Devblog 149

Shockingly the Metal Shopfront had very few bugs that needed fixing. The weird flamethrower exploit is now fixed, and its balance is equal to that of a sheet metal wall. I’ve also made some improvements! Firstly, you can now right-click to deposit items in the shopfront as both customer and vendor. Also I’ve added a small delay after both people have pressed Confirm before the trade completes. This makes the experience less jarring, and gives you a chance to really, really be sure.

After running my shop for a week I realized that the Peacekeeper Turret needed a little bit of work. Water Bottles, Bota Bags, Buckets, and Rocks are no longer considered hostile items to the turret, so you won’t be blown away by pulling one of these out. However, if at any point you deal any damage to anything you will immediately be targeted. I feel like this is a good trade-off: troublemakers may get one shot off, but they’ll be taken care of right away. I also fixed a bug where players would continue to be marked hostile even after respawning. Lastly, the Sentry Gun has a laser sight. Stay safe.

Gross, but check it out: I’ve added an option on beds where you can make them Public. If a bed is Public it means anyone can walk up to the bed and take it over. Then they own it. It’s similar to assign to friend but allows that process to happen if you’re not around. A good place for these to be used would be near shops or if you wanted to set up apartments. You can also set them to be private at any time.

You can now add a guest code to your Code Lock! When someone enters the guest code, they will be able to open and close the door but nothing else. They can’t unlock it, change the code, or take the lock off. I feel like this will be useful for a variety of reasons, maybe you can grant someone provisional access to your large furnace room for a fee? Should be interesting.

I’ve worked up a really rough implementation of the Heavy Armor. I added a new feature to support it: the ability for armor to dictate max movement speed. Each piece of the heavy armor you wear slows you down a bit, down to a total of about 30% loss when fully equipped. It does a pretty good job of protecting you, but it's very vulnerable to heat damage and makes you pretty cold in the arctic biome. It’s probably UP or OP, but I’ll fix it all next week. I really have to go through and adjust the Metal Facemask/Chestplate now to make sure everything has a purpose in the game as some of our costs vs protection values are all out of wack. I also really need to add more ways that armor can have positive or negative effects on the player, such as movement noises, helmets that partially occlude your view, etc. I’ll see what I can do over the next few weeks.

I whipped this together for the patch, but it’s only the first step toward showing items on people's backs, etc. Basically, if you ever touch a hostile item you become marked, and your character will display a Caveman Sash, instead of being completely naked. This resets when you die. Now at least you know when someone is bullshitting you when they say they ‘just spawned’ and ‘trust me, I really don’t have a Waterpipe’. Next week I’ll do some investigation into displaying the actual items on the player models. Enjoy!

The Vending Machine now has the same strength as an Armored Wall. I’ve also added a helpful feature that displays the amount of item being sold per sell order. This means if you’re selling 10 wood for 1 stone you’ll see this reflected on the screen. There are some minor changes too, such as a neat little light animation on the keypad, and some layout fixes so the icon doesn't overlap the screen text.

It’s better this way, trust me.

Here’s the deal: Vending Machines now have an option to ‘Broadcast Position’. When enabled, they will show up as a little green dot on everyones map. Existing Vending Machines need this toggled on; new ones will broadcast by default. This is probably a temporary feature while I try and figure out a more generalized way of getting markers on the map. Stay tuned!

This week role-players, ahem, we welcome some additions to decorate your home and make it more comfortable. In this batch of new items you will find two types of rugs, a table and chairs. To enjoy comfort from your rugs you have to stand on them. While table and chairs work akin to the campfire with a subtle radius of coziness.

It finally came my attention that some players were using the super low quality terrain mode, aka potato mode, as an advantage in order to have a cleaner view of items on the ground. Because of this, I added a high frequency texture overlay to potato mode in order to simulate generic ground detail and break the smoothness. Hopefully it will make it a little harder to see objects, just like in higher quality modes. I did my best to leverage performance here and it should perform the same as before. Here’s a preview comparing the noisier potato against a couple of other quality modes:

Worked on the foliage shader a bit this week to add tree/bush-style matching wind animation to our custom overgrowth elements. This won’t be in this week but will be included when the new foliage system is deployed.

I've started giving the Wood Armour the same treatment the Bone Armour had - or more specifically, making it look like something that might actually offer you some protection. Paul's done a lot of great concepts for it over the past, so I've got a lot of material to work with. I'm just about finished on the torso high poly and the turnaround on the rest should be pretty quick where I'll be able to reuse boards, in a similar fashion to the Bone Armour I'll be combining a lot of the boards into a single low poly piece so we can keep it looking detailed and interesting without having a performance hit.

Particle effects and decals from weapon and projectile hits were spawning extremely far away. This could completely destroy performance on high population servers with a lot of active gunfire. I’ve reduced the spawn distance of decals to 30 meters and particle effects to 100 meters. This solves the problem for now, but I’m sure we can do an even better job with this in the future.

I’ve spent most of the week testing and optimizing the multithreaded mesh batching system. The good news is that performance is starting to get to a pretty good point, which makes me hopeful for the upcoming foliage system. The micro stuttering when walking around massive bases is also pretty much eliminated, which was the point of moving the workload to threads. The bad news is that it’s not stable enough to go live this week.

We know there's been issues with picking up these newfangled world models, and some players have wondered why change at all? Simply put, it's just part of the plan to not have lame burlap sacks for every item. Unfortunately for smaller items it's caused you needless pain in picking them up. For now, enjoy the comedically large Sewing Kit and we'll aim to improve things. By maybe adding a ghost outline when you’re aiming at pickups or something like that?

I completed the third-person animations for the MP5, LR300, and the Semi-Auto Rifle. I also added a set of walking animations in preparation for the Heavy Armour. The armour will make the player walk a bit slower, so Helk asked me to make some proper walking animations (as opposed to the current system which just plays the jogging animation slowly).

I spent some time improving physics sound playback this week. Previously, we were just sending a soft/medium/hard effect to the client (since item physics are simulated on the server) when a physics impact happened. This worked okay, but it felt lame when something fell two inches and still made a big clunk. The volume of these sounds should feel a lot more natural now. I’ve also created a bunch of new physics sounds to go along with the new world models we’ve got. Most of these are based on existing item UI sounds, but they’re a bit shorter and more percussive. I recorded some new source material for a few items that will be used for some more new item ui/physics sounds next week too.