Hello chasers! This month our development work has been focused on getting the Passenger Princess ready for release and continuing the development on the vegetation and performance optimization of the game.
PASSENGER PRINCESS
Any new feature that is heavily relying on syncing multiple players together and server events are bound to bring a lot of edge cases, thankfully, our testing team have been hard at work to find and document those issues for us to fix rapidly. If you’ve been following our Trello or Discord, you’ve even seen this work in our work channels on a daily basis ! Since the beginning of the month, we resolved more than 30 bugs or tasks related to this feature alone. We still have a couple more to fix before releasing this massive feature, and you can follow the progress on our trello board here : https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
NEW CLOTHING
Part of this same update we have a new car and new accessories that we have shown last month. This month we integrated new player clothing that will be part of the same update! Here is a preview:
PROGRESS ON TERRAIN AND VEGETATION
Last month we showed the start of the work on the terrain and vegetation, ending the newsletter on some exploration on the trees. This month we can show how far the vegetation progressed with some animated gifs of the OUTBRK biomes with new trees integrated and rigged for wind:
Follow the progress on the trello card here: https://trello.com/c/MQewzcXc/1219-improve-terrain-and-vegetation-visual-look
CLOUDS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
Our external VFX team, Catalyst, has made significant progress this month on optimizing cloud performance. Our goal is to completely remove the blue artifacts caused by the "cloud downsampling" setting while retaining its performance benefits. Achieving the performance of a high cloud downsampling value without any visual drawbacks is a major step forward for the game's optimization. While we’ve successfully implemented this internally, there are still some side effects we need to address before we can roll out this substantial improvement to all players.
WHAT ABOUT TORNADOES?
Our extensive research and development on cloud performance requires a technical artist to be fully dedicated to this feature, working on it full-time. While it’s taking more time than initially expected, rendering full-scale weather model data within a game engine is largely uncharted territory, presenting us with significant challenges at every step. Given that our tornadoes are still in a very early stage compared to our vision, we’ve asked Catalyst to allocate a second full-time artist exclusively for tornado improvements and development. Starting in early 2025 (the soonest possible), a second developer from Catalyst will join the team to focus entirely on advancing tornado technology, while the current developer continues optimizing cloud performance and looks. Together, they will ensure their unified visual and technical solutions meet our goals for both quality and performance.
WEATHER MODEL IMPROVEMENTS
Development of our weather model is still in progress, with some issues in the current version being actively addressed. We anticipate resolving these challenges soon, which will be an exciting milestone. In the meantime, we’ll continue running new scenarios using the existing model.
That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/
Till next time,
-The OUTBRK Team