This week I was focused like much of the team on cleaning up, debugging, bug fixing and improving performance. The rest of the time I was working on finishing the design of our crafting system which we will hopefully be adding to the game soon! For now you can check out the crafting area which went into last weeks update along with the shooting range. I also added a new safe room door to the starting apartment so players are more aware there’s a world out there they can go and explore.
I’ve been wanting to start adding more melee weapons now that it’s in a better place thanks to the efforts of Lawrence. As per request by a member of our discord channel, here are 2 new additions that will be making their way into your hands very soon, enjoy!
Victor
I basically worked on getting Update 2 out, fixing a crapton of bugs, added various localizations to tooltips, worked on user experience issues like the fuses in the garage blinking if they can’t find them in ten minutes and fixing a major performance issue for our Oculus users.
Alex
I’ve been plugging away at the firing range; the goal this week (or at least, before next week’s blog post!) is to have variable scenarios selectable by the player. Jason and I have gone through a bunch of ideas for different things we can do gameplay wise so it should be a lot more fleshed out when it’s all said and done.
Earlier this week I went through all the actors in the sp_city level, trying to weed out any possible cpu/gpu hogs that were still lingering. A few small time things were cleaned up, but the biggest culprit seems to have been the scope on the rifle on the roof. It’s behavior has been slightly changed; now it only “works” when a player is gripping it. This shouldn’t affect the vast majority of the gameplay, but it will make the whole scope system vastly more performant. To be fair and honest, Victor identified it and did all the work on that one.. My contribution (TL:DR) involved making the scope material have a nice fade in effect when gripped.
Brian
I started working on our Campaign creating, adding, and optimizing audio and when I started the Wwise Profile noticed an issue. Old work that was left in was being called repeatedly causing major performance issues. We have since pulled the old code, updated it to reflect the current projects design and have seen a significant increase in performance. I am currently finishing up Apartment and will soon be working on the City map.
Lawrence
Bashing Zombie skulls
Is more fun when your weapon
Doesn’t feel like poop.
This week i’ve been really focused on hunting down and fixing every bug with the zombies that you all have so diligently reported! Melee is much improved on its last iteration, and while far from polished is a great stride in the direction we want melee to be in. So many bugs were smashed out, but some of the more poignant issues addressed were: Fixed issues with the zombie not smashing through the doors and getting confused, fixed mystery headless zombies (hard to headshot the headless horde ;), fixed issues with headshot particles, better spread of zombies in crowds, Grenading the riot zombie no longer makes him unkillable. Also particularly of note I tracked down a bug that made zombies player-tracking logic very sporadic if you roomscaled in a large enough playspace. And last but not least, Paul and I extended the gibbing system to let you chop those dead-undead-Z’s to bits!.
Paul
This week I was mostly focused on the physics assets as mentioned last week – there are just so many of them! It’s worthwhile though, we need our undead comrades to be as interactive and immersive as possible, so time well spent. Many are done and back in the game, all ready for you to destroy with the new melee system.
Also I worked on some animation bugs still resident in the system, such as double-triggering of stumble logic which led to some really crazy blending! Lastly, I worked with Lawrence on a system to allow gibbing of zombies after death, for maximum carnage.
