As part of our continuing effort to make Sierra Madre the best game possible, we are upgrading some of our assets and technologies before our first release.
Better Player Character and Weapon Artwork
The first major improvement we are making is in terms of aesthetics: better quality weapons and arm models for the player character. We are replacing our current weapon models with more authentic weapons and using a higher quality mesh for our main character. Here are a few of the weapon models we will be using:
Smarter Enemies, Allies, and Wildlife
In addition to our weapon art improvements, we are also overhauling our current Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) system. More specifically, we are replacing two separate A.I. systems with a unified system based off of Utility theory.
Well, that's cool, but why you should care? Our new Utility driven A.I. empowers enemies, allies, and wildlife to make more intelligent, less repetitive decisions all while reducing overhead. Immersion and realism are significantly improved over what is currently shown in our game trailer.
More Things To Do
We are adding a new mission system that will supply the player with specific objectives to complete. Completing these objectives will grant the user rewards and makes the game much more interesting.
Performance Improvements
Upgrading the game engine version has yielded significant performance improvements. Physics has seen a roughly 2x performance boost and multi-core processors see better utilization.
We have also upgraded to a new, multi-threaded vegetation rendering system that offers unbelievable performance! In our testing, Sierra Madre was running on Ultra settings, 4k resolution @ 70 to 90 frames per second (using a Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card)*.
Finally, we are switching to using a multi-threaded IK system that makes the aiming animations of enemies and allies significantly faster and more realistic looking.
*End user performance may vary depending on system.