Hey Everyone.
Its that time of the week again so I thought id keep you all filled in with with what we've been up to over the last week in GAMERFLEX towers (we don't actually work in a tower, more like three cramped bedrooms spread a 1000 miles apart lol). As mentioned previously our ongoing Unreal 5.1 performance issues are continuing. We have managed to tweak a few FPS out here and there but its still not performing quite as well as 4.27. This is admittedly probably down to our still getting to grips with the new features and oddities on the new engine more than anything else. We'll continue to make a 4.27 and 5.1 in tandem with each other and when we feel the 5.1 version is better in both graphics and performance we'll start uploading the 5.1 version and abandon the 4.27 version. Hope that makes sense!
We decided that before we go and steam ahead with the quests and missions as well as really fleshing out the story with dialogue, cut scenes and a deeper narrative we knew we needed to get all the basic mechanics in place first. Not just the basics such as movement and shooting but things such as environmental interactions, cover and vaulting, stealth and a whole lot more custom requirements to suit our games needs exactly. We think with the latest update coming up we are definitely moving in the right direction and making great progress which does give us a well needed dose of hope, things can get pretty low during the dev phase i can assure you of that.
So what have we done exactly? I wont go into every detail as things can get a bit techy and tedious at times but the following couple of short vids should help. The first and really quite important to us considering some of the missions we have lined up is a ladder climbing ability. If we are making a futuristic city with huge skyscrapers we might as well utilise them for various missions/quests and add some interesting new environments. Yes, i know we could add an elevator like we did with the outside of the Eros Station but ladders are so much more versatile and give you a better chance of just looking around and staking out a location. We cant wait to introduce missions and locations that will utilise this.
Another mechanic that wont do absolutely anything to make the game run better or make the game much more interesting but the addition of a load of cool things in a game does make the overall experience a lot more enjoyable. Like the experts say, its the details that make a difference sometimes. So, let me introduce limb reactive shooting physics. Like most things in game dev, we never really know the official naming convention for most technical things so this is what we call it here. Basically as you can see from the video below when you shoot a specific part of the body then that part of the body will be effected by the shot rather than the whole character going through a rigid reaction animation. Like i said, its not a game changer but it does make the guns a lot more realistic and the shooting does become more satisfying because of it.
Anyway. we have introduced some more goodies in the next build (Development Build 0.3) that i wont spoil by mentioning them here so look out for that in the next week or so as well as a new picture set for Patreon supports and maybe even a sneak peek of the forthcoming CyberpunkXXX graphic novel. Ok, that's a wrap for the second Dev Diary but as usual, If you have any thoughts, suggestions and feedback please hit us up on Discord. We would love for you to get involved.
The CyberpunkXXX Crew