Pre-Alpha Devblog #1 (Optimzations | Spawns | Fortifications)

Hello all, Our 0.7 build is live on our experimental branch. We've been pretty busy, optimizing for 0.7 and starting on our new fortification systems. We've decided to do smaller weekly forum updates to keep everyone in the loop. We will also do a small updates like this when any builds go live on Steams experimental branch. How to get into experimental branch 1. Open Steam and go to your games library. 2. Right click on STN and select "Properties" 3. Navigate to the "Betas" tab and select "experimental" in the drop down menu. 4. Close the properties window. For those that don't follow along with us on Discord it may seem like we're slacking when in fact we're busier than ever. We'll keep these updates short and sweet, with just a few pictures and examples of what the guys have been up to for the week. Please feel free to check out the changelog and see exactly what we've been working on. Optimizations We've spent a good deal of the last 5 or so weeks optimizing the project. Digging into the profiler and doing our best to smooth things out. We've made a start of it and although there's a lot of work left to do many of you will already feel the benefits. We've tidied up our scenes, taken care of small sector ticks like interiors loading and crunched the project down. You'll notice the disk space now is just over 8gigs where before our 0.7 it was nearly 11! We'll not bore you (as this work can be very tedious and not so enjoyable) with the details but things are running better. We'll remain committed to optimizing at the end of ever future update moving forward. New Spawn Points and soon to be added Points of Interest! We've decided that our old spawn system, consisting of over 100 spawn points for new players was a bit too over complicated and didn't really provide any general direction for the player. We've listened to backers who are tired of walking through our pre-alpha wilds only to find a town and be slaughtered instantly. The new spawn system consists of far fewer new player spawns and will always have a point of interest or direction to a town/structure. Below are some shots of how the new spawns are being set up.

The orange arrow is one of the new spawns all the green boxes are fresh design and direction for the player.

Example of a fresh spawn, structures to raid and direction to nearby towns.

Another example of addition player guide and design.​

This is just the start, new spawns are currently however design requires rebakes so new points of interest will come with each additional update as we move forward. Fortification and Aggressive AI (Coming in 0.8) Zombies are traversing through windows (no you're no longer safe in a locked house you will need to fortify the windows!!

Ignore the blue highlight, that's backend stuff. The player will simply walk up to a window with the proper tool in hand and if they have the required fortification materials it'll come out and snap to the window.

The player here is switching (ignore textures) through plank types. Weak planks (harvestable via fences and wood piles) vs stronger planks crafted from felled trees. We'll also include sheet materials like tin/plywood.

Just a short example of how boards can be manipulated once snapped to a window frame. This should add quite a good deal of customization adding the ability to totally cover windows or create space for shooting/viewing.

Above you can see a zed on his way into a structure, our nav-mesh links visible in our little animation test scene

​Well that's all for this little update, we should be pushing 0.7 to default this week after a bit more testing by the dedicated few. If you're interested in helping out with development as always comment below or join us on Discord. Thanks much for the continued support, come share your ideas, thoughts or concerns with us any time of the day! Regards, The team at a2z(Interactive);