Fractured Veil Updates Thread

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Maui is famous for jaw-dropping beaches and turquoise waters. Making the shorelines in Fractured Veil a special place is something we've worked on a lot. We recently completed work on a tool that will help us bring our beaches to life and give players great new places to build and explore.



The new beach diorama tool allows us to quickly and efficiently generate a number of different objects and scenes along the shore.



Placing these reminders of the world that existed before the Fracture used to take a poor dev hours of setting up by hand before the tool was completed.



The new tool even allows us to add loot and props to structures nearby. Making it possible to create new areas quickly and easily.



Exploring new areas and finding those special hidden spots can be a lot of fun. There are many interesting places to investigate and lots to see along our shores now.





Bits of the world frozen in time since the collapse of civilization dot the beach. There's even a few structures that players can search for necessities like water or old surfboards.



The numerous wrecks along the beach are perfect for exploring any time of the day, even the middle of the night.



It may be a bit further away from resources when compared to building a house in the jungle, but building on the beach has some great benefits. Not only is the ocean a beautiful looking backdrop but it can act as a natural barrier to help you avoid danger. It doesn’t matter if you’re building a stone fortress on a sandbar or a simple grass shack, there’s plenty of open spaces for players to build on along the beach.



With the new beach diorama tool in place, players can fully enjoy one of Maui’s most iconic features. We want the beach to be a place for you to meet up with other players, scrounge for resources, and an interesting place for you to explore with an occasional reminder of what life used to be like on the island.



If you want to learn more about Fractured Veil check out our Discord server.

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Keep Your Distance
While we’ve spent a lot of time thinking of ways to encourage people to play together, this week we’ve come up with a few ways to keep them apart. We’ve added three different types of barricades to the crafting menu to help players protect themselves and their constructions.

Our first offering is your standard wooden spike barricade. The pointy parts do damage and should be rotated to face potential threats.



Next we have metal barricades which in addition to doing damage have a slowing effect on anything trying to pass through.



Last but certainly not least, we have good old concrete barricades. Made famous in thousands of movie car chases, concrete barricades are an excellent place to take cover from gunfire and arrows.



Stepping Up
Good news #Builders! We added thatch to our spiral stair family this week. They offer a beautiful and economical option to the metal stairs in the game currently.



In addition to the new material, we fixed an infinite loop bug that could be triggered when removing and re-adding spiral stairs. Just remember to make sure that nobody breaks the bottom stairs or you could be in for quite a fall.



Leaving the Lights On
Finally, we did some torch tweaking, changing where they attach to window frames and adjusting their light radius. They offer the perfect amount of light to creep around the house now.



We updated our placeable Lantern too, giving them brighter and more realistic flames. You can see below how well the light up a room compared to torches.

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Campfire Stories
More than just a place to tell scary stories or make smores, campfires are an important part of life in Fractured Veil. They keep you dry and cook food, but they can also draw unwanted attention. Thanks to our community’s feedback, we made a number of campfire improvements this week to make them more performant and realistic looking.

We improved the smoke particle system and smoke plumes are now visible from much farther away. Here’s a look at the old campfires on the left and the new and improved version on the right. You’ll notice how much easier it is to see the smoke now, so you’ll have to be careful when building a fire….or else...


Surf’s Up
It’s always amazing to hear from players who haven’t jumped into a playtest recently that frame rates are higher and Maui is lusher and looking beautifully deadly. We made some impressive performance increases recently with many seeing around a 20fps improvement (we cap at 62fps). In our opinion, the game has never looked better. Last week we spent some time improving the rain and this week the water work continues with waves and the shoreline.

We made some big upgrades to the realism of our waves letting them roll into shore and turn into foam. We’re not done with the waves yet, but we’re really happy with the improvements we made this week!


Now, the waves interact with the shore, and the wet sand changes once the rain hits it, as you can see in this test footage.


We even improved how the underwater sand looks with light and shadows playing across it.

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Painting the Town
It might seem like we spend all of our development time trying to create a vibrant Lahaina filled with colorful plants, beautiful skies, and pristine waters but that’s because we know how important infusing the game with Hawaiian culture and deadly beauty is. This week we’ve taken it to another level and added a little color and character to the non-natural parts of the island too. Players will notice new graffiti, which adds a bit of realism and Hawaiian flavor. From huge murals on water tanks to simple tags on abandoned homes, players can now find survivor art across the island.



We even added random bumper stickers and decals to cars and trucks.



The automated decal system saves us hours of hand placing decals. It pulls random images and allows us to “age” the graffiti it applies to make it look like it’s survived decades of sun, sand, and wind.



Fighting the Good Fight
We made another pass at the sieging system, improving the mechanics, adjusting construction damage, and buffing the mutants to make them harder to take out while they smash through your walls, but rest assured - we’re not done yet.

