I've got a surprise for you. The most crucial article since the beginning of the project.

We've finished the first version of the Combat System

Since we were developing it from scratch. I've put the original concept on the workbench and reviewed what was good, what wasn't, and where to improve. We have redesigned everything related to Damage, Weapons, and stats.

Armors, Ammo, and Damage calculations were made more understandable, without stripping depth for possible builds and changes.

The weapons have changed to offer different tactical niches instead of just having different damage/range stats, during the article, we will list some but not all examples.

Keep in mind that all of this is subject to change, we can't see what works and what needs tweaking until we will do some more testing, some things might require a value change, and some need to have the feature reworked.

With that in mind, let's have a rundown of weapon attributes, with them I'll use some weapons as examples of how they work.

The weapons use Attack Lines to define how their attack targetting splits, they also can have a piercing that allows them to hit more than just one target per line. With some weapons, we’re combining those 2 to create different weapon types than the rest.

Through the article you will find small gifs showcasing the mentioned feature or weapons, they will be tested on a rather friendly family of spore plants. 

Attack Lines

Some weapons have an attack cone that decides how the weapon will perform. Bursts will split bullets evenly on each line, leaving the remainder for the main target. Single Shots are hitting targets in the cone with even power.

• Assault Rifle: rifle has a 3-line burst shooting 12 bullets, and every target gets hit with 4 bullets.

• Minigun: has 5 line bursts, 30 rounds split to 6 bullets per target hit.

• Flamer: hits everyone in its area of the fire, spreading damage to 5 lines on a short range and applying a burning debuff.

Target Piercing

Weapons can hit more than 1 target per line depending on their piercing stat.

• Laser Rifle: This single-line weapon goes straight and hits the first 4 targets in the path, upgraded version hits up to 6 targets, allowing for a great tactical damage multiplier on groups.

• Shotgun: Every shotgun has its piercing stat, with most shotguns being able to hit 3 targets per line, and having 5 lines, a shotgun choke mod allows one to extend weapon range but lower the number of lines to 3.

Explosion

Weapons fire a projectile that travels to the target location, upon reaching the target, it explodes.

• Rocket Launcher: It launches a rocket that flies towards the target at a slower pace than the rest of the projectiles, upon reaching the target it explodes, knocking everyone back from the center of the explosion.

• Plasma Rifle: Plasma weapons deal small AoE damage, upon reaching targets small splash damage is applied to everyone near.

• Grenades: grenades explode 1 second after reaching the target.

Pulse Weapons

On top of electrical damage, the attacks will subtract a small amount of target action points.

Melee weapons

The weapons have perks, some can pierce armor, some cause knock-down, and knock-back, and some cut and cause bleeding.

• Super Sledge: The hammer can do a wide swing, hitting multiple targets in front of the attacker, or thrust and knock back a single target.

• Sharpened Spear: Can hit 2 targets in a line, dealing piercing damage, or you can throw it.

They bite hard.

• Wakizashi: Thrust it for piercing damage, or try to cause bleeding with a swing.
• Cattle Prod: Damage enemy while dealing electric damage and lowering enemy Action points.
• Ripper: Cause bleeding with every attack.

Range Bursts

Bursts have been reworked and depending on the weapon, they split the attack between 3 lines of fire or 5 (minigun). They are more of a havoc-wreaking tool than accurate killing weapons.

Aimed Shots

As long as a weapon can aim, the main target hit will be resolved with an aimed body part, if you shoot a laser rifle, aiming for the head and hit 3 enemies including your main target, the main target is hit in the head while the rest count as body shots. There is now also flat aim damage, so even if you don't crit, hitting someone in the head is going to deal additional damage.

Current damage numbers are:

+30% for eyes

+20% for head and groin

+10% for hands and legs

The extra damage is going to close an annoying gap making aiming builds have to crit or gain nothing from aimed shots.

