Devblog 131

Everything below, but using moving pixels.

The MP5 is now in game, and craftable at level 25. We need to do some slight tweaks to the animations (reloading, third-person positioning), and I’ll be listening for balance feedback. Enjoy it while you can, because once the component system is fully implemented the parts for it will not be easy to come by!

I’ve heard some bitching about how the silencer “sux”, so I’ve added some long needed buffs to it. Firstly, weapons using the silencer will have their tracers rendered invisible. Secondly, the sound distance has been decreased to a maximum of 40m instead of the 100m it used to be. This should make it far more viable for stealth operations.

I’ve gone through the tech table and added more components for use in crafting recipes and to be broken down in the recycler. Next week I plan to adjust all the recipes and loot tables to spawn these. Should be fun!

I merged caves into the prerelease branch on Wednesday this week, the first step in deploying the new caves to you. There’s nine caves as outlined in my previous blogpost. We are still fixing bags of things as I speak, so the branch might be wiped again. Thanks to those of you who playtested so far! Also please note that caves are still flooded as I write this. Flooding might get fixed in the next couple of days. Same goes for ambient brightness inside all underground areas, where the end result should be a darker experience.

I’ve made the LR300 craftable as it was seriously underused. It unlocks at level 30.

We have a couple of outstanding networking issues that need to be tracked down and fixed. Some of them lead to strange and unexpected behaviour, others cause spikes in server traffic or small entity leaks. The problem with this is that all of them are kind of a pain to debug and only happen on standalone servers, which makes them far more difficult to find. I’m not an expert on the lower levels of our networking layer yet, but the good news is that any time I spend on this increases our bus factor and should help us with development and bugfixes down the line. To make things easier I added a number of admin debugging tools on the client and server. I’m still trying to track down a really random client side entity leak of parented weapons and weapon attachments that seems to be coming from issues with the parent to child group updates. While debugging this I found and fixed a different issue that would make certain entities send a group changed message before they were fully spawned, which would cause fairly significant spikes in network traffic whenever waves of trees, ores and collectables respawned. Overall I think I made some good progress with this, even though I don’t have all that much to show for my efforts just yet.

I've been making progress on the new Hazmat Suit and made a start on the low poly and bakes. Here's a shot of some of my test bakes to show where it's headed (with only flat colours applied). I'll be making the hood part of the suit a separate object to facilitate different types of headgear in the future (maybe a variant for protection against fire, for example). I should have the rest of the bake done by next week ready to move onto texturing, which will hopefully be a pretty quick task thanks to the clean materials.

I’m almost finished with the item placement sounds that I started last week (placing campfires, doors, etc). I’ve also spent a little time working on sounds for the MP5 this week.

I have continued working on replacing various placeholder props. I completed an industrial panel that didn’t make it to last week's update and began working on revamping the shipping containers. The new containers, apart from being higher quality, will come in multiple variations, with some that have usable interiors/or have been damaged.

After finishing up everything on the Monday, I started making progress on Paul's concept of the Recycler. My aim was to get it finished by today, unfortunately time has escaped me. Please forgive me! I have, however, managed to bake out all the base textures and I'm getting the model ready to texture. We hopefully will have that done by tomorrow. I don’t really want to put any pictures up yet until I’ve got a lick of paint on the model. Sorry!

The Bota Bag wasn't looking great. I've tweaked the animations and transitions. Before: After:

I’ve finished off the first pass at sound occlusion this week. It’s disabled behind the audio.occlusion convar by default while I test it this week, but assuming that goes well I’ll turn it on for everyone next week!