Greetings Pioneers!

Thankfully we’ve been able to find our issue with multiplayer and a fix is being tested as we write this blog. This means that a Multiplayer updated with the turrets is on it’s way! Unfortunately these issues are something we sometimes cannot avoid, it’s our mission to keep everyone of you informed. We must thank you all for your patience, as we know a lot of you want to try our build changes cooperatively.

In the meantime we’ve got a progress update on the new location layouts as we’ve really started to flesh them out. Here’s what the whips been cracking:

John – Lead Designer

In my natural habitat today with Marcin, prowling through the logic planning for revisions to the A.I. system and combat. This is exciting to me because we’re very aware that reducing numbers of A.I. isn’t really a solution to difficulty issues Pioneers experience, it’s more in depth with the how the A.I. responds and how the player instigates those responses.

Our main aim with these future revisions is to make the A.I. feel challenging and responsive to your actions, whilst not swamping you down with attack after attack.

Lee – Technical Director

One of those weeks where you want to desperately get onto the ‘fun bits’ of the gameplay A.I. but have to instead clean up issues with the newly integrated version of the engine. Oh joy.

Matt – Art Director

Working on effectively a benchmark area for all of our other key locations, I’ve been fleshing out any custom meshes for doors and unique items within our main encounter ‘silo’ location where Pioneers can are tasked to locate a mysterious device underground. This is a catalyst for other staged encounter areas which are effectively ‘battle arenas’ of sorts. All shall become clear when we release these zones for you to explore.

Tristan – Lead Developer

I have been investigating one of our multiplayer issues causing crashes after the player respawns. We have tracked down the area and put in a potential fix for it which should hopefully resolve the issue for now while the devs over at Epic can look into it further. Other than that I have been looking into some of the new movement logic that Lauren has been working on.

Ricky – Developer

Hi All, this week’s been action packed… with words… and being able to…use….stuff… more exciting than it sounds. I’ve been implemented designer based prompts and a new “use thing” system.

This will be utilised in only the most high tech, futuristic ways imaginable, like opening doors, turning lights on or off (maybe, you’ll have to bully the team a bit if they start complaining about things like performance costs or breaking the artistic vision), picking stuff up *gasp* off the floor and any other number of cases our hearts desire.

Joe – Environment Artist

I’m back! Been catching up on the level progress and plan this week, before getting stuck into starting on some environment kit pieces we can use for some of the awesome new locations the other guys have been working on.

The idea is to eventually end up with a library of man-made component pieces and textures that we can combine together to create whatever aesthetics are required for a given structure. In the future this should mean we have a consistent, high quality finish to every new area whilst still giving artists the flexibility to chop and change bits as required. This should make the whole process more flexible and much faster once we’ve got the pipeline nailed down.

Marcin – Designer

Working through the new A.I interactions with John, this pass will included the full melee system for which we’ll be drastically changing the behaviours and animations. I’ve also been implementing intial steps for the foundation of the objective system… how I do love a good objective.

Tom W – Designer

Continuing work on the Dam locations interior layout, with many tweaks to geometry and more thorough first pass positioning of lights. Looking forward to seeing this transform when we start to move away from our whitebox geometry.

Lauren – Animator

Taking a little break this week to re-charge my animation batteries. This isn’t a confession to me being a robot who requires batteries to run effectively >.> <.< … I <3 duracell.

Andy – Lead QA

So this week there has been some massive progress with the new level rework. Ive been lucky enough to get into the new parts of the map and do walkthroughs of the new structures. Ive also been working with another new guy call Mike, who is going to be working on making the drop pod and initial introduction area super cool.

In relation to QA, we managed to get a fix in for the crash that was really holding back multiplayer. That fix appears to have worked and now its just a case of cleaning up a few other known issues which means we will hopefully be able to get you wonderful people back into multiplayer games very soon.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix