Contagion VR: Outbreak Windows, VR game

Jason

Things have been quiet on the public front, but behind the scenes it’s been anything but. We’ve all been working extra hard trying to finalize mission 3, as well as making massive performance boosting optimizations to the entire game. PlayStation VR release is definitely getting closer, but we’ve still got some work to do on that front yet.

All these performance boosting changes can definitely be experienced soon in our next major public update which will include mission 3. We’ve also finally gotten around to bringing a better sense of conclusion to the ending of mission 1, having decided to completely rewrite, and redesign it in its entirety. It’s currently in testing, but we hope to have it released to the public build shortly.

We also decided it was time to rework the shooting range level, and make a better effort to bring that up to a much higher level of polish than its original design. That too will be available in the next upcoming major update.

Alex

It’s been a while! It's hard to encompass everything that's gone on since the last blog, but this last week I’ve been focusing almost exclusively on PSVR stuff. For the past few days I've been going through all the actors that use AK components (a Wwise [our audio engine] specific Unreal object that allows us to do stuff with sound) and tweaking things to squeeze out every last ounce of performance. Thanks to some discoveries by Lawrence, we've learned that the way we had been doing things were A) needlessly computationally expensive, and B) not the right way to even do them. All in all, this is great news for the PSVR build and will translate to good news for the PC side; less CPU wasted on this stuff means more zombies running around.

Brian

These last two weeks I’ve been focusing on optimizing Wwise for our PS4 release candidate. I’ve set new volume thresholds, specified voice limitations, updated all Spatial volumes and portals, as well as cleaned up level audio and placement. Things are coming along nicely and excited to get this submitted shortly!

Lawrence

This week I have been managing the PSVR optimization, we are getting really close to meeting the hardware-budget and have already got some of the levels running at 60FPS on PSVR with the regular PS4 console. Many of these optimizations are being merged back to PC build and as such will drop the CPU demands of that as well. Also, we now officially support 3DRudder on the PS4 port of the game.

Paul

Last week I’ve wrapped up the third mission [Charlie] and shipped it to the Beta branch. While it is in the hands of our testers, whom are trying break it in any way they can I am on a “bugs watch” squashing any bugs that may come into light.

Additionally, all of us within Monochrome agreed that the ending of the first mission did not feel like it provided enough closure and conclusion to the story. Therefore, I spent this week inside the city map of mission 1, implementing the scripting and game play changes that will hopefully bring a better sense of conclusion we all hope for and wanted from the beginning.