Friday Devblog 25

Andre fixed the animal pile. When an animal dies it respawns somewhere else. The problem was that that somewhere else was in the center of the map. Meaning there were no animals anywhere else. But hey, if you happened to be in the middle of the map then build yourself a home there. You were not gonna go hungry. Now they work properly. And they're hungry. For sausage.

As part of the move towards playability you now start with only a rock. It should be possible to get pretty much everything in game from that point.

Howie did a concept of how we could use triangular foundation/floors to make our buildings less square. The elegance of this solution is stunning. We get curved buildings and wall lengths all stay 3 meters - the only new required parts are the foundations. This is a perfect example of the huge impact a concept artist can have on the game, and Howie deserves a square shit ton of praise for this. So I made a quick prototype and it does indeed work just as perfectly as you'd imagine. This implementation is still in very early stages but I wanted to give it people to test as soon as possible. It'll get better over the next couple of weeks or so, I really can't wait to see the buildings that people come up with.

The lock now shows up on the door, and you can interact with it. This is obviously all placeholder art right now. This gives a clear indication that the door has a lock.

If you're on 64 bit Windows you're now playing a 64bit build. If you have a Mac you're already playing a 64bit build because they haven't made a 32bit mac for about 4 years.

With the move to 64bit we started seeing a lot more crashes. So I decided it was probably a good time to start scanning crash logs and reporting them. We already use Sentry to log exceptions.. So with a few tweaks it was made to parse the error logs for a stack trace and report the crashes.. A lot of the time if the game is hard crashing it's either the fault of one of our native plugins, Unity's fault or a driver error. This allows us to at least stand a chance of determining that without having to ask people who are crashing to send in their logs. It also helps everyone because with Unity5 in beta we can report any crashes back to them - and they get fixed for everyone using Unity.

Water reflections looked odd because they weren't being fogged. Technically, because of how it's rendered it makes sense that it doesn't receive fog. But that doesn't work for us because it looks like shit. So Diogo went apeshit on it. He knocked up a special override-shader that renders the fog correctly. It should also be faster too! It also fixes that little black line that sometimes shows up on the horizon. This has ruined a lot of my awesome screenshots in the past.

My favourite part of Xavier's hazmat suit is this. All the parts are individual, so feel free to take off the helmet and gloves and head south to the desert biomes for that Breaking Bad look.

A much requested feature. The campfire starts with a bit of wood inside to get you started, just like in Legacy.

I haven't got as much done as I wanted to but the other guys picked up the slack. Helk made his first commit this week, which tragically had to be reverted. I hope people can see how we're creeping towards baseline. It might not be as fast as everyone would like but we're definitely getting there. We're striving to make the game playable above all else right now, I'm trying to put 'new stuff' firmly on the backburner so we don't get into a feature leak situation. That said - we just got Speedtree for Unity.. so expect at least some new trees next week :)

Melee weapons have been enhanced. I changed the animation system so that the animations are played straight away. Previously they were played through triggers which could have a few milliseconds of delay before starting. This caused some crazy situations where you saw the effect of the strike before you saw the attack animations. The attack is now delayed too. So instead of of pressing fire and the attack being instant, the strike now happens when the weapon model has reached the appropriate time in the animation. I also found a bug in the effect system which meant that weapons weren't having the full range of sounds that Goosey had set up on them.

Andre made the trees snowy! Winter is coming!

You could use stuff through walls. This meant that you could loot people's boxes, or loot them while they were sleeping despite there being a wall between you and the object you were interfering with. Now you can't.

Paul has been looking at monuments. We want to start adding landmarks to the islands procedurally. We're trying to discover exactly what those landmarks might be. Howie got in on the action too Meg has been drawing a lot of needles. We were looking at medkits and we don't really like how they work. Right now they're like in TFC where the medit just hits you with a white case and you get health back. We want things a bit more realistic than that. So meg has been drawing needles. Like, a hundred million needles. I think she was waiting for someone to tell her to stop. Here's a selection of them.

Xavier is working on a new sleeping bag model

The Titanic's worst enemy is back for revenge. Petur's icebergs are in!