Hundreds of NPCs, Dynamic Events, and Major Optimization

Hello Cold Responders!

Our team has been busy in the past weeks and we wouldn't withhold our most recently added features and fixes to you. Current playtesters already appear to enjoy them!

Update Notes (April 21 to May 10)

AI and NPCs

• NPC Pool Subsystem. Hundreds of designer-placed spawners (Bambi, faction NPCs) no longer tick individually. On boot, each spawner snapshots its config into a single server-side pool and destroys itself. The pool prewarms cold pawns at a sequester point, then runs a 1 Hz scheduler that acquires pawns near players and a 5 Hz recycle gate that returns dead pawns to the pool after a 7 minute visibility-gated hold. Net effect: hundreds of NPCs supported with a fraction of the previous tick cost.

• GOAP optimization. Expensive operations are now batched, the GOAP tick rate is slowed, and a new dedicated AI Targeting Subsystem owns per-NPC target selection. The targeting component itself was refactored to feed the subsystem.

• More spawners on the map. A couple of hundred additional NPC spawners have been placed across L_Alpha.

• Season-aware AI. Helpers added so AI behavior can branch on the current in-game season.

World Events

• Dynamic Event System (v1). Designers drop one event Blueprint per event location. The actor itself is the event: visual props, guard post scene components, and loot anchors all live on the placed BP. A world subsystem rolls one event per in-game day, materializes the closest candidate when a player is within range, force-spawns one-shot loot at the loot anchors, and dematerializes when players leave. Announcements use the in-game MGRS grid (for example "Abandoned Convoy reported near grid F11"). One concurrent event server-wide for now.

• QA Menu. Press Comma for a developer test menu surfacing event triggers, console helpers, and other test hooks.

Static Doors

• AStaticDoor. New level-designer door actor distinct from the base-building door. Hinge swing, open/close/locked sounds, replicated open and locked state, per-world JSON save under Data/Worlds/{WorldID}_Doors.json. Lays the groundwork for the future lockpick item, which will call the door's unlock hook.

Vehicles

• Pawn-less vehicle control. Cars, the dirtbike, and the tank base no longer require possession. The character stays possessed; driving inputs route through a UVehicleControlComponent on the player controller and replicate via a wheeled input snapshot. Gear changes multicast so engine sound and animation stay in sync across clients. Mirrors the same architecture used for drones.

• Engine Simulator multithreading fix. Worker threads no longer stay alive when the engine is off. Engines spawn cold, idle on a long sleep when ignition, starter, and RPM are all off, and only consume CPU when actually running.

• Vehicles asleep by default. Vehicles default to not running their simulation until manually started, and now go to sleep on BeginPlay.

• Destroyed vehicle assets and PCG volumes. New placeholder destroyed vehicle meshes plus PCG volumes that scatter wrecks across roads.

• Fixes. Invisible vehicle bug fixed. Vehicle serialization issues fixed. Volvo sleep condition fix. Tank still in flight (todo).

1. Action System (foundational)

   • Three-faction MVP wired through the codebase: Militarists, Smugglers, Cultists. Includes a faction matrix layered over allegiance, reputation thresholds, vendor faction gating and price modifiers, faction-keyed POI icons on the world map, sphere-based safe zones at hub actors, quest stubs, and a basic dialogue prompt set. Concrete data assets, leader Blueprints, and hub level placements are still authoring tasks.

   Items and Inventory

   • Action bar persistence. Action bar slots now save and load across sessions. ItemIDs round-trip through save data instead of being regenerated on every load, and a new player-only UActionBarComponent resolves slot IDs back to live items on respawn. Several drag and drop visual fixes shipped alongside.

   • Battery level moved to attributes. Batteries report charge through the standard attribute system instead of bespoke fields, simplifying UI bindings and replication.

   • Looting hover stub. Initial pass at looting items via Hover plus F on corpses and containers, yet to be wired to inventory component.