One Hex

One hex still exists, if targets are lined up for one hex and the attack is using more than one bullet, instead of Attack Lines the burst will be soaked into a single target, hitting with a maximum of 50% bullets of the attack.

With changes on Armor DT and bullets, the damage is similar to the Season3 damage dealt, despite only 50% of bullets hitting the target. 

Hex Targetting

Every attack that can hit more than one target, including melee,  can be used with targetting hex instead of critter. You can shoot a laser rifle toward an area outside of your vision, or burst forward when blinded. You can carpet-bomb the area with plasma spam.

Healing Shots

Some weapons and ammo will allow you to do healing instead of damage. A zip gun loaded with syringe needles provides quick health bursts to your target.

Criticals

The crit roll table is hard to read and Crit Roll itself is an unnecessarily complicated additional stat after calculating critical chance.

For initial tests, criticals will deal extra damage based on the targeted part of the body. The additional effects will be caused by crit success using the remaining critical chance points.

In the result, the more critical chance, the bigger chance for additional effect to trigger, without crit roll stat being involved in the calculation. The system will make crits more evened out, making critical results like knockout or breaking limbs a sporadic event, not the core goal of the critical attack.

Weapon Skill Requirement

Every weapon has now a skill requirement and weapon skills are leveled up by use. A skill requirement does NOT stop you from using a weapon, it only makes it harder to hit the target. The weapons have different skill requirements, with a pipe gun requiring nearly no skill will make it easy for new players to score hits with the weapon, but giving Gauss Rifle to a newbie will result in most of the shots being missed.

Ammo

Ammo was reworked, instead of having DR, DT calculations, % lowering weapon damage, or increasing it, it will now simply just have nothing or one of those 4 perks:

• Piercing - Ignores 33% of target resistances.
• Poisonous - Damage is converted into poison damage instead.
• Shredding - Has a chance to cause bleeding effect, lowers total damage.
• Healing - Damage is converted into healing damage.

That does not mean that every weapon type will have its ammo equivalent, there won’t be a healing minigun or shredding flamer ammo. The ammo types will be added to weapons that make sense, and some weapons in the future might be added that specialize in using healing ammo for example.

Armors

Armors have been also changed and damage calculation is different. Most importantly Damage Threshold is a single value applied just once, not per bullet, and armors share DT for every damage element. Having no Weapon Ammo in calculation and simplifying Armor stats makes the system clear for the user. Differences from the DT will be adjusted within resistances that will remain separate per damage element.

Debuffs

There is a variety of debuffs in the game, all of them are new calculations and some of them are new status effects.

• Poisoned

Poison stacks within your body and some of the amount depending on your resistance will damage you every minute, before fading completely. Antidote lets you heal the poison damage. Poison stops passive heal regen.

• Radiated

Similar to poison, it's a damage that stacks up and wounds the player every minute, it is passively gained in irradiated areas so using RadX is important.

• Bleeding

Bleeding can be caused by monsters, weapons, and bullets. Bleeding has 3 levels and every level triggers an equal amount of damage per second.

Level 1 bleeding causes 1dmg/s

Level 2 bleeding causes 2dmg/s

Level 3 bleeding causes 3dmg/s

Bleeding stacks up to Level 3, after reaching this level it causes no additional benefit to the attacker.

Bleeding has a small chance to heal by itself, lowering the bleeding level by 1 up to a fully healed bleeding state.

Bleeding can also be fixed by First Aid skill, reducing the amount of HP healed by the process, more on that below. Other healing sources won't be affected by bleeding.

• Burning

Burning is a strong damage per second caused by fire attacks, it will trigger from 15 to 30 damage per second until it all fades. Most of Flamer's damage is moved into burning stat and off the instant damage of the weapon.

This results in initial damage from the flamer not being strong enough, but repeated attacks build up the number of ticks per second, which, if not managed, will end up badly. 

One Account Approach

What we want is for the player to grow attached to his character, this entails that the player will have multiple classes/builds on the account which he will be able to swap, while character skills will be shared between the builds and be passively gained.

