Hello Survivors!
We’ve got some fun news today. (Warning: This news may or may not be entirely new news to those who follow us on our Twitter.)
The Dead Linger will be using the Havok physics engine!
We’ve spent a few weeks of our time implementing unique and fancy physics into our game engine, with solid, efficient, but painstakingly time-consuming results. At some point, you just have to bite the bullet (or buy your programmers new keyboards after they smash their current ones in frustration.)
Seeing that we had literal months of physics work ahead of us, we’ve decided to go ahead and pick up Havok as our main physics engine, handling terrain collision, player collision, and the very important object physics so you can toss things, stack things, and break things to your hearts content. This change will save us an estimated 2 months of development time, and probably much, much more down the road.
(You can learn more about Havok at their website, along with a list of games you might recognize that have used Havok as well.)
We’re tying it into our existing engine as we speak (almost finished, in fact!) and should have some cool box-stacking and some other fun things to show very soon. We do have a dev vlog planned just around the corner, featuring multiplayer, some basic melee combat, world generation, and a little demo of the new physics system.
If you’d like to follow the team on Twitter (and not just our official twitter feed,) click the little twitter link under their names on our Team page. Everyone posts their work from time to time, talks about their personal lives, and will certainly keep you better informed. We’ll be posting more often on this blog as well, as we know many of you who don’t follow us on Twitter or visit our forums are missing some fun development screenshots and other cool stuff like that.
Thank you all for your support, awesome discussion on the forums, and being a wonderful, friendly community. Oh, and we expect to have The Dead Linger Alpha out by October of this year. Boom.
Linger on, Survivors!
