Devblog 87

M249 Changes

To clear up any confusion from last week's devblog, the M249 is not user craftable. I made sure of that this week. I made some tweaks to the rate of fire and accuracy, and I also introduced a new recoil penalty when moving. This gun is basically unusable beyond 10m, unless you are stationary and crouched. I also trickled this down so that we now have a...

Rifle Nerf

Pretty sure this is what was needed! I’ve added a movement penalty to recoil when using the AK47 and the bolt action. They’re still usable, but they’re going to be a lot less accurate when running and gunning. This should actually increase the viability of SMGs as they suffer no movement penalties whatsoever. p.s. before you lose it on Reddit, please understand that we will adjust this balance over the coming weeks to ensure its not OP/UP.

Pumpjacks Removed

This is a big one. When you log on your existing pumpjacks will be gone. You won’t be able to craft new ones, and you won't see any more oil craters. Sorry guys. The problem with pumpjacks is they were implemented far too early, before a tonne of other systems were in place to keep them balanced. We need more resources types, ways of transporting fuel, all sorts of things before this is a viable addition to the game. It was, in fact, the antithesis of Rust. Raiding dropped to an all time low because all you had to do was sit in your base and let the game play itself. It's a super boring mechanic that was way overpowered. I will revisit it in the future. I’d expect something like static pumpjacks in the coming weeks before we let people place them again.

Blueprint System Updated

Haha, did anyone see this? That was a bit of a screw-up by us. I’ve removed them from that table so you don’t have to worry about getting that kind of garbage in the very rare loot table anymore. I also made a pretty significant change to the way blueprints are unlocked. It will try its best not to give you a duplicate blueprint! You’ll still get a random item based on the tier you are unlocking, but this should allow people to progress with a little less frustration. I’m revisiting the whole system over the next few weeks (because it sucks), so this is temporary.

Next Week

I’m trying to figure out a way to make blueprint fragments work more like XP and let people unlock things in packages. I also want them to be more like a currency or a stat, something that persists across death. More on this next week, but it is sufficient to say the entire blueprint system as you know it will be going bye-bye soon!

Building System

I finished up the first half of the building system overhaul just in time for a release this week. It was a close call, but thanks to the help of the server owner community we were able to find and fix bugs very efficiently. This change lays the foundation for some interesting upcoming features for the conditional model and stability systems in the near future and fixes some fairly significant issues we’ve been fighting with for the last couple of weeks. I’ll try to remember and add all of the changes to the changelog at the end of the devblog, but I’m sure I’ll forget some of them. To summarize: you should observe a much more predictable stability system and far less building exploits and general awkwardness. That being said, keep in mind that it’s still a work in progress.

Grass Removal Exploit

There’s been a widespread exploit to disable grass via the ingame console. This is now fixed. People on Twitter are loving it.

Next Week

Enough backend work, time for some forward facing changes! Next week I’ll get back to working on the procedural maps, starting with support for the new and awesome loot areas. Depending on how quickly I progress with that I might also add some more building batching features that utilize the new building texture atlases Vince has been working on.

Atlasing

I’m done with the atlasing (the process of merging different textures onto one single texture sheet) of our building parts for now. Highest LOD meshes are to be batched soon.

Dungeons

I came back to my dungeon branch to create some more greybox meshes. This time around I made a basic set of pieces to form military tunnels. I also made a set of military bunker rooms that I'll use to interconnect the larger tunnels. As with any other dungeons, I will have a few sewer connecting pieces made too, so that I can add some diversity to path/verticality. Both sets currently comprise a minimum amount of pieces to keep maintenance low. As I speak I’m about to create a new radtown to put the modular pieces in situ, it’ll be a mountain-side tunnel entrance leading underground.

Next Week

I’m on holiday for a couple of days next week, but after that I’ll work alongside Andre to prepare our merge into main of the dungeon branch.

Underwater

This week I've been sprinting to finish the underwater rendering, including fixed refractions so players can look up and see something other than white, visibility limitations/fog, as well as aesthetic improvements. Also fixed a few bugs left over from last week. The transition didn't end up exactly as I wanted, and I had to eventually reach a compromise to keep going forward, but I think it works: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/buck2015/November/19/underwater.mp4[/embed] It's mostly done, and just needs some work on tinting and lighting. Reflections are disabled underwater, for now, because they looked like crap. The lowest quality mode (Q=0) uses a more basic, and therefore safer, rendering path and these changes won't work in that "fallback" mode. Unfortunately these graphics changes stuff don't just work - sometimes Unity is the culprit, sometimes drivers, other times it's just me being stupid - so we need to be careful when replacing the lowest quality mode to avoid breaking the game for lower-end hardware players, give them a unfair advantage underwater due to visibility limitations on high-end PCs, or spend time ensuring that it works the same (or close) to everybody. Every time I make big graphics changes, I have to test DX9, DX11, GL (OSX/Linux) then all of this times several GPUs and OS. I mean, it's not like I'm modifying the engine or anything, but it is what it is... That being said, I plan to drop this on the dev build during the weekend, hopefully working across all quality modes. Proper hardware testing and fixes will follow.

