Devblog 152

We’ve brought this piece of concept out of limbo and into the game. It works exactly how you’d expect it to: you place it, you paint it, you spin it, it stops at a random location on the wheel. I assume this will be used for games of chance or just for fun. I’ve set it up so you can deploy it on tables if you wish (roulette) and you can also set it up so only people with building privilege can spin it if you so desire. It's so silly but I can’t wait to see what people do with it: I personally plan on setting up a small casino...

Whoops. A +50 radiation protection value slipped through the cracks and was applied to each piece of the Heavy Plate Armor set, meaning it was way better than the Radsuit. This is fixed and each piece will provide a more reasonable 7 rads protection instead.

Oh my Lord. You know we have a problem when the second most populous entity on a server is a damn pumpkin. I believe Rustafied Main was running with about 90,000 at one point. I’ve nipped this in the bud by reducing its max seasons from 7 to 1. It will now behave like all the other plants.

You will now be able to find Supply Signals in green military crates, albeit very rarely. You’re looking at about a 2% chance to find one.

A very small and last minute buff to the Harbors: they now both have small refineries placed in really risky places. Let's see how this plays out! Note: This will only take effect when a server wipes. For official servers, this means April 6th

This is a pretty simple block addition to the game, but one that might change the way you move between floors in your base. The nature of it means you can climb laterally and much as vertically on the ropes and access various areas in new ways.

This seems to have polarized the community over the week, although I believe it will make the caves better. The death pit encountered in difficult caves before safe areas has been changed to implement a small passage down to the pit itself. The passage is located after the jump, so players who live in these caves will have it easier in my opinion. Raiders might still fail to jump over, but now both groups have a way to recover their stuff.

I worked on adding a little bit of depth to our Airfield. Similarly to the Trainyard, it now has an underground network of tunnels. These tunnels include a few bunker rooms, sewers, and a short natural cave segment. This should offer an opportunity to players to cover the surface of the Airfield while hidden in dark passages, to resurface at the other end ‘easily’. The loot found in those segments will be following the same theme as elsewhere in the game, meaning the natural cave segment will spawn ore nodes, and the bridges between cave and bunker space will have mining crates. This change is currently on the dungeon_art branch and thus will only merge to main at the beginning of April.

Pretty self explanatory. This currently only applies to grass, but bushes are planned once we’ve unified the new and old foliage into the same system (still some shader work required for that).

More performance progress from me this week. I started by stripping obsolete scripts and unused animator components from objects. This should reduce our memory footprint a little since especially unused animators are generally a pretty bad idea to have around. I wrote some scripts for the artists to check their work for those kinds of things so we don’t reintroduce them with the next art overhaul. I then continued with some profiling of gunfire performance. We’ve noticed for a while that sustained bursts of fire greatly reduced the performance of the viewmodel and animation systems. I tracked it down to the amount of effects and sounds in the player rigs, which made all transform updates extremely slow. I’ve optimized the recycling of those effects so we detach them from the rig as quickly as possible and added transform caching that stores all transform adjustments from viewmodel effects (recoil, sway, etc.) in temporary variables and only applies them once at the end of the frame. These efforts combined essentially eliminated the performance overhead from long bursts of fire. We’re talking 8ms of savings on some full auto weapons like the M249, and significant improvements across the board.

I finished up texturing and skinning the wood armour. I've set it up in game, but there's a lot of clipping and hovering when it's worn over clothing. I'm going through some of the puffier clothing items and thinning them down a little to try and minimise clipping when items are worn over clothes, and hovering when worn over nothing. Expect to have it in next week's update!

The replacement for the old bed is finished. From now on you can enjoy all the pyjama parties that you want, hide underneath the warm covers as you plan your next adventure, or spend a romantic evening in a dimly lit room.

This week I finished up on the Workbench. I’m starting my path towards making binoculars. Images for those next week!

This week I’ve been going over some of the viewmodels and polishing up any animations that looked a bit poor, and fixing some minor glitches in some of the animations. A while back, Helk mentioned some of the guns looked a bit “"weightless" and the animations were too "floaty", so I’ve been working on fixing that on many of the guns.

I finished recording the last of the source material for these last week, and finished cleaning up the raw recordings on Monday. I picked up some crushed rock (think mostly finer powder, not gravel) and used that to record an extra layer for the dirt footsteps, and also picked up and recorded the bark and gravel I mentioned last week. The first dirt recordings I did just used garden soil, and they sounded nice but needed a bit more crunch. The crushed rock was perfect! I also finished first passes at the in-game sounds for most of our existing footwear. Barefoot, Burlap Shoes, Boots, and Hide Shoes are all done, and boots for the Hazmat Suit are pretty close (just have to finish wood, concrete, and metal for that one). Once the rubber boots are finished I’ll do one more consistency/polish pass over everything. Then this will be good to go. I was really hoping to have these done this week, but they need another day or two of editing and testing before they’re ready to go out, so next week it is!

I also finished up and added a new M249 gunshot this week. Pew pew!

If you scrolled all this way to get to the changelog quickly, you might as well watch Shadowfrax's early video update.