The Compound Update

We’ve added a brand new monument to the sport: the Compound. This is a scientist managed space meant to perform as a protected zone, and there are guidelines:

• No Weapons
• No Looting
• No Killing
• No Sleeping

If you break any of the above guidelines you’ll be marked as hostile and the scientists and their turrets will use deadly drive towards you. The hostile standing persists throughout loss of life in an try to forestall griefing.

If you obey the principles then you definately’re welcome to roam the compound and work together with different gamers in a non-hostile vogue. In addition, you need to use the primary set of NPC Vending Machines, which promote quite a lot of gadgets:

• Basic Clothing
• Traps & Weapons
• Resource Exchange
• Tools
• Components
• Building Supplies

There’s additionally a reasonably superior chill space if you wish to take your roleplaying to the following stage

It’s most likely going to be gamed fairly exhausting, so we’ll have to only preserve iterating, however this may convey a brand new dimension to the sport that we’re very excited to see play out. We initially meant for folks to arrange these type of zones with peacekeeper turrets, however after a yr and no-one bothering we took issues into our personal palms. We actually hope you guys have enjoyable with this and we’ll be listening for suggestions and fixing problematic areas because the month goes on. Enjoy!

You can now discover a full swimsuit of diving gear from crates across the island. Each piece has its personal distinctive perform, and a full swimsuit will make you a veritable dive grasp.

Diving Goggles: You can see underwater.

Diving Tank: Breath underwater for 10 minutes, could be refilled.

Diving Flippers: Move sooner in water however slower on land.

Diving Wetsuit: Stay heat in chilly water.

In addition to those new gadgets we have added a cause to make use of them. There are actually a mess of dive websites discovered underwater. You’ll discover rock formations with respawning loot, in addition to short-term sunken ships.

Each underwater crate is tied down and should be launched to achieve entry to the loot. Simply press and maintain E on the crate till it has been freed after which retrieve the contents on the floor. This works greatest you probably have a ship and/or a number of gamers working at it, however should you discover a quiet place you will get alongside solo

As part of the diving additions, I created a set of underwater rock formations that one can find by exploring the ocean ground. There are six totally different variations of various shapes and dimension, and every of them spawns a number of crates containing loot. These have been created fairly shortly, so a variety of the artwork continues to be short-term, however we hope to shine them additional within the coming weeks.

It’s been a reasonably hectic trip for Damian and I this month. Lots of labor went in direction of the brand new compound, and whereas we re-used a variety of current artwork in it, we additionally strived so as to add some recent visuals the place we may.

At the top of this month-to-month dash, I spent a while engaged on a brand new piece of scientist gear. Here’s the sentry that can safeguard the peace within the Compound:

The dishonest scenario has been removed from splendid this yr. In truth, it hasn’t been this unhealthy in fairly a while. We’re conscious that it is an issue and I’ve spent nearly all of my time this month on new server facet prevention mechanisms to push again on it. Here’s a listing of issues hackers can do:

• Projectile trajectory hacks
• Speed useful resource gathering
• Speed swim and crouch
• Looting dropped gadgets by way of partitions
• Placing deployables by way of partitions
• Damage by way of partitions through head clipping
• Silent melee swing and assault
• Silent projectile impacts
• Sign add lag
• Rapid fireplace bow
• Unlimited oxygen
• Crafting queue server crash exploit
• Chat UI corruption

There’s no excuse for us not addressing these for so long as now we have. We merely have not held up our finish of the deal. The excellent news is that is precisely what I’ve been engaged on this month and not one of the issues on this checklist needs to be doable anymore. Hacking isn’t going to be solved solely and I’m positive we’ll see new or unknown methods hackers can do their factor over the following few weeks, however we’re dedicated to doing what we will on our finish so the scenario won’t ever once more be as unhealthy because it has been for the early months of this yr. We’re additionally speaking to EAC about what they will do higher on their finish and we’ll have common check-ins with them to judge the progress.

I did one other sharpening go on the constructing system to forestall a variety of exploits which were rising in recognition over the previous couple of months. The checklist of fastened exploits consists of, however is just not restricted to, doorless roof bases and fanned wall stacking, which I’m positive somebody will inform us makes the sport actually unplayable. The freshly rewritten wall stacking prevention additionally comes with fewer false positives, which ought to convey again some builds we unintentionally eliminated with model three of the constructing system.

