Friday Devblog 19

We decided on a building strategy this week. Scott has been cobbling together some placeholder models and we've got walls, windows, doors, stairs and ceilings in. It wasn't long until people on the experimental server were building crazy things.

The cargo plane now drops an airdrop package again. The package can be looted and stuff, just like in legacy.

Swapping items in and out of your belt to build different components is terrible. So now you can right click and choose which component you want to build. The menu here is placeholder - we're thinking a radial menu will suit best.. but it's something we're going to experiment with. There's still work to do on the building system (models, conditional models, more parts, upgrading, structural integrity, not defying gravity).. but I'm reasonably happy now that we have a strong foundation that we can build on, so we can start pushing it forward.

Andre and Petur have been putting a new billboard system together. A billboard system is how the trees turn into 3D sprites when you're a certain distance away. The new ones have normal maps, so they react properly to the environmental light.. making it even harder to tell that they're billboards.

Bill made some pretty clouds! It's a relatively simple addition, but it adds so much. Here's some with and withouts.

We didn't like Unity's standard terrain texture blending. We wanted to do texture-modulated blends instead. That basically means that instead of the texture blending via a linear gradient between terrain vertices, the transition is now influenced by a height texture which is unique for each surface type. This is the difference. A more real world example would be this, where the rocks don't fade into the grass, they instead break into pebbles.

We changed the player's skin shader to a better one. It has rim lighting and translucency. Which means that the player doesn't look completely flat-shaded at certain times of the day anymore. There's still a lot of tweaking to do as we're not using real depth maps or anything yet.. something I'm sure Tom will be all over when he's back off holiday.

Weapons now define which type of damage they do.. Bullet, Slash or Blunt Trauma. And they do different particle effects depending on which one. So the axe no longer leaves bullet holes etc.

Goosey has finished animating the Boar! And he's added/refined the bear animations!

Bill and Andre have been working out how the rocks get placed in the maps. Defining a bunch of rules for where they should be places, how many should be placed, which rocks should be in which biome, how close to water etc etc. It's resulting in a lot more natural looking placements. They're also working on a moss system, to help you find your way around.

Dan has modelled Paul's concept from a week or two back.

You may have noticed that when you're in third person or when you're being shot at the player isn't aiming in the right place. Well Goosey is on that. He also knows I have a thing for sexy white boots.

Andre has been improving the map generation further still to give a more varied landscape, with nice pointy mountains with snow at the summit.. and they said procedural maps wouldn't have awesome landmarks.

I think we all hate the torch model as it is right now. Paul did a concept for a new one. Paul also did a concept of a robot NPC. I think he just wanted to draw a robot. Meg done more clothes Howie (who started work this week) has imagined how the buildings would age

Getting the building system fleshed out was a big step that we took this week. I'm hoping over the next couple of weeks to get some guidelines together for the artists and start getting some actual models made. This move us even closer to baseline - at which point we can actually start the real fun and move the game forward. The experimental server is now password free. Anyone with the know-how should be able to download it and start tinkering. I'll get a bit of a guide up in due time but for now if you want to host a server you are totally on your own.. and please be aware that we update 10-20 times a day.