   • Drop and place fixes. G key drop bug fixed. Placeable item placement bugs fixed. Item CCD MACD fixed. Attaching items to already-equipped equipment fixed. New Server_UnequipToContainer helper for clean unequip flows.

   • Actor proxy KillZ fix. Items dropped near steep terrain or outside the streamed area no longer get culled by the kill volume.

   • Base container transactions now correctly track which containers were modified during a transaction fixing a long standing bug in the rollback system.

   Player Corpses and Saves

   • Player corpse persistence fixes across boot respawn, save serialization, and rendering on the world map. Corpses now show up reliably on the map and survive save/load round trips. Visuals still not quite working as intended.

   Combat, Damage, and FX

   • Projectile damage and armor. Several bugs fixed in the projectile damage pipeline relating to armor pass-through, broken armor fallback, and bone hit resolution.

   • Reload sequence fix for a class of weapons that could end up in a stuck reload state.

   • Landmines fixed. Triggering and damage application restored.

   • Visor overlays and effects redone for the helmet visor system.

   • 50BMG temporary effects added pending final art.

   • Bullet VFX size reduced for readability.

   World Map

   • Map baker fixes and a full bake of world map data.

   • Drone icons regenerated, more drones added.

   • Corpse rendering on the map fixed.

   • Drone voice over fixed.

2. Performance

   • Transient object pooling subsystem. Generic pool for short-lived actors and components that previously hit spawn and destroy churn.

   • Navmesh moved to runtime regen with Navigation Invokers. No baked navmesh data on disk. Each character carries an invoker that regenerates a 256 m radius around itself. 512 m tiles. Pool-sequestered pawns do not register their invoker, avoiding a boot-time nav spike.

   • Errant Paths and Biomes commandlets optimized. Per-cell explicit cleanup and forced GC reduces required RAM to roughly 32 GB and VRAM to 6 GB. New options to run only a subset of cells, or to skip a specific list of cells, so a partial regen run can resume without redoing everything.

   • World Partition and audio parallel worker counts reduced. Audio may have brief choppiness in heavy moments while this is fine-tuned.

   • Engine Simulator worker threads no longer kept alive when unused (see Vehicles).

   • AInteractibleActor mesh tick disabled by default and made opt-in per actor.

   • Streaming overlap check disabled as the project default to avoid the cost of running a full overlap check when loaded through world partition or world partition transformers.

   • Network traffic reduced for group state and corpse broadcasts.

   • Render settings tuned to reduce memory usage.

   • Foliage resimulated map-wide with more aggressive LODing.

   • Paths resimulated to fix weight painting and foliage.

   • Memory leak fixes in commandlets, with explicit cleanup methods to force memory release between cells.

   • Texture leak in the icon helper system fixed. First reported by @Sharky, thanks!

   • Navmesh regen performance improved by gating runtime nav updates on the Errant Landscape persistent layer brushes.

   Graphics Menu

   • Display, Upscaling, Advanced Graphics, and Post-Process setting collections added. DLSS, NIS, Streamline DLSSG, and Reflex are all exposed where the hardware supports them.

   • Old SteamAudio plugin removed.

   • Streamline log spam in shipping builds silenced.

   • Exposure settings corrected across the board.

   • AMD FSR plugin and bindings still pending.

   Levels and Map Polish

   • Road splines reworked across most major routes. Multiple resimulation passes follow the spline updates. Whole-map foliage resimulated with the new optimized settings.

   • Physics materials fixed in the factory area.

   Loot

   • Military loot table fixed.

   • Corpse loot interaction stub via Hover plus F.

   Server and Multiplayer

   • Dedicated server crash caused by the online subsystem fixed.

   Engineering Helpers

   • New helper for loading UAnimSequence from soft object paths, matching the existing static mesh and material loaders.

   • VFX material velocity output fixed for bullet trails and similar effects.

Thank you for reading and stay up to date for more!