Alpha 13 news!

Some forum guys were asking why we are working on graphics and not game play, so I here is the low down of what we’re all doing:



Graphics aren’t slowing anything down, we hired a graphics guy. This freed up our normal programmers so they can do more game play oriented coding. So basically we are getting more content now. The minibike was a HUGE system with a lot of features.



The new zombies not only look better and have mocap, when you hit their head they might move in a way you can’t even predict, making the next shot harder to do. They actually are root motion driven, meaning their feet are planted to the ground and the animation is what moves them instead of a static moving object at a set speed with its feet moving. Now when you hit something and they fly back with force, it’s real force driven movement, not the other way around. It’s a bigger impact than I thought it would be.





Joe is back on AI. He had to do UFPS (the first person player controller with awesome physics, ineria, etc) and then he did minibike physics… a couple of really hard tasks, now he’s back onto AI, we are redoing horde code so if things work out, every player on the server will get his own horde now, instead of only one player. The hordes will even scale, so a level one guy who joins a server on day 798 who gets the horde isn’t completely hosed, and the guys who have been there since day one and have a group of level 50 players aren’t yawning at the underwhelming horde coming to get them, or a horde that didn’t come at all who went after someone else.

If he has time his optional tasks are cold weather survival and the bread crumb system.

Chris is doing the new harvest system which will be awesome. Less vacuuming stuff up and notification when your inventory changes, when crafting items are finished, etc. Chris does a lot of nasty stuff like all the chunk bugs and core engine stuff too, he’s chasing a memory leak right now as well, and doing part of the new GUI.

Robert is integrating UMA 2. Our art is amazing, but in game characters do not look so good. UMA2 solves this, it uses Unity5’s standard shader and is much easier for us to add new art. Expect new clothing, hairs and some nice presets, and no more ugly troll characters with 8" legs and 60" stomachs. After that he’s going to be working more on random world gen and doing part of the new GUI.

Ryan our new graphics guy, is doing water. So even though this is a graphics thing, its going to pave the way for some new game play, allowing streams, waterfalls, boats, underwater treasure hunting, etc.

Alloc: Not sure what he’s doing. He does weird stuff I’m not interested in like networking and weird optimizations I’m unaware of, but its always something hard and nasty. The guy loves the real tough jobs that have no visual reward, totally the opposite of me :)

I’m integrating a lot of the new mocap animations our 2 animators have been working hard on, doing the new harvest system balancing and item reduction, (its less than you think you guys raged over nothing really) and working on improving all of our traps we have (you saw some of it on the spikes already).

Rick is working on the new GUI art and functionality and some big business stuff. Don’t even ask.

Joey and Asia are finishing up the hazmat suit, working on more HD zombies and Ryan is doing the steel door which is going to be badass, and a lot of other models.

Andrew is making the rocket launcher and will do the assault rifle next.I’m probably missing some stuff, but this is what we’re up to. Screens and videos will come when stuff is presentable.



