Spencer

This week I’ve been working more on getting loading external maps into the engine at runtime. One of the things we are reliant on to do this is the AssetBundle feature of Unity which has undergone a lot of work in the last couple of patches. We need these changes before we can start loading in maps the way we want, so I’ve spent part of this week working on upgrading to 5.3/5.4.

This is a bit of a juggling act of weighting up the regressions with the improvements, its currently looking like 5.3 is stable enough for us to upgrade. Initial reports also show a good improvement in client side FPS.

I’ve also been working with Mils to ensure his city objects are as re-usable as possible and will even fit into our build system. These prefabs will be re-usable to anyone making a map, and we’re optimizing them so they can be used to create large scale cities. These will go hand in hand with the map tools, I’m looking forward to seeing what game modes people create with them.

Not much flash to reveal today, but much needed progress on mapping SDK work.

Mils

This week I have been creating the outer shells for the urban buildings that I posted about earlier. This takes a bit of nutting out, so that everything works modularly.

These may be autoplaced by the game mode or built into the buildings by players. The internals are still 100% explorable, and will have different internal floor layouts.

The modularity of these should allow map creators the flexibility to vary the cities a lot.

I think some signs and adornments should add a bit more a of human touch to this giant lego set.

Cow_trix

I’ve been working on some new storm effects, implementing the C&C machine and fixing some issues around write only item slots.

In the last patch we fixed a bug that allowed swapping of write only item slots (vehicle parts). The ability to swap them wasn’t intentional but now that we’ve fixed it we realize its pretty crappy not to be able to improve a chassis.

Our ideal scenario is allow people to trash items on vehicles but not get them back. Something we’ve been thinking about for a while is context menus on items, and given we have no clean UI way to delete something without being able to move it, this is a good opportunity to add this infrastructure to our UI. This will add much more freedom to interactions you can have with items, things like unloading weapons of bullets, eating food from the UI etc.

While looking at the item system I am going to try to get some sort of asynchronous synchronization of item transitions to the client so we can drive a UI tooltip that shows progress towards things like food going rotten, smelting, freezing etc.

On the storms front, I am looking at adding a blizzard, and a meteor shower. Blizzards will make using a campfire in the snow futile and make it always a gamble to head into the snow biome without the proper gear. Meteor showers will yield rare ores, but also kill anything in its path. This may include buildings if we can figure out a way for it not to suck, maybe a buildable roof item that is meteor resistant for harsher biomes.

Gavku

Hey all, well I managed to finish up the CNC machine, baking out/painting its texture/setting up its material in Unity, then hand-balled it over to the coders 😉 Should be a fun little addition when it gets in game

Next up for me was to start work on a nest or hive for the flying-ant/wasp critters to spawn from. Initially I drew up a couple of ideas mainly focusing on trying to find an interesting shape and something that we think will work well with our environments.

This hive will be the first of our tier 2 PVE encounters. This object will be a random spawn location and will continuously spew out a large number of wasps. Killing the wasps won’t yield loot, but mining the hive will give you a much sort after resource. Getting close enough to mine it will be the challenge.

We decided to go with the middle design, which will stand about 4 player heights tall. The low poly has been built and unwrapped, and the sculpt done. Currently I am in the process of baking out the maps.