Devblog 153

Shut your blinds! Binoculars have arrived! Not much needs to be said about these. You can find them in Purple Crates or craft them at a cost of 5 HQM and 1 Gear. The good thing about the Gear cost is if you don’t really want a pair you can recycle them and have a chance at retrieving the Gear. Right click to peer through the binoculars and Left click to cycle zoom levels. Enjoy!

Some minor fixes to the Spinner. Firstly, I disabled occlusion on the spin sound so you’ll hear it through Chainlink Fences and Shop Fronts. Secondly, I fixed the issue preventing things from properly attaching to it. This means if you throw a Spear at it, the Spear will spin! So will bullet decals etc.

A bug was introduced a few months ago where the map would not properly update its drawn sectors to other players due to an optimization. This is now fixed. Thanks, bawng.

Furnaces have been being abused forever. Due to an oversight in the Furnace code (most) players quickly learned if they split the contents of the Furnace up into multiple stacks, each stack would cook separately, vastly increasing the performance of the Furnace. This is a bug and an exploit and I will be addressing it soon. The real reason I’m dealing with it now is because every time someone set a furnace up like this it would constantly be creating and destroying new entities as it threw Charcoal out into the world. This had an adverse affect on server performance, something we are looking into. So, for now, any time your Furnace spits something into the world it’ll turn off. This means you’ll lose a slot on the Furnace and Large Furnaces will suddenly seem far more attractive. More to come on this in the following weeks.

I’ve removed the gear cost from the Crossbow. Let's see if everyone bitches about this and I have to add 3x Tech Trash to the recipe next week.

Objects that can hold fuel will now have a selection panel reflecting their contents. This panel can be used to load/unload the fuel.

I’ve added the ability to pick up a bunch of items after they’ve been deployed.

• Tuna Lights
• Lanterns
• Ceiling Lights
• Flame Turrets
• AutoTurrets

Due to the aforementioned fuel inventory, the light sources will simply have their inventory moved to the item. For the turrets, it will just attempt to move their contents into your inventory along with the item. As with decor deployables, you’ll need to have building access and have a Hammer equipped to pick these items up. I know this is sort of a weird mechanic, but it serves its purpose right now in preventing screw ups. We’ll have to come up with a “real” way to handle this soon.

The Holosight's Tech Trash cost was reduced to 1, and the Silencer cost was reduced to 5 HQM. Maybe we’ll see a few more attachments these days? Oh and C4 requires one less Tech Trash too. I also reduced the cost of the Eoka, making it even cheaper to not craft. Enjoy!

I continued on my path to reduce frame rate drops and increase overall performance on the client. This week I added pooling support to a large number of client side entities, which greatly reduces stuttering when those entities are created. We’re now pooling nearly all common client side entities and the last remaining step is to optimize some of the lower level inefficiencies like network deserialization and network group management. Next I optimized our runtime mesh building which is used by player colliders, building meshes, dynamic occluders and most server side colliders. As I mentioned before there are parts of mesh building that Unity forces us to do on the main thread, and I managed to reduce those costs down to around 0.1ms per frame even at peak times, which is a reduction by a factor of 10-20 depending on the task. Workshop skins are still a bit of a performance concern, but I think I have an idea for how we can combat this. However, I might switch over to server side optimizations next since there appear to be some rather big areas of improvement that need to be dealt with on the high population servers.

We’ve started work toward a new monument: a rocket launch site that's fully equipped with the rocket, factory, office outbuildings, etc. The area will aim to provide a challenge to higher tier players, typically players who are into end-game content. The type of loot spawns encountered should be higher tech than the rest of the game’s locations. We’re also trying to get a nice mix of indoor and outdoor areas to vary movement and player encounters. On one end of the site is the rocket launch platform with its chute; on the other the factory where the rocket was manufactured and carried by a train to the platform. We want to offer interior segments inside the factory hangar and at least one office building. The launch platform already has an underground network, unlike previous monuments.

After finishing up on the Tier One Workbench I worked up a new asset: Binoculars! I managed to finish the model this week with LODs, so here’s an collage of images of the model, and as usual you can take a spin below! I’ve made a start on the Tier Two Workbench, and will hopefully have images to follow by next week's blog. Peace out till then!

You can't market your skins while they're for sale in the item store anymore, which is usually about eight weeks after they're initially made available. This is something we've decided to try out after looking at the current system and talking to the skin authors. The issue has been that after the first week no-one buys their skins. So the whole system of increasing the skin prices over 2 months becomes useless. Our hope ultimately is that this is more profitable for skin authors because this is their work. Our secondary hope is that when the skin leaves the store and is marketable, it retains or exceeds its original cost and is still profitable for people to market. While we get that this might possibly "hurt" the people that have been buying skins to flip them in the relatively short term, we can't encourage that behaviour. We're trying to make sure that the item's author is making the profit from it being sold, not the flip men.

Unity is prepping to release 5.6 any time soon. Once it goes live and is stable we'll be able to release the new AI system. Right now the beta version has some UI bugs. If those are fixed and 5.6 is released properly, and we don't have any more issues, it'll be April 6th. If not, then it'll be May 4th.

One issue I'm constantly running into when creating or updating armour and clothes is the fact that all our clothing items have quite drastic differences in terms of displacement. I touched on this briefly last week, but it means that layering items becomes a nightmare of clipping and floating where I have to accommodate for such a large range in offsets from the skin. I'm working on standardising some of these values a little, to minimise the clipping and floating as much as possible. It should also mean that complicated items like the heavy armour (or even the bone armour, but no promises as of yet) will be able to be equipped over clothing. You can check out a comparison of the floating and clipping below.

I went over the animations for the following weapons this week: AK47, M92, Spear, Sawn-off Shotgun, Double Barrel Shotgun. I tightened up some of the “floatiness” and made them feel more “chunky”, as well as fixed some clipping issues. I also fixed a longstanding bug with the viewmodels clipping when the FOV setting was changed in the graphics options. The viewmodel now adjusts accordingly and there should be little to no clipping.

Woohoo! This is done now! It ended up being a larger undertaking than I originally intended time wise, but I’m quite happy with how it all turned out so I think it was worth it. Hearing the light pats of your bare feet switch to clompy rubber when you pop a Hazmat Suit on feels great. I may re-record a handful of the jump landing sounds, because some of the hard-soled shoe on hard surface jumps sound a little too sharp right now. The code side of this is pretty minimal but it hasn’t been tested outside my local copy of Unity yet, so I’m going to hold off on pushing this out until next week just to be sure we don’t end up breaking something as important as footsteps.

I've finished up fixing world models that were displaying skins incorrectly. As previously stated, in a couple of cases this was due to optimisation, and in the others these issues have been there since day one. We’re only now seeing issues due to finer details being placed into areas of the skin not utilized by our base textures. Going forward, we're hoping to make models with these types of skinning considerations in mind to help we you create great content.