Smores and Shores

[h3]Campfire Stories[/h3]
More than just a place to tell scary stories or make smores, campfires are an important part of life in Fractured Veil. They keep you dry and cook food, but they can also draw unwanted attention. Thanks to our community’s feedback, we made a number of campfire improvements this week to make them more performant and realistic looking.

We improved the smoke particle system and smoke plumes are now visible from much farther away. Here’s a look at the old campfires on the left and the new and improved version on the right. You’ll notice how much easier it is to see the smoke now, so you’ll have to be careful when building a fire….or else...

[h3]Surf’s Up[/h3]
It’s always amazing to hear from players who haven’t jumped into a playtest recently that frame rates are higher and Maui is lusher and looking beautifully deadly. We made some impressive performance increases recently with many seeing around a 20fps improvement (we cap at 62fps). In our opinion, the game has never looked better. Last week we spent some time improving the rain and this week the water work continues with waves and the shoreline.

We made some big upgrades to the realism of our waves letting them roll into shore and turn into foam. We’re not done with the waves yet, but we’re really happy with the improvements we made this week!

Now, the waves interact with the shore, and the wet sand changes once the rain hits it, as you can see in this test footage.

We even improved how the underwater sand looks with light and shadows playing across it.

[h3]Look Who’s Coming For Dinner[/h3]
We’ve made good progress on our sieging system and fixed a number of bugs. We buffed the mutants to make them a bit harder to take down, fixed a bug that would allow them to sometimes walk through walls if they approached them at a certain angle, improved their targeting, and made it possible for Trophy Collectors to throw heads from behind barricades. It’s never been harder to survive a mutant onslaught in the game.

[h3]Saying Hello To the New Neighbors[/h3]
The Thorcon Power Plant is the social hub in the game and we recently made some additions inside. Players will now find an area of tent stalls ready for a variety of vendors and trinket peddlers down the road. We even included some porta-pottys to help keep the floors clean. The hanging shark smells bad enough on its own.

A new area for players to explore appeared on the map this week.

Cobbled together from structures that weren’t completely leveled by the Fracture

signs, scrapwood, bits of metal

and even a few repurposed buses

The new tenants aren’t around yet but it’s still an interesting place to explore. The universally friendly “BAR” sign is turned on, so it’s only a matter of time before players can expect a new watering hole in town.

[h3]Community[/h3]
Mahalo to our testers who help us every week find what’s not working and what can be improved. Your feedback is hugely important to us so keep it coming! Here’s everything you found and we fixed this week.

hop - AI can no longer open locked doors

If you want to learn more about Fractured Veil check out our Discord server and visit our Reddit page.
[h3]More About Fractured Veil[/h3]