Hello folks!

Welcome back! It's time for another update of how things are going! Enjoy the read!

We will continue discussing the same topics from the last month, interface and living town system, as they are the current focus outside of engine-related work.

Interface

The work on the Main screen continues and we have finished designing and creating the Core game box, a part of the interface that shows all the necessary details.

And as mentioned before, we added some customization for the player to have it set up the way he prefers, you can check it out on video here:

https://youtu.be/vVd02iwiRAc

Town System

The living town system received significant additions and tweaks, making the whole world a lot more alive looking.

Panic

A panic system was implemented, the gunfire, fighting in town raises the panic level, the town citizens cower and scream, running to hide in a nearest safe spot while town guards pull out their weapons and begin to look for troublemakers. 

The town guards will also exist in northern towns, making troublemakers rethink if they want to pointlessly go and kill everyone on their sight for pocket money. 

After Panic fades out, the town calm down, going back to their previous routines.

Triggered Panic video:

https://youtu.be/qYK5mREJCm0

Visitors

Another important addition to our town system are Visitors.

Visitors are traders and wastelanders, not unlike the player.

Those NPC's will offer to sell their goods - that can range from junk to really rare items - to the player, offer him a quest or request to travel with him to another town in sorts of one time VIP escort caravan.

The visitors stay a while in town, depending how busy they are kept by players, then leave, who knows what happens to them later.

Few Visitors coming in:

https://youtu.be/4HGGApDBAaI

We're working to give Visitors an original look that will help players spot them out in the now crowded towns of the wasteland. They will carry backpacks and sometimes be accompanied by a fellow mutt or anything else that can be tamed in the universe of Fonline.

But beware. Not everyone who enters the northern towns might be friendly.

All of the above videos were recorded in classic 3d setting, no animation smoothing, 18 fps animation limit, and no multisampling, some people might enjoy such setting more.

See you next month!

Hey there!

We're on vacation season and most of the time we weren't around, but we still have made satisfying progress!

As we push on further we find more and more issues with the engine, thankfully as it became open source, we can fix it ourselves.

Our past month...

The engine reworks continue, while the rest works on feature frameworks and interface.

The first version of the chat interface is in! We have implemented new fonts for the game and quality of life systems while providing some nice customization abilities.

https://youtu.be/iReVbh0pQIY

The chatbox can be resized to your liking, in future we plan to add more options, including font size.

In meanwhile all the necessary interface concept art is in progress. Some examples below.

The worldmap interface, Chatbox with players listed side by side, with a vehicle panel if player is driving one.

A modular elevator system, we will be able to use this one and change amount of buttons and labels on them as neccessary, the fancy warning sticker will be also replaced accordingly depending on location.

Code wise there is always not much to show on the frontend result but the living world initial system is in! 

The maps have a pool of spots and a list of NPC presets that randomly generate the citizens and town guards. The AI between citizens and guards is different. While guards focus on patrolling the area and taking a break from time to time, the citizens just go around minding own business. 

Below you can see two videos from tests of random generation and movement, the NPCs say debug commands so we know what are they "thinking"! Additionally, their idle time is shortened to make them idle less for testing.

https://youtu.be/i8rfELQLTIU

The town Adytum during it's daily routine. 

https://youtu.be/xVZmWIVNJdY

Gecko. Not a place to be for a smoothskin.

Русскоязычный перевод (Russian Translation Link)  

Welcome back! 

Wow. Just wow. This month was amazing. We received amounts of support we haven't even dreamed of. Thank you, everyone, for fueling up our passion project! 

We're going to touch a few topics today. The upcoming tech demo, races, living world mechanics and chasing own art style. 

A month passed quickly. And while there was a lot of code wise restructuring. The main task this month was steadily preparing a playable tech demo.  We have also moved from SVN to GitLab, which in the end will help us out manage the different versions and WIP things more smoothly. 

What will be the tech demo? 

The tech demo is going to be a VERY barebones straightforward test. The players will be able to download the client that will help us test things out. All players will be able to register, create a human character and will be put onto a single open map with all other players. People will be able to chat and hang out there, while their FPS and PING get registered for analytics. We will do some stress testing, for example spawning hundreds of 3D NPCs. 

This tech demo will be first large scale online experience, which is necessary as the game stability is currently a great unknown, sure, the game runs nice for us, stress testing on my old notebook gave positive results, but such a large scale test is necessary to ensure everything is going the right way. Different models, textures used by players. A lot of shaders generating different colors on the screen might affect performance. Question is how much it does, and with that, you'll be able to check out the character creation and the game yourself! 

It will be announced at least a week before, and the client will be shared through patreon.

Onto next topic now!

Chasing the artstyle

One of the main goals is to create a completely new with quality of life improvements interface that fits and is original. Too many changes came to all of the interface panels to stick to old concepts. And since we would have to develop them from scratch anyway. We needed to nail down the style first. 

Our goal was to make something that looks modern, although preserves the post-apo style and is not looking like another interface copy. We knew that near all interfaces use A lot of Brown and green and the classic buttons. We did our best to stay away from it after seeing that we really can't make this color scheme appealing to us. 

