April Update Preview
Agents, before we head into the weekend and close out the month, we wanted to give you a little sneak peek into upcoming changes that will drop with our next update in April. We’ll dive into two subjects that are pretty massive in how they affect the game: Sound Occlusion and NPC Behavior.

Sound Occlusion Rework
A massive rework of how we handle audio is dropping with the april update, enabling occlusion on a wide array of gameplay affecting sounds.

This affects everything from field upgrade chests being open to weapons being fired or gadgets being placed to differing degrees. For instance, you can expect to hear weapons better through walls than a chest being opened.

From a developer perspective, we now have full control on what we want to flag as “occluding” and what should not be, meaning a table in the center of the room won’t occlude a gunshot for instance, but a structural wall will.

This is something we’ll keep a close eye (and ear) on through the patch cycle to gather feedback and see how we iterate on it moving forward, but we are excited to roll this change and see how it affects your experience.

NPC behavior overhaul

There is quite a bit of new on how NPC operate this update, so let’s go through the new systems:

Item Awareness
You probably had a moment in the past where a NPC would stop near an intel and looked very suspicious. Are they hacking? Is it a player? These moments are fun, but they used to happen purely by random chance, a NPC deciding to walk there with no rhyme or reason.

This is no longer the case. NPC can now know where they spawn items and NPC with a high internal “Suspicious” rating will hang around them within interacting distance to better approximate a player’s behavior and blur the line further between players and NPC.

Running Ratio based on gameflow
How much NPC run overall will now be affected by the current state of the game. Running will be more rare in the early game and much more present in the extract for example, scaling as the action ramps up to fit the pace of the game.

Reaction to danger zones
The fear effect on NPC is dictated by what we call danger zones. A danger zone is generated around the shooter and where the shot lands. In the past, these zones were both the same side and would not account for occlusion by walls or floors. This could lead to afraid npc giving away a fight from very far, causing more third parties.

Now, we support different danger zone sizes and we can occlude the danger using the same flag we use for sound occlusion, making the aggro of npc more predictable and closer to what you can hear. This should limit weird situations where NPCs two floors above a fight are afraid if a bullet lands near the top of a wall below for instance.

We will be unveiling more changes and additions you can expect in April very soon, including more map changes, gameplay tweaks, bug fixes and a few other surprises.