Hello, Chasers! This month we started to build the next major update for OUTBRK, which will be our 0.3 version. We’re also showing a preview of new character customisation to come in the future and showing some progress on our update to our weather model.
WELCOMING A NEW TEAM MEMBER
This month, we welcomed a new full-time member to our development team! Angeline is joining us as our newest programmer to help accelerate the development of gameplay features and quality-of-life improvements. She’s already proven to be incredibly skilled and a great fit for the team. Say hi to her on Discord!
BUILDING THE 0.3 UPDATE:
PERFORMANCE UPDATE PROGRESS
Performance and visuals upgrade of the weather is the main core of the 0.3 update.
Our VFX team is putting the final touches on a major visual upgrade that eliminates nearly all rendering artifacts—like the blue or white pixels you might have noticed around trees, small objects, or distant geometry. These improvements also resolve pixellisation issues around objects, regardless of your cloud downsampling settings.
On top of that, they've contributed to a major refactor of our weather data packaging system, resulting in a reduced memory footprint for scenarios and what appears to be a significant overall performance boost.
With these changes—plus enhanced rain visuals and improved volumetric lighting—the storm chasing experience is about to look better, run smoother, and feel a whole lot scarier.
(Screenshot taken with cloud downsampling set to its maximum value of 2)
VEHICLES ON THE MAP
We're adding new icons to the map to display vehicle locations, along with small info cards that show each vehicle’s occupancy in real time.
SEAT INDICATOR
We’re adding an indicator to show in which seat the player is sitting in and how many passengers are sitting in the car. This will be a crucial piece of information for drivers in sticky situations waiting for passengers to get back in their car before taking off as fast as possible.
REMOVAL OF “LOOK BACK” ACTION
We're removing the "look back" action and replacing it with a fully immersive free-look system, giving you the ability to look around naturally in any direction.
VEHICLE LIGHTS
We’ve completely overhauled the engine’s lighting system to define our own custom falloff rates. This results in more realistic illumination of roads and objects ahead of vehicles. Lightbars now cast light properly as well, adding to the intensity and realism of the chase experience.
TOW AVAILABILITY AND MAP ICON
Since not every gas station is a location you can get towed to, the map will show a slightly different gas pump icon where towing is available.
To prevent players being towed directly to their inevitable demise, we’re adding a status on the gas stations to disable towing when inside a tornado warning. This new feature comes with an icon and a description on the map.
DESTRUCTION
We’ve improved the precision and timing of destruction to eliminate odd offsets or delays when tornadoes impact objects in the OUTBRK world.
HATS!
We started working on getting hats into the game. This is not planned for 0.3 but here is a preview of what's to come:
WEATHER MODEL
We're making great progress on our high-resolution weather model to deliver more detailed and visually stunning storms. The first major step is complete—we've successfully run our initial simulation. Now, we're moving on to the next phase: running the model on a massively powerful computer setup. This will drastically speed up processing times and even open the door to generating playable scenarios based on real-world upcoming weather setups.
Here’s a comparison of the same setup showing the radar simulation before and after—an incredible improvement!
NEXT STEPS
We started looking at integrating daily contracts for players to gain more currency by completing various challenges. This will hopefully help players get currency faster and also help new chasers have some sort of short term goals early in the game while learning the game systems.
You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
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