Having Perk presets you’ll be able to change your role in safe locations and experiment to see what hits home for you, without the necessity of creating a new account and leveling it up separately or going through reroll process.

Skills

The skills are now passively gained by use, For example, using first aid will slowly level it up, and scoring kills will increase the skill of a particular weapon. Repairing items will increase repair skill, disarming traps will level up traps, etc.

Currently, all skills are planned to be progressive.

Skill books will multiply the skill gain rate for a given amount of time.

The cap will remain at level 300, although in the early season we might limit it to lower numbers to ease up progression.

First Aid

Doctor and First Aid are merged into a single skill that Heals HP, repairs broken body parts, and removes bleeding stacks.

• Injury Heal

If the player has multiple injured body parts it will try to fix all of them, lowering the chance with every successful heal until it attempted to heal every injury.

• Hp Heal

First Aid heals target hp depending on player skill with a minimum of 30 HP per action.

It will fix the bleeding, subtracting 50 HP points of heal every bleeding level. So using bleeding weapons or bullets might prove useful to deteriorate enemy first aid abilities.

Both Injury heal and HP heal trigger together

Sneaking

It’s worth noting that sneaking will be gained by perks, not skills, forcing you to choose between perk points allocated into sneak instead of other combat/utility perks.

Those changes will be altered/modified by the perks that the attacker and target can have.

Hey folks!

It's been a while! Happy new year everyone, I'm excited to see plenty of familiar faces still supporting this project. Hats off to you folks. I hope what you'll read below will be satisfactory for at least some of you.

Below I'm going to list the most vital features developed since the last time we were bold enough to write down an article. What we'll go through is quite a chunk of milestones and the most vital features being implemented into the game.

Base building

The Player now can build his base. The base system was designed in a way that a player has full control over location. By putting up a tent in an encounter, the player takes over the map and can place buildings, containers, workbenches, furniture, and defenses.

The player can also salvage resource nodes and clutter in an encounter to free up more space. You're able to set up car parking lots, player spawn points, and quicker exit points from the map.

In the future, we can use the same system to create public player towns or player-driven events like PVP Arena. This is a core change we've been working on and improving the engine to support live tile (floor and roof) placement.

Crafting

Crafting was designed anew, we wanted a clearer, less cluttered crafting system.

The main goals of the new crafting system were:

• Max 4 crafting components per recipe.
• Reduce the amount of crafting resources, for example, require leather instead of gecko skins or brahmin leather.
• Crafting resources consist of ~8 basic materials and ~3 advanced materials.
• Remove randomness from crafting, which means getting rid of the re-crafting process for better rolls.
• Allow players to craft in bases, let the player build workbenches.
• Provide recipe-specific workbenches and detect them nearby during crafting.

A new in-game system was made from scratch, involving completely revisited resources and recipes.

The Player now can craft inside his base by building a workbench, workbenches do not have to be interacted with, they just have to be nearby. A recipe shows if the required workbench is available. Currently, there are 4 types of workbenches. General, Ammo, Chemistry, Gunsmith.

A manageable worksheet lists all the recipes, and we can convert them to game data with a click of a button.

Quest-based crafting. The system also supports unlocking quest-related recipes, giving us another tool in storytelling.

Randomly Generated dungeons

A flexible dungeon generation system is developed to allow constantly evolving, never-ending dungeon delves. Similar to Sierra Caves, this dungeon generates loot, enemies. More importantly, it randomly generates whole floor layouts, generating rooms, corridors, lighting, traps and quest-related NPC's, interaction spots.

The dungeon system is composed out of 2 types of structure, corridors, and rooms, with a little chaos involved, no dungeon floor will ever be the same, rooms will be filled with enemies or treasure, or occasional neutral NPCs, while corridors might be a simple walkway or a treacherous puzzle/trap.

Without getting into too much detail, a party of players can delve into a dungeon, first preset we've made is early game city sewers, the player can continue going lower and lower with his party, the deeper he goes, the difficulty improves, it's up to them to decide when to leave and use one of the exits that appear now and then.

The randomly generated dungeon system, like most of the things we're creating, is fully versatile, So with some balance tweaks, scenery changes, and new room modules, we can create new types of dungeons easily or even PvE challenges. A Temple of trials challenge was brewing in my mind for years by now.

Randomly Generated encounters

Worldmap encounters now go through multiple layers of randomization. The Biome is picked based on player position in the world. Every Biome e.g. Mountains, Desert, Forest contains a list of premade maps and available resources. Resources and structures and loot are generated onto the preset map, giving a fresh feel every time a player spawns in.

We also do plan a grid-based traveling between encounters, allowing the player to just keep on wandering without the need to exit to the world map, who knows, enhancing things on longer consecutive delve sounds like a good plan.

Resource Gathering

Randomly generated encounters and some of the dungeons contain resource deposits. The system is open-ended and allows us easily create Resources and assign them to game locations.

Resource nodes might require tools, e.g. Pickaxe for minerals, some items support more tools than just one.

Some resource nodes are replenishable, like computers in vault 15, some are limited and can be harvested multiple times before permanently fading.

These changes rebalance the approach to scavenging, harvesting, in the current season it is far better to scrap gear than to gather raw resources. Amount of items per encounter and weight, ability to have own Resource Node farms in the base should tweak that gameplay standard a bit.

Friend list

A friend list allows you to add players when both sides agree.

Added players can see each other's location depending on their privacy setting. Players can also chat and invite each other to a party.

This adds necessary support for solo players, currently, an often scenario happens where players separate before sharing contact information and one random death might lead to a split. Staying at the party and adding each other to the friends list makes it less necessary to be involved within a big group.

Ping system

The player can notify his party members with a ping system. Pings can be placed on the area, critter, or even the player himself. This allows for far more tactical coordination.

Pings placed on critter or player follow and update position as long as it remains within player's sight, upon reentering player's sight ping reappears on the target.

The player can place three pings - Attack, Move, Defense. Pings do not overlap between players. For example, Player A and B can both place attack ping and both will be visible for everyone.

New World

We are improving locations to provide a more intricate and tactical approach on PVP maps and extra convenience to community locations. A lot of work went into redesigning in-game cities and dungeons. The final goal is to modify every core location with improvements based on both our and player experiences.

The unprotected towns need to support a new guard system, new planned PvP game modes and feel less linear. Map layout for combat is something that the community knows better and we're working closely with experienced contributors, trusting them with the redesign process.

Retro artstyle aim

We've been experimenting with rendering in the game. We have improved some shaders and changed the way how engine rescales sprites. We've settled on a more old-school-like system, which additionally gets rid of all the artifacts like the checkerboard floor and makes 3D critter renders feel better merged with the environment.

Minimap

A player can launch the minimap button to see surrounding buildings and NPCs. The minimap can be dragged, resized, and zoomed.

In the future, we wish to recreate this to show quest markers as well as color players based on name/faction colorizing. For now, that'll do.

That's not all!

There are plenty of minor improvements to list down, but there's no point in making this list look like a changelog or digging deeper into engine reworks and tweaks.

Most of the major gameplay loop features were designed and implemented into Season 4. We're drawing closer with every month and some features require just a small polish. The game feels more and more complete with every passing feature.

I could say that we just need to finish up the combat system and character development and release Beta, but I don't want to throw any promises or feel rushed, so I'll keep my mouth shut!

Thank you for reading through. I'm very happy to share the Season 4 progress, especially since some of those features were in development for over a year with no display to the wide public. I feel relieved that the community could finally witness some of our collaborative efforts. Even if it leads to a post-apocalyptic desert.

Hey there! 

After polishing, improving, and resolving any jarring issue mapper had that came to our minds, we have finally finished our release version of mapper. It contains a lot of improvement, including a search bar, tile brush, and lighting editor. Find out more by watching the video!

