With sprint 28 wrapping up in a few days, everyone is finishing up goals and hunting down any remaining bugs. Terry continues working through trueSky issues, cooks, and crashes. We’ve worked through many of our recent weather and lighting problems and are focusing on making the water look perfect. We’ve fixed our fog and disappearing sky issues, and future Lahaina is looking great.
The team has made a number of lighting improvements, and have good looking lanterns and torches lighting the dark and dangerous places in the game. We’ve added a number of animations to make players and NPCs alike look more realistic when they shoot, climb, crouch, and run. We improved a bunch of 1st and 3rd person shooting animations in particular. Now when a player draws back their bowstring and holds it for a period of time, they will actually shake slightly.
We’ve made similar improvements to weapon audio and appearance. Our firearms have never sounded better, and melee weapons thud, thunk, and crunch in the game more realistically. We’ve improved our ranged AI using all weapons but bows as well. Now, players can count on select horrors of the jungle shooting back when fired upon.
With all the lead soon to be flying around Maui, we started working on a cover system for our NPCs. Currently some of them will stand in the middle of a firefight like tears in the rain. Beyond just taking cover behind an object, (which we’re teaching them too), we want our NPC’s to move when bullets are flying, find tactically beneficial places to be, and avoid running in straight lines. They’re not likely to pass voight-kampff yet, but maybe later…
We’ve expanded our crafting system with lots of new recipes. Players can now make virtually any bit of gear in the game if they have the necessary resources. Even the volatile element 127, the fuel that allowed Veil travel and powers the Thorcon Power Plant, is incorporated into our crafting system now. Players brave or foolish enough to experiment by adding a little 127 in the mix while they’re building something like ammo, might get a pleasant surprise in the near future, or blow up. You never know with these kind of things.
The drones patrolling the island and broadcasting what is happening around Lahaina, are avoiding trees and not traveling through the Earth anymore. We plan on adding a lot more improvements like audio detection next sprint. We finished up some ui improvements as well, with new tooltips, widgets, and translucent menus that make it easier to manipulate your inventory without getting ganked by something coming out of the jungle.
We’re finishing up performance work that has resulted in huge building improvements, much to the delight of our GPUs. Our procedural building system is now constructing beautiful and performant buildings like never before. Our work building out the areas surrounding the Thorcon continues and we’re finishing a first pass at its interior. We plan on adding a lot more to the inside of the power plant next sprint, reflecting that it will be the social hub for players.
We’ve completed the nuts and bolts of a player bank system and just need to finish the art, and decide where players will be able to access the extension of their personal inventory. We discussed a few possible looks, and talked at some length about how many or few drop-off locations should be available to the encumbered.
Finally, the web team is finishing the work on the new site navigation, in addition to call out and contest slides. We’re focusing on improving user flow and various marketing initiatives too. We’re working on a number of promo videos and GIFs, as well as sharing some more of our early concept sketches, as we spread the word about Fractured Veil. Below you can see one of the teaser videos we made with one of our Trophy Collectors welcoming you to Lahaina.
