Devblog 135

For a long time I've talked about adding the ability to convert unwanted Steam items into some kind of currency, enabling you to use them to buy new items. The first steps towards that happened this week. Here's how it works: The new inventory screen shows how much wood, metal and cloth you have in the top left. You can convert clothing into cloth by selecting it and clicking Break Into Cloth. If you have lots of items (like if you just raided marketplace and bought hundreds of them, like I did) you can select multiple items and break them down. Clothes break into cloth, deployables (boxes, sleeping bags etc) break into wood, guns break into metal. Clicking an item in the crafting area at the bottom left of the screen allows you to spend your resources on other items. You'll be able to select that item in your inventory and open it. Which will give you a new item. No buying keys needed, or planned. This is the birth of this system. The hope is that it'll give even the most worthless items worth, and help to prevent items on the marketplace all bottoming out on price. There's evidence that this is already happening, so we'll keep an eye on it and iterate over time.

No-one else bothered to approve any skins, so I added a few. That means that no-one is allowed to bitch me out for choosing the wrong ones. Congratulations to the authors of the new items! The speed and the quality of your work puts us all to shame. Click the image to see what's in.

Wow this thing was so messed up. Here are some of the changes I made this week:

• Single click burns fuel for half a second instead of a single frame
• Must be held down to create fire
• Merged fireballs last for a maximum of 30 seconds (instead of 8 minutes!)
• Double fuel burn rate
• Double fuel capacity
• Massive damage increase against players
• Tightened up fuel stream graphics

It’s still a powerful raiding tool, but you’re going to have to really commit the fuel to burn down doors and houses. I think everyone will be happy with this balance change. As always I’ll revisit it if warranted

People were starving, and finding food was too random. Before we do another real survival pass I’ve gone ahead and added ration boxes to the junk piles. You’ll find food, water, and anti-rad pills in them. They have about a 15-20% chance of spawning in a junk pile.

Don’t you hate it when you’re running around a Radtown and before your reaction time kicks in you’ve already accumulated 50 rads? Me too. I’ve increased the gradient on most radiation zones significantly, so it will ramp up over several meters instead of just hitting you like a freight train. You’ll be able to probe the zones a little more easy now. Keep in mind I’ll be doing a full radiation pass in a week or so once people get a little more used to it. I’ve also lowered the droprate of anti-radiation pills substantially as they were slightly OP.

I’ve added a Semi-Automatic Body component to the game, which is required in both the Semi-Automatic Pistol and the Semi-Automatic Rifle. Due to the fact that the SAP is a beast, and didn’t require many components, people were rushing to create it and bypassing all the earlier stage stuff. It’s just too beast to be that easy to create. You’ll find the part in the square crates in Radtowns or junkpiles, and also rarely in barrels.

The SAR Sucked. Now that it requires a component I knew no one would ever craft it, so I’ve gone ahead and made a bunch of changes to make it a far more viable weapon. I wanted it to feel similar to the M1A1 Carbine in the first Call of Duty game. The horizontal recoil has been reduced significantly, and the time it takes to feel the recoil slightly increased, making it less jarring and more smooth. It is very easy to land multiple successive shots now which meant I had to *slightly* nerf the damage. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Bone Armor of all sorts was too expensive and too underutilized, so I’ve reduced the bone fragment requirement significantly. I’ve also added protection to the Wolf Helmet and seriously reduced its costs as well. Hopefully we’ll see more of these in use.

Progress carries on behind the scenes. We’re currently both working the heavy hitters of the area, so it may seem a bit slower than usual. We’re done with the tug boat this week, and will be moving on to more floating stuff with the following barges. In addition we’ve been working on the harbor crane model. The mesh is now nearly finished, requiring only some final touches and LOD’s.

I merged another batch of networking fixes this week. This time I finally addressed another long-standing network group desync issue that could leak weapons and tools at world origin on the client. I also tracked down a problem with weapon attachments that could prevent them from being properly network limited after server load when they’re not attached to any weapon. This would message them as invisible entities to clients that are around the center of the map, which is of course semi optimal with regards to server traffic and client performance.

Last week’s massive update unfortunately had a number of performance regressions in it. The biggest one is probably the stuttering issue a small number of people are experiencing in DX11, which materializes as weird sluggishness when looking at certain objects, like player buildings or road meshes, and is usually fixed by switching to DX9. I narrowed down the changes that triggered this, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to make all that much sense that we caused this on our end since there were practically no graphics changes in that time frame. To investigate further I started talking to Unity in an attempt to track this down or at least get some way to extract more details from the ominous Gfx.PresentFrame call that seems to be causing it. Another performance issue has been caused by stray editor-only functionality that made it into the release build and was calling an empty update routine on a bunch of entities. This is now fixed. A related problem led to increased server memory usage and decreased server performance and is now also fixed. Next I noticed significant overhead from some light scripts in the updated dungeons and optimized those calls by only doing them for objects that are close to the camera. Lastly, I finally enabled full player model pooling by default on 64 bit systems. This eliminates framerate drops whenever a player or sleeper was coming into view and is especially significant on high population and battlefield style servers.

The reworked hazmat suit is finished up and in game! This suit takes up all protection slots, but at least you won’t accumulate any rads! You’ll find it rarely in crates. We will definitely be increasing its usefulness shortly when we really ramp up the radzones in certain places (read: death without it).

With the component system we need to provide a new resource for players to find in the world. At the moment, we only have Helk's beautiful barrel clusters. Ideally we want the components to be found naturally in the world, from things like old vehicles and discarded electrical junk; you want player's natural intuition to work, where if you see something like an old vehicle you can expect to find thing like gears/cogs springs etc. Radtowns will also become a bit more rewarding to scavenge, and a lot of the currently plain empty concrete rooms will be filled with shelves, old lockers, and equipment that you can scavenge for components. Here’s a few of the ideas I worked up so far Also shout-out to Ben! Lonewulf for life. If you bump into him on Nottingham. show him some love!

Work continues on making the assets you’ll find in the junk piles. I’ve textured quite a few of them and I’m just going through the rest of the list to get them complete. I only have a couple of items left to do, like the pipe fragment, metal blade, and the tech trash pile, and then I can go onto the mesh for which these are embedded into. I threw some of the items into a scene for you to see: There will be tools in the toolbox obviously! I’ve kept them in a separate file so that I can use them for future items too.

Most of this week has been more polish and fixes on a bunch of sound related stuff for me. We found and fixed a bug with excess DSP usage with sound occlusion on surround sound setups, which is a temp fix for now. I’m going to need to come at the filtering thing from a slightly different angle, because of the way Unity’s audio system is set up, but it shouldn’t be an issue. We fixed an issue that was causing physics sounds from destroyed boxes full of loot to cause some extra lag. River sounds come in/out more smoothly (they’re part of the local ambience system now, which didn’t exist when we added them). Wounded screams should stop when a player dies fully. Timing on some viewmodel sounds is a bit better now. Reverb zones have been optimized a bit. Deployables that attach to another entity will play their placement sounds in the right location instead of at the world origin. Timing on ambient sound layers like birds and crickets has been tweaked, and a bunch of random sounds have had volume tweaks, eq tweaks, and other general cleanup done to them.

I finished up placement sounds for deployable building parts this week (ladder hatch, window bars, embrasures, doors, etc).