You can get mapper from discord channel:

Discord link 

Or from this link:

Google drive link 

If you'd love some example maps to make it easier where to start, here's plenty of them compatible with the new mapper:

Map pack link 

With mapper out of the way, we're going back to gameplay features we're working on, more on it in our future post! 

Hey there folks! 

We haven't written here in a while, but despite the COVID19 outbreak and lack of articles, we're going strong with the game! 

We've made quite the amount of features and upgrades since the last article, improving the basic quality of life and implementing the new core gameplay mechanics. There is honestly too much to write about so I have compiled it into a Showcase video for your convenience!  Have a good watch and come back to the article if you have any questions. I will try to update this post with Q/A if any questions arise. 

The video will mention:

1) New context menu

2) Item management Quality of Life

3) Mouse improvements

4) Party System

5) Weapon Modding System

Assuming you have watched the video, we hope you're satisfied with how things are progressing on our end. We have other improvements and systems in progress which can be noticed on the video with an eager eye - but it's not done yet, so all we can hope is that showing already done systems will erase any doubts that you might have had as we went silent over the months. 

Hey there! 

Things are busy, so without further introduction, let's get back to the topic of Random generation!

Random Gen modularity.

Quest generation work continues as intended. The ultimate goal is to give the framework as much flexibility as possible and allow the system to be easy to implement in quests, events, pretty much anything.

The other side of its easy to use was a goal to make it also very easy to create new elements for the system.

And after a lot of deep tweaking and writing crazy algorithms, we have managed to create a modular structure generation that makes creating presets very easy and convenient! 

Just like before, we will try to discuss the generation step by step.

Preparation:

1) Preset design

2) Premade structures

On Generation:

3) Randomly choosing a structure

4) Populating the structure

Repeating steps 3 and 4 desired amount of times.

5) Introducing outdoor sceneries.

1) Preset design

Listing items and setting them down was the usual way of how things were done on S3, I will use encounter containers as an example. 

The containers are spawned on preset locations, they are set inside encounter map and are taking a single hex of space to not cause any kind of overlapping.  This is a very simple and straightforward way to generate additional content on the map.

Our current goal is to improve such generation by a total rework, we want system to be:

• Allowing bigger than 1 hex sized elements
• Allowing walls/roofs/floors to spawn
• Reducing the need to describe elements in such deep detail for things to work properly.

Well, we did it. The current system supports multi hex containers and sceneries, that are not overlapping each other, have significantly improved the randomness of spawn and are generated within premade structures that are spawned into the map.

Without getting into technical detail I will show you the Tribal preset that is used as a testing ground. 

Above you can see the "list" of items that can spawn within the tribal settlements, the system picks up data from a map preset file and builds it into a preset on the server-side. Here a person can define what is going to spawn where - 1/2/3 are containers with different rotations that help to define against what wall can what be spawned, latter 4/5/6 is the same concept but for spawning sceneries, a flavor. And last 7 are the elements that will spawn outdoors in the settlements.

There aren't many tribal elements in the Fallout files to fill up those lists with more content, but I'm certain raider camps and such will be far more varied!

All a person has to do is to put desired elements in the set spot, it is insanely easy! There is no need to duplicate files, to list them down inside game scripts, this single map is ALL that the server needs to fill up Tribal structures! The rest is handled by the ever-growing code of Random Generation.

2) Premade structures

To take the best of two worlds we connect random element spawning with premade structures. Those structures can be designed one after another by an eager mapper skilled person. There are no crazy requirements, just like with elements, structures are also modular and saving the map file after adding some more is all a person has to do. 

The structure is made from 3 key things, SPOT hexes to define where structure begins and ends, LOOT hexes where the elements from presets can spawn, and the structure itself - walls, details, roof, and floor.

So... We've created a map file, without too much detail, what happens in-game?

