Posted April 30, 2019 by StudioVR
Dave here with what may be the biggest alpha update so far, we'll waste no time and get right down to the good stuff: We've totally rewritten our ai from the ground up, this means enemies and civilians are a whole lot smarter overall. Enemies can now "see" and "hear" you, as a result they are much better shots now and firing off a loud weapon might attract unwanted attention. Civilians are a thing we're testing now as well with a few scattered around the map, they will run away from danger(such as gunshots nearby) now as well as a result of the improvements to our ai.
NPC vehicle ai is also seeing further testing in this update with a few more cars driving around the map using various ai configurations and a fully functional city bus you can ride around to the various stops which are: downtown, whitefish island/church, suburbs, docks, outskirts and chinatown, at this point the bus doesn't travel beyond the Paradise metro area however so if you want to take a scenic trip out of town you're still going to need wheels of your own.
A ton of work has gone into fleshing out and polishing the map and improving the visual quality of the world, looking back at our initial prototype the difference is just breathtaking and we're super proud of our hard working and dedicated artists and consultants who are helping us to shape this massive world. We've put in a lot of effort and at this point as a result the world map itself is about 90% complete as it will be in game, there is still a ton of small detail work and art to do however to really breathe life into the world, but the skeleton of land area is near complete at this point.
We've also tweaked physics for the starting "car" to make it more forgiving for newer drivers as you learn the mechanics, don't fear however the supercar and roadster are still around town for the speed demons out there but we wanted to ease newer players into driving so we've "nerfed" the starter car a little bit to make it more user friendly. Other minor adjustments to vehicles have been made as well based on feedback to improve our vehicle "template" system we're building to allow us to quickly iterate and create new land vehicles.
Last but not least, we're running a developer contest for our loyal fans and supporters, seeing as this game has become our personal love letter to obscure pop culture in the process of development we're calling on the gunters out there to find and document a few of the easter eggs, secrets or references included in the current build, with the first player to submit three separate "eggs" via screencaps on our official discord(https://discord.gg/dwp8YaA) offered the chance to be immortalized forever in game as a custom npc, be included in the credits alongside our awesome backers and team and receive a steam key on release into early access. Two runner up prizes will also be offered to others competing to find the eggs and will be rewarded with a honorable mention in the credits and steam keys as well.