JUNE 2023 - UPDATE — DEAD MATTER

Hey Survivors!

Didn’t expect to hear from us again so soon, did you?

We wanted to get out one last little update to our community just before the end of the month. This blog is going to be a little more short-form than our last two updates since working on 0.11 is our primary focus right now, but even still there’s a good chunk we wanted to go over!

*New Survivalist Bunker being added for 0.11*

UPDATE 0.11

As we approach the Early Access release we’ve shifted gears from feature implementation and solving the most complex technical problems first to focusing on polishing our overall experience and gameplay. This has however led to some complications with our build pipeline necessitating a few hardware upgrades and downtime on our backend so that we can automate some very time-consuming tasks such as building HLODs, building all of our navigation data, spline data, etc.

Regardless, once we’ve got a few builds turned around we will have something prepared before the end of next week, once the next update is out we’ll be pushing on full steam ahead to Early Access.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

A week after our last blog post, we released a new vlog. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out below. We’re monitoring the comments and we are extremely grateful for the tremendous amount of support the community has been sending our way!

LOOK & FEEL

As previously mentioned we’ve shifted towards not only just building the experience but refining it.

While we’ve still got a long road to walk down, we’ve made some improvements that we feel improve the overall feeling of playing Dead Matter. Our landscape now loads properly at a distance, this will also be including buildings, and other meshes in the world such as vehicles, random campsites, etc. Given our landscape, we felt that this was fairly key to implement before we hit Early Access.

UI Update

In terms of refinement in the name of making the game feel better, we also have some updates to the UI. You may have noticed that our UI has been in a been of a state of flux for the last few updates. Here’s some work that the team has done to bring the UI up to snuff in preparation for EA.

Procedural Content Generation

Those of you that have seen our original Kickstarter materials will know that we used to experiment a lot with Procedural Generation. We’re moving back in this direction where it makes sense, especially because the scope of our map is massive and we need a realistic way to deliver on these goals. Unreal Engine 5 brings a new set of PCG tools to the table and they’re coming in clutch for us.

*Every rock and tree in this scene was placed procedurally, this is subject to change especially since we’ve only just recently dipped our toes in the pool.*

We’re working on building up a library of tools and PCG graphs that minimize the amount of time and effort our environment artists need to spend to accomplish repetitive tasks such as placing rocks, guard rails on the sides of roads, embankments, etc. Currently, we’ve got some basic rock placement tools with much more coming in the pipeline for next week.

These tools aren’t perfect and probably never will be, but with the new Procedural Content Generation pipeline that UE5.2 brought to the table, we’re confident we’ll be able to give our team the level of control they need to rapidly build out any space that needs focus.

Misc. Procedural Content

*We run on oil and we run on beef over here in Alberta.*

Ages ago, we had a license plate system in the game where every vehicle would have a unique license plate on the back of it. We cut this feature shortly before we shipped into Closed Alpha due to the BeginPlay time taking between 1-2ms on a modern CPU. While they didn’t directly cause any issues, the sheer number of them and the fact they each had a unique texture became a problem hence why it was cut. This new solution simply uses primitive data and is much more efficient for the scope of game that we are building.

*Look closely, and you can see the radar dish bases have a variety of orientations applied, yet the dish is pointing in a consistent direction.*

Another piece of content we got ready for the Level Designers is the Satellite Dishes that point in a consistent direction, allowing you to use them to orient yourself as well as a basic power-line tool to allow our artists to not have to worry about all the headaches that come with manually placing powerlines and the cable actors that go with them.

Personally, these were some of my favorite features in the game, it’s about time that we’re seeing them make a comeback.

SKS TEASER

Here’s a teaser of the new SKS that we’re currently working on getting into the game for Early Access to flesh out the civilian tier weapons and add more variety to the arsenal we ship into Early Access with. There’s also going to be a new civilian shotgun that will be making an appearance in Early Access that will be shipping with the next update.

Survivalist Bunker TEAser

wrapping up

Thank you very much to all of our supporters. We really appreciate the support that people have been sending our way. Passionate feedback from our community has been a key ingredient for the success of the direction that we are taking the game in. We look forward to this next patch, Early Access and beyond.

JUNE 2023 - UPDATE