road Archives - Fractured Veil

Roadside Attractions

The end of our systems update is in sight and we know how eager many of you are to get in the game. We appreciate your patience! We’ll be handing out new testing keys again soon. As always, a big mahalo to our current testers who help us find bugs and provide great ideas for the game. We love your feedback! Here’s a list of everything you found and we fixed since the play session last week.

Aazlor – Outline on the building part that is going to be upgraded so you can see what you are upgrading.
Eldisty – Can’t see other players muzzle flashes/bullets and there are no sounds
nubkid – AI hitching once more than 60 were spawned.
zaccsi – AI Sliding.
Maikowl – AI on constructed pieces.
Azshire the Great – Spawned in God Mode.
Larry – Server crash when building.

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

There’s no doubt that discovering a new building or big landmark in a game can be exciting. As players of survival games ourselves, we know how fun it is to explore a large structure, looking for hidden loot or whatever else may be living inside. It’s one of the reasons we’ve spent a ton of dev time making our Comm Tower, Thorcon Power Plant, and Veilstation great places to explore. We also thought getting there should be just as much fun.

We’re always going to be adding more stuff (closed-alpha means we can keep testing / adding / breaking), so for the roads more and less travelled, as well as the little stops in between, we wanted to give exploration fans reasons to get excited. This week we focused on improving some of those in between areas and our diorama system. The system automatically places interesting things to see and loot to scrounge along the trails, paths, rivers, and roads, basically everywhere players commonly travel going from place to place. Take a look below at some of our roadside attractions.

July 31, 2020

Road Work and Game Fixes

If you’d like to travel to Lahaina in the year 2120 and test your survival skills while helping us make the game more fun to play we’d love to have you. Click the link to join our discord and go to the #assign-roles channel. We’ll give you a key and get you set up in the game.

A big mahalo to all of the testers for their bug hunting prowess and their great suggestions to make Fractured Veil better! Here’s a list of everything we’ve fixed or improved using their input from last week’s play session. We’re hard at work addressing the remaining bugs and implementing more of your awesome ideas in the game!

nubkid – Road decals are being applied to wooden crates and other objects. Bodies disappear too quickly, less than 5 minutes.
Aqua – Recipes not updating as you gather resources. Building pieces disappearing 5 seconds after being placed, mainly walls/windows. Constructed objects and bodies are not persisting between server restarts after a crash.
Kruton and Schism – “Take all” is broken.
Palaman/Fatih/40 – Can’t build campfire in your building. Need to make it more obvious that totems need to be built and stocked with resources to auto-repair. Can place iron ore in campfire and it disappears.
Saur – Round floors not rotating properly. Code Locks are not accepting codes being entered.
Sckiz – Can’t put bandages on the toolbar.
TrublsmScHOLAR – Task: If player is holding a torch, hold f on dead body to ignite. Persist hints on screen for longer.
Dreis – No progress bar on recycling buildings.Mouse look and feels a little clunky, not as smooth and responsive as other games.

In addition to squashing the bugs and implementing the suggestions made by our testers we made a number of improvements to the diorama system and map. The team added new buildings throughout the play area, improved road materials, and implemented the new road system. Lights, cars, and loot will now be spawn procedurally on every road. Here’s a look at what players can find while exploring the beaten paths in the game.

May 8, 2020

Safe Zone Updates and Fixes

This week the team made several improvements to the Safe Zone that surrounds the Thorcon Power Plant. We added a new “In Safe Zone” icon to the player’s status bar so you can tell when you’re in a protected area. Toxicity no longer decays or affects the player while in the zone and items can no longer be thrown while you are in the safe zone. Bandages, syringes, medkits, and all food items are now usable there too.

We fixed a bug where foliage destruction was getting desynced when a level was streamed in a second time during a single play session. We Adjusted the holster rate of all weapons to improve the overall smoothness of weapon switching, and the holstering animation no longer blocks subsequent requests to equip a new item. We added some improvements to the mutants too. Cannibals can now return to a dead body they were previously consuming if they were interrupted during their dinner. Additionally, the cannibal will now only receive their cannibalization buff if they completely finish eating a body.

Lastly, we made updates to our procedural road and diorama tools to fill out the world with more variety and content without needing to hand place everything. We added corpses, barrier areas, and torches to dirt and gravel paths. Below you can see a few screenshots of the tools in work.