RustNative Loading Error

Garry pointed me to a thread where some players were getting a loading error on RustNative.dll. From the information provided it seemed to be related a missing opengl32.dll dependency, which is weird, but I went ahead and removed that specific dependency on Windows, since we only care about D3D9 and D3D11 on that platform anyway. To anyone having this specific problem, please give the dev branch a go and post your results there.

Intel HD 3000/Integrated Graphics

We received some reports of people not being able to run the game on integrated Intel HD 3000 GPUs and I've spent an unreasonable amount of time on a borrowed laptop to try and sort out the problem. I've compiled some info and opened a new forum thread to hopefully get some answers. Please check it out if you're having trouble related to low-end hardware.

Next Week

Deploy underwater rendering, test and fix.

I spent this week redoing a lot of the movement animations for the player. I redid the walking animations for all of the various weapon holds. These new animations look more distinct than the run animations. I also added a couple of transition animations for when the player enter/exits a run. This is what it looks like so far. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/November/18/2015-11-18_23-30-08.mp4[/embed] Some work in progress. [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/minhle/2015/November/18/2015-11-18_23-39-18.mp4[/embed] I’m pretty happy with the results so far, but I need to tweak the stopping animations a bit more. It’s playing a bit late (ie. it’s not playing as soon as the player comes to a stop).

Next Week

Finish up the movement animations and go over any other animations that could stand to be polished.

Unity’s been crashing every second time I run the game in the editor and having to constantly restart it has been slowing me down a bit, but I finished up and merged in the new ambience system. Hooray! I’m pretty happy with where this is all at now and the new system has given us a lot more power and flexibility. Most of the work I did this week was pushing and pulling all the different sounds to get them to sit well together, but I’ve added a few smaller useful things like the ability to limit the number of active in world ambience emitters categorically (which let’s us say only the nearest 3 trees, the nearest 2 flower patches, and the nearest 3 ocean wave sound emitters can play their sounds at the same time). I also polished up and added in the synthesized cricket and bird sounds I made a while back and added some other new sounds (ocean waves, more tree creaks, bees, etc). I also spent a tiny bit more time working on soft-target melee weapon impacts and started on the M249 sounds.

Next Week

I’ll finish up soft-target melee impacts and the M249 sounds and then work on some smaller things like arrow impacts and furnace ignite/extinguish sounds.

Clouds

Spent some time learning how the clouds work and then built a new cloud layer texture from scratch. I tried to build it correctly to consist of mainly middle cloud types; Altocumulus and Altostratus. I’m going to see if I can build in some cirrus and cirrocumulus as a next step. Here's a video so you can see how it looks in a poncy timelapse kind of way. [embed]https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.facepunch.com/SCOTTYD/2015-11-19_13-39-20.mp4[/embed] I also started looking at the horizon clouds, which are currently turned off due to a weird bug that makes them flicker. I’m building a bunch of horizon maps that should blend with the main cloud layer. Doing proper sets of low lying cloud types like stratocumulus and cumulus. These will be directionally lit, so it'll look pretty good at sunset/sunrise.

Explosions

Building on the directionally lit particles work I started last week. I built a new “base” explosion. The smoke is just one map and the motion is just coming from animating the particles instead of an anim sheet with like 60 frames. In the video I’ve hooked it up to the grenade just to show it off. If you walk through the smoke it still obscures your vision, but not totally so hopefully people will like it more. [embed]https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/files.facepunch.com/SCOTTYD/2015-11-19_13-29-01.mp4[/embed]

Other Stuff

There was a bug with the WM torch where the embers had an animation sheet that wasn’t set up right. But instead of just fixing it I took the opportunity to totally rework the effect. No point in doing a video for this because in 3rd person it’s just obscured by your character's big melon head. The footstep splashes where visible at night because I stupidly used an additive material for the foam particles. So that’s fixed now.

Next Week

More cloud work, a look into thunder/lightning, general storm stuff, and tree collision.

I’ve made a start on the LODs, and I also started on a new customisable weapon: the semi-auto rifle. Paul and I both think there’s a lot of possibility with one in terms of customisability, as it seems to be hugely more “junky” and pieced together.

Next Week

Finish off LODs and make a start on the low-poly/UV’ing of the new gun.

More weapons to throw this week, including the bone knife, machete & salvaged sword: [embed]http://files.facepunch.com/alex/bones_and_steel.mp4[/embed] The throwables are something as an animator I'm able to get in game without code support. So if you're worried Garry & Co should be concentrating on more important things you can be rest assured they are.

Next Week

More of the same.

It's been a pretty frustrating week for me. Normally a character would be broken up into a few manageable pieces, but I can't do that for a seamless naked dude. This means large files, dense geometry and general instability which isn't fun. Nevertheless I've been able to get the character to the point where he's ready to go into the engine. I've tweaked the flow of polygons in several areas so that deformation will be a bit smoother, particularly in the chest. I've spent a lot of time on the hands, because in all likelihood I'll probably end up replacing the current first person models, you can check these out here. Here’s a comparison gif and a link to a model viewer so you guys can take a look for yourself. It’s worth noting that a lot of texture/shader quality is lost in the viewer, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Next Week

Get the guy into Unity and take a look at the current shader setup. I’ll try and take a look at the rig too and make a first pass on the skinning to re use all the animations on the current guy.