The Hot Air Balloon Update

The Hot Air Balloon is now reside! You’ll discover them throughout the map, primarily in fields or different areas with flat floor. Hop on and fill it with Low Grade Fuel, hit the ignition and it is up, up and away… principally.

To steer, you will must discover a pocket of air shifting within the route you want to go and try to remain in it by sustaining that altitude. To make it easier to with this, the balloon has a windsock and varied flags positioned round it that will help you gauge the wind route. If you are rising too far above the pocket, disengage the engine and permit the recent air to dissipate. This will lead you to lose altitude. Re-engage the engines to rise once more, and rinse and repeat till you attain your vacation spot. The HAB comes outfitted with a small storage pouch to carry extra objects, and might comfortably take 4-5 passengers.

Be cautious of SAM Sites. The extra harm the balloon takes the extra it loses the power to climb. It could be repaired with Cloth, although.

This is the primary actual type of direct transportation obtainable within the game, and it was a serious enterprise by many members of the staff. It could have just a few flaws and points we’re unaware of, however relaxation assured they are going to be addressed in upcoming patches. We’ll be patching this bug ASAP, so perhaps do not raid with it simply but:

Please get pleasure from!

Soon folks will have the ability to fly over your compound in a Hot Air Balloon and completely circumvent your defenses. But don’t fret about it, the SAM Site has you lined.

Available on the Scientist Outpost for 500 scrap, this deployable will maintain the skies away from any gradual shifting air autos. Simply deploy it, fill it with SAM Site Ammunition and overlook about it. One factor to notice is that the SAM web site is indiscriminate in direction of air targets, so be sure you take the ammo out of it should you’re planning on a balloon journey your self.

Please word that there are a number of SAM Sites positioned on the roof of the launch web site. These could be taken out with projectiles or explosives, and can stay inactive for a while permitting you to land, however taking the steps could be the extra environment friendly route.

A a lot requested and wanted function has been added to the Cargo Ship. We now have a number of looting rounds. Here’s the way it works:

Upon spawn, the ship will fill itself up with a plethora of loot:

• 1x Locked Crate
• 1x Elite Crate
• 4x Military Crate
• 4x Regular Crate

These will spawn in every single place, together with beneath deck!

After 10 minutes, (or CargoShip.loot_round_spacing_minutes) the loot will respawn, however in numerous places. This will occur three instances (or CargoShip.loot_rounds), and the cargo ship will now depart after 50 minutes (or CargoShip.event_duration_minutes). You will know a brand new spherical has bagun when the ship sounds its horn.

There are 30 crate spawn factors on the ship, and every around the loot will seem in a special spot, so you will have to comb the ship to be sure you get all the things. This ought to result in a hell of much more motion and enjoyable interactions as a result of you understand that so long as the ship is lively on the map there’s something value combating for on it.

Moving ahead, I’d like so as to add a bunch of controls to the ship to open and shut doorways, in addition to CCTV cameras to actually add to the expertise.

I suppose 100% goal sway discount was a bit bit a lot. It was so correct that I nearly felt like I used to be utilizing the debug digital camera when aiming. We’ve diminished the goal sway discount to 80% as a substitute, which continues to be fairly good.

A minor oversight by us final month meant {that a} sure configuration of clothes allowed you to have rad safety so excessive that you may wander round launch web site with out taking any harm. This has been fastened by lowering the wetsuit’s rad safety from 20 to 15 factors.

Pumpkins have been the one plant to have a number of harvest seasons. This was type of damaged, and the entire pumpkin patch factor was getting uncontrolled. We’ve restricted their season to 1, like all the opposite crops. Hopefully we’ll all see fewer pumpkins round, and revel in increased framerates!

This month I primarily labored on increasing the playable space throughout the Cargo Ship, including a big inside beneath the deck of the ship. This inside could be accessed by way of doorways on the back and front of the Lazarus. When you enter it, you can find two massive rooms full of delivery containers, crates and loot containers, all guarded by Scientists. Here’s some pictures.

This month we give you a barely completely different expertise on the Cargo Ship occasion on prime of the inside that’s obtainable to discover now. Cargo ship fashion 2 carries tanks, helicopter, and a few ominous biohazard waste. The new format is extra open than the containers one whereas nonetheless offering loads of cowl for traversal.

This month I added a brand new module to our shaders for producing real-time, procedural wind animation for generic surfaces. We already had a module particular for vegetation, however this one extends it and permits utilization on any type of materials.

Our first utilization case was the Hot Air Balloon material, flags and windsock:

It would possibly are available very useful to animate particulars on participant’s garments, weapon particulars (eg. straps) and even different extra generic parts across the map monuments.

Spent a part of the month researching enhancements to our Tree Impostors, together with some third social gathering options. Unfortunately, our bushes (and different fashions) could find yourself displaying the bottom high quality mannequin (impostor) very near the digital camera, both throughout streaming and even by reducing high quality settings in graphics choices (e.g. Max Tree Meshes = 10). Thus, our impostors could present up very massive and take a giant chunk of display space.

