Weekly Dev Log for January 19th, 2018
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Weekly Dev Log for the week of January 19th, 2018. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Tower Unite 0.4.0.3 Patch
We released the 0.4.0.3 Hot Fix for Tower Unite today, you can read all about the changes that were made in the announcement thread here.
Zombie Massacre
Zombie Massacre continues to be the main focus of the week, and many features and bugs have been fixed as we make progress.
Gameplay
A big focus for this week was getting a playable prototype of Zombie Massacre up and running so that it can be tweaked, and to give something to our artists so that they may start to design their maps around the game.
Zombie Massacre on the Tower Unite Menu Screen Zombie Massacre Prototype Gameplay Still #1 Zombie Massacre Prototype Gameplay Still #2 http://img.macdguy.org/i/2018-01/2018-01-19_18-29-06_cfh3YdyDA7xF.webm Zombie Massacre Prototype Gameplay Video
Guitar Weapon
@Matt has been working hard on creating a brand new guitar model to be used as a weapon in Zombie Massacre. The old guitar model wasn’t textured with Substance Painter so the new one will look significantly better.
Freshly Baked AO Render of the Guitar Weapon. (50% Polycount of the Original | Uses 1 Texture instead of 5) Zombie Massacre Guitar Weapon: Old Bridge vs New Bridge Zombie Massacre Guitar Weapon: Old Knob vs New Knob
Radio Tower
Behavior
The Radio Tower item had it’s behavior changed to better match the original idea. The Radio Tower now kills zombies instantly, including burst visuals, instead of continuous particles.
Appearance
A radius system was created to display the area of effect for the Radio Tower item, and it’s functionality is shown off in the Zombie Massacre Gameplay Video above.
Zombie Massacre Radio Tower: Radius System
Virus Weapon: Sci-Fi Handgun
@Johanna has been busy working on the remastered Sci-Fi Handgun for the Virus Gameworld.
Virus Sci-Fi Handgun Remaster: Finished Model (Needs Texturing)
Virus Sci-Fi Handgun Remaster: Finished Model (Needs Texturing)
Virus Sci-Fi Handgun Remaster: Original Concept Art by @Wergulz
Virus Sci-Fi Handgun Remaster: @Matt's Concept of the Top Half of the Gun
Virus Sci-Fi Handgun Remaster: @Johanna's first pass of the Sci-Fi Handgun, with the original Top Half from @Wergulz Concept Art
New First Person Hand Model
@Krionikal has been working on some remastered hands for use in the view model for the weapons.
New First Person Hand Model
Steam Workshop
@Zak has been working on Steam Workshop support this week. He’s currently working on Skeletal Mesh Importing, and conducting research into SMD importing.
Linux Client News
@Sabrina has been looking into issues with the Linux Client. These issues started occurring due to a change that Epic made in Unreal Engine 4.18. Over the course of this week, he fixed the dependency issue that was causing the Linux Client to not boot.
However, he was unsuccessful in his attempts to fix the loading issues. Upon further research, he found that some people were having success with disabling ASync Loading and the Event Driven Loader, two very powerful systems which help Tower Unite load about 2x faster than without them enabled. He tried conducting tests with building version of the Linux Client which had these systems disabled, only to be hit by a roadblock where the game would then segfault.
Unfortunately, the Linux Client is one of the lowest priority portions of our game at this time, and until we are able to get this fixed, the Tower Unite Linux client will be pretty much useless. We can’t give an estimate when we can get around to fixing this issue, but do know that it will be on our list, and should the worse come to pass and it not get resolved beforehand, getting both the Linux Client and the Mac OS X client of Tower Unite up and running will be our top priority after Early Access release. We apologize immensely for this inconvenience to our players on the Linux platform for this downtime.
Miscellany
On Tuesday, @macdguy @Zak and @Sabrina had a friendly meetup with some Valve employees and some other indie developers at Valve HQ to talk about Steam. Due to this, @Sabrina and @macdguy were out of the office (so to speak) on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Wrap It Up
That about covers everything that happened this week at PixelTail Games. We’ll see you all next week, and have a great weekend!
