quests Archives - Fractured Veil

It’s Unreal – 5.1 IS HERE!

Aloha Thrivers,

We’re SO excited to share that after many months of work, we’re finally shipping the Unreal Engine 5 Upgrade to your PCs!

We want our community to join the newest version of the game sooner rather than later, but we know this was a big lift and have found even more bugs than we thought we would. We’ve always had bugs (#gamedevlife) but because of all your help, we’ve been hacking through them as much as possible so we don’t want to stop doing that anytime soon!

Since this is a major update, we want to make sure everyone is aware of a few things that will impact your experience with the game:

Your character(s) will be wiped – which means you will need to create a new name and look for your character in the world.

All of your loot will be gone and any bases you’ve built will be gone since we’re starting a fresh new server. This ensures no issues, bugs or corruptions carry over from our old Unreal 4 build.
Your minimum required specs may have changed; we will share a survey in the first weeks of testing to identify how the game performs on different hardware.

We currently believe to achieve a mostly stable 1080p 30 fps experience at medium/low settings you’ll need a PC with the following specifications:

OS: Win 10
CPU: intel i5 8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 2600
RAM: At least 8GB
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1060 / AMD RX 580

We will carefully monitor the community’s feedback about this topic

Scope of the test

While the new build doesn’t necessarily have new content if you have been playing the game within the past few months, it includes a great deal of changes, bug fixes, and improvements. Not to mention a completely new global illumination system and a lot of good stuff that comes with UE5.

With this update, we will be particularly interested in hearing your feedback about the following:

Game performance and Stability in Unreal Engine 5.1
Server Stability
Economy Changes
Zones balancing
World Loot Distribution
NPC / Enemy AI
Weapon Balance

However, we do have some tiny surprises for you to find…

Other things to keep in mind

Fractured Veil is still Alpha(ish) in that we’re testing, breaking, fixing, breaking, and fixing again. While we fixed most of the bugs you reported in the previous months, we are aware that with a new game engine, NEW bugs are going to appear. We are still months away from our Early Access release later this fall and we will do our best to release a great experience for everyone.

Please check our discord server inside #status-and-bugs for a list of Know issues.

We’re Just Getting Started

We know there are still some issues, but we didn’t want that to stop us from getting 5.1 in your hands! We need your help to keep testing, playing, discovering new bugs, and having FUN. All of us at Paddle Creek Games want to say THANK YOU for being so patient and supportive. You’re the reason we’re doing all of this and we can’t wait for you to see what’s coming in the next few months!

Cheers,
Ryan and the folks at Paddle Creek

June 8, 2023

Time To Go On A Quest

This week the team started off by circling back to refine and build out a number of player and social features. We’re looking into ways to highlight our affiliate program, and improve its usability. We looked at how a few other games use theirs, and discussed at some length what would work best for us. This led to a conversation about gifting Kula, our premium currency, to other players, and using it to buy packages or merchandise to give to your friends or fellow House members.

We looked at the House sign up and creation process. Remember, if you want to go fast in Lahaina, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We started a list of House improvements, and other issues we found too confusing in other social aspects of the game. We talked a bit about bundling game packages to make it easier for people to buy copies of the game for their friends, as well as clearer notifications to tell when your friends are online, or playing the game.

Jared cleared out a few bugs on the web page, and dug into some form validation work. After finding a bug with how the forums work last week, we decided to take them out of iframes, and figure out a better way to incorporate them on the page. Jesse finished the design for the ingame shipping/logistics company Alohagistics. Instead of the boring old crates, and boxes found around the map, players will now find a good mix of packages from 2050’s cheapest shipping solution. Alohagistics – Get There Eventually.

We continue to push ahead with crafting improvements. Jesse has finished the last of the wireframes and we just need to hook them up. He’s still doing some rollover work on inventory items, and addressing a few minor bugs. With a little ui polish, we hope to have the first iteration of the system working by next week. We also took a look at our old keybindings, and made a few minor changes to make certain actions in the game more intuitive, while keeping things like shooting, running, jumping, and crouching in the usual places.

