The team made some good progress on streamlining crafting and improving ui this week. We added some improvements to how drag and drop works, highlighting items selected, and fixing a bug that offset where your gear got dropped in your inventory. We cleaned up some of the navigation on the crafting page to make things a little less cluttered, and made some upgrades to how scrolling works. A bug that would occasionally break scrolling was fixed, and we are adding a few context menus to help you sort through your gear and compare items.
We plan on working on a queue layout the rest of the week. This will allow players to see what they are working on, and help people playing at work determine if their gun mods will be done before their next meeting. We added some animations, and looked at background options to make the whole crafting experience look more authentic.
Terry continued his work on builds, and the East Coast mirror is up and running with a couple of us using it. Git onboarding continues with only a handful of contractors left who need to move over. We made a number of audio improvements, and discussed what still needs to be done, including a Wwise update. Chris had some concerns about our patcher, so we discussed its size and various ways we could handle it differently down the road.
A number of bugs were fixed this week in the game. The rain now actually makes a player’s clothes wet, and is visible no matter what your body position. We weren’t really feeling the 2D dry rain on the island. We also discovered a bug that sometimes makes party members flicker in and out of existence. While most of us are big fans of bouncing between worlds, it’s really hard to fix someone’s arm when their physical body is manifesting across the multiverse. At least with a traditional splint anyway.
Our new and improved campfire is almost done, with only some ui work left to do. Players will now need to feed wood to the fire if they want to: keep it burning, dry their clothes, grab a bite to eat, warm up, and talk about their day. We discussed the proper rate of burn to strike that perfect balance between having an ever-burning log, and allowing players time to do something other than harvest wood.
We grunged up many structures, and roughed up a lot of ruined roads, but we still have a lot to go. We talked about some procedural building upgrades that should save us some time, and still provide different types of damage and weathering so all of our ruins don’t look like carbon copies.
The group continues to add the final touches to the underground spawn area. We made some lighting and texture improvements to make it look appropriately dark and slimy, but still comfortable. We added some new audio so you can hear just how bad the electrical connections to the jury-rigged Nuuskin pods are. The team briefly discussed the starting equipment available to players in this area, and possible tweaks to your beginning gear.
We began work on our first quest scenario for the game. While we’re still working out the specifics, it is going to take place in the area around the Communication Tower. We looked at some existing real-world features on that part of Maui, and talked about what we wanted to include, and what we’d like to add. We circled back to our zipline discussion from last week, and looked at our first semi-working zipline demo. There are a few bugs to work out yet, as San kept going straight into the ocean his first time down. He probably would have made it all the way to what was left of Japan had he not drowned first. Even with the bugs, fast traveling from the top of the comm tower is a lot of fun.
Lastly, we continue environmental work to make the jungle and beach areas look as realistic as possible. Here you can see one of the escaped bears taking a little nap on the beach. Unless you’ve come loaded for him, it’s probably best to keep your distance.
