Our programmers have been hard at work on a variety of tasks. To start, they’ve been working on optimizations for post-processing effects, cloud shadows, and volumetric fog. Dropship encounters were also refined, and work has progressed on the armed NPCs. They’ve also continued to focus on the turrets, quests, quest world markers, and the cruiser vehicle. Additionaly the ladder-connecting functionality is being worked on. Last but not least, a lot of bug fixing was also conducted.

The level design team has really been at it! Last week, they prepared new foliage, made additional adjustments to the base building elements, and worked on landscapes for rock placements. The sawmill main building and hangar are being reworked, and distant LODs for the prison were modified, along with the machinery in the stone mine. Additionally, the team is making adjustments that will greatly improve indoor lighting in buildings.

The animation team has continued their work on the foliage, new pushing animations for bikes and the quad, and the new trailer. They’ve also put greater focus on bug fixing and preparing the Halloween content.

The hard surface team worked on the engine attachments for the quad, dirt bike, and cruiser, as well as on the malfunction graphics. Among other things, the tractor is being set up along with its dashboard and light emissions, and bike and RIS interactions are being improved. Also, work has continued on the turret models and texturing, which we teased in one of the recent dev updates, as well as on the rework of the improvised rifle and the TEC1 relay and jammer items.

The soft surface art team mainly continued their work from last week with the female inmate clothes, trash ghillie suit, and school bag, with added tasks related to the headlamp vertex color, armband slots, and high poly weapons for the tribal characters!

We have a small taste of the fan-favorite vehicle for you guys — the aforementioned dashboard of the almighty tractor!

(Here's hoping this speedometer will fare better than the RIS one when it launched...)

The sound team is still making sure that the sounds for the turret and for the quests pop.

These guys do what they do best — drink an inordinate amount of energy drinks, keep the cheaters at bay, and test out new features coming into the game.

Our game designers are keeping their heads down and ensuring that the quests are as awesome as they can be!


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And now, it is time for Q&A:

• I'm fairly certain that's a regular person. There's no reason to put those fever dream gremlins as a reference.

• Combating cheaters is definitely our top priority. We'll make sure to eradicate the issue almost completely by the time we hit 1.0, but our current top priorities lie with fixing the most egregious bugs and introducing new features and reworks.

• Those will come a bit later. Our current focus is on the upcoming quests and new reworks that are coming in hot. We might have something in store for you in that regard very soon. ;)

• This will be part of the upcoming inventory rework. We understand the necessity for this improvement, and work has already begun.

• Those sound insanely cool and are definitely worth considering. However, they do seem like a big post-launch update, so it's best to be patient with this in particular.

See you next week!

Fratman

We promised you guys we will give you more news about the hordes as soon as we could, and on that promise we deliver. As you are reading this we have started testing new changes to the Horde system to adjust it properly according to your guys feedback and the issues we seen ourselves over time.

But not only us, as we want the community involvement in this as well. With the soft launch of Dropships we have some pretty good feedback, allowing us to adjust and tweak the feature before full release. So we are adjusting this approach to the horde changes, and all of our Alpha testers have access to the horde changes. And all of them will be adjusted according to their feedback.

The changes include both how and when the hordes get triggered and the puppet spawn proximity depending on the area. We do not want to share numbers at this point as the numbers are not what is important here, what is important is that it feels good and that is the feedback we want. To have it feel right. And on this we have our community and Alpha testers to rely on. For now let's have them check it out and break everything and adjust further as needed, and thank you all for your patience. You will hear from us soon!


- Beda