SDGNelson

Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.

Four weeks into 2021, and four Friday updates for Unturned. It feels like we are back in 2016! Most of this month's work was not particularly exciting, but here are the highlights:

Unturned Stuff

For the next map coming soon seamless teleporters have been added. These maintain your relative position between the entrance and exit, so non-Euclidean spaces can be faked e.g. "it's bigger on the inside!"

I brought the automatic item icon measurements from 4 back to 3, which then highlighted a lot of flaws with the approach. This converted the renderer world space bounds into camera space to find the center and dimensions, but inflates the bounds when rotated. Fortunately most items have axis-aligned cameras.

Since each item, object, vehicle, etc used to be in a separate asset bundle there are a stupid number of duplicate files. I added a tool to hash all assets i...

Looking ahead to the new year.

For 2020 along with the regular updates I completed three big refactors that had been on the to-do list for a long time: foliage streaming, network transport layers, and support for uGUI. This has me feeling optimistic (aside from Unity frustrations...) for refactoring in 2021 with one particular goal in mind: eliminating multiplayer "lag lines".

Currently in multiplayer the game has awful lag spikes / hitches / stutters when loading large bases on the client. A lot of players refer to this as "lag lines" because there is no hysteresis - walking back and forth across a grid cell boundary repeatedly destroys and reloads bases.

The core problem is that all barricades and structures in a region are synced in a single frame. The server has to send a lot of data all at once, and the client stalls the game thread to process it and instantiate all of the objects. This is currently necessary becaus...

Suffice it to say, the 3.20.16.0 glazier update did not go as smoothly as planned.

This month I had been planning to work on AI interaction in Unturned II aiming for some survival gameplay by the end of the year. Unfortunately the glazier update was followed by a stressful week of crunching to patch issues and address feedback, and then a sad week adding optional support for IMGUI as a fallback for players experiencing Unity bugs. Unturned is probably the only Unity game that fully supports both IMGUI and uGUI... not a fun accolade.

The next devlog will be delayed until hopefully sometime in January. I will take a bit of time off and catch up on a few miscellaneous tasks, but there ought to be another couple blog posts to wrap up the year.

The post In-between Devlogs #042-043 appeared first on ...

4.20.14.0 update with shade zombies, punching, and more!

Zombification

Initial support for succumbing to the infection has been added. For the meantime it is triggered with the /zombify command, but eventually it will be tied in some way to damage from zombies.

Your zombie will wander away with all your gear, so you will need to hunt down and kill them to recover it. They are currently passive, but I think it would be interesting if higher level/geared players produce more dangerous zombies. There will probably need to be a limit of one "shade" zombie per player on servers to prevent griefers from spamming them.

Another idea I am toying with, rather than wandering, would be if the zombie stays in a ragdoll state until someone startles it. This would keep you on your...

4.20.13.0 update with weapon stances, one-handed animations, lasers, and more!

Weapon Stance

Each weapon can support one-handed and/or two-handed stances. You can equip a weapon that supports both in your dominant hand slot to use it with both hands, or in your subordinate hand slot to one-hand or dual-wield. The pistol is fully animated now with left, right, and two-handed animations. Certain actions like reloading require both hands and work properly when a different item is in the other hand, whereas others can be performed simultaneously like changing your attachments.

Handedness

Rather than lazily mirroring the denizen mesh, the animation is now mirrored at runtime for body and weapons separately. This means text and symbols are not backwards on left-handed c...

Well, I did not expect to be writing this!

Unturned II

I have made some progress since the last post, for example adding the ability to switch between one-handed and two-handed weapon stances, but I will save those details for the next devlog. Almost all of my time this past month has been spent on the "Potential UI Rewrite" for Unturned mentioned in the "In-between Devlogs #040-041" post.

Since this has resulted in spending two months on Unturned rather than Unturned II, my plan is to commit as much of November and December to Unturned II as possible, and hopefully finish one of the "exciting" features like open-world enemies by the end of the year.

Glazier

A "glazier" is a tradesperson who does glasswork. I decided this was a good name for the Unturned UI refactor, as the system would need to learn a new technique: uGUI

The goal here was to almost seamlessly convert the entire game UI ...

Update on what I have been working on for Unturned 3.x and Unturned II.

I have ended up working on Unturned 3.x more than expected these past few weeks. There has been some nice progress on Unturned II as well nevertheless.

Transport Layer Rewrite

Rewriting this aspect of the netcode has been on my to-do list for a long time, and was the main task I mentioned in the previous devlog. In a case of bizarre timing Valve actually deprecated the old V1 Steam Networking the same day I began working on the new V2 Steam Networking! The changes are essentially ready to go now, and we just need a fix from the current Steam client beta.

