Attention inmates! The heat is on, and summer is in full swing, but that doesn't stop us from working on some cool new things! See what's up in this week's edition of our dev update! ->
Aside from bug fixing, which is still quite prominent for this team, there's a lot of new things that we can share here! Let's start with the big ones, shall we? First up, work has begun on adding cuts and bruises visual effects for the prisoners, meaning that you'll be able to see the injuries your characters are sustaining. Also, the very early stages of work have begun on the much-anticipated infections and diseases system! Can't share more details on it yet, but you can bet that we'll have more on that in the weeks to come! Work has continued also on the clothes painting mechanic, but you already saw some of that from before. Apart from that, there were also some optimizations made to the mesh lights, an admin command for removing NPCs was added,
Our level designers are still deeply involved with bug fixing. Not much to add here at the moment.
The hard surface folks are actually working on some cool new things! First up, they're finishing up the military shovel and are reworking the look of the electrician tools. They've also started working on the military tomahawk item, as well as some new firepower in the form of a Tommy Gun! To top it off, we're also working on an improvised wheel item that will help you get those vehicles in working condition faster!
On the soft surface side, they are starting to prepare for a new Twitch drop campaign that we'll have sometime in the future!
The 2D team has been engaged with some level design textures and making corrections to the mobile phone UI to better distinguish between new and opened quests, as well as some corrections to the Journal UI.
The animation team is also heavily involved with bug fixing, but are also working on new marketing materials, and new animations for the flag pole BB element! More on that in future updates!
The sound team is making changes to the directional wind and to the wind effect for roofless vehicles, and is recording new barefoot footsteps and editing water/sea sound effects.
Our design team has been engaged with some bug fixing, but are also heavily involved with designing the aforementioned disease feature.
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Now let’s hear some of your impressions from last week:
- We're very much aware of this. We're working to upgrade some of these processes within the company to make sure that we roll out better and meatier updates and fixes, while being realistic about what we can achieve within the time frames that we have. It's always a balancing act between working on new stuff and fixing the old. Our main goal is to start rolling out things that don't need additional tweaks and fixes to avoid spending time on fixing as much as possible so we can focus more on new stuff. We're not there yet, obviously, but it's something that we'll be striving for.
- Yep, both of those would be very cool and are definitely worth considering. The mobile phone feature could be vastly expanded with additional possibilities, but we'll see how we'll approach this, taking into account all the other cool stuff that we want to and will start working on very soon!
- This one is making a lot of rounds and we can see that a lot of players are impacted by this so let me address it by stating that the team is aware of this and that some work has already been done to mitigate this issue. All in all, I'd just like to say that the team does indeed hear you on this and that we'll be looking into it. In the meantime, make sure that you use a bonfire, that you take off your wet clothes and that you put them close to the fire as much as possible. I know that some will say that this also does not work — it does, albeit slowly.
- Just to make sure that we're not scaredy-cats that avoid heavy topics — here's an address to that topic that we've missed in previous updates. We acknowledge that the current system could be vastly improved. Having an NPC with a shotgun spawn in your direct vicinity is not a recipe for a good time. We get it completely. However, taking into account what we've addressed in the first question, there's only so much time and resources that we can spend on a variety of things that need to be worked on. Make no mistake — I'm not here to sound apologetic and to make excuses. In any case, the team is aware of this, the NPCs and their behavior will be significantly improved in one of the updates that will come to the game by the end of the year, and we'll see if we'll manage to squeeze in some improvements to the encounter system. Players can leverage the newly released server files and introduce a lot of modifications to their servers, which can improve the spawns of the NPCs. It's a bandage solution and not a real one, but at least it may provide a less frustrating experience until we manage to deliver the real thing.
- The NPC behavior and reactions will be improved in one of the subsequent updates that will come into the game by the end of the year. They already stagger when they get shot, but it is not a good experience if they get a bullet to the head and handle it like champs. We'll look into it.
That would be all for this week! See you in the next one and make sure to keep an eye on the following platforms:
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- Fratman