April 30, 2020

Audio Improvements and Breaking Windows

We started the week by making a big audio pass over a wide variety of game interactions and systems. There are new sounds for menu navigation, eating fruit, meat, and canned foods, crafting, adding an attachment to weapons, holding your breath while aiming, and felling a tree. In addition, we’ve made a few updates to the elevator to make it sound more realistic. We may not be ready for an elevator simulator mini-game, but the new updates are a big improvement. If it clinks, clanks, buzzes or thuds, we have audio for it.

Much to Chris’ joy, we began some bullet penetration work so players will be able to break and ruin a lot of what they discover by shooting it. While it’s true that non-broken glass is a rare find after the fracture, you will soon be able to shatter windows and the island’s usable glass market on a whim. We also talked about including gas tanks and other volatile objects to the list of ruinable/explodable items for players who like to examine things while they’re on fire.

The team also nabbed a few bugs this week. We fixed a bug that would cause the drone stream to constantly restart. We nabbed a construction error that would empty your inventory when trying to place a piece in your structure, and we finished attaching and positioning fire fx for flaming torch projectiles. Throwing a burning object at someone’s face has never looked better.

Work continues on our AI spawner so that we can fine-tune how many horrors of the jungle hunt players in different areas, and where they might hide. We want to make sure that we don’t overfill an area with terrors or leave a neighborhood too safe. The spawner improvements allow us to quickly adjust mutant and animal numbers across the map. We’re also improving loot drop mechanics and are working on a beach tool similar to the automated river, road, and building systems we have now.

Below are a few areas created with these automated tools. As you can see, they are looking great.

August 22, 2019

Building Broken Neighborhoods

We just started a new sprint, and in addition to adding a few more features to our drones and automated systems, the team is focusing on designing a construction system and making a trailer for the game.

A number of weapon upgrades and fixes were completed this week. We added unequip and throw sounds to the item/weapon classes and fixed a bug that prevented weapon equipping sounds to play. We also fixed an issue with first-person animations getting stuck when swapping weapons.

We made a few torch improvements too. A bug where the torch wouldn’t play an unequip animation was fixed and we addressed a problem with torch fire VFX not being properly attached to the torch mesh while moving. While it looked cool and probably simulated the visual effects of severe dehydration accurately, we like our fire to obey the laws of physics.

In preparation for our game trailer, we’re finishing up what we’re calling “roadside attractions” to our automated road-building system. The paths most traveled in the game now have a collection of signs, boxes, streetlights, and debris to remind players of the vibrant Lahaina that once was. We improved the weather system as well and gave the sky that deep blue that Maui is famous for. Below you can see the culmination of this work in one of the neighborhoods that we plan to feature in our trailer.

If you’re interested in a daily update of our development, check out our Daily Update Twitter feed and see what’s happening every day of the week.

July 12, 2019

Creating a Pack Mentality

The team has been focused on AI improvements and has made quite a few this week. We want the animals in Fractured Veil to act as naturally as possible, and our mutants as smart as they are ugly. We started the improvements with animals.

Deer now make use of our dynamic AI grouping system. When a player spooks a buck it will start running and others nearby will join it; We also increased the time they will flee to make them harder to hunt. Our wolves got a few new skills as well. We added a howl mechanic that allows them to alert others nearby to food or danger and form a pack. We’ve added a “scent” feature to players that allow the wolves (and a few other nasty things down the road) to track you down like an angry parent when you’ve missed curfew. Finally, we adjusted their combat tactics a bit by employing “hit and run” attacks and having them charge at different angles instead of just sitting in front of a player, making them much harder to target and hit. All in all, a big wolf pack is one of the most dangerous things on the island now.

We are incorporating some of this grouping work into our mutants as well. It’s never been more important to properly dispose of your kills by burning them or risk creating a cannibal horde looking for fresh meat. We’ve beefed up Big Bob making him a big problem for a group, and virtually impossible to take out single-handedly. The Trophy Collectors just got deadlier too. We’ve adjusted the poison damage their fetid projectiles do, and made it easier for players to get poisoned when hit or standing in the noxious cloud left by their rotting ranged weapons.

As work on improving our road tool continues, we started to build a similar system for rivers, streams, and creeks. While the team still has some kinks to work out, we hope to have a system for procedurally generating waterways on the map soon. Below you can see one of our most complete roads going through the remains of a neighborhood, and a stream cutting through the jungle.

Don’t forget to check out our new Daily Update Twitter feed if you enjoy staying on top of our development process. We post updates and bug fixes there daily so you can stay on top of our progress

June 19, 2019

Tag: road