Friday August 6th,
Hello everyone, we’ve had a decent week making progress on 1.10. Andre has spent the majority of the week working on swimming and it’s coming along great. James has been working on hardcore and standard modes and John has been polishing up some animations and adjusting manipulation speeds.
Swimming
It’s happening! Swimming has been missing since day one. As much as we didn’t think it was a big deal (easily avoidable), wow, it really does make a difference. Originally we didn’t know exactly how the mechanic was going to work out and just what we could pull off. Andre has done a fantastic job so far and we already have an excellent base for the feature. You’ll be able to swim, dive and see underwater. Stamina will take effect and you’ll only ever be able to go as far as your stamina allows before you take damage. We’ll expand on this feature and tweak it as you all provide feedback.
Improved Animation Speeds
Many of you have requested that we speed up world interaction slightly. John has spent the week tweaking animations/manipulations and we’ve come to what we feel is a nice spot. Generally most things have or will be sped up over the coming quality of life patches. Weapon reload is a big request and that’s what we’ll showcase below. Reloading and cleaning/gun interaction speeds being tweaked slightly like this seems to make a dramatic and enjoyable difference in game. We’ll tweak further with player feedback. Currently speeds are around 1.5x faster than their original state as shown below.
ARG Cleaning animation (OLD)
ARG Cleaning animation (NEW)
In Game Guide System
As mentioned last week we plan on introducing a dynamic in game guide for new and returning players alike. Andre has begun the visual implementation of both the in-game even based guide and the menu based guide. The system is being developed in such a way that we can easily expand on the system should the community request more guidance. Please keep in mind everything in our devblogs is subject to change and under constant development. We’ll keep you posted on features as they develop throughout the builds life cycle.
In game event based system
Menu based guide system
Additional Bug Fixes
A lot of what’s going into the next couple of updates isn’t pretty and shiny. There’s not a lot of great preview pictures or gifs/videos. We’ve spent the last week going through our internal ticket list and cleaning up all of your reports while working on some of the most requested fixes and tweaks. Below are a few of the things that we’ve fixed in the last week or so. As always, you can follow along via our changelog.
Vehicle issues: Vehicles have been problematic for a few builds now. Driving as a passenger is very glitchy. Player lag is currently felt hand in hand with a vehicle/player rotation issue. James has sorted this rotation issue and driving is far smoother than it has been in some time if not ever. There are currently other issues to take into account when it comes to driving and sector loading and we’ll be doing so shortly. That being said the experience is improved tenfold and you should notice it instantly when cruising with friends.
Inventory scrolling issues: Currently you can end up in a situation where your inventory is expanded above the top edge of your screen. This can cause the player to have to scroll up to see a single item sitting at the top of the list. It can cause the player to assume they have nothing in their inventory when they actually do. This issue has been sorted and you should now always see the first item in your inventory space.
Removed logoff from bus stop: This has been a confusing sticking point for some time and as we removed bed logoffs this feels fitting. Remember, you can currently log anywhere in the world.
Increased damage effects for low health: We’ve added the critical stat notification and thought an improvement to the low health effect was called for (previously not noticeable or working in some builds). Andre has reworked and improved the low health effect and it’s far more noticeable now.
We'll continue to work on improving early game mechanics and fixing all the bugs you guys have found over the last few builds. Thanks again for the continued support and issue reporting.