Thank you for taking the time to keep upto date with development. We will be discussing the latest milestones in development, what to expect in the next update, our breakthroughs in the game’s file size and new seasonal events soon to arrive.
If you enjoy reading these development updates and would like us to continue posting them between game updates, please leave a like below or comment as we always love to hear what you all have to say.
Performance
We have heard loud and clear from recent feedback that performance is the main thing holding back many players from fully enjoying the game. We want to make sure you all know that improved performance is now our highest priority and we have already been working on steps to improve. We are aware of stuttering that can happen, especially when an infected hordes arrives, and we are investigating methods to mitigate this problem in addition to other optimisations.
Project size and Update Times and Loading Times
We have pulled out all the stops (as well as long nights fuelled by tea and coffee) to address one of the major issues with the game - the overall file size and install time. Over the last week, we have dived deep into adjusting packaging configurations, micro-managing textures and working on setting up shared assets across characters and NPCs in order to reduce the game’s total size. The hard work has been worth it though as we have greatly exceeded our expectations on how much space could be saved. With all these techniques combined, the game has gone from being a huge 90+GB size to approximately 30GB in size. This means a total of roughly 26GB download for new installs on Steam.
Jaws of Extinction used to be packaged as one large .pak file. We have now managed to set the game up to use multiple pak files of upto 8GB in size. In some instances, this may help to reduce the overall install time when updating, especially for smaller patches.
These particular adjustments are not expected to have any radical affects on in-game framerate, but are expected to help to improve any memory-orientated problems experienced by some players. Loading times have significantly improved as well.
New systems
One of the latest systems we have been working on is the brand new skill system expansion. This allows players to modify skills using perks. Skills are broken up into categories, skill blocks, grades and perks.
Each category will contain multiple skill blocks and each skill block contains 4 grades: 1 to 4. Each skill block will have 10 available perks that the player can activate which will improve that skill in some way. A maximum of four perks in a block can be active at one time.
Take a look at the example image below for a clearer demonstration of how this works. The final in-game version will look similar with some minor changes.
Halloween Event
We will be running our Halloween event in game from 22nd to 31st of October
The aim of the event will be to locate Halloween Jack's lair and save a hostage. You will accomplish this by finding and destroying pumpkin patches around the playable map area to gather event points. Once you have collected the required amount of points the location of Jack’s lair will reveal itself on the player map and you will be able to battle Jack to save the hostage and receive your reward for defeating him.
More information on how to take part in the event will be released very soon, so remember to keep an eye out for future posts.