Here are some failed attempts:

But after experiments, tests. We have managed to strike something that we enjoyed a lot!  A very original and fitting interface art style that we began to expand upon!

For inspiration, we have looked at cold war era terminals. Their keyboards, screens. Our research object was not the Fallout interface, but the era that inspired the world of Fallout itself. 

An old keyboard and our initial button reconstruction slotted into it.

Our first concept of everything, the vintage screen with an interesting pattern, weathered buttons, both screwed into a brushed steel pane that was fit onto a strong portable base that hides all electronics. 

This was it! We found what we were looking for! Since then it was a quick slide to other interface concepts! 

A barter screen, where we fit all things together and designed how input slots will look like. 

A concept of friends menu, showing first tries on weathering and destruction of the brushed steel elements. 

And our barter screen once again! This time-weathered down and damaged by passing time and careless use all over the wasteland. It made us scream "We nailed it!"

All of those concepts are downscaled and watermarked, they do not represent either the current or final result. We are still experimenting with and polishing the art style.  But we can admit, the worst is already behind us.

Living World

One of my biggest desires was always to make the world of Fonline feel alive. The current S3 towns are filled with Idle NPCs that stand still until shot, guards following a simple move to a pattern or being completely stationary. 

In Season 4 we want to make all towns feel alive with possibilities a player could use to their advantage, protected location filled with guards moving and patrolling, sometimes taking a stop to talk with other NPC or going for a drink to the bar, citizens that group up for small discussions, visit stores, doctor, transition between maps of the location, wandering traders coming into the town, looking to sell things, Trappers visiting the town, offering to sell you maps leading to interesting areas they spotted while traveling. Common folks randomly getting quests that you can pick up and do with your party. 

The unprotected towns will also change depending who holds the power in town and for how long it wasn't raided. Players will notice a bigger impact over communities, and significant changes caused by Power Struggle between factions forced to share the locations, for Example Metzger and Lara in Den.  

Playable races

Players will be able to choose from 3 races. 

Human - All around balanced character, yet weak for the environment. We haven't been made for the world of wasteland, and it shows.

Ghoul - A feeble remnant from the old world, though a human from pre-war times, he is far better prepared for the current world situation. Radiation isn't that much of an issue, yet his body is frail.

Mutant - An art of the Master, they are strong and resistant. A walking war machines, their biggest issue is that other feats came by the sacrifice of speed.  

The races will be fully customizable just like the Human's are. All of them will provide different perks and have different statistics at the beginning.

A lot of people often wanted to play as a ghoul. The requests are flooding my DM box up to this day, while others tried a mutant and though it was fun to play one, the inability to run was their bane. 

In S4 we fix those both things.  We make all the races playable. Ghouls and Mutants get the ability to run. While on ghoul it's a quality of life change, the mutant is a one big balance issue. A running beast with a strength of monster truck will bring fear to its enemies. Now, how do we balance giving mutant an ability to run? 

Well, the main concept we have now is to make mutant Burn action points while running. This means that in combat running will cost AP, forcing the player to stop after running long distance to recover some, putting him in disadvantage. This way they have a tactical movement ability that cannot be used to rush to hug their enemy without putting yourself on AP disadvantage. This also means that they stop being an issue outside of combat.

 Whoever played mutant, knows how annoying is to walk through the hub or around your base. They were too slow. Now because having 0 action points won't be an issue in a safe environment, the mutants can run freely, making an out of combat experience heavens better.

That's all for now!

And once again we've reached the end of our Monthly article. I hope it shined a light on some interesting things in the works and you have enjoyed the read! 

Oh before I forget. Our dev team grew a little. We have four new guys that joined our ranks since the beginning of the year:

Waffen - A good friend of mine. Some might recognize his name from car paints in the game, Waffen is doing the interface for us. And the concept visualizations above are all his work.  

Krizalis -  Krizalis is our new game design writer that is a friend of Skycast and joined team after finding out that our S4 concept and many ideas had smoothly aligned with his. 

Yoummuu - Our contributor and my longtime friend, his decent knowledge of 3D and a fair skill in programming made him decide to jump the boat and join us. Work related to 3D models and its back ends will be steadily transitioned to him.

Brightside - Hosting. From few months he handles hosting of all websites and the current S3 server. He is also the one that developed Roza 2.0. 

And Since the people asked me who is currently active from our Dev team. I'll list the core dev team below.

Skycast - The big brains behind the engine and the majority of the advanced code. Without him, none of that would be possible, he serves the role of a final decision maker and pioneer that explains the new engine to the rest and tells what is possible and what is not.

Balthasar - A long-time developer and fanatic of math related programming. Bunch of the code that he is tasked with and delivers is based on algorithms and calculations. Of course, we both are also writers and quest/dungeon coders. 

Rascal - Although inactive. He often drops in to see how things are going and provides helpful feedback.

Wesan - And me, well talking about myself always made me felt awkward so I'll just say what I do, not who I am and quote Skycast:

We have Wesan as great community support/game design/coding/actually anything.