After a lot of hard work on our quest demo this sprint, it’s completed and moved from staging to production. Certain Trophy Hunters now throw things at players more macabre than pineapples, and we fixed a bug that would crash the game when a player would throw a weapon. We’ve worked out the bugs with the zipline, so you can now enjoy a panoramic trip from the top of the Communication Tower, and actually stop at the bottom. We’ve: fixed some audio issues, finalized the quest dialog, populated the areas around the tower with loot and quest items, and worked out the lighting as you can see from what’s left of this tiny park near the tower.

We’ve completed models for the next group of mutants to chase and murder players, as well as fixed many of our weather issues (before we upgrade trueSky next sprint), and made a lot of performance improvements. However, with all the work we put into the quest demo, we didn’t quite finish a few goals. We’re carrying over a few things into the next sprint including finally biting the bullet and updating to UE 4.20.2. We’ll have more on that later this week.

September 11, 2018

Lighting Paths and Cloudy Skies

The web team continues to dig into the player profile page making improvements, and streamlining the friends and referral process. Jesse put on his research hat this week, and looked into a number of other games, picking out what works, and what seems confusing. Using that knowledge we looked at a number of wireframes, and talked through changes we could implement to make the process as easy, and appealing as possible.

Jared is busy hooking up some of these improvements, and we talked through some other player interactions we’d like to foster. Various incentives for things like: completing your player profile, connecting your social media favorites to the game, and uploading shots or streams of your gameplay, were discussed. We came up with a good set of rewards and bonuses we can give players in the near future, but no FRV research hats I’m afraid. That’s Jesse’s thing.

We continue to push forward with a number of audio improvements across the board. We have new sounds for picking-up and dropping items depending upon their size and what they’re made of. I personally find the clang and slight echo of an axe dropping in the underground spawn area to be strangely pleasant, while my office mate feels the clang loses it’s appeal after the 50th drop in a row. However, we both agree that it sounds realistic.

It seems as though that the skies in the game are filled predominantly with one type of cloud, the cirrus. A few weeks back Chris pointed out the flaw in TrueSky, and we requested more: cumulus, stratus, cirrocumulus, nimbostratus, and a few others we could still remembered from that section of science class in high school. We’re working on adding some variety to the sky now, as well as making some improvements to their low hanging representatives, the fog.

While we continue to populate the game map with: buildings, roads, plants and structures, this week we started adding a few other things, namely boxes and bodies. Players can find a number of different types of containers to rummage through and loot. Ranging from a cargo container to a tiny shoebox, we have a container for you. We’re working on an ingame shipping company logo to give the containers some personality, and have the auto-looting feature up and running. Most of the bodies have been pretty well looted, and are there to add an ominous feel to the forest, and serve as a warning where they are plentiful. As far as I know, none are affixed with a shipping label.

Performance improvements continue with the Veil Station upgrade. In the near future we plan on using the station as the social hub of the game, instead of the Thorcon Power Plant, which is now the main gathering point for players. We’re making some improvements to our procedural building system in order to create pre-trashed buildings. Currently, we can add rickety decks and slight damage on the fly, but have to go back and grunge up siding and roofs by hand.

One of our main focuses remains completing our first quest scenario, centered around the Communications Tower. We have the storyline, and tasks worked out, and looked at a scene breakdown of the area: where players have to go, the obstacles they will encounter, and the items available to loot. We discussed marking objectives in the HUD as point of interest, and subtle lighting cues that will point characters in the right direction at night.

The team continues to make good progress in overall lighting in the game as well. We’ve spent a lot of time improving our volumetric lighting, and making sure that areas lit up at night act as a beacon for players, but still allow them to move around stealthily. You can see the fruits of that balancing act in this shot of a shack built in what used to be a parking lot.

