Hello everyone! This week on What’s In The Pipeline, we talk about our progress over the last week moving towards our next main patch. This week predominantly includes a rework of the tutorial area in Backwater Beacon and the various fixes and expansions on the Electrical System first introduced on the Staging build last week.

New Tutorial Area

The Hanouten Safezone, known as Backwater Beacon, has received a major update to the tutorial section. The area has been expanded significantly, to now include a new road and overpass into the area behind Liam’s garage.

With access to new space, the tutorial area now follows a much less cramped environment when teaching the basics, such as movement, climbing, jumping and sneaking.

All of the skills taught in the tutorial are aimed to better reflect the kind of things a new player might need to know as they start their journey. For example, we felt it was important to show new players how to handle bleeding damage, so a crash course in bandaging is now included.

Players are free to ignore the tutorial altogether, dip out part way, or run through the whole course. Any tips given during the tutorial will appear in the Guide for later reference.

Electrical System Updates

Last week we debuted the electrical system on the staging branch. Every day we have uploaded new staging builds with fixes and new features to the electrical system (many thanks to all the staging testers for their excellent work).

Since the initial launch of the system, we have introduced two new types of generators: Solar Generators and Fuel Generators.

Solar Generators can only be crafted using somewhat rare Solar Panels. Panels can be looted or bought. The Solar Generator offers slightly better average power output compared to the wind generator, but is susceptible to weather and night/day conditions.
Fuel Generators burn fuel provided from Jerry Cans. They give a high level of power, but need a constant input of fuel to keep running.

Fuel itself has been reworked slightly. There is now just a universal fuel type called: Fuel. Fuel can be obtained by syphoning from old cars or converting ingredients in the Biofuel Convertor.

The Biofuel Converter is a new crafable object that takes manure, spoiled food and oil. It works similarly to the Composter and will output Fuel (for use in generators or vehicles) over time.

Spoilt Food has changed slightly as well. All food will now provide a universal ‘Spoilt Food’ item if uneaten for long enough. This food can then be used in the Biofuel Processor if you have one.

In order to help manage variable power outputs from generators, you can now install a Battery Array if you have enough Car Batteries to craft one. This item can receive and combine multiple inputs from generators and output a constant average power. If the generators stop generating for a while, the Battery Array will kick in and continue to deliver power for a time period.

Optimisations

Continuing work from last week, a series of additional optimisations have been done concerning texture resolutions, which aims to help GPU and memory usage.

Additionally, there has been a significant improvement to vehicle performance, which was caused by problems with some physics related calculations. With these improvements, driving is a much smoother experience.

The old tutorial area used to contain a number of expensive text-popups that affected safezone performance. With the updates to the tutorial area, these pop ups have been removed and replaced with an alternative.

The JoE Development team @ KYE Creations