March 2024 Recap

Monorails?!

If you've been watching the recent development streams and tweets from our Lead Developer Kev, you might have spotted us working on a system that allows us to create smoothly animated overhead monorails.

You may be wondering, why are we building a whole system for monorails? Well, it's a bit more than this. We've essentially reworked our previous system for handling essentially any type of dynamically moving stage decoration object (such as the trains, monorails, cars, and airplanes) seen outside the PaintSquad lobby and tracks. While we could already create paths with the old system, spawning the vehicles, letting them move across the path, and destroying them had to be manually handled in code for every instance where we needed such moving object. This worked fine for a few object, but with more, it increases code clutter and is just very inflexible. This new system gives us much more flexibility for any type of moving stage object moving forwards.

Slice

The aforementioned system for track/path-based moving stage objects heavily depends on Slice, which is our system to create moving multi-block structures. It allows us to build objects such as trains, cars, airplanes, etc. but also things like gates, cranes, and potentially even elevators. This system has also been heavily reworked, fixing various issues, allowing us to now use essentially all blocks without issues. Additionally, models are now optimized better resulting in slightly improved client performance.

Build Server System

When building our maps, we have come across one big challenge: Maintaining multiple versions of one map. For example our PaintSquad lobby has various variants for Paintfests and Seasonal Celebrations. Additionally, almost all PaintSquad Maps have changes for several game modes. If we now were to change something on the base version, we had to manually apply this change to all variants.

Because of this, we've built an advanced system that allows us to track the individual changes of each variant and manage them with ease, speeding up the workflow there significantly. Additionally, this system also allows us to manage dynamic map changes, such as the explosions in Invasion more easily. We'll discuss this system in more detail in a future post on our developer blog.

Some more screenshots

Similarly to last time, we've got another screenshot to share of an upcoming... thing, we've been building... (Don't expect these every month now though, we don't want to take away all the surprises yet!)

The future

Whilst there's still a bunch of work ahead of us, we're now starting to work on the "Experience Core", which is closely related to the workings on PaintSquad, so we're getting closer to the actual gameplay instead. More on that in next month's recap though.

P.S.: Happy International Transgender Day of Visibility. Trans individuals and rights matter! 🏳️‍⚧️