Development Update (08/15/2014) news

Hello, and happy weekend everyone!This update is going to be a shorter one than usual - primarily because of the issues we've been focusing on, which are documented below:

Animations

We're still doing a lot of work on the animations for the game, and this is currently our most critical item to get fixed and improved. We've been doing work on blending additive animations (for the players arms), working on adjusting base movement speeds and animations to reduce foot sliding, adjusting the base skeleton so the player isn't hunched over when running as much, adjusting the base mesh to remove some of the "turtling" effect in the neck at times, making some custom transition animations (crouch to stand, stand to sit, ...), re-skinning the mesh so it conforms better to animations, continuing to work on and improving the first person weapon animations, and pretty much everything else you can imagine related to animations. We want the animations to look as good as we can for all of you, so we're really doing our best in this regard.

Main Menu

A lot of clean up work has been done on the main menu of the game. It hasn't really been updated for almost a year now, so it was time to make sure it was entirely functional again. It will now correctly use your Steam name in game, which you can change in the main menu, when you log into servers, show the correct number of players on servers, the time of day on the servers - all the typical stuff you'd expect. Right now there are just about a dozen base video options you can set for the game. In the future (during alpha) we'll revisit the video options and break down the options a lot more so players can tweak more specific settings. So, for now, it's functional, but is definitely far from being something final.

Game Optimizations

At this phase of the game we're not going to be too picky when it comes to optimizing the game, but we have been spending time adjusting some of the larger issues related to graphics performance. Some of our original assets for the game were really poorly optimized, and even some of the more recent ones, so now a lot of them are a lot better. There were cases where we reduced assets that had around 200 drawcalls down to 10, and others that had 80 down to 2 or 3. With Cryengine, there are some simple mistakes that can be made with assets that have a really dramatic performance impact if they're not modeled correctly. There are adjustments we want to make for the vegetation draw distances (right now everything is set to the default values), but we'll wait on that until we have the vegetation we want to use locked down and then do it all in one pass - that's why the render distance for the grass is short in some of the videos and screenshots.

Updated Vegetation

As you'll see in the screenshots at the end of this update, we've been working on some new vegetation for the game. They make the world look much better than before, and they are also more optimized than the previous ones were, which allows us to render even more of them at once.

General Cleanup

In general, there has been a LOT of cleanup made to the game over the past couple of weeks - models, textures, code, materials, physics proxies, and animations. Unfortunately we can't really show any of that process off in a weekly update, but I think it's important to mention in the update because a lot of our time has been focused in that area.And now, time for some screenshots! (we will do another Twitch stream as soon as we're ready with the animations)

And now, time for a photography exhibit titled, "Foggy Morning in Woodhaven". The photographer is still an intern, so please ignore the watermark on some of the photos and the blood he accidentally left on the lens after his fall down a cliff to capture the last photo(he really wanted that photo!) - clumsy, but dedicated.