We’ll be enhancing AI behavior and improving gameplay based on your feedback until having waves of mutants trying to destroy your hard work is as fun and challenging as it can be



Sand, Surf, and Sun
We’ve made huge improvements this sprint to the waves, weather, and water making the environment look as beautiful and real as possible. This week is the culmination of all that work. Not only have our efforts resulted in huge performance gains but the wilds of Lahaina are looking stunning. We made a few post-processing updates and ambient occlusion improvements to make the colors and lighting really stand out.



We Improved shoreline waves with wet sand effects, better rolling waves and foam upping the realism of our shorelines.

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Version 0.1.706 Patch [Major] - Water and Sieging Improvements
It’s almost impossible to think about Hawaii and not think about its beautiful blue waters. Getting just the right color, perfecting the way the light reflects, and the interaction between the waves and the shore are things we’ve tried very hard to make as realistic as possible.

This week we updated all those aspects of the water and worked on player/water interactions too, adding splashes and ripples to the ocean and streams to make them look and act like the real thing.

Whether it’s the middle of the day:


Or approaching dusk:


Players can make a big splash on the beach or in one of the rivers that flow through the jungle.


Exploring one of the many wrecks along the shore is a great way to appreciate how much dev time we’ve put into making the water, weather, and lighting look great.









It’s looking good even from under the waves.



Fighting the Good Fight
With the help of your input we made another pass on our sieging system and made a few more improvements. We fixed a few bugs including one that would allow a siege to be started on a base that was already under siege, and mutants can now occupy a base instead of just tearing it apart. We also activated random sieges. So any base now has a chance of getting unexpected visitors knocking down the front door when a player is online.



We also added a trailer mark to the rotting heads thrown by the trophy collectors making it easier to see where the putrid missiles are coming from in the middle of a chaotic battle

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We’ve said this before, but we really want to hear from our community. To prove it, this week we spent a lot of dev time fixing bugs found in our test sessions and making improvements based solely on player feedback. After our latest run through the caves we made some updates to how AI move and how they navigate together. The pathing and grouping improvements should reduce mutant stutter stepping, and keep them from pushing each other around, getting stuck in tight places, or worst of all getting stuck in walls while navigating places like the caves.



Next we took a look at recipe and research costs. We introduced our first merchant last week inside the Thorcon Power Plant and after a few days of players giving us feedback about recipe prices and research bench costs we made some tweaks.

Mr. Mixer Head’s (official name still pending) entire inventory has seen a price change. We updated research bench prices, fixed bench UI not working properly, and added messages for learning and failing to learn recipes. We also adjusted the 127 costs of certain recipes, and smelter costs to make sure the item/crafting loop is both fun and challenging enough.



We nabbed a number of bugs with the help of our players this week too. We fixed a bug where water would appear in the player inventory when recycling a canteen. We fixed a bug where a player wasn’t able to pickup a barricade, a handful of crafting failures, and an issue with NPC bodies not burning up properly.

Speaking of not burning properly, we discovered it was possible to attach a campfire to the side of a building. In addition to breaking the laws of gravity, it was a problem because if you attached enough the entire area would be covered in a cloud of smoke obscuring anything in the area. We fixed the bug so players can’t make their own fog banks anymore but don’t worry @spitfire we have plans for some sort of smoke machine for your base in the works.

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This week we’re continuing to make improvements based on player feedback and finished work on a handful of systems to make gameplay more fun. First thing on our list was looting.

We know how important it can be to grab the goods quickly off a body when you’re in the middle of a fight. However, being able to instantly loot an opponent creates problems as well. After a few iterations, some persistence work, and listening to your feedback we made a couple of updates that should make the “getting stuff” process better (at least for now).

First, we made improvements to our quick looting system. If you just want to grab everything and sort it out later, you can hold “F” and scoop up every last bit of backpack filler on a body.



Best of all we put a little preview window in the game so you can check out what’s inside a container without actually opening it. Just hover your mouse over a box or crate and you’ll get a quick peek inside.



We fixed the party system so if the leader of a party leaves or disconnects the next player in line will now be promoted to leader. As much as it pained us, we also fixed a bug that would allow players to harvest meat from corpses by shooting them. Being a cannibal was never so easy. After some spectacular player falls we updated fall damage and added an impact noise when a player receives any damage from falling.



Mr. Mixer Head (nickname pending) is offering a new weapon for purchase inside his booth. Players will be able to buy a compound bow now, perfect for those who aren’t fans of close combat or the price of bullets.



Since players have a new ranged option we decided to take a look at the closer side of combat too. We made a number of improvements to how melee combat works including changing the way we calculate swinging weapon distance, making it easier to drive your shark-toothed club through mutant flesh.

