July 19th 2019 by SDGNelson

Typically the introduction states the main focus since the past update, but this time I'm not sure which to put.

Expanded Access

Owners of the Experienced Beret in 3.x can now opt-in to Unturned II access. Over time I intend to gradually lower the playtime requirement for accessing Unturned II as it's further polished. If you own the beret you should see a "Claim Access" button in the inventory menu.

This is much more scalable than individually giving out CD keys, and I'm happy to be able to give a benefit to anyone who's been supporting the game for such a long time, though I suspect more accounts will begin idling now. Rewarding your support as thanks is really important to me, so I have similar plans for promotions between 3.x and Unturned II e.g. benefits if you have gold or items/skins, and benefits for playing the Unturned II versions.

It was very kind of Valve to allow us to set up this access system even when we don't have any revenue from 4 yet, so big thanks to them!

CQC Map

The latest version now includes a temporary close-quarters combat map which shows how keys/codes will be an interesting influence on looting, and brings most of the existing combat features together onto one map.

Storage Proxy

Interacting with a live player now grants access to their inventory. What?! That seems OP. Not a permanent change, but to test that it works properly. Multiple players can now be controlling the same inventories, and hopefully all work with multiplayer properly. In the future I expect this will be used for examining a handcuffed player's inventory, but for the moment it is also used for looting their ragdoll rather than spilling items everywhere. Corpse and death totem despawn timers are paused while interacting with them.

Outfits

Wearable items were already mostly implemented, but needed some update work. In this version are only the jeans, t-shirt, gloves and magic backpack.

Holstered items are not what they sound like, but the most accurate name I could think of. Essentially if an item is in your storage and thus unknown to multiplayer clients, holsters are responsible for finding important items and making them visible. There was some work on this last year, but it's a lot more robust now. Holster components prioritize items, and observers attach them based on rules like 2-handed gun, 1-handed melee, gadget, etc. It will be used for 3.x-style trophy cases, and works for items on the ground and in your inventory. Will be cool to see dual-pistols in your hip-holsters and a frying pan dangling from your backpack!

One of the main focuses here was improving the clothing creation tools, and I think we can call it a success. It's fairly easy to create manually weight-painted, weight-transferred, or rigid-attached clothes now.

First-person (left) and third-person (right) Denizens with holster points:

Client Item Command Queue

Last article I mentioned making the server dumber by creating a client->server item command queue. This saw some revision so that the client maintains the queue, and when ready submits it as a series of RPCs to the server. Using this quite a few inventory features are smarter: for example if you drag an attachment into an attachment slot it will swap them and move the old attachment to the same location in your inventory, or you can drag a weapon into your weapon slot to exchange it with the current item.

Replication Graph

Epic began working on the replication graph features to better support Fortnite's 100 player multiplayer, and now Unturned II has been adapted to use them as well in preparation for higher player counts.

Bullet Holes

Bullet holes now use baked normal-mapped decals, rather than flat images. This allows them to stack/combine together nicely, appear more realistic with more depth, but still have a style matching the game. On the left here is a splintered impact for a wooden surface, compared to an even concrete impact.

Miscellaneous

Obviously a variety of other smaller features and content were worked on, but three of the more interesting ones were:

Holographic optics spawn with a random color again, and will have reticule randomization in the future. Item variants still have some more work to do.

Items now have "cheat nicknames" registered with the asset manager so that they can be spawned by name without loading all the items. Server admin tools are still on the to-do, but I think we can guarantee having some nice auto-filter features with this e.g. "SpawnItem Eag" suggesting Eaglefire.

Nice optimization wins have brought the game back to stable 120fps at top settings for me in the editor (was at 90fps last week), so performance should be better in general (250fps in shipping on my pc). At the moment there isn't any particularly slow code showing up in the profiler, but I'll be keeping an eye on it.