...

4.20.12.0 update mostly fixing stuff from the previous update.

Left Handed Mode

While it may not have a gameplay impact, I do want to support left handed characters to make left handed players more comfortable. It impacts a lot of systems and is good to tackle early on. You can now use the "/MirrorHandedness" command to switch the character between left and right handed mode.

It uses much the same approach as in Unturned by flipping the entire character. Last night Molt realized this does not work at all for vehicles, so we might need to take the trickier approach of actually mirroring the animations instead for the next update. At least that will resolve the oddities of flipped text and models.

One Handed Keybinds

Dishonored is one of my favorite games, and unfortunately I defaulted to the confusing right click uses left weapon, left click uses right weapon from that game. Now the left and right ...

4.20.11.0 update with Scorpion-7 defenses, electric flashlight and dual-wielding pistols.

Trirotor Drone

Scorpion-7 personnel left these automated defenses watching over their facility during evacuation. Their scanners detect motion, so you can stand still while they pass over you to remain unseen.

4.20.10.0 update with permissions and converted models from Unturned.

Prop Conversion

The foundation of a pipeline for automatically exporting assets from Unturned and subsequently importing them into Unturned II has been assembled. For now about 500 props have been converted, and a few thrown together on a haphazard test map.

The converted prop map should be useful for working on survival and core game features, as opposed to the spawn killing on the sandbox map. Once plans are eventually finalized for destruction mechanics work will resume on actual Unturned II props and maps.

In the future I predict there will be interest to play the original Unturned maps in Unturned II, so these tools will be useful for converting official maps like Russia as well as workshop maps.

Admin Permissions

In the previous update anyone could use the time commands. To prevent that a basic role system has be...

Looking back on the past year.

Thanks for another great year on Steam! It was three years ago today that Unturned 3.0 released from early access, and six years since Unturned 2.0 originally launched into early access. It has been about seven years since my initial work on Unturned 1.0 - yikes!

There were sixteen Unturned II devlogs, and fourteen Unturned updates (excluding minor ones) this past year, so the development focus was split about equally. Despite not many direct gameplay changes to Unturned I feel like there has been a lot of good work to improving the quality, and intend to continue e.g. eventually revamping the netcode. I also hope to continue shifting more dev time towards Unturned II, but think it is important to show that commitment to both games for the long haul.

Reviewing Announcements

Each update had its fair share of changes if you would like to read them. These are my thoughts looking ba...

4.20.9.0 update with sky and framework for admin commands.

Admin Commands

Support for chat commands has been added alongside several time-related utilities. Note that permissions and roles have not been added yet, so anyone can execute them temporarily.

I decided to loosely follow POSIX / GNU argument parsing so that it can be standardized between commands. Each command can define named parameters parsed from "-key=value" or "-key value", and other arguments are treated as operands. The commands should try to be smart about the operands, e.g. "/time 12:00" wants to change the time to noon, but named parameters ought to be useful for cases like "I want to ban a player with this steamid, not a player with a numeric name."

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4.20.8.0 update with trees.

Gameplay

Obviously certain elements like the magical downward swing insta-killing trees are temporary. Main changes compared to original Unturned:

• Felled trunk is permanent (rather than an effect) and will be harvested for sticks and logs.
• Stumps do not respawn.
• Trees can be planted.
• Art is manually designed somewhere between the early 3.0 trees and the later speedtrees, aiming for good performance with a distinct look.

Eventual features for future updates:

• Tools for uprooting stumps.
• Damage dealt by falling trunks.
• Heat the pine cones to release the seeds. Grow a sapling before transplanting into the forest.
• Melee direction left/right to cut vertical trees...

Continuation of Part I.

There are a lot of different ways to do light shading! The source code for Unity's Universal Render Pipeline was a good reference for the Unity internals. This does per-object forward lighting in a single pass which I think might prove useful to keep the dithering stable.

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4.20.7.0 update introducing the first melee weapon: a fire axe.

These past two weeks were focused on core melee functionality for the fire axe item, fisticuffs, and gun smacking. There is still more work needed for the fists and guns however, so only the fire axe is included in the update.

Melee Part I

Warning: the blood and gore setting is enabled in this video.

Melee damage is dealt entirely from the 3rd-person animation intersections. (Whereas in Unturned the damage is "hitscan" directly toward your crosshair.) This means an attack of the weapon can strike multiple targets as long as the blade itself hits them.

Each weapon defines multiple hit shapes (boxes, capsules) that optionally deal damage. For example, the handle of the axe will interrup...