We’ll be back next week with more.

August 31, 2018

Attaching Cameras and Creating Talents

This week marks the beginning of sprint 16 and we spent some time going over what got done from our last sprint. The highlights include: completing the bug hitlist from our Friends and Family Alpha, weapon attachments for all your scope and bayonet needs, a quest system to give players a little purpose, a item spawning system to ensure that there’s plenty of loot available, and we finally have a working elevator in the communication tower.

We did find a slight problem at the top however. There’s a sizable area where a player can fall unexpectedly and inexplicably hundreds of feet to their death. We briefly discussed leaving it and putting up a “Mind the gap!” sign but decided it would probably be best just to fix it. We pushed our armor system and crafting tools into sprint 16 along with, finishing work on a programmatic building system, and designing a talent system. You can always see what we have planned and what we’re working on currently, by checking out our sprint section.

The team discussed notifications and talked about how to best integrate them with our tactical map and House command features. We want Houses to be able to send alerts to all members whether they are logged in or not. This led to a fairly in-depth conversation about base building and what features we’d need and want to be included. We discussed possibilities for customization and the game mechanics involved with a player building something from scratch instead of just taking over an abandoned building. We talked about how defending your base would work, and went over different scenarios involving automated turrets and defences, including letting players operate a turret via the web.

We continued work on our shopping cart. Many bugs were squashed including one in which duplicate items would break everything. We added address field validation and we’re auto-populating city with zipcode now. We’ll have chronological sorting to the story section soon, so you can read about events and people in the order in which they happened. Jesse is finishing up our Manimal logo and working on a ui design for attachments, before moving on to talent trees.

Terry is working through some issues he ran into with Plastic while trying to merge 4.17, and San continued working on APIs for persistence, as well as cleaned up things on the backend. We talked about how to best implement a camera that would provide screenshots at a certain frequency. We discussed the mechanics of how that might work and where we would attach it. The team talked how we could use such a system beyond just tactical purposes.

Finally, with so many systems getting into a working state and models reaching completion, we talked quite a bit about trailers and gameplay videos. We went over different types of videos highlighting certain aspects of the game and how that differs from a cinematic style trailer. We kicked around a few different ideas and Jesse is working on some possible storyboards. With the art team finishing up work on the communication tower, they’ll be focusing on some of the other large buildings. Soon players will be able to explore more than just the loading area inside the Thorcon power plant.

I’ll be back on Thursday with more updates and some new screenshots from our creative meeting.

October 3, 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

Tags, Forums, and Kill Data

As usual we got a lot of work done over the weekend and hit the week running. Here’s what we we’ve done since our last update.

Our forums are now hooked up . Instead of trying to create our own we decided to go with Discourse. It seems to be simple, intuitive and most people are familiar with it. Best of all, it’s already done so we don’t have to spend precious engineering hours creating our own. Right now there are just a few threads, but as we get closer to rolling the game out, we’ll add more topics of discussion. However, there is already a thread for recipes of our in-game canned meat product. Feel free to add your own family SSHAM recipes if you have one. (Paddle Creek Games does not encourage or endorse the eating of fictitious meat products. Though we too get the tasty attraction of shrimp shu-mai)

We’ve added tags to the media section so you can easily sort images. If you only want to look at tools of death and destruction just click on the “weapons” tag and you’ll only see guns, clubs, and sharp things. This will become more useful as we post more art, 3D models, and screenshots.

The team is finishing up animation work on weapons, crafting, equipment use, and climbing/jumping. Patcher/launcher work continued to sort out any remaining bugs, and we talked through some lingering builder issues.

We’re working on our alerts system and polishing up the ui. We’re tying them into our quest system (which is in the process of being built itself) and integrating them into the map to help with navigation and to highlight points of interest. All this map talk led us to a discussion about a desire to have a tactical mini-map for houses that members can use to monitor the location and status of other house members. More on that later.

