1 down – 4 to go!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been concentrating on filling out the rest of the exterior of the retreat area with details such as an old garage, woodshed, barrels, foliage, chicken coops – you name it, it’s probably there! I’m pretty much satisfied with the work done on this area as a first pass and now researching reference imagery for the next area I’ll be working on; a small abandoned train depot.

It will be part of the old abandoned mining town on the north east of the map, which will offer a nice balance of urban exploration alongside the rural locations. I have a real love for urban decay so I think this will be a nice change of pace from the environment of the retreat.

Next up: code
R_Yell has come back and has been a tremendous help in getting some much needed features into the game. Firstly, we did a little more work to the zombie optimisation system to allow for more aggressive culling on low end systems without any ugly popping. To do this we added a system where the zombies will fade out before being culled, and in combination with the fog it looks very smooth and is very efficient! Next he removed all of the unused weapons from the game, and also added in a new one – The Flare gun! Excellent for torching a few undead!

Also added is better weapon sway, fixed iron sights, disabling firing whilst sprinting, view bob while sprinting, proper timed grenades that count down from the moment you pull the pin and also a feature which lets me tweak weapon accuracy via the weapon script files.

The code side of things is definitely coming together now, so I just need to make sure I keep up with the art and level design! I’ll post a video in another time showing these new features in motion.