Friday Devblog 14

Players now die. I don't think I need to explain it. Players die and drop a corpse. You can loot their corpse. The actual looting is missing some UI work - but it kind of works. You can also loot sleeping players without killing them (or give them stuff/dress them :). There's an interesting bug right now that I have left in to see how it plays out. You can actually loot alive, awake players if you stand close enough to them. This seems like something that should be possible, but it's a bit overpowered right now. You can literally take the rock out of the other player's hand before they kill you if you're fast enough. I'm leaving it in to see if it causes any significant issues, or whether it offers more emergent gameplay.. my gut feeling is that we'll have to nerf it a bit, say, add a progress bar to looting stuff - so the other player has a chance to realise what's going on.

The switch to HTML UI is pretty much done. The old system is completely removed. This week I implemented context menus, inventory notifications, tooltips and crafting. Here's a video, I'll explain what's going on below. The column on the left shows your available blueprints. The bar in the background is an indicator of whether it's craftable or not based on what's in your inventory (the tooltip will soon show specifically how much the item costs). Left clicking will queue up a craft. Right clicking will cancel a queued craft. It's organised into categories (although the items aren't actually organised yet). You can see your crafting queue on the bottom right. You can click the red cross to cancel an item. Items that contain other items can be opened while you're holding them. This is an experimental feature. It's something that makes sense, but we don't know how much sense it makes yet. Here's some more: In this video keep an eye on the bottom right. Now you can see exactly how much shit you're picking up. And how much shit you're losing when building. You'll also notice the tooltip in the top right. This shows up when you're deploying a frame to indicate the cost, and it shows up when you have a construction tool (like the hammer) and are looking at a frame or a damaged block to indicate the resources that part needs. Please forgive how shitty they look, they are programmer art right now.

Andre implemented a new stars system, stars are bigger and brighter.

A bunch of smaller stuff happened too. The server refresh button works, server browser pagination works properly. We turn off the game camera before you spawn, to get rid of that 5 seconds of seeing the procedural terrain being generated from high up in the sky. A disconnect button was added. The player's animations are predicted properly on the client. Fixed a melee attack bug that meant the attack would miss if you were too close. Time Of Day is now synced over the network.. so when you join the experimental server it will be the same time for everyone. Fixed a few issues with player lerping, that meant they were always too far from where they really were (this felt like lag, but it was artificial). Added RCon (coded from scratch, in 3 hours). New fire effects on ignited campfire.

Meg's Fishing Traps: Paul's Lamps: Meg's Caltrops: Meg's Improvised Armour:

Real progress was made this week. My plan right now is to polish up what we have, get it playable and error free next week. At this point I think we'll have a strong enough foundation to let GPS start hosting servers and start implementing real shit.

Alex and Tom have got their weeks of hard work in game. The new player rig is active. You probably won't notice any difference unless you're a detail freak. New features include, 'real' eyes (movable, separate shader), openable mouth, LOD models for everything (offers huge perf benefits). The new rig is cleaner, Alex has an incredible eye for detail when it comes to rigging and animation and has fixed a bunch of issues that you don't see until they're pointed out. He's about 70% way through converting all the animations to the new rig - but all the important stuff is in. I believe the guys are looking at skin and eye shaders to make things a bit prettier, but nothing to report here yet. Oh he's got a penis bone now. This isn't because we're going to start animating his dick. It's to attach the censorship cube to.

The Unity water reflection system is some massive rendering issues with fog. The reflections don't get fogged. It's something that has annoyed us, and we've tried a bunch of different things that never really pan out. So we tweaked the water to make the reflection less apparent.. and we like it so here's a screenshot.

Petur and Andre have been tag-teaming the grass, trying to make it look less shit in the places where it looked shit. They are succeeding. This is your new wallpaper. If you're homophobic just pretend he's a wrestler.

Petur has been throwing together assets for a biome he's called the Northern Beach.

Bill and Andre have continued their investigation into the procedural cave system.

Goosey is making more progress with the wolf animations.

Dan has modelled and textured one of the improvised tools that paul concepted last week.