Hello chasers and happy Easter to those who celebrate! This month we integrated a new playable unique car, new billboard designs, new animated lights for player cars, deployed servers in new regions and optimized the game when driving around.
INTEGRATED PLAYABLE LIVESTORMCHASERS.COM CAR
We integrated the chase car of Kickstarter backers livestormchasers.com and all its exterior and interior accessories. The led lights can be turned on and off by the player to improve visibility in hazardous conditions.
You can see the reveal post on their official Facebook page here : https://www.facebook.com/100044525645683/posts/962897378537775/
BILLBOARDS
We integrated a lot of new billboard designs in the world, including all Kickstarter rewards we received. If you had a billboard design Kickstarter backer reward and you didn’t send us your design, please send it to [email protected].
Here are some of the newly integrated billboards that can be seen all over when driving around.
ANIMATED LIGHTS
We integrated animated hazard lights that can be activated by the players for more immersion and roleplay opportunities. There will be 3 models available for early access, a small, a medium and a large hazard light. Here they are in action:
REGIONS SUPPORT
So far, all of our playtests sessions were limited to the Americas for technical reasons. As we gear up for Early Access, this also means we started deploying servers across the ocean to accommodate players from other regions. We now have a server cluster in North-Europe on which we started testing matchmaking connectivity and stability. We don’t expect to have a lot of server clusters for early access, but enough so that our international players can have a nice gaming experience without too much latency. We can relatively easily add more server clusters in different regions if the game becomes successful in regions we didn’t anticipate in the future.
ROAD OPTIMISATION
In an effort to make the game run smoother at early access, we found significant improvements on the way we calculate our road trajectories, resulting in smaller file size. This will reduce fps drops that some users had when driving around during playtests, especially when approaching a city.
NEXT STEPS
We’re still working diligently on integrating the volumetric cloud and tornado. The collaboration with the shader artists team is going very well, we have a weekly meeting with their team every Friday and they submit their progress regularly. We are at the last phase of debugging and we already started recording footage to show this new technology in a proper video. This part of the work is what takes the biggest chunk of our development time since we’re making a weather game after all, and we can’t wait for the big reveal you’re all been waiting for!
That's all for this development update ! Please keep Wishlisting the game on Steam, as it helps us break through the visibility algorithm and reach potential new chasers! If you haven't already, Wishlist OUTBRK here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/
Till next time, chasers.
-The OUTBRK Team