Unturned 2024 Survey

To expand on this: The request for easier server hosting would technically be implemented as "listen server hosting". In that mode your client would run as both the client and server simultaneously and your friends could join without the separate dedicated server software.

That's how multiplayer worked in 2.0. There is a host player in the world and everyone joins them. This approach isn't without downsides, however, and so dedicated server support was one of the absolute top priorities with 3.0. I over-corrected though and didn't factor in listen server hosting as being an important feature.

Singleplayer sort of runs as a listen server. It's running both the client and server code simultaneously. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as just enabling joining singleplayer to make listen server hosting work at this point. Lots of code the has been written with only dedicated servers and singleplayer in mind, and would function unexpectedly on listen servers.

It wouldn't be impossible to add listen server support, but it would be a big undertaking, i.e., multiple months at least to ensure everything is working properly. I expect it would also lead to dedicated server improvements, too. For this survey I know that gameplay improvements have been some of the top requests, but perhaps in a future year it could be an option.

In the meantime I have made a lot of improvements to make dedicated server hosting for Unturned a lot more streamlined!

Hmm not out of the question. I'd been thinking mostly of controller navigation in the UI, and perhaps updating to Unity's new input system. Considering how tightly coupled with Steam Unturned is already there wouldn't be much downside to using Steam Input directly...

I may as well at least add the option for auto-updating server mods. The code is mostly already there and it's been requested a few times recently. When that feature was first added it wasn't *as* important for the server mods to be completely in sync, but now the game is pretty strict about asset mismatch to block some cheats.

Are you playing at higher settings though? I've kept an old laptop around for testing and generally the framerate has improved over the years on my end.

I agree that would be useful. Certainly comes in handy in e.g. Minecraft or Valheim. Maybe can be included in a future similar poll/survey. Though I think it would be hard to coordinate everyone to agree to sleep in a PvP server.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it! One note regarding tools like playit.gg: relatively recently, support for Steam's Fake IP and Server Codes joining have added an equivalent feature built-in. That is to say, you can join by Server Code or Fake IP without port forwarding and without tunneling software.

That sounded like there must be something wrong to me, so I double-checked today. My wife has a low-spec MacBook Air from ~2016 that I previously used for testing Unturned's Mac compatibility, before getting the newer M1 Mac for M1 compatibility testing. On that MacBook Air I was able to walk around one of the Buak towns facing the center mountain (most performance-intensive viewpoint) at around 20 fps low settings. Obviously 20 fps isn't ideal, but Buak is the most graphically-demanding map in the game by a long shot, and that's even having made optimizations to the base game specifically targeting the map. (other maps run much better on that laptop)

My gut expectation is that nowadays if anything runs at 1 fps there's probably something wrong. What platform are you on? Do you have any additional launch options specified in the Unturned properties window in Steam?

The survey is now closed – thank you to everyone who participated! https://blog.smartlydressedgames.com/2024/02/12/unturned-2024-survey-results/