Devblog 65

Farming

I started work on farming this week. There's two plants you can place right now: pumpkins and corn. These plants need water, heat, and sun to live. The more of these they get the faster they'll grow. They hate being planted on rocks and snow. This is all really boilerplate right now. All the art is placeholder stuff from the asset store. I've been spending a lot of time on the workflow to make sure we can add new plants really easily, and this has translated to pretty much every other asset in the game (clothes, weapons, etc). So yeah, this is working right now - it's four days work. It works, but it ain't pretty. I wish I had three months to work just on farming, but we'll iterate on it over the coming weeks.

Wolf Headdress

Xavier's wolf headress model is in! You need a wolf skull and some cloth to craft it.

Bota Bag

The Bota Bag is in. It's a default craft. You can take water from your water catcher to fill it. No filling from rivers just yet though - sorry. It's boilerplate.

Model Rebuild Performance

I've been looking into why people are lagging so hard during firefights. One thing I came across was that the player models were being rebuilt more often than they needed to be. This is done usually when a player changes clothes, and is kind of an intensive process. So now it only does it when there's definite changes, which I'm hoping is going to help out with performance here.

The Rest

• Dedicated Server text is yellow if running in debug mode.
• Dedicated Server console shows map name.
• Added Depth Of Field option.
• Terrain Parallax works.
• Added SQLite.
• Change mouse input to use GetAxisRaw.
• Fixed floating buildings.
• Increase decay rate.
• Fixed Hemp Bush blocking bullets.
• Added entity.debug_lookat (for admins).
• Menu music obeys volume control.
• Spear hold positions.
• Fixed C4 directional damage bug.

Next Week

I had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to do next week, but I think I'm going to take a week to polish, bug fix and optimize. We've been on a feature push over the last few weeks and none of the features we've added are particularly polished, so it's probably time to do that.

We've started investigating a female model. We really don’t want to make the female model unrealistic in the sense of her being aesthetically idealised. In the same way that our male models aren't perfect specimens of the male body, neither should the female be. No huge boobs nor four-inch waists here. Scott made a comparison image of progression over the three days, from the start on the left to what we have now on the right. Next week I should be going onto the low-poly and texturing, and possibly applying the mesh to the rig and testing in game!

This week I fixed the glowing water during night time and fixed some subsurface refraction and shading issues. It now looks consistent during the entire day-night cycles: We had to report a bug to Unity this week regarding a memory leak. However, we can’t yet be sure if the problem is related. Regardless, to be able to blame or rule out Water2 as the source of the problem, I replaced the Water Reflections with a Water Quality slider. Setting it to 0 will disable Water2 and revert back to Water1. If you’re being affected by this problem, please attempt to set this slider to zero and let us know if it helps. Please note that these changes were dropped into the development branch so they might take a while to reach the stable release. Some other misc changes.

• Fixed cascaded shadow bug introduced by the water.
• Fixed potential speedtree shader transmission bug; encountered when porting to Before, because Unity.

Next Week: I was summoned to help out a bit on Before this week and will get back to the tasks at hand as soon as possible.

I finished the shivering animation for when the player gets too cold. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-17_15-27-30.mp4[/embed] I rigged up and animated the sexy new semi-auto pistol that Tom whipped up. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015-06-15_10-32-25.mp4[/embed] I also started working on a new helmet. Next week I’m going to finish off the helmet and start work on the bone-club view model.

The past week or so has been a bit slow for me since I’m trying a few new things. The most important of those is that I’ve spent the past few days getting to know some new programs that should help me work on textures a bit faster, specifically Substance Painter and Substance Designer. While there’s a bit of a learning curve, these programs should help me speed up one of the slower chunks of the player clothing creation process. That in mind, here’s a half-finished road sign armor jacket that I’m continuing from past updates as the testbed for these programs. Next week I should have this finished, I should know a lot more about some new texture creation programs, and I should have a very good start on the pants to go with this jacket.

I completed the windmill player structure, and animated it. It will soon come to you when our electricity update hits. I decided to work on the Sphere Tank monument, which is one the players like to build on top of. I’m opening its inside to make it a place where attacking/defending the structure will force you to walk on unstable gantries and hanging pipes. I would like to keep its inside free of player built stuff in order to control how open the space is and make sure it is harder to defend, but the top of the structure should still offer you the possibility to build. I’m currently playing with the idea of offering players some crude oil at the bottom of the structure, which will attract a lot of visitors and keep the people who own the structure on their toes.

I’ve been working on six new melee weapons from one of Paul's concepts. So far the high-poly pass on them is done. These will be textured early next week and also have world models created.

I worked on the new survey charge. I quite like the idea of you being able to push it into the ground to create more of a feeling that this stuff has been properly unearthed instead of the way it currently just sits on the surface. Scott's also suggested that instead of a fuse it could actually work with C4, so I'm working on some designs that are more along those lines. Next is an idea I've had floating around for a while, now that we're starting to get more food stuffs and tier two buildings it makes sense to start working on tier two cooking. This could possibly introduce different types of foods, ways of preserving things, and the ability to make your food go further. Lastly are the usual icons. This week we have seeds, pumpkins, corn, the bota bag, and the wolf headdress. Next week I'm going to be working on some more finalized ideas for the survey charge, some more ideas for the tier 2 cooking, and hopefully a few other things.

I've been finalising the concept art for the wooden armor this week. We wanted something that had a more unique silhouette and would kind of provide some basic protection early on for players, but that would also take a certain amount of damage and then break apart. I went for something that had a more improvised look, basic planks of wood held onto the body with netting and rope wrapping. I added a headgear piece to accompany it, made from a carved out log; it's optional, so you could make this and wear it with something else if you like. Next week I'll move onto some more wearables, probably bone armor or something similar.

This week was pretty straight forward for me. The thing most of you will be excited about is the new (vastly toned down) chicken sounds. I also did a set of sounds for metal doors, a new set of sounds for the quarry, and made some small updates to the bush rustling sounds. I’ve started working on distant gunshots and a nice generic way for us to crossfade between different sounds based on how far away they are, but that probably won’t make it in the update. I’d like to eventually use this for things like only playing the smaller trickling water details on rivers when you’re really close to them. Next week I’ll be finishing up the distant gunshots and starting on the last couple of animals that are still using placeholder sounds.