Jack-o'-lanterns, a reworked options menu, better building colliders, the first step towards painting the inside of your base, further adventures in optimisation, and more.
It's useful though, because we can verify stuff like that the memory leak still exists. We updated to Unity 5.2.1p3 this week and the leak still seems to exist. Unity have been fixing a few memory leaks in the UI system--which seems like it could possibly be the cause--so we're hopeful that it will be fixed in the next Unity patch.
Anyway. I've been looking at the impact that shadows have on performance. We're going to look at a few tricks to make the rendering of them faster. I've added a new option to the options menu that lets you select shadow distance and cascade count. If you're getting shit framerate in the higher graphics modes, changing the cascade count to none will give you much better performance.
Here's a poll about performance.
I introduced some artifacts in water local reflections caused by back reflection while attempting to remove some other artifacts, caused by failed tracing (white dots). While this can't be avoided 100%, it can still be drastically reduced:
Pushed a quick fix for the flickering clouds some people were having and fixed a performance problem affecting River-less maps.
I've also reworked our basic building blocks collisions to stick closer to the skin of what you see, allowing much more precise cover/shooting around them. You can also walk under your twig and wood foundation blocks with ease now. This and other upcoming changes into the building system should improve the way we build our bases, visually and also from a stability point of view. At the moment the building blocks allow all sorts of glitchy bases that we don't support, and we will be working towards fixing that. For those who are waiting for Dungeons greybox levels to be released that means it’ll come later, as it needs to be synched with a wipe cycle.
Aside of these two things, I have reworked our quarry, pumpjack LODs, so you should now be able to stand on the moving parts while it functions.
I also made some interior building blocks to support building skins, some basic wallpaper and carpet floor textures. The idea is to empower you guys into making your base interior look the way you want it to be. This is just the first pass on this. It shouldn’t be that hard to implement, as we split interior and exterior parts of our walls. What I did here is really just to facilitate Garry’s work for when we get this done.
I also modified the deploy animations for a bunch of the firearms. Previously, there was an issue where if the player immediately went into iron sight before the deploy animations was completed, it would look really shitty. I fixed that up, so it’s much smoother now.
I’ve also finished up on the LODs on both the holo sight and the AK47, and I’m in the process of getting them ready for implementing in game. You can take a look at both the AK and the holo sight here.
I've made some small changes to the proportions of the body and I'm in a position to move onto the next step. You should be able to view the mesh in 3D using the marmoset viewer below!
I've also started working on early silhouette ideas for an NPC drone that will have some role to play in the future around higher loot locations. With the possibility maybe for these to be repaired and used by players to fly about and scout/spy on bases from the air, these are gonna be based somewhat on the real drones you can buy today with either quad or tri rotors and probably slightly more armored up and military looking with cameras on (I won't say where their image feed is going too just yet :p).
