Devblog 150

I spent most of my week on this and I hope it pays off. Not too much to say about the actual feature other than the game will score all of your inventory and display the most hostile weapons on your back or hips. It was a hell of a lot of work, but I’m really happy with it. It really adds to the look of characters and we should have done this a long time ago. It also modifies the game in a few ways which I will address here. First of all, it looks for items in your entire inventory, not just on your belt. Anyone is going to be able to see your best tools and weapons now. How does this change the game? Well, you’re not going to be able to pretend you’re friendly and then pull a Pipe Shotgun or a Spear out of your ass and kill someone before they have a chance to react. I heard people complaining about this on reddit for a long time and I finally solved it. Since the commit logs there's been bitching from people on the other side that they can no longer do this. To those people who are unhappy with this change I gotta say this is a basic mechanic that has been present in video games since the early 2000s and we finally got around to implementing it. I know you were exploiting it to murder people and steal from them, and you consider that part of your ‘sandbox’ experience, but you’re going to have to come up with other ways to be a sicko. With that said, I do plan to add stuff in the future, like backpacks and maybe ankle holsters, so there is an actual way to conceal exactly what you are carrying to a certain degree. Maybe things like shanks that are very powerful one use melee weapons that are concealed? There are many ways to reintroduce some of the freedoms you believe are being taken away by this, but at least they’ll be cool and part of the gameplay and not just taking advantage of a missing feature. This is probably not the last iteration of this and there will probably be a bunch of bugs. One minor side effect is that any time you holster a weapon it will turn your flashlight/laser off for that weapon, and you’ll need to turn it back on when you draw it again. I’ll fix this for next week.

Thanks to the guys over at Rustopia, we ended up getting a large number of profile samples that are helping us pinpoint why servers with a large number (>250) of players seem to be experiencing lag issues. This manifests itself on your client as the inability to open boxes, rubber banding, everything seeming to pause for a moment etc. We’re going to analyze the data and hopefully provide some relief for this in the coming weeks.

Instead of simply snapping to a new location, Auto Turrets now scan more slowly when they are idle. I’ve reduced the volume of the turn sound so it wasn’t all you heard, and I think Alex Rehberg will be producing some less annoying ones in the not too distant future. I’ve also modified the laser beam it emits to be green when in peacekeeper mode and red when in attack mode. I may just change it so you can only see the laser when it is in peacekeeper mode, but for now this should help players tell the difference so they can be less timid when approaching shops.

I noticed some items weren’t being used as much as they should be so I’ve reduced their costs to compensate.

• The Bucket Helmet no longer requires a Sewing Kit and is cheaper. Its armor protection has been slightly reduced to compensate.
• The Pump Shotgun now requires two Pipes (was five), one spring (was two), and 20 High Quality Metal (was 30).
• The Pick Axe requires 125 Metal Fragments instead of 150

It’s still not fixed. Do not place Vending Machines on triangles or triangle foundations or any change in building stability (upgrading, removing) will result in the Vending Machine being destroyed. I thought I fixed it, but I didn’t and I’m looking into it. Sorry guys!

This month’s wipe includes all the work on the monument overgrowth, a number of updated foliage and building assets, various terrain generation fixes and a bigger snow biome.

A couple of updates back, when optimizing the gunfire effects using game object pooling, I inadvertently broke the light emission from those effects because the script that handled them wasn’t supporting pooling. I fixed the script and they’re now back. [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://files.facepunch.com/s/062ad6e36b6a.mp4"][/video]

I did a second pass on the foliage animation in order to account for the "high frequency oscillation", aka flutter, that was missing from last week's version. I also added additional knobs to give the artists more control over the final result. It should look more natural now, but do expect tweaks to make it more realistic, further down the line. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/diogo/2017/March/02/15135/2017-03-02_16-55-07.mp4[/embed]

I fixed a few culling related problems since last week:

• Fixed culling ignoring terrain carving; e.g. players would disappear if they were ~15m ahead and entered a cave
• Fixed culling lag when players turned visible; e.g. players would take some time to appear after they show up from hiding
• Fixed culling related error in spectate mode, when the target player died

There are still some culling issues pending and we're tracking down the remaining. This optimization is important to us in the long run, so it's important we get it right. I'd like to thank you all for your patience and for everyone who reported to us about related issues.

With Vincent and I both moving houses this week (separately), there hasn’t been that much progress on the art front. I have mostly focused on making last minute optimizations for bunker rooms, and then spent the rest of the week working on a new deployable locker that you will be able to decorate your bases with and store precious items in.

I added all of the new third-person animations and wordmodel changes (that I’ve been working on the past couple weeks) into the game. I’m pretty much done all of the major weapon holdtypes, and now I’m just going through the list of items to see if there’s any that could benefit from having custom third-person animations. I’m working on custom animations for the guitar, and I also started working on sitting animations, so we can have the player sit in the chairs that were added last week.

I finished up on another world model, the Wolf Skull. I adapted the cranium from one of Tay-Tay's sweet models (in the Bone Armour set) which helped save a lot of time (thanks, Tayter!). You can have look at it below.

Work continues on the Wood Armour rework and I've finished up baking the chest piece. I've tried to keep it as low poly as possible and I'm pleased that it's retained a lot of it's high poly detail. I'm hoping to have the rest of the set baked out so I can make a start on the texturing at the end of next week.

I worked up a Dropbox from one of Paul’s concepts. The Dropbox will sit on your door, enabling you to drop stuff inside. I would say “take a spin of it below” but sadly emission materials aren’t supported in the viewer, so you’ll just have to imagine spinning it. I also began work on Pauls’ concept for the new tier 1 Workbench. Progress is good, and pictures will follow next week.

I’ve been working on Heavy Armor sounds this week, recording metal movement and some pot impacts, but I’ve been experimenting with filtering the rest of the in-world audio when the pot is on your head, and playing around with filtering the voice chat of other players who have a pot on their head. I haven’t been able to get the filtering stuff sounding stellar with Unity’s DSP effects, but I think even if we have to keep it fairly subtle it’s a nice touch. I think it might be cool to take the tail from some of the pot impacts and let that ring out a tiny bit if explosives or other super loud sounds happen near you. And yes, I’ve worn a pot on my head multiple times as a sound reference this week.

New sounds for the Vending Machine are in now, and it plays physics sounds for the item you’re purchasing, which is kind of fun.

While I was working on the Heavy Armor I couldn’t stop thinking about finally doing footwear specific footsteps, so I started recording for those this week too. I’m really happy with how these are coming along so far. I’m going to be adding some ground types that we don’t have sounds for as I finish this up too.