Friday Devblog 27

We opened a Bugs and Suggestions section over at our Support Site. Please feel free to report any bugs you have, or make any suggestions. This has proven really useful to us already - and I'm sure it will only get more useful the more people know about it. If you're experiencing a bug that's on the site you really help us out a lot by voting it up and giving it more attention. Here's an example of how not to report a bug:

A couple more options have been added to the F2 menu. You can now toggle PVT on and off - which gives some people a significant frame rate boost. And you can now adjust the draw distance.. this should rally help your frame rate.

I fixed a number of bugs with the triangle foundations and walls this week. Placing walls was placing them the opposite way around to on other foundations. Which meant that when you placed railings they looked really odd. Also, you couldn't place campfires and stuff on them. Now you can!

There existed an exploit where you could get twice the amount of stuff refunded if you cancelled a craft multiple times in quick succession. This is now fixed.

I added name tags back this week. So now you can see who people are. We did want to do something a bit more special in this area. We wanted it so when you saw a person you had to click on them and name them. Then whenever you see that person again they'd have that nametag. This would mean that you could name your friends, or a sleeping guy who you stole from. But if someone was sneaking around you they wouldn't have a nametag. But we haven't done that yet. We decided that we might as well just do it the old way and then make changes from there. We have made a few changes though. The colour of the nametag changes depending on the ambient light. At night it's darker and harder to see. It's not drawn as far away as on legacy either. We wanted to avoid the situation where you spot people because of their nametag floating over their head. We only really want the nametag to show when it's really obvious that the player is there - when you can see their face clearly. In the future we will likely make this a feature of some clothes. For example, a balaclava might remove the nametag.

You might have noticed something weird about the player models at varying distances. Sometimes the player wouldn't have a head, or hands, or feet. This is because all of the player's components were LOD'd separately. So their hands could be LOD2, when the rest of the body is LOD1. This could end up looking really odd - and although I haven't benchmarked it I'm sure it took more processing than just doing one. Which is now does. The player model now shares a LOD Group that is dynamically created.

Andre has been busy making the AI a bit more like legacy. Animal ragdolls now bleed properly when you attack them. Animals have colliders - so you can't just run through them. Deer and Boars will now run away from the player - instead of running towards them.

I did some work on the building block system today. Building blocks are things like a wall, a foundation, a floor, a window. I dramatically simplified the code and I made them upgradable. This is only boilerplate right now - it's a start. When you place a building block you'll place a frame. Then bash that with the hammer to give it wood, and it'll upgrade to level 1. The level 1 blocks are all what they used to be. Keep hitting it, giving it wood, you'll get it to level 2. Get some stones, keep hitting it, and it'll upgrade to level 3, then 4. Get some metal fragments and you'll get it to level 5. There's a lot of balancing that we need to do here.. but the intention is that instead of placing walls that are inpenetrable from the start.. you'll have to actually work at it to get to that level.. and you'll probably only fully upgrade the walls at ground level etc. Right now none of this has any art. And it looks terrible. It's literally just coloured versions of the old meshes. But our intention is that each level will have a different mesh and texture. So upgraded buildings will be made out of stone a metal. I made a slideshow illustrating how we're probably going to do transitions here. I'm hoping that over the next couple of weeks we'll start to finalize our ideas for building levels - and start to get some of this stuff in game.

Xavier's clothes went in this week. He gave us a t-shirt and a snow jacket!

We've added a Foundation Steps building block. This should allow you to have multi-level foundations.. and more importantly it means you don't have to jump up to get to your house anymore.

Andre has made the terrain generation at least two times faster - by moving a bunch of code into C++.

I started work on an SDK. It's on Github - right here. It's pretty much useless to everyone without Unity 5 right now (I think). It just includes a Player Model scene and a few sets of clothes. This should hopefully let people make new clothes. We haven't totally decided how we're going to let people put them into the game. The TF2 marketplace/trading method is tempting, but we want GMod style map/mod downloads on workshop too - and I don't think we can do both. Either way feel free to have a mess and share with us if you come up with something cool.

When loading a save from the server the owner of the sleeping bags wasn't being saved - which rendered them useless. This is now fixed.

Tom modelled a box. [18 days] Dan finished his bow. [20 days]

Goosey animated the Salvaged Pickaxe

Not a terrible week. Some real visible progress has been made. I'm that confident that we're getting close to baseline that I put some of the reboot screenshots on the steam store page. It's time to start thinking about what we REALLY need to do before making that switch. Next week I want to look more into the survival aspect. I feel that's something we're missing right now in the reboot.. there's not really much fear of dying of hunger, or being killed by an animal, or being too cold. We need to make it more obvious that these things are happening. I also want to make it more obvious how to build (how to press right click while holding the foundation).

Howie has been being awesome again.