NEW YEARS MASSIVE UPDATE!

Hello, to the Community of Divergent Network for our first 2023 blog update! This is a big update for Divergent, and there have been many changes and plans, so let’s get into it! Before we begin, we hope your New Year's was great and you all had the time to spend with friends and family!

We would like to start with some of the many changes we have made to the vehicles. We discussed entering some new snow vehicles into the server in the last blog update. Those will be here to stay regardless of whether we are in the winter season. We’d like to host snow sessions even if we are not in the holiday season. The new vehicle updates we are going to discuss, though, are for the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office!

The Blaine County Sheriff’s Office previously had a unique set of liveries and vehicles from the RedSaints Code 3 Pack; however, there were many issues with the vehicle pack we had, such as undesirable handling and, for some odd reason, all vehicles maxed out at 95 mph. We discussed with our development team the issue, and apparently, a lot of the code was screwed up. Now we have migrated to Ripples’ Liberty II Sheriff Pack, which introduces 3 SUVs, 5 Sedans, 3 Pickup Trucks, and 1 Muscle Car. Previously BCSO had a limited selection of trucks and no high-speed units. Now, they have a much more comprehensive selection. We prioritized BCSO to get the first fresh pack due to our previous issues with their pack. We will soon work on replacing the San Andreas State Police and then, finally, the Los Santos Police Department. For now, we will be rolling with the default liveries however we do hope to migrate to our own customized liveries unique to Divergent Network.

The next update we bring is to the gas system of the server. We currently use LegacyFuel for our vehicles which initially added an animation to exit the vehicle pump the fuel. We like this system more than the standard drive next to a pump, honk to turn off the vehicle, and wait for the fuel bar to rise, honk, and go. We felt that LegacyFuel added a much more realistic feel to things. We took things a step further and are now using a combination of LegacyFuel and Redrum’s Fuel Pumps to enhance this realistic feature even further!

Now, players need to exit the vehicle and walk to a gas pump to pick up the Fuel Nozzle and insert it into the vehicle. Players are not stuck holding the gas pump in one position. Now they have the freedom the fuel up their vehicle and walk around, maybe enter the gas station and pick up a few snacks for their journey and return to their vehicle and unhook the nozzle. Currently, there are a few bugs, we know that if a player leaves the nozzle in and gets in the vehicle, and drives off, it explodes. However, the nozzle re-equips onto the fuel pump before this happens. We do like the off chance that a player forgets and causes an explosion at the gas pumps, and are working to remedy this bug. If a player keeps holding the nozzle and runs away from the pump, they are prone to explode, which we intend to keep. 

As seen in the image, we did edit our own ymap to where the gas pumps are blocked around by concrete poles. There is not a huge abundance of them, so players are still able to walk in between them, but we do hope this helps the issue of some desync occurring where a vehicle glitches into a pump and explodes it. Now, the vehicles should desync into the pole, which causes them to “crash” into the pole, avoiding a crash into the pump. The gas poles ymap also offers gas pumps near every state-owned helipad and plane hangar, so if players are flying, they can refuel. Once we initialize an Air One subdivision, we want there to be no “30-minute timers” being set to “refuel” we want players now to rely solely on the gas features we have in the server and utilize them to their fullest extent. 

One of the last script features we have included is a much easier trunk script where a player can go to the back of any vehicle and simply press a keybind to open it. Players have the option to hide inside of it or close the trunk again. This feature is also offered on trailers, but due to the distance parameters we set, there are some instances where players need to return back inside the vehicle and type “/trunk” to close it. There is a way to fix this issue, but that would result in some undesirable consequences. 

We’ve also done a few map changes as well. We have included a firehouse within Sandy Shores, so the San Andreas Fire and Rescue has a closer interior location. We’ve updated Sandy Shores Medical. Our previous version was a little glitchy and outdated, and our map is a much cleaner and streamlined version of the previous one. We’ve also added new motel rooms at the Harmony Motel. We also have a temporary Bayview Lodging interior. This is a current placeholder for one that we hope to get. We are also in the middle of attempting to obtain a commissioned interior for the San Andreas State Police at the NOOSE Headquarters, so SASP does not need to rely on the sheriff stations or Los Santos Police Department Stations. 

That’s pretty much all the additions we made to Divergent Network in the last week or so. Now we would like to discuss some of our plans. As we are cleaning and tidying up the server, we are also working on a lot of promotional material for the server, such as a range of 2-3 trailers, some short tik tok clips, and a new intro title sequence for our Divergent Cinematic Series! Once the trailers are uploaded, they will be displayed below here in the blog update:

That’s pretty much it for the beginning of this month! We hope to release another blog update sometime next month unless something is drastically changed that we would like to report on. We hope that you all have a great start to your 2023 year and hope to see you on the server soon!