The settlements are generated, of course!  The above pictures are some of the randomly generated settlements that were created on the Quests. 

The quest is telling what preset and how many buildings to generate (Adjusted by little randomness) and the randomly chosen structures - 3) spawn into the world one after another, becoming populated - 4) with preset elements. After all of those are spawned, the outdoor area of settlement is additionally populated with outdoor elements to add even more flavor.

The settlements feel pretty empty without NPC characters, but this has to wait into far further future when the AI system for enemies is complete.

This Preset system, based on a single map can take any form we desire, they can be monster nests, raider camps, ruined buildings - whole districts separated by roads,  such system will make every encounter, every quest, slightly varied and unlike the previous.

Thank you for sticking with us folks, we are glad we can continue our passion project without pressure, taking all the time we need to deliver what we intend to. 

There are more things related to S4 stirring in the background, including the concept of weapon modding, but things are not too set in stone yet to bring them to light!

Oh, I have almost forgotten! Happy anniversary! In last month we have hit the 5th year of Season 3!  I am working arm to arm with contributors to squeeze out some things and create a quality update for the occasion, so stay tuned for that!

Hey!

We've come with another monthly report, sit down and have a nice read! I'm excited to share the news!

Today we will discuss gameplay and questing, also show off the innovative hotkey system and end up with a small surprise!

Quest Generation

Gameplay loops, repetition, roguelikes...

I'm sure many of you have played or heard of randomly generated mission content for games, it's a fairly tested system that makes repetition less mundane and allows for interesting scenarios, secret rooms, surprise events.  I can name some games on top of my hat that uses room generation, Warframe, Enter the gungeon, The Binding of Isaac... I could go on and on. Sierra Caves on Season 3 is an example of unlimited content, but it has neither a specified beginning or an end.

The goal for Season 4 is to create a more interesting and varied gameplay loop. We know how people enjoy caravans, which allow strangers to teaming up for personal gain. We know that people like repeatable quests. Toxic Caves with Cathedral are all-time favorites.

Most of the missions take months and a crew of people developing and polishing every aspect of it. But what if we could create a PvE quest framework? Implement another gameplay loop that players can participate in freely?

I've begun to prototype this right after I have finished the beta live town system. So let's discuss randomly generated quests!

The fundamentals:

• A party-based PvE experience with start and end of the quest, tied with maps in between, generated by the defined length of a quest.
• Quests are limited to full party size and scaled appropriately.
• Loot in the maps is randomly generated, in similar style how Toxic Caves loot is.
• The final map has a quest goal, raiders camp to wipe out, caravan to save, pre-war item to retrieve or anything else that gets implemented with the quest system. 
• Players have knowledge of their goal, quest length, and difficulty from the noticeboard where they picked up the quest.
• Additional to loot and experience gained from the quest, there is also an experience reward for finishing a quest, pay in caps, and sometimes an item reward.  This is per player based so, for example, everyone from 4 players would get 2000 bottle caps, metal armor and a handful of experience upon completion.

Issues and ways to solve them:

• Backstabs

1) This is not an issue to be exact. The unprotected towns with increased risk reward should not limit the PvP aspect, this is wasteland after all.

2) But protected towns should have either completely disabled PvP or have a reputation impact for friendly fire. We have to experiment with which one will be better for new players.

• Matchmaking

1) Players have to be able to find each other, This won't be a big issue thanks to global chat and friend private chat, the quest noticeboards will be put near main town entrances, and party leader will be able to pick up the quest. 

This will either result in players teleported to quest location or able to head out to world map and find quest circle.  The areas will have memorized who can enter it and only people that were in the party at the launch of the quest can enter.

• Player alting to get more of the reward

1) One of the main goals of S4 is to construct player accounts in such a way to prevent alting. We know we won't be able to fully erase the possibility of that but we don't want multilogging to be a vital part of the game.

2) The way to combat it at first glance wouldn't be actually too hard, noticeboards are in dual log protected areas, yet as we mentioned before, anyone who's in the party when picking up the main quest should be able to enter it, it includes people, not in location and/or on the global map.

