We have been working on a number of internal improvements to the game's architecture to facilitate new features.
New Character Art
We are overhauling all character art in the game. A preview of this character art has already been rolled out to the gunslinger NPCs.
New Town Layouts and Building Art
We are overhauling our buildings with models that are both more realistic, higher quality, and more efficient to render. We hope to have the new building art in the next update coming soon. The new building models use typically a third of the polygons and at least half of the texture memory of the old building models.
New Factions and NPC Behavior
We are working on a new American Indian Faction as well as overhauling the current NPC behavior. The new NPC behavior will focus on creating more interesting scenarios and adding interactions with NPCs. The new system is being previewed with the gunslinger NPCs in the game. This system will be brought to the other NPCs soon.
New Character Controller and Other Foundational Improvements
Migrating to a better character controller
We have begun internally migrating over to an improved character controller. The character controller is responsible for moving the player, handling weapon mechanics, animating the player's model, and handling interactions between the player and objects in the world.
Fortunately, our game's core architecture uses a loosely-coupled, modular design and will allow us to migrate to this new system without breaking important functionality.
Why are we migrating to a new character controller?
Well, the character controller that we currently use in game was rigidly designed and is not modular enough to handle some of the new features and interactions we are working on.
Instead of rewriting parts of the core character controller every time we need to add functionality for new features, we have decided to migrate to a modular and flexible controller. A modular character controller makes it easier for us to write interactions and to add new features.
Input system improvements and better interactions
As part of this migration effort we are moving to a new native input module and looking to simplify input in the game. The new native input module will have better support for game pads (e.g. XBox controllers).
We are also working on simplifying complex interactions and making basic tasks more interesting.
Moving weapons into the inventory
Currently weapons are managed outside of the inventory. We are working to migrate weapons to being stored in the inventory and to being treated as inventory items. Moving the weapons into the inventory will allow us to improve aspects of game-play related to weapon selection and picking up and dropping weapons. One such aspect is allowing the player to customize the game's HUD bar to include the tools / weapons that they want to have quick access to.
How these changes affect the development of the game
These foundational changes are aimed at making development of new features easier as well as improving general game-play. Once we have completed and integrated these foundational changes we will be better able to design and implement user feature requests.