And well, that sums it much. If something needs to be done. I'll do it.

Currently, my main tasks are running Patreon, Season 3, supervising contributors and new developers and Season 4 3D, Coding and Art.

And that's all of us. Bunch of folks that preferred to get on and do something than ponder about "What if..."

All that's left for me to say is to see you next month! Cheers!

 Русскоязычный перевод (Russian Translation Link) 

Hey there! 

It's finally time, I've been waiting for this day more eagerly than for any silly man made holiday. A day where I can finally show off what's happening behind tightly shut doors!

As it is the first article and I don't want to spoil everything at once, we'll focus on a few topics today, namely character customization, new 3d model system, and the lighting.

Before we dive in further. I have to say this is still an EARLY WIP status. And things might change over time (For the better!).

So, least intimidating but still key things first, the lighting.

The lighting on the newest engine was significantly improved. It's sharper, it doesn't end abruptly on the walls causing weird cuts. This might be of little importance but the ambiance is what creates world building, and lighting is the big part of it.

On the first example, we're going to find out how much better light shines onto walls compared to the previous lighting system, which is a far cry from our new engine. From mapper's perspective lighting took too long because of how it reacted with walls. The new system not only looks far better but also saves up work of creating fake light tinting on walls and blocking light passages.

You can also already notice the quality and sharpness improvement on the rendering. The game brings more detail thanks to our heavy work to export all 14,000 + graphics from FRM to PNG format, with some quality rework, and rebuilt animations by decoding their offset from original files and building .fofrm files that are equivalent of the frame by frame gifs. 

This even further shows the level of detail in our reworked art on our new engine.

And just a cozy bar as the last example.

Here's the link to 2:1 scale images attached for closer comparison if you're curious! 

So! Since we have a rendering and lighting system behind us, time to take a small sidestep and talk about planned features that are new compared to Season 3. Of course, things might change over time.

A friend list - Come on, it's 2019!  What game doesn't have a built-in friend list where you can see if your friends are online and around! Solo players that did not partake in big PVP gangs couldn't just log in and without any other third party find something to do. This is going to help.

Party System. Ability to see your squadmates location no matter what and keep an eye on their health/action points, be able to tag enemies and mark places lets you approach the game more tactically with your squad. 

Chat System. A whole revamp on chat system was necessary, now sporting a Global/Map/ Local/Faction/Private Messages with various filters and options lets you configure the chat window the way you desire!

Now, enough of that feature talk. More things to show to catch you up!

So, onto the topic of 3D Support, characters, animations. Goals to reproduce the old-school style... 

Well, this was a challenge, and most of my personal time was dumped into development and tweaking the models, just making everything work was an impossible feat from the very old files from long abandoned Fonline 3d project. 

But! Thanks to the amazing help of Karpov, we have finished All necessary 3d models and animations for the game! Karpov, which some of you might recognize, cooperated with us to bring 3d work onto a new engine system, we discussed restructuring together, we have found missing armors and animations, and have completed them. That includes 2 other playable races than human, but it's something I won't spoil yet.

(One of the many models specifically designed for Fonline2 by Karpov.)

There were 3 core things that we had to follow while developing 3D.

1) Reproduce the style - We all know how the old fallout models look, they are not the nicest but they have an original charm and fit perfectly to the post-apo environment. 

2) Reproduce the animations - After years, we are all used to see how the character walks, how a character stands, how he or she holds, shoots, plays with a weapon as an idle animation. So our goal was to frame by frame reproduce it.

3) Cut down repetition - So, this might sound odd but let me explain. All of the items share the same animation In 2d critter, and some armors by default look exactly the same, for example, combat jacket. Our goal was to stop making everything look like clones by providing a model for EVERY weapon and armor in the game.  We have completed it.

Another repetition was by how players look, we have solved this by customizable cosmetic settings, the player can decide if his helmet from armor, for example, combat armor, should appear, or we should still see his hair without a helmet on, Same rule applies to shirts, and pants.

So, do you want to have red mohawk even when you equip combat armor? Feel free! Want to wear a pink shirt under your chest piece? We're not going to stop you!

(Oh isn't he charming!)

On character creation, you will be able to choose your default clothing, skin color, and the hairstyle. The clothes and hair will be fully customizable by a color slider, allowing you to create your own wastelander. 

Of course, it doesn't mean customization is over, there is a multitude of vanity items to spruce up your looks, and you can always visit a barber to try out new hairstyle on your character. 

We're proud and happy to look behind and see so much progress. Especially that we're just starting. We will develop Season 4 more openly from now on, especially when our issues with the engine are now resolved, or easily solvable thanks to it becoming open source.

We can't give out a roadmap, especially that this is a hobby project and life can hit hard sometimes, but we will provide monthly article if nothing goes wrong from now on! We also plan to release a tech demo somewhere this summer,  where players can come in, test the game performance and let us collect data on how things are working out. 

And that is the end of Patreon launch article. We hope you have enjoyed the read!

Fonline 2 Dev team.