Future Perfect Update 10 is now live on Steam. New features, bug fixes and other improvements go out to Steam every day in the “beta” branch, and once a week we wrap this progress into a stable update in the “main” branch. Here’s what’s included.

Shadow Improvements

In the last update we made some improvements to the shadow filtering quality, but there were still some artifacts left. These artifacts are what is known as shadow “acne” because they show up as spots along the surface. The artwork in Future Perfect is very susceptible to these types of artifacts because of the “clean” art style we’ve chosen and the way that everything is built out of modular pieces. As a result, the techniques we used in Natural Selection 2 didn’t carry over very well.

This week we took the time to hammer out these artifacts. We still have some more improvements to make to the shadow quality, but this should be a good step forward.

Inventory HUD

We added a small HUD indicator to the default player to show the items you’re carrying in your inventory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihc2yY9b_po

Decal Size Gizmo

We added a 3D gizmo for resizing decals in the world. When a decal component is selected, you can grab the arrows and move them around to resize the decal.

Crates

Few games are made without a crate or two. We’ve got three! You can find these three crates in the appropriately named “Crates” package.

Footsteps

Using the animation event system we added last week, we put events in the player movement animations that are now hooked up to footstep sounds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DZ_5w0UoVk

Natural Selection 2 players will probably recognize the sound effects we’re using right; these will be replaced with something new in the future.

Lumberjack Game

We hit a patch of “writers’ block” with our heist game, so we decided to switch gears for a moment and experiment with a lumberjack game. Based on the popularity of games on Steam where you chop down trees, we expect this will be an instant hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjBPgpnwnFQ

In addition to these new features, we also made a handful of bug fixes. If you’d like to see the details, check out the “Update 10 – Done” list on our Trello Board.

If you’d like to help support the project and get access to all this progress, you can do so by purchasing Future Perfect Architect Edition from our website.