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Our playtest sessions are the best way for us to hear directly from our community, but not the only way (see #suggestions in our discord). However, since players have our attention and our ears once a week, we make sure to take note of things that keep coming up. Guns and ammo in the game are a regular topic of conversation, so we focused on some fixes to those this week.

Players have limited inventory slots so we decided to make all ammo stack to 100 now and updated its dimensions and weight. We fixed a bug that wouldn’t allow you to reload a gun that had been dropped on the ground and picked up, and made it so projectile based weapons would receive durability damage when they are fired.

These improvements should make it easier to carry around enough ammo to blast every mutant and other player you come across (if that’s what you’re into), and add a bit of realism to the act of firing hundreds of rounds through a firearm without a proper cleaning kit. We’re still big fans of our Hawaiian inspired Melee Weapons but if you’re in need of hardware we’ve got you covered.



We found and fixed a number of issues that were crashing the game thanks to our players. We resolved issues with: loading containers, adding water to containers, projectiles hitting foliage, and updating partial stacks of ammo causing the server to crash.

Even though we recommend that you look for goodies before setting someone or something on fire, we squashed a bug preventing you from properly looting a burning corpse. We also fixed a handful of drinking bugs including one that made it impossible to drink from rivers at certain angles. Players should now be able to quench their thirst no matter how they approach the water, even from 90 degrees. Drinks are on us from now on!



We fixed a bug where corpses would randomly show up in the inventory UI, and a fun one that would cause a player to look like they were phasing between veils of reality by getting stuck crouching or proning near the edges of water.



We made some improvements to drone performance and fixed a problem where a player would start bleeding if they were hit with a piece of meat. Bleeding to death from a bloody steak is no way to go. Lastly, we fixed a bug that would cause player spawned items to go to the very center of the map. It was a great feature for anyone who happened to be there looking for free loot, but not so ideal for whoever made it.



If you want to learn more about Fractured Veil head over to our Discord server.

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The feedback we gather during our test sessions is invaluable to us and vital to our development process. It helps us uncover bugs and figure out what systems need tweaking. After listening to what you had to say this week we made some improvements to the siege system.

We set up small, medium, and large mutant wave spawners to send the proper amount of mutants charging at your buildings. After running a few tests we decided to increase the difficulty of medium and large sieges in order to strike that right balance to the battle for your bases. It can’t be too easy but it also can’t be impossibly difficult or players will keep dying and losing all their hard earned loot.

Our goal is to hit that sweet spot where it seems like combat won’t go your way, but players manage to just pull out the victory in the end if they work well together. Nothing feels as good as hobbling back into your base to start repairs after barely repelling a mutant horde.



We resolved a couple of issues around drinking this week since staying properly hydrated is a big part of surviving post apocalyptic Maui. First, we reduced the time it took to drink from water collectors and other sources, making it easier to drink on the run. We also fixed a bug making the canteen only usable once before becoming dead weight in your inventory.

After working out the water bugs we turned our attention to some fire problems. Many of you mentioned having trouble burning up bodies. Cleaning up after yourself is important if you want to avoid attracting cannibals and keep Lahaina clean and beautiful. We made some adjustments to make impromptu cremations a bit easier including halving the ignition time for burning dead bodies.



We made a lot of improvements and fixed bugs you found with the inventory too. We increased the amount of empty space in the inventory screen where items can be dropped on the ground, made equippable and usable items go to your interact bar by default if there is room, and set the lifespan of items dropped in the safe zone to 15 minutes.

We fixed bugs that would allow players to swap their equipped weapon into a container and still have the weapon equipped, items being deleted when being drug around in large stack sizes, and we fixed a crash when firing weapons near other players. Players can once again spontaneously attack others and break alliances without worrying about breaking the game.

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Mele Kalikimaka from everyone here at Fractured Veil! Even though it’s a short holiday week we still managed to fix a number of issues our testers helped find in our play sessions and make a few improvements. We’d also like to introduce our Green Lady, a new addition to the mutant family coming in 2021. She’s going to make you think twice about leaving your presents under the tree….

First on our list were a couple of upgrades to our construction system. Door locks now require players with door permissions to also input the password to get in, and we fixed a bug with some foundation pieces not lining up correctly.

Many of you told us that you wanted the ability to build smelters on the landscape as well as construction pieces and functionality for the construction tool to recycle pieces along with the upgrade tool. We added both this week to help streamline the building process.



We fixed a handful of inventory and container bugs too. We resolved a problem where keys would get stuck when alt tabbing in the inventory menu, and an issue with the interact widget display when viewing items that were on or next to a construction object. We fixed the infamous server crash bug when picking up stacked items from the ground and putting them in a container and a bug that would duplicate items when swapping a non-stackable item with a stackable one.