Garry applied help for first-person clothes fashions, so this long-awaited characteristic is in finally! I’ll be sharpening these over time, fixing up any rogue seams that are far more seen in first-person than the view they had been initially meant to be proven in. I’ll even be including extra tiling element to fashions with apparent fabric-like supplies. Full help for skins can also be included!

I added new AI for the Compound scientists. They can observe strict patrol paths, pause on the trail to make sure the peace is stored in that space, earlier than persevering with. There are additionally stationary Compound scientists that stand nonetheless till they should handle hostile intrusion. The Compound scientists are fairly relentless at working after and discovering any participant that disturbs the peace, with a newly added potential to seek for misplaced targets.

The CH47 scientists, Military Tunnel scientists, and Junkpile scientists have all seen enhancements all through the month, and the bug that stored AI Dormancy from being enabled by default has been fastened.

The underwater a part of our ocean rendering has been unimportant and placeholder till now. With the workforce shifting to make water a significant a part of the sport, some adjustments had been mandatory.

If you keep in mind our earlier underside of water, when trying up was primarily refractively clear. That’s not how water works, nonetheless. If you take note of a half full glass of water you will discover how the water floor, between the water and air, acts like a refractive layer when trying from the highest and reflective when trying from the underside. You can discover an evidence of this phenomena here.

This change, together with having the ability to use a masks to enhance underwater visiblity, is more likely to have a giant affect in your diving, since it could prohibit your consciousness of what is going on on on the floor.

There are nonetheless challenges forward, nonetheless, that are lined within the Water Rendering WIP part.

For these of you who aren’t acquainted with Ambient Occlusion, it’s used to approximate the notion of worldwide illumination when assets aren’t obtainable to compute life like full-scene lighting, which is nearly at all times the case with video games.

The earlier approach we used was very quick, nevertheless it was a really poor approximation. It suffered from all types of overdarkening, and we could not correctly setup the viewmodel palms whereas nonetheless getting good ends in mid and much distance.

This implementation is predicated on the present new state-of-the-art approach for Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion. It is rather more correct and sturdy, faithfully approximating the bottom reality, or precise brute-force raytraced ambient occlusion.

The impact has been exaggerated on this photographs. Notice how international shadowing now connects objects to the bottom and so they now not appear to be they’re hovering.

Surprisingly, it additionally turned out to be sooner than our earlier one, leveraging using temporal integration, as you may see from the FPS delta on the decrease left nook.

Please word that it nonetheless has a couple of quirks and will probably be improved over time.

I took a while to do one other optimization go for this replace, this time I centered on CPU-side rendering. Just a few hundred of the environment objects weren’t utilizing {hardware} instancing correctly, in addition to some particular detailing surfaces we name ‘deferred mesh decals’, which required customized instancing code.

It’s exhausting to inform how a lot this may enhance general efficiency, however is probably to profit gamers utilizing low to mid-range CPUs.

The newest underwater adjustments pushed me to start out taking a look at fixing among the issues we presently face with water rendering, and hopefully open the door to some lengthy overdue enhancements within the close to future.

You’ll discover how underwater does not presently work correctly on rivers, how flashlights are means too dim when deep within the ocean water or how caustics aren’t shadowed and should disappear when trying from beneath the water floor. These are among the recognized points we presently face that are not trivial to repair.

I began engaged on fixing them for this replace however, sadly, they aren’t prepared so the present plan is to toll them out on the following replace.

The chainsaw obtained a correct sound go this month. This one was actually enjoyable to do. All the sounds that the chainsaw itself makes are new and fairly a bit beefier. We’ve additionally bought loops for hitting totally different surfaces now, as a substitute of the goofy repeated influence factor we had going beforehand. I stored the bass on the chainsaw engine sounds considerably mild and emphasised the midrange buzz/growl extra, after which within the floor hit loops I boosted the lows a bit to attempt to emulate the sensation of a chainsaw connecting with one thing in actual life. I believe the sound for the chainsaw hitting flesh is among the grossest issues I’ve ever made.

The boat bought a correct sound go this month. I experimented a bit with new programs to fade and mix between loops which might be tightly associated to one another, like a number of engines, and landed on a pleasant answer that is fast to arrange and offers us a variety of management. This was used to deal with the boat engine sounds and the sound of the water across the boat.

There are sounds for mounting, dismounting, pushing, and steering the boat now. When you are shifting close to full pace there are occasional thump/splash sounds as if the boat was hitting small waves, and there are physics influence sounds whenever you hit one thing now too.