Devlog #5 — Dressing up, building up, and finally getting wet

This round was about the player: what you wear, what you find in boxes, what you can build with it, and a handful of things that made the world feel broken the moment you stepped into it. You can now swim. You can build a second storey and walk up the stairs to it. Your own head no longer blocks your view in first person. And every loot box on the map actually has something in it.

A new look, and 40 things to wear

The player is now a bald, rough-looking survivor instead of the default character. On top of that sit 40 pieces of clothing and armour: helmets, gas masks, face masks, vests and plate carriers, shirts, trousers, boots, shoulder pads, pouches and grenade pods. They range from tattered pants to armoured helmets. All of them are worn on the body, follow the animation when you run and crouch, and stack in layers the way you'd expect.

The new survivor in a spread of outfits, masks and helmets

Each piece has its own inventory icon, shot in the same studio setup as our gun icons: front-on, same lighting, same framing. The first batch came out with a dozen plain grey icons because the textures hadn't finished loading before the photo was taken, so we re-shot those once everything had settled. One pair of boots also turned up wearing a pair of grey placeholder trousers that came baked into the model. We hid those, so the boots are now just boots, in the icon and in game.

Open your bag and the pictures are there next to everything else.

The armour numbers are rough guesses for now (vests 10–40, helmets 18–28, legs 6–19). They'll get tuned once there's real combat to tune them against.

Loot boxes that are never empty

Clothing and armour now drop from boxes all over the map. Small boxes lean towards clothing, big boxes are about even between clothing and armour. Building gear is in there too: hammers, and stacks of wood, stone, metal plates and scrap. Enough is in there that you can loot a few boxes and start building without any cheats.

That exposed a nasty bug. When you played the game as a standalone build rather than inside the editor, the boxes were empty. The map streams in around you as you move, and our loot system only filled the boxes that existed at the very first frame, which in a standalone game was none of them. Boxes now fill themselves the moment their part of the map loads. In our standalone test, 59 of the 62 boxes around the spawn filled. The other three rolled empty, which is allowed. In a later run we counted 22 hammers, a few thousand wood, and 28 pieces of clothing and armour across those same boxes.

Loot boxes placed across the map's towns

Map-wide: cars, loot, and a weathered world

Beyond the spawn, the whole map now has life in it: 54 cars along the roads (most of them wrecks), 374 more loot boxes spread through the towns, and navigation data for 38 towns so people and animals can walk around them. We also fixed parked cars falling through the ground when you drove away and came back before the terrain under them had loaded.

Some of the 54 cars placed along roads across the map

Buildings, props and crates got a weathered pass: moss on the tops, grime at the base, and they now pick up a wet sheen in rain and settle snow on top in winter.

Building: up the stairs

Building had three problems you'd hit within a minute of trying it.

Lag when changing pieces. Scrolling from wall to floor to stairs froze the game for a moment, because each piece was being loaded from disk on every scroll. All the pieces now load when you spawn, and the preview only rebuilds once you stop scrolling.
No second storey. You couldn't put a floor on top of a wall. The cause wasn't the building rules at all. The map has huge invisible boxes that tell the engine where to grow trees, and the building check was treating them as solid. That blocked placement over most of the map. They no longer count as obstacles. Foundation, wall, floor on top, all green.
Stairs you couldn't climb. The stairs were a fraction of a degree too steep to count as walkable, so you slid back down. They now count as walkable. In testing, the player walked from the bottom to the top without jumping and stayed put.

Standing at the top of a staircase onto a second floor

We also tested the building blocker that had been open the longest: shooting a wall. Before, a foundation shrugged off a full magazine. Now a wooden foundation starts at 150 health and goes down under rifle fire. In our test, about one magazine from the scrap AK took it down.

Swimming, and building by the water

You couldn't swim. Narrative, the game framework we build on, already has swimming built in. But our sea was only a painted surface, so the game never knew you were in water. When the game starts, we now put real water under the surface of every sea and lake. Walk in and you swim, with the proper swimming animation, and you can climb back out.

The same change fixed building near the shore. The water used to count as an obstacle, so you couldn't put a foundation anywhere near the coast, including at the spawn. Now you can build right up to the waterline. One known gap: we haven't confirmed that you can place pieces while standing in deep water. From the beach it works every time.

First person without a face in the way

In first person, your view was partly blocked by the inside of your own head. The camera sits where your eyes are, and the game was still drawing the head around it. Now your head is hidden only while you're in first person, and only on your own screen. Look down and you still see your body and feet. Switch to third person and the head is back. Other players always see it.

First-person view with a clear look at the world

Checked since the last post

A few long-standing items on our test list got ticked off:

The weapon hotbar key no longer pops up the quick-use wheel. Pressing 1 just draws the weapon in slot 1.
The "blueprint compile error" popup no longer appears when you press Play.
All 11 crafting benches sit on the ground properly, including the Advanced Furnace, which used to be sunk a metre into the terrain.

What's next

A full play-through of all of the above in one sitting: clothing, swimming, building by the water, and the first-person view from the player's side.
Armour tuning, and cleaner icons for a few pieces that look too alike (two dark vests, two pairs of armoured pants).
Fuel and damage for cars, a way to flip a rolled car back onto its wheels, and switching seats.
Making storage boxes, the recycler and the generator placeable from the hotbar, and getting cooking working.