Caves, Cars, hit points, and Steve.

I was just testing tonight feeling out the new block hit point system we have and found a cave. What was interesting about it, is that it didn’t descend straight down and there wasn’t any ore in it either. I ran through it and saw another opening not to far in. I thought wow what a cool place for a small base.



Cars are now harvestable. Rather than blowing up you can mine them and get metal. But if you are smart, you will use a wrench and disassemble the car to get all kinds of cool parts, like short metal pipes, springs (now required to make a blunderbuss), cloth, small engines, batteries, radiators and more. You can still loot them too, but the loot isn’t guaranteed like before, since you can harvest them, and now that they aren’t entities (eating collisoin and server cpu) we can have a lot more cars in the game. I will thin the wasteland down, as that was too many cars, but I got good framerate rendering that many cars, where the old way would have choked my cpu.



Speaking of the blunderbuss, its now the most powerful shotgun in the game, followed by the sawed off, and then the long barrel pump. Of course range and reload time make a big difference, but for up close one shots, the blunderbuss is king.



Speak of block hit points, before, all blocks had 10 hit points and then we used a hardness to say how hard it was. In the end it was really just a bunch of math that made it difficult to balance the game and also made it impossible for us to really display a health bar for blocks. So you had no idea how tough a block was before actually minining it 100%. Now each block shows a hit point value as you harvest it and you can see how effective your tools are and the impact low stamina has on damage too, feedback that was always invisible before. Plus you will get a feeling for what blocks are the strongest in the game because well, stats are awesome.



A while back I introduced zombie Steve. He as still in t pose, but now he is rigged and animated, and I must say he and Arlene are the creepiest zombies thus far. Both of them have the most horrific motion captured movements I’ve ever seen.



I’ve made a LOT of other little tweaks and changes. I hope to shoot a video soon showing off some A13 in action. I need to fix a few death animations and glitches yet, but I’m getting close.





