SDGNelson

Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.

Summary

There was an Unturned update with some features for future maps, and Yarrrr retired from the commu...

Reflecting on the past year.

Thank you for another great year in the Unturned community! We have now been out of early access (4 years) for longer than the early access period (3 years)! This past year saw 35 updates bringing a variety of major content and features to the game:

Reviewing Major Announcements

Elver Released

Danaby and Renaxon shook up the gameplay in really interesting ways. This kickstarted a lot of innovation in the map projects to experiment and establish unique identities. I think this cemented my role as the programmer for the game designers. Albeit I need to prioritize some of the critical foundation rewrites before...

Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.

This feels like a monthly report to my boss (the Unturned community). "Uh oh what did I work on again? I promise I was not being lazy!" Though I did play a lot of Frostpunk after picking it up on the Steam summer sale.

Feedback

Unfortunately there was no clear winner of the character design debate. There has also b...

Revisiting the pros and cons of soft vs rigid joints.

Unturned II development is slow and challenging because I want it to be as close to perfect as possible. Conversely, developing improvements for Unturned 3.x is fast and easy because it is far from perfect.

The flaws in the current character design have been nagging at me. Negative feedback on the removal of "fingerless" gloves was the breaking point; I decided that a review of the character should be prioritized. While I did experiment with some ideas earlier this year, I am hesitant to make any firm decisions without feedback because changes may stray too far from the classic Unturned character design.

One of the tasks I worked on this week was creating an alternative character design proposal. It features similar proportions, but adds hands, feet, and rigid joints. Exact dimensions (especially the width of the hands) are subject to change. My thought here is that i...

Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.

It feels like this month flew by! Looking back on the various completed work does not line up with how busy it seemed. Here are some of the more interesting points.

Kuwait

Refactoring weather to support sandstorms for Kuwait started late last year, and I was quite slow to finish it as the update notes or Animatic and NSTM can attest. We can also thank this for the recently added lightning strikes. They were fun, but very loud to develop, and the first newly new vanilla feature in some time.

Animatic and NSTM prepared several mythical effects for the map. Unfortunately they were not released because there is not a good system yet for non-unboxed mythicals. I had intended to do a feature for purchasable tools or crafting the Kuwait mythicals, but there are more side effects than may be apparent:

Non-preset mythical cosmetics will require some extra per-item da...

Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.

General

It has been an unusually quiet month. Lots of various behind the scenes work, and preparation for the next curated map. There were a few updates continuing previously discussed efforts in Unturned e.g. weather, effect audio replacements, physics material extensions.

ProtonMail

I moved SDG's email from G Suite to ProtonMail after using it personally for about a year. The move went smoothly after setting everything up, just swapping the MX record near midnight. It might be overkill, but I do not want to depend on too many services from any single company. This feels a little ironic considering Unturned PC depends on Steam as much as a fish depends on water.

Unturned II

Despite my recent excitement on Unturned, I should probably get back to more full-time focus on Unturned II. There has been some fun experimentat...

Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev. Focused on the decisions and thinking behind the RPC rewrite.

RPC Rewrite

Unturned uses "remote procedure calls" (RPC) for all gameplay netcode. This is a fancy way of saying that when you press the "pick up item [F]" key, the client asks the server to call a PickUpItem method, and then the server responds by telling the client to call an AddItemToInventory method.

Prior to the rewrite it looked something like:

public void askChat(CSteamID senderId, byte flags, string text)
...
channel.send("askChat", ESteamCall.SERVER, ESteamPacket.UPDATE_RELIABLE_BUFFER, flags, text);

This works fine, but there are a lot of aspects to improve:

• Back when most of this old code was rewritten nameof() was not available in Unity's c# version, so a typo could break the call and not be found until runtime.
• P...

Late anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.

There are less days in February than I thought, so when it was suddenly March 1st there was no blog post! Then I prioritized other tasks rather than writing this. It will only list February stuff though.

We have somehow had an Unturned update every Friday of 2021! How long will this continue...?

Roadwork

A player named Zefirka emailed me last month highlighting that all of the older maps had wonky jagged roads, and kindly offered to help update some of them. I had to decline the offer because we do not have a contributor licensing agreement (yet), but it did remind me that the nicer spline roads were added all the way back in mid 2016, and at the time I had decided it would take too long to manually update the existing maps.

I think my perception of time has changed since then. My plans for updates were a week or two ahead, whereas now my chang...