SDGNelson

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...

On the weekends I like to try out little hobby projects. Usually to learn something new. This weekend I was curious to check out the Unity "Scriptable Render Pipeline" with the goal of "pixel art" style 3D.

Garden path with grass and colored shapes:

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4.20.6.0 update continuing work on saving and loading.

I had actually been planning to work on melee this week. Yet here we are! Lots of nice improvements to share. In case you would like to share your melee suggestions here is the current status: https://trello.com/c/Ns9jDz2r

Newly Saveable

Eventually it would be great to be able to quicksave and then immediately quickload without any noticeable changes. In this direction, many more objects are now integrated with persistence:

Firing Range

4.20.5.0 update focused on saving and loading game state.

Persistence Overview

While there are definitely bugs still lurking, the foundations for saving and loading are relatively functional in the beta now:

Much more level state is persisted than in the original game. For example items manually placed in the level editor are onl...

4.20.4.0 update focused on splitscreen and gamepad (controller) support.

Sorted from most to least interesting.

I have fond memories of splitscreen multiplayer growing up, so supporting the feature is important to me. Next will probably be savedata and basic administrative / social tools.

Splitscreen Fixup

The majority of development for this update was spent tidying up features for splitscreen. There were a lot of interesting cases like:

• Outlines on items need to be relevant per-viewer, but that stencil buffer state is per-object.
• Spectating yourself as a split-screen local player.
• Screen-space features like scope markers or centering the cursor need to make sure they are using the per-player screen region.
• Many engine UI features like popup menus did not work properly with multiple players.

Splitscreen Options

If you have a keyboard / m...