Devblog 49 - Swimming | Animation Improvements | AI Fixes++

Friday August 20th,

Hey everyone, hope you’ve all had a fantastic week. We’ve made great progress burning through issues and making improvements to core mechanics. James has been working on the ‘home’ system for the new gameplay styles. John has been tweaking and improving animations. Andre has put some polish on the swimming mechanics and I’ve spent my time working on the upcoming improvements to our guide system. As always, feel free to check out exactly what we’re up to via our changelog.

Swimming

Terribly sorry, that’s the best way to start after having tested the swimming implementation. Wow, was that needed! It really brings the world to life not having to constantly worry about death when you’re near a body of water. Andre spent the week adding all the finishing touches to the swimming mechanic. Proxy animations have been added so you don’t look like Jason Voorhees walking across Crystal Lake anymore. Stamina now affects how far you can swim before you start sinking so don’t go thinking you can swim right off the map. Players will be able to freely dive for quite a few seconds before taking damage to drowning (underwater caches, perhaps?!). You’ll receive ‘warning gulp’s’ before drowning to alert you to make your way to the surface. Now it’s time to start thinking about boats and fishing!

Animation Improvements

Part of the quality of life improvements and general game improvements we’ll be focusing on in the coming updates is fluidity. Weapon animation speeds were something that needed addressing. John has spent the week tweaking and changing animations and animation speeds. He's made reloading animations around 1.5x faster than they’ve been in the past across the board. You’ll also notice a new last round and partial clip reload animation.

New mid clip reload

Along with reload animation tweaks and speed tweaks we’ve adjusted cleaning speeds on all weapons.

Clean Lengths

ARG 15 - Old: 14.6 | New: 9.1
Clintchester - Old: 11.3 | New: 6.9
Double Barrel - Old: 9.8 | New: 6.0
Double Barrel Sawn Off - Old: 9.8 | New: 6.0
FRKS - Old: 9.9 | New: 6.0
Pump Action Shotgun - Old: 9.6 | New: 6.0
R-6804 - Old: 8.0 | New: 4.8
357 Magnum - Old: 5.2 | New: 3.0
Bateman - Old: 5.9 | New: 3.4
Lola And Garry's Iron - Old: 8.0 | New: 4.8
Rauser Rig - Old: 7.8 | New: 4.8

Zombie Fixes

Looking through player created tickets we’ve noticed and have personally run into stuck zombie issues. This occurs a lot around intersections and complicated world areas. The majority of the issue was due to an AI vision check being reversed. That has been sorted and it seems to have fixed the issue during internal testing. Below is an example of of the current issue or a variation of it at least. If you have any further issues like this when version 1.10 is released, please share with the team as soon as possible.

Zombie stuck (fix coming in 1.10)

We'll continue to work on improving early game mechanics and fixing all the bugs you guys have found over the last few builds. Thanks again for the continued support and issue reporting.