The weekly update for Future Perfect is now live on Steam! Here are some of the changes in this update.

Asset Thumbnails

This week we implemented a long planned feature: asset thumbnails. Now when you open the asset browser in the editor you’ll see preview icons:

Right now we only have thumbnails for models and blueprints (that use models), but we’ll be adding support for texture, material and collision assets as well.

This is part of our continuing effort to improve the usability of the editor interface.

Bow and Arrow

The bow and arrow is a new item in Future Perfect. It’s using programmer artwork, but the bow and arrow was a good chance to implement something a bit different than other hand-held objects we’ve implemented so far. Holding the left mouse button will gradually draw back the arrow and releasing the button fires the arrow. Drawing the bow string farther back will fire the arrow with a greater force.

Unlike the other weapons, this one requires some special animation blending to handle the dynamic drawing action and responds to the button being pressed as well as released. This gave us an opportunity to expand the underlying system for handling items.

Tree Generator

Automators are special types of scripts that run in the editor to make it easier to build worlds. In the past we’ve used them to implement procedural building blocks. This week we implemented a new Automator script for automatically placing trees on a landscape:

To allow this Automator script to randomly place place trees on the ground we gave Automators access to the collision information for the world. Now the same ray tracing and other collision queries available to regular scripts can be used in the editor to automate these types of tasks.

These are just some of the most visual changes in this update. You can see the whole list — which includes a lot of bug fixes and smaller changes — on our Trello board under “Update 14”.

If you’d like to try out Future Perfect, you can purchase it from our website.