Most options do not deal with that very properly, since most of them have been constructed to show impostors at a distance, the place technique-specific artifacts are barely noticeable.So after getting disappointing outcomes with third social gathering options, I made a decision to maintain our flat impostors and, as a substitute, optimize them as a lot as I might by concentrating on the most important GPU bottlenecks.

Shaders have been tweaked and redundant textures have been eliminated with a purpose to make pixel rendering as low cost as doable. Another large change was including assist for tighter meshes with extra vertices, as a substitute of straightforward quads, with a purpose to assist scale back overdraw on areas which might be mainly empty. Areas on impostors which might be absolutely clear nonetheless get processed by the GPU and typically it is value including extra vertices in change for saving pixel processing:

In our case, our tree impostor textures had various empty area so our financial savings could attain 30% overdraw discount on a per-tree foundation. These financial savings ought to assist low and mid-range graphics playing cards essentially the most, particularly on areas with dense forests.

This lengthy overdue job has been on the backlog for some time. I began selecting up on it this month and a lot of the issues at the moment are fastened. Most have been rendering or shader associated. It was a bit tougher than I anticipated and looks as if Metal assist on Unity is in determined want of some consideration.

The motive we’re doing it is because OpenGL has misplaced assist from Apple and they’re now specializing in Metal. This means we’ll have to modify as properly, hopefully sooner fairly than later, with a purpose to sustain when it comes to options and efficiency. It additionally means we’ll have the ability to activate some options we have stored disabled on MacOS, resulting from not being supported by Unity/OpenGL, like occlusion culling and optimized impostor rendering.

I’m hoping to roll it out for subsequent patch. The efficiency bounce is wanting promising, albeit not dramatic.

With all of the latest occasion and water automobile additions, we felt it was time to enhance the precise water as properly. That means each aesthetics in addition to physics. For this iteration we’re planning so as to add correct massive scale waves, together with displacement, foam, disturbance and some shading tweaks.

In this work-in-progress video you may see the low frequency wave displacement on prime of the upper frequency waves we already had:

Navigating will not be as simple with all of the waves affecting the physics, and circumstances at sea could even be change relying on location or climate.

I continued my work on the parented entity motion system. There have been some points with getting kicked by our anti-hack system when leaping off shifting entities which at the moment are dealt with appropriately. Another large enchancment is the angular velocity estimation when entities are far-off from the origin of their dad or mum, which primarily affected the cargo ship. Lastly, physics props like dropped objects and grenades at the moment are appropriately dealing with intermittent dad or mum adjustments and protect their world velocity. I feel we’re attending to a extremely strong place with this, and the brand new sizzling air balloon is a reasonably spectacular demonstration of how far we’ve come.

I fastened numerous small points with the consumer aspect entity motion interpolation. Physics props like dropped objects and grenades now present a lot smoother motion on the consumer by utilizing the right physics timestamps. I additionally fastened an edge case that might trigger some seen jitter for just a few frames after an entity was instantiated, which affected each physics props and server projectiles like rockets.

Unity’s asset administration typically, and asset bundles particularly, suck. It’s ridiculous that one thing that ought to actually be supported out of the field with none customized code continues to be a seemingly unsolved downside as quickly as your undertaking exceeds a sure measurement. The gist of it’s that asset bundles solely assist 4GB (previously 2GB) of property, so it’s a must to break up your undertaking into a number of bundles. However, the extra bundles you utilize the slower your loading instances grow to be and the larger the overhead. Assigning asset bundles within the editor additionally has the draw back that you find yourself together with property within the server construct even when they are not wanted, which slows down construct instances and needlessly will increase disk utilization and replace measurement of the server set up.

The solely constructive information is that in 2018.1 Unity added the choice to cross a code generated asset bundle construct map to the construct methodology. Using this you may work out an asset format that results in the minimal variety of bundles that will not throw cryptic error messages when making an attempt to load them. Since it is code pushed you too can use completely different layouts for consumer and server builds and due to this fact exclude property you do not want from the server construct. Once you have gone by the method of writing all that pointless code you find yourself with a considerably future proof answer that hopefully prevents artists from unintentionally fucking up the whole construct as a result of they added a brand new texture. So, that is the place we at the moment are: depressing, however hopeful that no one has to the touch any of this once more for a very long time.

Recent developments from the EasyAntiCheat staff has enabled us to begin manually issuing short-term game bans to gamers who refuse to play truthful. We take a zero-tolerance method to cheaters and gamers who repeatedly play with them, ruining the game for others.

Previously we solely issued server bans for gamers who repeatedly performed alongside cheaters, we are able to now lengthen this punishment throughout all servers with short-term game bans of as much as one 12 months. Expect to see this function expanded upon within the close to future.