Welcome to our June Progress Report! Wait, what do you mean it's not June anymore? In any case, last month, we saw a lot of progress on the mapping front, but a bit of a slowdown in programming as we squashed quite a few critical bugs.
Let's dive in (and hopefully I can upload all the screenshots!)
Progress Report
Level Design
Following up on our prior rework of the Nexus, Ballads has taken the time to work on the buildings in the immediate surrounding area, some of which was teased a few days ago in community chat. The building just to the left of the Nexus has been converted into a makeshift holding and detention area, modelled after migrant detention centers employed by a variety of countries. Here, individuals will be detained before being moved to a more permanent holding area or transferred to Nova Prospekt, a fate truly worse than death.
Not only that, he's reworked and redesigned the entire Hotel interior, creative a level of extravagance one would only expect as the highest echelon of loyalists, or perhaps the more unsightly mobs that might frequent the city, competing with both groups?
Where Ballads focused on interior work, PngNoRe has been hard at work reworking some of the core map elements, such as street light placement, prop placement, road sizes, pavement and pavement shapes. Among the more flashy work he has been tasked with, he has reworked the area leading up to Kleiner's Laboratory, adding a variety of details and filling out that formerly empty space on the map, bringing us ever nearer to a more full, detailed experience for the players!
Programmer and User Interface
We've hit a few road bumps with getting our apartment system functional, however Chris Comstock has been hard at work refining an apartment system that should be relatively free of any nasty exploits or issues. Taking the care to be mindful of the variety of situations a player might be in, such as the potential for being trapped inside of an apartment by an owner, the ability to knock to notify someone is at your door, or the abilty to vacate your apartment on demand has taken time, but will hopefully prove fruitful in an relatively unbroken system! (Please don't break it on day one!)
Further, the system is designed to be optimized for the map size, with apartments only being rendered in proximity and being unloaded when the player leaves, vastly reducing the potential load one might have! Loading twenty to thirty apartments all at once when you enter a building can be taxing on anyone's rig!
Nya0 has, and will continue to be, busy working on refining and developing the UI that we will all become very familiar with! His emphasis on quality and passion for his work have been more than instrumental in defining the player experience, and will, hopefully, provide a memorable and professional impression on players! While we may not be able to show much this month, we will hopefully have a lot more UI to show off next month (we're replacing the UI elements for the player HUD shown off in /updates/update-03/)
Weapons
Astro has finalized the functionality for weapon crates, ammunition pickups, and the animations for the fire and reload of the AR1! His work refining and developing the weapon system has been truly exceptional!
Clothing
Civan has continued to design unique 3D clothing options for players, particularly some lovely suits for donators! We look forward to seeing a lot more of his unique style, and I would like to personally thank him for convincing us that 3D Clothing assets were the way forward. Without them, we'd be using 2D shirts/clothing, which simply wouldn't have the same aesthetic appeal!
FROM THIS UPDATE
In pictures.
About this edition
Republished from the original announcement and its continuations. Discord ping syntax, thread-opening notices and unrelated personal asides have been removed; contributor names and links have been made readable. Historical plans retain their original context.