Seriously, though, that's the brunt of what we've been doing. All winter. Good performance is critical for a competitive FPS; anything under a stable 60 is intolerable for this kind of game and for anyone who plays competitive shooters seriously, a steady 120 FPS has become the minimum.

We've also been working hard to sort out the many problems our physical inventory has brought with it. I've discussed some of the exciting possibilities the inventory system brings with it, but there were serious drawbacks to the implementation that cost us substantial development time. We've spent considerable effort sorting out the numerous complications that arise when you have animations driving inventory events. These were important to solve because they'd be total game breakers. Good FPS is important, but if your gun didn't fire on the server because the state of your weapon is desynced between client and server you've got much bigger problems.

We're still far from release, so our goal isn't 100% bug and performance issue free, but it was imperative we prioritize these un-sexy issues this winter before we could get to any real matters of game design. You can't really iterate and design on a game that turns into a slide-show when everyone starts shooting.

The final piece to complete the puzzle was Unity's 5.6 update, which brought huge framerate increases and other goodies like Vulkan API support.

We're pleased to report we're running at about a 120 FPS baseline [read: not in combat] on a i7 4790k at 4.0ghz, GTX 1070.

Level geometry:

Over the winter we've experimented with all sorts of architectural features, like elevated windows, catwalks, skylights, low walls, and even the odd dance floor.