Devblog 138

The M92 is fully functional and in game. It does about 15% more damage than the SAP, holds 50% more ammunition, and looks badass. You’ll find them in helicopter loot crates and supply drops.

I’ve changed the military weapons to be uncraftable. This means the M92, MP5*, LR300, and M249. Let me know how you guys like this change. Maybe as they’re uncraftable they need a damage boost or something similar? I’ll be listening *MP5 is still craftable because we currently don’t have any way to apply skins to already crafted items. I’ll sort it out next week.

I didn’t have a chance to fix the repair of items that have components as an ingredient. I’ll do that next week, but I did triple the blade cost of these... sorry!

I’ve buffed and nerfed the Spears. They now have an increased attack radius, which means they're easier to stab people with. Their melee damage has also been increased about 20%, and the Stone Spear has a very slight range bonus. On the flip side, I nerfed their throw damage by about 20%. I did reduce the throw damage by a lot more (down to the same damage as stab), but the overwhelmingly negative response lead me to bring it back up a bit. Lets see how this plays out.

I went through the loot tables and got rid of a bunch of junk. You’ll no longer find garbage like sewing kits in the actual crates. Instead, green crates will have a chance for piles of Pipe, HQM, and Turret parts. You’ll also find double the metal fragments for the worst case barrel scenario.

I played a whole lot this week. Some items were priced way too high for what you actually get out of them.

• Floor grill
• Prison gate
• Prison wall
• Chainlink fence
• Chainlink gate
• Shopfront
• Metal bars
• Armored bars
• Wood bars
• Embrasure A
• Embrasure B

All of these have had their prices halfed or quartered. Enjoy!

Wasn’t it annoying how any time you entered a code to gain access to a lock it would unlock ,forcing you to just relock it right away anyway? Well that doesn’t happen anymore. Now when you enter a code to a lock to gain access, it’ll simply authorize you and play a notification, sound but remained locked. You can then unlock it if you choose to do so.

I’ve lowered the Rope cost from 5 to 3 on the Ladder. The Satchel Charge now only requires 1 Rope. Big whoop.

Vince’s natural caves are in! I spent the week fixing some issues with their procedural placement, addressed minor gameplay concerns and optimized them using the culling volume system I implemented last week. I had to disable some terrain texturing adjustments from the caves since it negatively affected the world loading times, but we’re planning to re-enable it once I’m done addressing our loading time issues.

I increased the default world size from 3000x3000 to 3500x3500--which represents a 30% surface area increase--to give the world generation a bit more room to work with. We believe this is the gameplay sweet spot for medium sized servers and highly recommend server owners to give it a try.

To avoid making our loading times even more insane with the addition of caves and the bigger default world size, I slightly optimized the world generation of larger worlds. Furthermore, I’m planning to use this month to start working on a solution that will fix our loading time issues once and for all, even if the world generation gets more complex in the future. This new system will also allow server side mods to change the world generation and should eventually even allow servers to share community-made maps. I've been laying out the plan for this since the end of last year, so I’m pretty excited to finally have some time to get into it.

I addressed a number of exploits that would allow extreme foundation stacking in base designs. Claiming that this will solve the issue once and for all and nobody will ever find a workaround would likely be hubris, but it should be a step in the right direction and significantly limit the versatility of foundation stacking.

There have been an increasing number of cheats that enabled rapid fire for projectile weapons over the last couple of months. The good news is that I found and fixed the problem in the server-side weapon firing rate verification that was allowing those cheats to work around it and they should no longer be possible.

I continued with the work on smaller industrial props. The fuel tanks featured last week are now finished, and I made some industrial power generators. I then started work on an abandoned truck. Hopefully I will be able to show some progress next week, when it’s in a better state.

This week I finished the forklift mentioned in last week's blog: I also made a start on junkpiles mounds, which will act as a ground cover for the piles you loot from in the game.

This week I finished up on the last of the three charge viewmodels, the Survey Charge: I needed to change the way the code called animations for all three charges as they weren't triggering properly if firing in quick succession. I also set up holdtypes, world models and created LODs. All three are now live on main.

I've almost finished up creating world models for all our clothing items. I've got a couple left to make, but here's me throwing a few out of my inventory:

Pretty cut and dry this week for me. I’ve finished up a bit of recording/cleaning source material, and then finished creating sounds for the bota bag and the water bottle. I’m almost done with sounds for the M92 as well.