0.12 Foundation Update

Survivors,

It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything, as we mentioned in our last post, we just didn’t feel comfortable or justified in promoting or talking about the game publicly in any sort of way that would lead to people buying it with the state that we launched in.

This is because as people who enjoy playing games, we didn’t feel just in promoting a game in a state that wasn’t enjoyable by any means. We truly felt like we let people down and that’s not what we wanted from our launch.

To put it bluntly it’s clear that a lot of people care about this game and that our communication and the state of the game was terrible. This post and our latest vlog cover what we’re doing to address both the game and our communication with the community.

DEVELOPMENT VLOG 14

Before we dive into the specifics, be sure to check out the latest development VLOG which covers a lot of what we want to dive into with a lot more depth than what we’ll be diving into.

COMMUNICATION CHANGES

We’ve added channels to our Discord to keep people up to date with development, we’ve got a channel that includes all the commits being made to the game as they’re being made to the game as well as a channel to keep people up to date on the builds that are going out.

We’ll be expanding this automation to X / Twitter / Xitter to keep people up to date and informed, if you have any suggestions on where to report these updates, please let us know.

Not only that, but we’ve also made our issue tracking completely open and public. You can view the issue tracker for the game here: https://github.com/QI-Software/deadmatterpublic/ or for the website here: https://github.com/QI-Software/qi-website-public/

We’ve reviewed the bans that were issued on our Discord and on the Steam Discussion forums and have unbanned hundreds of users from both platforms.

It’s clear that upon reviewing these that there were a lot of people that were banned that should’ve not been banned hence we’ve revoked the bans on hundreds of people that we felt were wrongfully banned from the community.

Lastly, you can expect regular update posts at least once a month from us and for those posts to be shared across all our social media platforms. We’ll also return to making vlogs on a much more regular basis to help keep people up to date and informed but there’s no strict schedule that we’ll be following for them.

CHANGELIST

We migrated backends in the middle of the update, and we’ve still got some work to do so we don’t have a fully detailed list of changes.

Quite frankly there’d be a million thousands of little changes to post about and we’d rather cover the meat and potatoes while letting people figure out what else was updated by simply playing the update.

Appearance Customization

Our old character creation lacked the ability for you to customize the appearance of your character in any way whatsoever. We’ve opted for a more limited customization schema to keep things realistic. You can pick one of 50 faces with both male and female characters now being supported. You can currently customize the skin tone, eye color and hair color of your character.

We’ve also updated the first-person hands so that they use the metahuman hands offering better shading and increased immersion while playing as your character.

Hardcore Mode

We’ve added a hardcore mode to the game. When Hardcore mode is enabled, container-based loot will never respawn, loot that is found in the world will take 5x longer to respawn. Additionally, you’ll take twice as much damage as a player. Since loot is never refreshed in hardcore mode, any item you place in a container will be saved until it has been removed.

Server Performance

We have significantly improved the server performance; our server is on average about 500% faster than before. We’ve still got a little way to go to make sure that dedicated server performance is bulletproof but this is the first major step in the right direction for server performance.

Cooking

Campfires, BBQ grills, fireplaces, portable camping stoves, household gas and electric stoves can be found throughout the world as useable cooking surfaces. Non-electric cooktops require a burnable fuel source to operate. Burners on cooking appliances can be toggled on and off provided they have an adequate source of energy. Cooktops take thermal inertia into account, requiring you to wait for your cooking surface to heat up for your food to start cooking. To cook food, you simply place it on a cooking surface such as a frying pan or the surface of a grill.

Gardening

You can now grow your own crops that can be used for food or utility such as growing hemp for a source of cloth. Seeds can be found in the world or by harvesting bushes and can be planted in a gardening plot that you build yourself or a gardening plot found in the world. Gardening plots that are outdoors will be automatically watered when it is raining.

Camping

We’ve added a new set of items geared around the camping experience, you can now find items such as lanterns, tents, sleeping bags, cots, camping chairs and even a portable cooking stove. You can deploy these objects in the world at a campsite or even inside of a building that you’ve claimed depending on your needs.

