Spencer

Hey guys,

It’s been a pretty chaotic couple of weeks due to the DDOS fairy visiting us more and more frequently. Battlemu1e has been hard at work moving all our servers to new providers that have rock solid DDOS protection, which should fix all the downtime. Battlemu1e also left without adding his devblog update describing the exact state of all the servers so you’ll have to head to reddit for that.

Since the content patch we have been experiencing some CPU issues which appears to be caused by the fact that every man and his dog has a car now. Cars with wheels cost a fair bit of CPU, and since the patch pretty much all chassis on populated servers are drivable in somebody’s base chewing up our megahertz. We will be putting out a patch in the next couple of days to hopefully address this issue along with getting kicked out of vehicles bug.

MAP SDK

This week I’ve started work on getting the first pieces of the map / gamemode SDK up and running.

I am still very much in R&D phase, testing out what is possible, finding ways we can leverage Unity to do the heavy lifting for us.

The first step is to allow content creators to author maps using a free install of the Unity editor running out Mapping SDK “ShigiTools”.

ShigiTools is a set of helpers that currently supports:

Terrain heightmap generation

Procedural detail, tree & grass scattering

Procedural texture painting,

Rock placement,

Biome definitions,

Loot spawn locations

Occlusion analysis

The learning curve on these will be steep, so don’t expect a point and click level editor like GTA 5. They will however be powerful.

The challenges I am currently working through are how we will package and distribute map files.

Ideally, the process will work like this:

You download and install a free version Unity 5 You load up our SDK project Edit map until satisfied Run command in ShigiTools to compile and export a Unity asset bundle containing everything your map needs. Put asset bundle in folder on server and client Host game on new map

Distribution of asset bundles could be done lots of different ways. Likely we will use Steam Workshop to serve up files. In an ideal world it will work in engine just like Dota2.

Our game framework already supports multiple maps, which will make integrating maps just a matter of loading them into the engine. What we don’t support currently is multiple configurations for all the things inside the map like Biome stats and visualization, Creature Stats, Player metabolism, Machine behavior, loot tables, items etc.

Step 2 of this process will be taking all this configuration data which is currently in Fluent C# code and moving it to configuration scripts that are loaded at runtime (XML or something similar)

There will be some challenges here but nothing we didn’t plan for.

Why are you working on this before you’ve implemented feature X?

The sooner we do this, the sooner we reap the benefits of the content the community will create, hopefully that will give people a more sustainable flow of content while we work on engine systems and new features. Also because I feel like I’ve been on a bug fixing treadmill and need to get into some juicy engine system code.

Mils

What started out as a simple skyscraper ruin, has become a bit of an epic idea. I made one floor of a square shaped Skyscraper/Office Building with an inbuilt stairwell, which you then stack. This instantly gives you a rough concrete multi storey building with a fairly low texture and polygon overhead. It looks like we are going to break these into smaller pieces and create large format building prefabs.

We hope to be able to create buildable cities with this method. Possibly, you will be able to take hold of the whole thing by locking off the stairwell and adding windows or walls to the outside. Whether these are built from scratch within the game by players or pre-built in the map, or both, is unclear as yet.

I have added Elevated Highway sections, some signs and lights, which we would like to add also. These are built conservatively so as to keep the polycounts and texture counts down also. Performance is always taken into consideration.

Cow_Trix

Recently, I’ve had fun implementing all the new traps, putting in a few fixes for chat (hopefully the next patch will be the last of those tags becoming visible), and implementing some new features. We’re going to try ownership stakes having some form of upkeep – nothing too strenuous or annoying, but something that means that if someone isn’t online for days, their ownership over a base can be contested. Of course we’ll make how long totems last configurable, for casual players on slower servers.

I’ve also been working on the Wrench, a new tool that can disassemble cars into loot. Hopefully this should allow people to finally trash all those crappy chassis.

Finally, I’ll also be looking at drills, and rebalancing them to be slightly less overpowered than they were pre-nerf. We’ve got lots of feedback about what you guys think the drills should play like, and what their place in the meta is, so I’ll be trying to take that all into account.

Dazzler

I have been working on the new creatures. They are all rigged up and being animated (For the layperson, rigging is where you create all the controls and skinning to animate the creature). Here is a sampler of the yet-to-be-named dart bug. It get aggressive and shakes like a rattle snake before flinging ranged darts at you from it’s back. The weak point is the end of the tail, the rest will be pretty well-armored.

