Devblog 37

Like last week - almost done. All the weapons have been converted to the new system. Helk is working on an improved damage system now, which is a bit complicated so I'm gonna wait until it's done until I explain how it works. If I've done my job properly you shouldn't notice much of a change with the weapons. You might notice a few bug fixes but that should be it. The refactor happened to allow us more options moving forward with things like reloading. I'm sure you don't The weapon refactor has encompassed a bunch of things that don't really have anything to do with weapons, so I'm keen to merge it into the main branch and get testing on the development branch on Steam as soon as we can. These are things like queued network updated, to avoid flood outs and network choking when sending snapshots (which are happening a lot right now).

The old water was killing your framerate. Andre set about making new water this week. Instead of re-rendering the scene to create a reflection, it uses screenspace reflections. It's about a million times faster because it's pretty much free to render. It doesn't look as good as the old water right now - but I'm sure given the choice you'd rather have those 7 extra frames per second - right?

Players now all spawn on the beach. This is a bit of an experiment we're running, it's something we've thought about for a while - since the start of legacy in fact. It means that players initially will run into each other a lot. It means that players will probably want to run away into less populated areas to start their new life. It's an experiment anyway - let us know what you think.

This isn't done yet - but we are working on porting the old legacy map. Andre is working through the procedural stuff making sure a bunch of stuff works on hand-made maps too, and then there's a bunch of art stuff. So it's going to be a while.. I just wanted you guys to know that it's happening - because I don't think we've confirmed it anywhere yet. We would like to enable community made maps, but it's a sticky area. I'm not sure whether it would work, so it's something we're going to have to talk to Unity about and get their feedback.. because I know they're keen to support user created content - and I don't think that's within capabilities of the engine right now. But I might be wrong.

Dan's done his little lighthouse!

We heard you were worried about people breaking in through your ceilings/floors - so helk went in and made metal and stone versions.. which are much stronger than stupid old wooden versions.

Vince's new improved satellite monument is in!

We had a problem where if your quality settings were set to one of the lower settings you wouldn't get any light from the torch, or fires, or lanterns. Andre fixed this for you.

More branch work this week, with no real update. The weapon refactor stuff is pretty much done now. Once the loose ends are tied up we're pretty happy to merge that into main and we can start doing stuff that has appreciable results for you - so you can see this wasn't just coder masturbation. I'm hoping once that's out it will fix the lag drop bug we're seeing pretty commonly that is causing people to have to wipe their servers after a couple of days. Once that's out and all working, next week is all gameplay and bug fixes again. I'm hoping to stop houses falling down for no reason. And I'm hoping to do some blueprint stuff.

If you smash a corpse up, it'll spew a bunch of items instead of just disappearing. Corpses no longer disappear when you're looting them. If you started the game with the command line "-dev" it enabled a bunch of developer tools - which were being used to cheat with - this is now disabled. Fixed melee attacks sometimes not hitting, or not being that accurate.