June is Pride Month, and it’s a great opportunity to celebrate LGBTQIA+ pride and some community-made content. Let’s celebrate Pride Month together – learn about the in-game celebrations for pride, along with showcasing some of the amazing work of community members.
We believe it’s important t...
Read moreModding and server documentation for Unturned – now easier than ever to view! Welcome to the Unturned Documentation.
Last month, we announced a new home for our official modding and server documentation for Unturned. Since then, even more modding documentation has been added, and we’ve added a lot more information on how anyone can contribute!
You can visit the ...
Read moreModding and server documentation for Unturned – now easier than ever to view! Welcome to the Unturned Documentation.
Last month, we announced a new home for our official modding and server documentation for Unturned. Since then, even more modding documentation has been added, and we’ve added a lot more information on how anyone can contribute!
You can visit the ...
Read moreThe first blog post for 2023! Featuring our new support site and help center, a helpful mod for aspiring mappers, showcasing a popular community suggestion, and more.
Last month, we launched our new Unturned support site and help center, which can be found at support.smartlydressedgames.com. Not only does it contain a lot of helpful articles for common issues, but there is also a user-friendly way to file support tickets!
We are still adding (and improving!) our support articles, and we would like to...
Read moreThe first blog post for 2023! Featuring our new support site and help center, a helpful mod for aspiring mappers, showcasing a popular community suggestion, and more.
Last month, we launched our new Unturned support site and help center, which can be found at support.smartlydressedgames.com. Not only does it contain a lot of helpful articles for common issues, but there is also a user-friendly way to file support tickets!
We are ...
Read moreTokyo Game Show 2021, Unturned: Paper Edition fan project, mod showcases, and more!
The Tokyo Game Show, commonly shortened to TGS, happens annually each September. This year, we made a brief appearance to discuss and showcase the upcoming Elver DLC (and next-gen upgrades) coming to Unturned on consoles.
JPepe's Vehicles ++ mod takes all your beloved vanilla Unturned vehicles, and gives them an overhaul both visually and mechanically. The remastered vehicles use a custom vehicle physics profile to make them more controllable compared to the flighty vanilla physics. They have new, higher-poly models, damage states, animated trunks and dashboards, and more. Lastly, these vehicles will spawn naturally on offi...
Read moreElver and next-gen is coming to Unturned on console, the Chef Zombie plushies have shipped, and more!
Hey, console players! The Elver map is coming to Unturned on console, followed by next-gen updates for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S!
...Anecdotes from the past month of gamedev.
There was an Unturned update with some features for future maps, and Yarrrr retired from the commu...
Read moreAnniversary giveaway winner, base-building contest winners, and a fare-thee-well to a community veteran and administrator.
A very short and brief blogpost to recap some anniversary events from last week. For a recap of the past year, you can check out one of our previous blogposts.
From July 7 to July 9, we hosted events for chances to win special mythical hats! There was a random giveaway, and a base building contest.
Players submitted a variety of different bases! From cozy freeform huts to shelter from harsh weather, to beachside lounging to catch the sun. We had traditional honeycombed designs, bases built along the map's edge, and massive towers. Festive, colorful mansion...
Read moreReflecting 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:
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...
Read moreToday is the anniversary of Unturned on Steam! Come celebrate with us, for a chance to win a mythical in-game cosmetic.
Hello, survivors! Today is a special day for us, as it marks the anniversary of Unt...
Read moreAnecdotes 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.
Unfortunately there was no clear winner of the character design debate. There has also b...
Read moreKuwait receives even more content, the Chef Zombie plush campaign is almost over, drive a camera-mounted drone, and more!
AnimaticFr...
Read moreRevisiting 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...
Read moreAnecdotes 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.
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...
Read moreIt's the end of April, but the community-made content never ends. It's the animated Tales Of The Unturned, a major console update, and Tech Expansion 2.
After nine months of work, Toothy Deerryte (also known as DeerryteTV) released the second episode to their fan-made animated series titled Tales Of The Unturned. The series follows the story of a recently-drafted Joel Miller, in a now apocalyptic world.
Note that the Tales Of The Unturned animated series does feature some cartoonish blood and gore....
Read moreAnecdotes from the past month of gamedev.
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.
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.
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...
Read moreAnecdotes from the past month of gamedev. Focused on the decisions and thinking behind the 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:
devtrackers.gg
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:
Whether you're shooting missiles across Hawaii or chucking turtles at your enemies, we showcase some of the best ideas the Unturned community has to offer! From art, to artillery, to Terry, to questions, we have it all.
A community-made mod for every kind of perfectly reasonable folk. Call in a recon aircraft that marks your enemies with yellow smoke, and then face your enemies head-on with your favorite tortoise turtle and a lifetime supply of glue.
...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...?
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...
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