Hello, Chasers!
Today’s newsletter is a big one. We’re introducing a new team member and sharing progress on several major areas of development, including the upcoming Vegetation Update, weather systems, and networking improvements.
VEGETATION UPDATE
We’re now setting our sights on our next major update: the Vegetation Update.
This update brings a significant visual upgrade to OUTBRK’s environment, giving the world a more modern and detailed look. Tree coverage has been fully repainted across the map, ground textures now show much more detail, and new grass variations help make the world feel richer and more natural. The world map and minimap have also been updated to better reflect the new environment.
We’re also improving the collision around broken tree pieces, making them feel more intuitive and less frustrating to drive around.
Here is some content recorded directly in the editor, showing the new OUTBRK world:
The update is now entering its testing phase. Because this is a large content update, we expect testing to take some time to ensure it reaches the level of quality we want. As always, we appreciate your patience and support.
NEW TEAM MEMBER
Starting this Monday, a new programmer is joining the OUTBRK team full-time. Please welcome David S. to the team!
David has over 10 years of game programming experience and was most recently a Gameplay and UI Programmer at Behaviour Interactive. He’ll be helping us accelerate development as we continue working toward OUTBRK 1.0.
Say hi if you see him in Discord!
SERVER DEVELOPMENT
We’ve also been working on a major technical overhaul of OUTBRK’s networking systems.
This work is laying the foundation for future features such as reconnecting to a game after being disconnected, spectating after dying, letting other players drive your car, significantly reducing perceived lag between vehicles, and creating more social interactions like emotes or small activities while players wait for storms to form.
There is still a long road of technical work ahead before these features are ready, but we can already share an early look at one of the improvements: player animations are now being replicated much more smoothly over the network.
CLOUDS
Great progress has been made on the final steps of the cloud system that will accompany the new weather model resolution. We can now see fluid, fully dynamic cloud motion driven directly by the weather data itself.
The result brings immersion to a new level, with clouds converging and even rotating around mesocyclones. This is a major milestone for us, as staying as close to reality as possible remains one of our core goals.
The final task remaining is eliminating some fading effects between data frames. We are being extremely meticulous with this step because we want it to look perfect, especially for the timelapses that many of you enjoy creating.
SCENARIO TECHNOLOGY
Another feature coming with this resolution upgrade is a new system that allows us to adjust scenario positioning. This helps increase storm coverage across the OUTBRK map while also giving us the ability to slightly slow down some extremely fast-moving storms that would otherwise be barely chaseable, all while remaining scientifically accurate.
This is particularly important with the new resolution, as storms are significantly larger than before. The goal is simply to respect the scale of the game while making the atmosphere more chase-friendly in certain situations.
This new generation of scenarios will also introduce an element of randomness. Offsets will be selected by the servers, helping make every chase feel unique.
Finally, it will allow us to produce multiple variations of scenarios from a single weather model simulation.
TORNADOES
Our tech art development partner, Catalyst, has completed development of the next generation of tornado visual effects for the game.
We are now beginning the integration process with the weather engine, which will allow for a much wider variety of tornado types, including the highly requested wedge and multi-vortex tornadoes.
That’s all for this update!
You can follow our detailed development on Trello here:
https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
Consider leaving a review on the Steam store to help us reach more future chasers:
Till next time,
-The OUTBRK Team