SDGNelson

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...

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.