Structural Integrity

Remember last week when I said something about working on something big for the building system, and everyone thought I just meant the new build system.

See Structural Integrity In Action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfaLd-OOm6A

Well it wasn't the new build system. It was making buildings fall down.This has wrongly been referred to as a weight system. It doesn't take weight into account right now at all, in fact it's kind of the opposite. The intention was to allow people to be more free in their building, a specific example would be to allow people to build self supporting floors - without a pillar or wall under every floor block. This doesn't work without the structural integrity system because you could build sky bridges. Now we have integrity we can allow you to build floors on floors, because if it's wrong it'll just fall down.So let me be honest. I'm not a mathematical genius. I'm not a structural engineer. I don't know what I'm doing. This system isn't going to ever be 100% true to life. You will be able to build some stuff that defies physics, this is just the way we're doing it. We don't want you to not be able to make the legit structures that you've made before, we just don't want you building stairs to the moon.From a raiding point of view this is a total game changer. We don't know how it's going to affect stuff - but we're going to be watching, tweaking, improving, adding counter-measures over time. There are bug that we know about, and I'm sure there are bugs that we don't know about. Yes - it would be cool if falling blocks killed the player. It's all a work in progress.

New Building System Overview

We've rolled out the new building system. There's a few things I want you to know about it so you don't get angry at the wrong things.

Building Plan

To place building blocks you need a Building Plan. Once you have crafted a plan and have it in your hands you can change the building component by holding down the right mouse button and left clicking on the part you want to use.The blocks start out black. This means they have low health. You don't have to do anything - they gain health by themselves. When looking at at block you'll get a tooltip showing its current healthIf the placement of the block is unstable it will also show the stability as a percentage and the background of the health bar will turn red.

Hammer

You can speed up the blocks health gain by giving them a whack with the hammer. This changes their regeneration speed - which falls back down to normal slowly - so a couple of hammer wacks is all you need to do.When you're looking at a block with the hammer you can hold the right mouse button to see a menu. From here you can do things like upgrade/downgrade to another block type, rotate and demolish.If available for a block, when upgrading to stone (or metal) the block's maximum health will increase. This will make the block turn dark again - you know what to do here.Some melee weapons aren't very effective stone and metal, so it's a good idea to upgrade your blocks to one of those - especially exposed foundations.

Tool Cupboard

Some options on the hammer aren't available unless you're within the influence of an authorised tool cupboard. The tool cupboard makes it so only the people who are authorised with it can use building tools within its radius. The tool cupboard is craftable in the menu.Once placed you should authorise yourself with it.You will see information on the bottom left of the screen describing whether you're within its influence.

Work In Progress

All the models are basic geometry with placeholder textures right now. Real art will be coming soon. Some of the descriptions and icons are missing on the pie menu. The black overlay flickers sometimes. The placement guide block jumps all over the place. We're on it, don't worry.

Weapon Refactoring

I started refactoring the weapon system so that weapons are actual entities. They're just items right now and it's pretty limiting in the scale of things we're able to do.This is not going to be a short process so I've started another branch with the changes on, and am working on it periodically. So it's not done yet and when it's done you probably won't see any immediate benefits, but it will make stuff a lot easier for the coders - and we'll be able to make the weapons suck less.

Map Size

Andre has added a server variable so server owners can change the size of the map for their server as they see fit. If you're a server owner and want to change your map, you can with the command line "-server.worldsize " where value is a number - default is now 4000.The default map size is now 16km2 - this is down from 64km2. This is a gameplay change, but should help out performance quite a bit.

Window Bars

You can now add bars to your windows. You can look, loot, throw and shoot through them - but you can't walk through them.

Optimizations

We're hoping to see some frame rate increases this week. Andre did the tree thing, so they should be a lot faster now. Diogo has been tweaking the terrain shader - so that should be a lot faster now - especially on the shitter quality settings.We've got analytics running so we'll be able to see if there's a performance benefit. I'll post the graph next week.

Chickens

Goosey has been messing with the chickens again.

See Video

..and Andre has put them in game and made them dance. They're not done yet though.

Operation Unsuck

We're looking at ways to make the maps better. We're probably going to make a non procedural map (which will be playable), then generate the procedural maps from that. This will be easier than designing for a procedural map - as the programmers programming the procedural stuff will have a very good idea of what it should look like based on the non-proc map. No timescale on this.Howie and Paul have done some paint-overs to show some ideas of what the environment should/could look like.

Rustafied

If these devblogs aren't enough for you then you should really keep an eye on rustafied.com and their twitter feed, and maybe check out their server. They post what's happening pretty much every day, and usually multiple times a day. It's really inspiring for us to see someone taking this much interest in what we're doing.