Dear This Thing Of Ours fans and fellow readers,
We would first of all like to send our most sincere apologies to you all for lack of updates and keeping you all in the dark. This doesn't mean that the Skull Crackers team has put their guard down and stopped working. There is some great news for those who have been wanting to see some in-game footage we are now at the stage where we have a huge selection of animations to produce some in-game footage with a trailer following behind. There has been a number of changes made to the map not just visually we now are starting to see pedestrians walking about and traffic driving around which has been amazing to watch how the AI is being more stable and developed as weeks go by. We have added a number of new locations to the map, which includes:
- Underground fight club.
- A number of hideouts where special character will be based in a time of need.
- Police station with a fully functional interior.
- Rundown boardwalk.
- Exteriors for a number of purchasable properties that will be available to you.
- Huge construction site.
- Nightclub exteriors.
- Blakedown Manor - includes a rich part of town.
- Crew hubs - each area will have a crew hub which will be full of interactions
- Hospital interior.
- Drug dens.
We have also been working on expanding the map out further into more countryside looking locations that include dense woodland which has a big ranch that will be a host to a serious of events throughout your criminal career. We have also been going back through a lot of the map where there were minor glitches (overlapping of textures, gaps between to objects, none collidable objects, etc) this is being done to ensure a smoother ride upon testing. There have also been replacements of a lot of objects across the map which we have a changed to a more suitable and and higher quality ones to match the art style which we try our best to carry through.
We have also go a little teaser for you of the famous V Club!
The programming team has been especially dedicated and have put some serious extra hours to make the game run smoother, so a huge round of applause for their hard work! They were very kind enough to put this amazing changelog together for us:
- All vehicles in the game have a randomly generated license plate number now.
- We've added a drivable forklift
- Made some great progress on our traffic system. Vehicles now stop at red lights as they should in real life, and will check to make sure there is not a vehicle in front of them, so they don't collide with it.
- Finished our object pooling system.
- NPC's spawn inside of vehicles.
- Added speed limit zones. Vehicles will slow down on certain roads and speed up/go faster on certain roads.
- Added a lens flare effect to our sun.
- Added 200+ randomly spawned vehicles on the map.
- Added and cleaned up some of our LOD's.
- Fixed an issue with the lighting in-game being too bright.
- Thunder and rain effect will no longer stop on the main menu.
- Minimap no longer renders lighting.
- Added raindrop effect to the windows on the main menu scene.
- Mini map icons will now lock into place with their respective positions on the map.
- The player will no longer get stuck when exiting the pawn shop.
- Fixed issue with not being able to select a dialogue option when chatting with an NPC.
- Mini map no longer renders rain.
- Mouseover on the main menu should now be the same color as the normal background when using arrow keys.
- Made loading screen hint text background darker.
- You can now cycle through all of the hints at the loading screen.
- Fixed an issue where headshots weren't insta-killing an enemy.
- Fixed issue with bolt action sniper rifle not having a pick-up icon.
- Sniper Rifle camera now zooms in with the scope of the gun.
- Added lasers when enemy AI sniper's are aiming their weapons. Making them easier to detect and find.
- Fixed issues with some of the vehicles' colors at car dealerships.
- Fixed issue with footsteps not playing correctly on new player model.
- Fully set-up both car dealerships in the city with purchasable cars.
- Fixed text on some game objects was appearing to be blurry due to texture streaming.
- Set-Up new player character model. Changing out old blue character model for white tank top and red sweats model.
- Fixed issue with melee weapons not equipping.
- Gun despawns when getting inside of a vehicle and can't use the weapon wheel.
- Changed handbrake to spacebar instead of E key.
- Store Clerks play random barks when getting robbed.
- Store Clerks raise their arms in the air when getting robbed.
- Trunk System - You can see my forum post for the details on that one.
- New Inventory System - You can see my forum post for the details on that one.
I hope this puts all of your minds at ease that we havn't been slacking but with the colder weather approaching we shouldn't be risking freezing our asses off and staying indoors to produce this masterpiece of a game. As majority know we are an indie develoment company which means that we are very limited to what we can do with the game at times due to working in a such small team, so we will be launching a number campaigns to raise money which we would love for you to show your support. All of the money raised will be used towards the game to make us and your dream come true.
All the best Skull Crackers Entertainment team, we love you all and thank you.
