We’ve added numerous navigation and style improvements, as well as a number of slides that better explain the game. Users should be able to get to various sections easier, and learn more about the game, the development process, and upcoming contests/events. Check it out and let us know what you think on our discord server.

Our performance improvements continue as well. We’re taking another optimization pass on procedural buildings and breaking down levels to get a boost. While we have had some crashing issues in the last few play tests, we’re working through them and still have logged some quality play time. Below you can see a video from a recent session that shows a player trying to keep his distance while filling some mutants with a few arrows. Everything is going as planned until a surprise bear decides to join in the fun.

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April 12, 2019

Character Customization and Thudding Clubs

The team is finishing up our big optimization and performance push, and moving into character customization work this week. Our first step was to introduce a female player model to the game. Right now it works just like it does in nature. You randomly spawn in as male or female, and in the future we will allow for more personal touches to your character. While we still need to make a few adjustments to the woman model, she works fine for testing purposes. We’ll be spending some time working through all the combinations of weapons and gear with both models to make sure that they work on the post-apocalyptic red carpet, and don’t break the game somehow.

We made some more drone improvements too. We learned that the flying camera’s attention span left a lot to be desired, and they would often stop filming characters or battles if they noticed a squirrel running around nearby. We’re making sure they understand that players are more important than small rodents, and we’ve removed their spotlights when they’re flying around during the day.

We’ve made a few changes to the game’s co-stars this week as well. Players will find an increased number of wolves running across the landscape, hunting down anything too slow to escape the pack. We also discovered a bug with some of our mutants not moving unless they were aggroed. This led to situations where the terrors of jungle would stack up inside each other like twisted Maui nesting dolls. While this might make for a memorable encounter, we want the horrors to respect their personal space.

Finally, our audio work continues this week with updated soundbanks and improvements to: weak points, things breaking, weapons, ambient noise, buildings, and directional sounds. The underground spawning area now sounds as dark and dank as it looks, and melee weapons like the ones below will clang off metal objects, thud off of wood, and smack against your enemies.

April 5, 2019

Performance Improvements and Completing Packages

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.

March 5, 2019

Building Better Group AI

As the week winds down we’re completing work on a few items from the game’s fictional companies. Soon the map will be littered with branded items that remind players of the thriving Lahaina that existed before The Great Fracture. Players will be able to slaughter their thirst by discovering old cans of Manimal. They’ll marvel at the shelf life of SSHAM, Lahaina’s favorite processed meat product, and dig for loot in abandoned Alohagistics packages that didn’t “Get There Eventually.” We also looked at a number of new speargun options ranging from the top-of-the-line future designs to ones that would make MacGyver proud, and a few that were more fun than practical.

With some new weapons on the horizon we made some improvements to mutant AI, focusing on groups. We’ve already made a lot of improvements to Big Bob this week, and are wrapping up more generic leader AI work now. Leaders now generate an array of locations around an enemy that others can move to. They fill the ranks of their groups with new members when need be, and dead or disabled members are now automatically removed from any temporary AI group they may belong to. In the past, mutants would keep a place at the table so to speak for their lost. It was touching, but ultimately not good for game play. We also made a few improvements to the AI threat generation system.

We continue to adjust lighting and add detail to the social hub of the game, the Thorcon power plant. The team is making a number of performance improvements currently to help out your cooling fans, and let you enjoy all the detail we’ve put into the massive structure. We continue to build out the map around the games hero buildings, ensuring that there is plenty to do and discover as you journey between destinations. We looked at a few new concept drawings that should be a lot of fun to explore.

With all the recent foliage and weather improvements we turned our attention on making some audio advancements. We want the jungle and forgotten places to sound as good as they look and will be making a large audio pass in the near future. Below you can see the culmination of the lighting and environmental work we’ve completed so far.

Don’t forget that you have less than a week to enter our XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB giveaway. The contest ends February 13th. There are multiple ways to enter including joining the Fractured Veil discord server, and reserving your player name.

February 7, 2019

Building a Better Jungle

The team continued work on our autonomous eyes-in-the-skies this week, and made some great progress. The drones now have fuel and refueling logic. Sometime soon they will occasionally need to make trips to a refueling area, giving players brief windows of anonymity. We added Kantan Charts so they will be able to display graphs in the HUD, and cleaned up the drone restarter code to ensure that their coverage of game action is maximized. We also found and fixed a number of bugs including: the drone getting stuck in the tops of trees, problems with moving to new areas properly, a bug where the drone could get confused on which state to be in when too high off the ground, and becoming stuck in place when reaching an interest level of 0, while searching for targets. We had one incidence when the drone ended up stuck in the comm tower base area like a bird in a mall. It wasn’t compelling viewing.

We completed the first pass at a new drone HUD as well. We want the HUD to display useful information for players, but not cram the view with so much that it distracts from the quality and detail of the camera itself. The new HUD contains: a compass, altimeter, various stat tracking widgets, CPU/GPU stats, information about the drone state, and an area for various messages. You can check out all of the various improvements and the new HUD on our YouTube page.

As we fill out the map around the social hub of the game, the Thorcon Power Plant, we’ll soon be working on some of our most densely packed neighborhoods. The team is making sure the parks are sufficiently foreboding, giving them just the right amount of half-working street lights and dilapidated trappings of society. We’re making a materials pass over everything too. Soon metal objects will spark and wood will chip when you hit it because you’re a bad shot, or just like shooting everything.

We’re working on torches and campfires to make sure that the light is visible from a distance at night and the fire gives off smoke. We looked at a few more concept designs for decals, signs, and decorations. We finalized a look for a few crafting items, some new weapons, and the player bank. The team has also made good progress on a procedural foliage tool. Along with our building and road system, we can fill out areas quickly and efficiently with great looking places to explore, and lush environments. Here’s a look at a few areas filled in with the foliage system.

Finally, don’t forget that we’re giving away a XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB. The contest lasts for another 13 days, ending on February 13th. There are multiple ways to enter including joining the Fractured Veil discord server, and reserving your player name.

January 31, 2019

Drone Tracking and Lighting Improvements

We’ve continued our road work this week, improving the roads most traveled and connecting hidden trails. Using the existing network of Lahaina streets as a guideline, we want to ensure that players move throughout the map and avoid bottlenecks. We’re taking some time to make the neighborhood ruins a little bit nicer too. The team is furnishing homes this week. Players will soon have all the comforts of a post-apocalyptic home including: cupboards to open, old refrigerators to search, but not hide in, medicine cabinets, vermin, outdated canned goods, and in some cases, a surprise mutant.

Our game drones have never been better. The team has put a lot of work into their AI and movements. We’ve improved some of their animations and their ability to work their way out of buildings when they get accidentally trapped or stuck. They are really good at tracking things now, and are much better at deciding what is worth filming. We’re currently working on overlay and HUD options, and should have something game ready soon. You can check out all these improvements on our YouTube page.

With many of our TrueSKY problems worked out, we’ve been tweaking our environmental lighting with great results. The fog, water, and sunrises have never looked more gorgeous. Below you can see the fruits of our lighting labor.

There’s no better way to see all the environmental work we’ve done than with a XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB, and we just happen to be giving one away. The contest lasts for another 18 days, ending on February 13th. There are multiple ways to enter including joining the Fractured Veil discord server, and reserving your player name.

January 26, 2019

Tag: Lighting