Beds

You can now sleep in sleeping bags, beds, or portable cots. If you’re in singleplayer, time will advance approximately 8 hours. If you’re in either Singleplayer or Multiplayer your stats will be restored.

Clocks

We have added a ton of clocks to the game, from digital clocks that can be found on appliances such as radios and electric stoves. We’ve also added analogue clocks such as wall clocks or grandfather clocks. You can use these to tell what time it is in-game.

Trading

Trading has been completely overhauled from the ground up to provide an easier experience for the player and one that is overall much more functional than before. Dialogue with NPCs should also feel much more immersive as we’ve done a bit of work to polish that up for this patch.

World Border Fence

We’ve added some concrete fences to block off the parts of the map that are currently not suitable for play, we’ve also walled off the Canmore hamlet for the time being as well since most of the buildings are in various stages of completion.

New Locations

We’ve fleshed out the river area near the Canmore Hamlet, sprinkling in about a dozen or so points of interest in the area. We’ve also gone a step further by adding the fan favorite Grotto Mountain bunker back into the game as well as a brand-new bunker in the Seebe region.

Entry

Doors leading into buildings that can be claimed now have a 90% chance of the doors being locked, this means that if you don’t have a lockpick handy that you’ll need to pry open the windows with a crowbar or break them to climb inside.

Doors can typically be unlocked from the inside, allowing you to let your friends in once you’ve gotten inside. Areas with rare loot such as KP Research, Gamma Mike, Willow Rock Bunker, and the Federal Stockpile may require keys or cutting open fences or a combination of both to access.

Fluid Containers

You can now find various fluid containers in the world such as fuel tanks, sinks, toilets, etc. You can refill your water bottle from these sources or drink directly from them. You can also drink water directly from the rivers found on the map.

Claims

We have completely overhauled the claims system from the ground up, our old claims system was barely functional to begin with and was plagued with crashes when it did work. No longer is this the case, to claim a building simply find a claim marker (electrical box with a small light in it). Once you’ve claimed a location, you’ll need a hammer to build things made from wood or a welding torch to build things that are made from metal. You’ll need a mallet if you plan on doing any repairs or if you want to upgrade your doors.

If players are a concern, you can find NERA barricades at Gamma Mike or the Federal Stockpile. These barricades are unique as they can only take damage from explosives which can be found at a few locations in Quaite Valley.

Gunplay

We have completely overhauled the ADS system and the math being used to drive it, as well as cleaning up how ADS interacts with recoil. Recoil has been overhauled and should now feel much more impactful and much less janky.

FOV punching has been fixed so that bolt/pump action weapons don’t have this weird FOV change until you cycle the action.

Idle animations are now driven using a procedural animation system which is the same system being used for a new iteration of the weapon inertia. On top of all of that we’ve also fixed the way that audio is playing when interacting with your weapon so that audio cues like inserting shells into a shotgun play much more consistently than before.

Animation Fixes

Lever action rifles such as the 1895, 1873 and the 1887 have had their animations fixed up and now generally function as intended. This is alongside some much-needed fixes to the C7 and the C8 which no longer spawn with their attachments in a completely broken state.

We have also fixed the R700, the MP7 animations and the HK416 not playing their animations correctly and they have been added to the loot tables.

Optics

Optics such as red dot sights and scopes should now also be functional with all fake zoom being removed for the time being. This is primarily because it was distorting the image to the point where it was rendering the optics nearly unusable.

Interaction Icons

Interactions now have icons to help build familiarity with the various interactive elements in the game, interaction icons also provide feedback to the player by informing them if they’ve searched a container or not.

Conclusion

We’ve used this painful period of radio silence to reflect upon our values as a studio, what our fans expected in terms of the game and what our fans expect in terms of communication. In our opinion, any communication from us that wasn’t accompanied by major changes and fixes being brought to the game, would at that point be the wrong move and would only add fuel to the fire. Not only that, but people already heard us say that we’re going to fix this, and it was time for action, not talking about action.

We’ll catch y’all on the next update post. For now, stay safe out there and have fun.

-QI Games