Devblog 43

We've had a long standing problem with mass drops on our servers. After about 50 people have joined, and after a few hours, every few minutes everyone on the server would drop out. This turned out to be a problem with how Lidgren (our low level network library) recycles packets. The list of packets was growing that large at times that it was affecting performance of the network thread - which periodically stalled and stopped sending out data, causing clients to eventually give up and disconnect. This is another one of those bugs that we've been chasing our tail on for a long time unsure whether it was something we were doing or a ddos attack. It could have probably been avoided completely by using a tried and tested networking library from the start.. but I guess this is how network libraries become tried and tested.

This is a tricky one to explain, so I'm not going to bother. Sometimes on the client locks that we on doors weren't actually showing on the door, they'd show at the center of the world instead. And sometimes when saving we'd lose the fact that the lock was attached to the door. This meant that when loading that save the lock would stay on the door but the door didn't know it was there so didn't use it. Meaning anyone could open the door. This is fixed. Finally.

Xavier got a bunch of new jackets in. For now we've only put one in the game because we don't have UI to handle reskins yet, but there's a lot of verirty there for the future.

Paul, Tom, Goosey and Helk have got the assault rifle in game. It's an AK47, but I don't think we're calling it that in game for some reason. Maybe because it's got a shovel handle.

Will kill animals and players, should be fun to see how this plays out with base defense, eventually it’ll actually trap things instead of kill them but lets see how this plays out, corpses of any object that trip it will stick around for quite a while so you can revisit your traps and see what they caught!

The airdrop was dropping an impotent package right in the middle of the map. The package it drops is now potent, and it drops it somewhere randomly on the map. The package also has higher value loot than can be found in the other loot spots, and you don't have to pay for it.

Like legacy, you now start with the limited ability to craft items. You need to find and study blueprints to be able to craft new items. We're still tweaking which blueprints you start with and which you have to find so please let us know. The blueprint data is decoupled from the map save data. So if your server administrator likes, he can wipe the map but keep your blueprint states. In the future I want to look at making the way this data is saved my available to server mods so server providers with multiple servers can share blueprint/player data between them.

This is a bit of a placeholder which will be replaced/removed once we have more loot spawning monuments. Around the map you'll find barrels spawn randomly. Break them to get their contents which can be items or blueprints. This is part of the radtown strategy to give people more of a purpose to roam the island, and make it possible to acquire new blueprints. They won't be barrels forever.

Let me start by saying that this is all placeholder art. We got a bunch of models from the asset store and put them together. We're figuring out what works and what makes sense using this placeholder art before fully committing to creating our own art. We want more internals, we want you to be able to enter any building you see. The towns work very much like in legacy. There's buildings, there's respawning loot, there's radiation. Things might look a bit weird initially because we're still experimenting with telling the procedural system how and where to place these, and to modify the terrain around them so they look like they've been there for a long time. We have big ideas for Radtowns.

An awesome week. We're really flying now, making some great progress. The game is definitely fun to play again right now. When we aren't getting EAC and Steam Auth Timeouts the servers are performant and stable - even with 200 players. This is all awesome. Next week, bug fixes and balancing. I'm aiming to replace all of the old UI with new stuff, because we've been putting up with this shitty stacking/splitting system for long enough. And damage, drowning, on fire and bleeding overlays, so you know when bad things are happening to your body.

Aiming down the sight provides a recoil reduction, crouching further reduces recoil, weapons have higher recoil in general now Bolt rifle now has no aimcone - bullet goes where you aim + gravity Fixed player corpses not spewing their contents when destroyed Fixed bug where lootables could become permanently occupied Fixed code lock not displaying its status in the world Fixed unducking when opening menu Tweaked how positions were updated over the network - clients should get more up to date information now

Many apologies to the linux guys. There's a bug currently affecting the current Unity 5 Beta that is causing a crash on startup. Hopefully this will be fixed in next week's update, all we can do right now is apologise and let you know we are thinking about you.