3) Multilogging protection on the map itself? No sense, the reward is upon quest completion, alts wouldn't have to enter. 

4) This is the most vital issue in the whole of Fonline2, a lot of things and rewards in prior seasons got nerfed because multiloggers are exploiting it, increasing necessary effort for the fair players.

5) This requires a lot of tweaking to not punish a fair player.

Quest Generation breakdown.

The quest builds a grid of maps depending on quest length, pretty straightforward process.

Using the grid as a reference, it creates passages so that players can go in between the maps.

Now the Quest chooses preset maps to fill the grid, the maps are checked if they have available passage defined in the previous step and added to the possible spawn pool.

The maps now get filled with content depending on the player scaling and quest difficulty, enemy groups are chosen and spawned per maps, structures like houses and tents, graves, minable ores and resources like Broc flowers spawn depending on preset map details, containers containing loot roll a RNG chance to spawn with loot generated inside. 

Additionally, hazards have a chance to spawn on the map, be it the whole map being irradiated or full of mines/beartraps. Tread carefully!

To add some flavor, other maps spawn, some might be dead ends, some might be a treasure-filled sidequest with a whole underground section and rare reward, think of them as possible special encounters.

Let us continue...

Now the map is generated, players can go tackle on their quest! The final map contains the task that has to be completed, kill a raider leader, save kidnapped civilians, defend pack of brahmins or find out whereabouts of the missing caravan.

This system has potential, with the community that creates new maps we can make it more and more varying and interesting, we intend to add premade structures generations, letting small houses, shacks and bunker entrances to spawn. This isn't a goal for the early version, but I shiver when thinking of how much can be achieved!

Here's a Video of the VERY EARLY prototype! There is a lot of WIP stuff in it. But we have most of the above-mentioned steps implemented!

https://youtu.be/33Z6waj-JVs 

To note, container spawns and passage grids were put closer to the middle so I don't have to walk through whole map size.

Interface

The work on the main game screen continued, behold, hotkey panel!

The panel is resizable and has 3 pages, each attached to different hotkey combinations.

Hotkey slots will support different items and do different things depending on the item type:

Armors - Left-clicking on armor hotkey puts on the first possible armor found of the type.

Weapon - Left-clicking weapon puts it into the main hand, right-clicking puts it into a second hand.

Ammo - Will switch the ammo type on the currently used weapon. Example, AP from JHP.

Drug - Left-clicking uses the drug on yourself, right-clicking allows you to specify the target you will use it on.

Skills / Perks - Depending on the type, they allow you to use on self or target - or both with left-click /right-click.

Hotkey icons will show the amount of item if it is a stackable item and if the player even has the hotkeyed item in inventory, or if an action is in cooldown.

Keyboard hotkeys also work. We haven't settled how will hotkeys react to things like drugs or skills, we will either add customization for each hotkey slot to let the player choose a priority or resolve the second action with another hotkey.

Hotkeys don't have to be visible on the main screen to work from keyboard keys.

Here's a video of the hotkey system recorded by Balthasar, it seems he forgot to put on pants!  Oh, silly Balthas...

https://youtu.be/wYfhAGyKsCI 

We plan for the hotkey file to be able shared between players, and we're looking towards saving it in such a way to make it easy.

New contributor!

An old friend of mine contacted me recently proposing his exceptional art skill to our use. We've barely started to experiment with the scenery but the results are already amazing! After we master the scenery art style we will be able to breathe in a new life with fitting map elements created under our vision. 

Here are some samples:

I'm sure you wouldn't guess which one is which without the labels, huh?! 

The notable issue is that original art has a mild contrast, and it is very visible on the table which used too strong dark strokes to separate wood planks, a lesson for the future.

And that's all! I will continue working on QuestGeneration for quite a while, as this is a big challenge, so expect more of that in the future!

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!