San spent a lot of time working on analytics regarding player death and respawning. Our plan is to make available that data to players and use it to create some really interesting graphs. You’ll be able to compare how your house did in combat compared to other houses or who the top shooter/stabber/clubber is on the island. You’ll be able to see how many times you died (maybe even what killed you) and how many confirmed kills you have. Being able to see your name or your house at the top of the kill list should help add some validity to your bragging rights, and we like to help. That about wraps it up. We’ll have another update later this week but now it’s time to go over some surfboard designs. Here are a couple that just came in.

July 11, 2017

Making the moon smaller and the price of pretty

We finished our (temporary, likely) in-game chat system so you can share your words with your friends (but not words with friends, we’re not that kind of game company). We designed it like our quest, alerts, and login to be integrated with Google services.

San worked on a new patcher for your quicker loading enjoyment and removed a bunch of old code. Multi-stream downloads are supported. He worked on a minimal RPC Voip test service that Discord would be hooked into later.

We did some more trueSky debugging to fix some of our mysterious glowing and other strange lighting issues. We found that directional light on the Moon was not hooked up. We also changed the moon’s size slightly in the hopes that it would fix some of our trouble. We don’t anticipate any effect on the tides.

We’re doing some more post processing work so you can expect some extra pretty pictures coming real soon. In addition, a bunch of environmental improvements are in the works including some improved blending and ground textures. Note the cool totem.

With all the environmental work coming up we had a discussion about its impact on performance. We talked about the balance between having a game that is enjoyable to play on a mid/low level GPU vs. making a setting that is as realistic and beautiful as possible. In the end we decided the price of pretty was worth it and we would focus on making a fun, lush environment instead of worrying about the game playing smoothly on an old laptop.

June 27, 2017

Friends and Thorcon and Genitals and Stars, oh my

Hey everyone! We had a busy week and these are some of the highlights……

The team made the friend request notifications smarter, so once you’ve sent a request you aren’t constantly reminded of it. We worked out a few lingering sitemap issues that were causing URLs to point in the wrong places. The team fine tuned the sidebar navigation following some of your suggestions. We hope it’s a much more intuitive clicking experience for you now. Thanks for the feedback! We smoothed out a number of styling and color problems on the blog and squashed a few minor layout related bugs there as well.

In the meeting, we discussed social links and if our energies would be better focused on providing useful in-game stats for players about their characters and houses. Instead of spending weeks tweaking the Facesnap or Twitterbook API’s, we decided to devote our time on systems that would benefit our players more directly.

We’ve started looking into how best to integrate Discord so our players can easily ask us questions and keep better apprised of our development process. Ideally, we’d end up on a channel with all our alpha users and let em chat with us there, or something. In the short term, players can add a link to their Discord user profile in the social settings.

Also this week, we should be getting our trueSky source license. Top minds are on it, the tippyest toppiest! We hope to have our sky looking a little more awesome gorgeous soon.

We’re starting to make a framework for our quest system so you can feel like you have a purpose while running around and get rewards. We’re also finishing up on how the inventory works, you have to put your stuff somewhere, and a couple of game mechanics including: cooking, crafting, and combat.

We’re working on a catalog of sorts for game items that users can look through. It will be separated by item type: clothes, weapons, medical equipment, etc. Items will be accompanied by a picture, game statistics, a description of what it is, and even how it works in some cases. We look forward to eventually reading the product reviews and seeing how many stars you give the travel size Leiomano.

We made a lot of other important decisions too. For instance, we decided that 127, the element used to provide power to some of the game’s most futuristic technology, is likely to cause genital cancers if inhaled. So there’s that…..

Here’s a look at the inside of the Thorcon plant. Hazmat suits or at the very least, lead underwear, is advised. We’ll have another update, with more eye candy, later this week.

June 26, 2017

Tag: quests

Scope of the test

We’re Just Getting Started