As Jen mentioned yesterday, we wanted to do another development update to inform everyone of the progress of the game, and the company as well. To start off, I'll explain what the company has been doing, for those of you that may be interested, and then we'll delve into the game update itself.
Company Information
As some of you may be aware, we've had many people working on the game over the past couple of years. Some of the team members have already passed their two-year mark of working on the game, while several others are a lot newer to the team. The game started out originally just as a level for Cryengine, titled Canyonlands, but it was quickly decided to turn it into an actual game as the team expanded and we learned more about Cryengine itself. Because of the way the game originated and evolved there was never any signed contracts set up with the team from the start - the contracts were essentially just Skype chat messages saying that the team members would be paid at a future point when the game went up for sale. So, because of that, over the past few weeks we've been finalizing all of the agreements with the team members, which involved a lot of time with attorneys, and we're now ready to push forward with the game again. With the contracts now in place, several of the team members started working on the game full-time this week, which should really help us now to evolve the game more rapidly. We still find it interesting, and sort of humorous, that nobody on the team has ever met each other in real life. All of the team members are all still working from their homes. At some future point we'll get to meet each other, and I'm sure it will be both fascinating and a bit awkward at the same time.
We are also actively looking for several more people to join the team!
The company has also been investing in professional level tools for the team members to use, which should really help to make all us more coordinated now - source code control system, issue tracking system, documentation system, customer service system, etc. Unfortunately, setting all of the systems up and migrating to them has cost us time that we could have been working on the game instead, but with those systems in place we are now able to completely focus on the game once again and really start making some progress.
With that out of the way, now it's time to talk about the game!
Map Expansion
One issue we've always had with the map is the sheer number of vegetation objects on it. We had to place all grass by hand, which was causing a lot of stress on performance - memory, processing power, and loading times. We were just short of 4 million instances of one of the grass models, for example. It was to the point that we really couldn't expand the map much more because we would have needed to add many millions more instances of grass. Luckily, Crytek heard our pleas for help, and the groans of our customers, and added support for procedural vegetation. In the patch Crytek released yesterday, we can now start using procedural vegetation for all of the small, non-gameplay related vegetation - grass, flowers, small rocks, and more. All of the trees, bushes, and anything that could impact gameplay will still be hand-placed and will be just fine from a performance stand point. All of the new areas will start using procedural vegetation, and we'll also go back and start updating the currently released areas to use procedural vegetation as well, so we can get rid of all the hand-placed grass where it make sense.
In addition to the current, small cave on the map we released a couple of weeks ago as a teaser, we'll be adding a lot more caves. They will be dotted across the map, large and small for you all to explore. These caves will serve as a nice backdrop, base, or source of loot. You'll need to search really well to find some of them.
Weapons
Over the past weeks the team has been working on some new weapons. These will include more melee weapons, rifles, a shotgun, and a pistol. See the images at the end of this update for images of some of them. A couple of them are very close to being ready, so we'll add them in updates as quickly as we can, and then we'll continue to add more and more weapons, and different types of weapons, as often as we get them done. Some will even be crafted.
Crafting/Base Building
The crafting and base building is still planned to be partially released soon. It had to take a back seat to getting the early server issues addressed.
Anti-Cheat
So far we have done away with a lot of the cheaters, but there's always more we can do! We have been talking with a third-party anti-cheat solution about implementing their anti-cheat service. We are very impressed with their system and think it will do really well for Miscreated. Having a third-party handling this will take a lot of work off of us, and allow us to focus more on the game development itself. We'll have more information on this in the next couple of weeks.
.223 Caliber Rifle
AT-12 Shotgun (12-gauge, multiple ammo types)
Survival Knife
Check the forum post for links to larger versions of the images.