We started off the week by getting the team system up and running. Players now have the ability to make groups with their friends, or anyone else who’s up for running around the ruins of future Lahaina, looting and shooting indiscriminately. There are map markers indicating how well everyone is staying in formation for tactical strikes, or to point out who’s chasing deer instead of concentrating on the objective. You can also now spawn on a team member’s name so it’s easier, and faster to keep the band together. There is still some minor ui work to do, but for all intents and purposes, the first pass at our group play system is ready.
San and the web team continued their work on drone cameras and the Veil News Network (VNN) page. We have a live camera drone tour of the island up and running on our YouTube page. There’s still a few kinks to work out, like not passing through an occasional rock or tree, but it’s a great way to see the game world, and a terrific start to our goal of a network of cameras catching the play action live. We talked about adding an adjustable field of view to the camera drones, and various overlay options to change the experience as well.
Jesse and Jared continue working on the VNN page itself. We talked about different future video options for viewers including the possibility of time lapse feature, to allow players to see anything they happened to miss during a busy Lahaina day. We’re fixing bugs as they appear, (we recently had an issue with weather from different worlds not displaying), and making a number of improvements to the page itself. We talked some more about possible feeds and different VNN channels. If you have an idea for a channel you’d like to see, let us know in the forums.
We’re adding audio support to a number of buildings and locations, as well as running through the map, and making a list of the places that don’t sound quite as good as the should. AI work continues too. The animal AI is mostly wrapped up, and we should have semi-intelligent NPCs/creatures in the near future. There’s a few new animations in the works as well. We’re focusing on a few last weapon animations to make them look more realistic, and some player movements too. This week we’re focusing in particular on ladder animations, focusing on player’s hand placement and head tilt while climbing. In addition we’ve completed the first tier of a loot dropping system, that is designed to let players know when a new shiny piece of gear is available in a certain area. It’s up to them to find it, and claim it before it gets scooped up by someone else.
Terry spent some time working through some auto-merge issues, and our neverending map and performance improvements continued as usual. We talked at length about the latest improvements to our programmatic building system, and discussed a number of custom buildings we could design and put together using the system. The detail and lighting work inside our big buildings continues, with the focus for now on the Communications Tower. As you can see in the picture below, the elevator in the tower got some attention this week and is looking good. We can’t however vouch for its safety, so ride at your own risk. Also, we are not certain if the wolf noises at the bottom and top are gone, but we’ve become attached to them…
As always, we’ll have another update later this week
