WIP teaser of some of the work for the vehicle update coming this year. Changes to 62 vanilla vehicles, including all 36 car-type vanilla vehicles so far.

Unturned 2024 Survey

Edit: The survey has now closed. Thank you to everyone who participated! I intend to share the results relatively soon.

If you've played Unturned before and have a few minutes, I'd appreciate your input on this survey! The goal is to collect feedback on what the Unturned community is most interested in seeing in 2024: https://forms.gle/Fv4guTqb5ApacQbM9

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! 🎄

How to sit in the corner of a cat tower? Asking for a friend.

Phoebe napping on my notepad while I was working yesterday 🙂

Reason other players using items isn't animated/heard: I fixed a bug with equip timers, but forgot other clients don't update that timer. (patch soon)

Reason Arid bus driver is not working: after the dialogue rewrite, the client thinks that response ends the interaction because it doesn't link to other dialogue, when it should still be telling the server you selected that response. (patch soon)

In the next update, item descriptions automatically include a variety of relevant stats, from damage to movement speed to recoil control:

I've added 108 stats to the descriptions so far, though I expect some more will arise from feedback after the update. This is yet another improvement that was long awaiting the automatic layout UI support.

Less exciting teaser in the middle: I've unified the main menu workshop and news feed with the rest of the UI. Previously, it didn't match the UI scale or your custom UI theming.

Since the feed was variable height, it required an automatic layout, so it was created using uGUI separately from the rest of the game's UI. Now that I'm introducing automatic layout into the rest of the game, it is time to bring everything under one roof!

Also, the first teaser for the update hopefully coming next week. Longer text chat messages, about time!

For context: from 2013 to late 2020, Unturned only used IMGUI, without automatic layout, for performance reasons. In late 2020, I added support for uGUI for players running into issues with IMGUI. Still, I had to keep IMGUI compatibility for players facing different problems with uGUI.

Knowing that Unity was working on UI Elements / UI Toolkit, I decided to wait before abstracting anything for automatic layout. The next Unturned version upgrades us to Unity 2021 LTS, which supports runtime UIE/TK.

I've integrated it as a third mostly-functional option and begun adding automatic layout to some menus. (uGUI was all the way back here: https://twitter.com/SDGNelson/status/1337458104259133440)

Phoebe

We adopted a sweet little cat named Phoebe! She's approximately 3 years old. So far she's undecided whether she wants a role at SDG or not.

I've been taking the development of the next Unturned update more "slow and steady" this past month than I used to. It's much more relaxing. No specific release date is planned yet, but it will probably be in early October.

Most recently, I've been working on the conversion to "UI Elements" / "UI Toolkit" - Unity's newer UI system. After upgrading to 2021 LTS, it's supported for use in the game view.

I have yet to make any big decisions about handling the Unity trouble. Some posts have suggested we can stay on the current LTS versions with the original Terms of Service. That would probably be fine for a few years (4-5?), but longer down the road, we could start to see issues on newer OS.

Unturned has custom formats for levels and doesn't rely much on Unity assets like prefabs, so automatically converting the data to another engine would be feasible. However, converting all of the code and game logic would be a massive effort. Existing mods would be unusable without the creator(s) running the conversion, and all code plugins would break.

It's also been pointed out that now could be a great time to revisit the possibility of a new project. In the meantime, I've been playing around in Godot, reading the "Game AI Pro" books - one of my weakest areas in gamedev, re-sorting my Lego by shape (sorted by color as a kid), and painting the house.

Do you like long difficulty to read lists? Well then, I've got every Unturned changelog from the 8th through 9th anniversaries merged here for you: https://blog.smartlydressedgames.com/2022-2023-unturned-changelogs/

This afternoon Jasper passed away. He made it to the relatively old age of 17. He was a very sweet cat, and we were lucky to have him at SDG as Chief Bug Hunter.

On Friday he was diagnosed with the dry variant of Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP). His health had deteriorated exponentially recently. The vet recommended euthanasia soon. We had it performed at home, so he went to sleep calmly and peacefully, and much loved.

Picking an update frequency is tricky.

Weekly or every second week is annoying for many players because servers have to restart for them, but in general they're less likely to need a patch/hotfix. (for example because there are less changes overall to have unexpected interactions)

Monthly means servers are stable for longer and gives me more time to work on bigger changes, but is more likely to need multiple patches which is perhaps more annoying than weekly.

For example, more than a month before yesterday's update I made a seemingly minor fix to handle newline ('\n') in unquoted strings. By yesterday I had forgotten it was even part of this update, lo and behold it caused issues in quite a few mods!

For some players, a few objects in the Arid update had flickering textures. The .1 patch fixes this by slightly increasing the level batching UV padding from 0.00001 texels to 0.001 texels. It was more apparent on Arid because Arid's texture atlas is bigger. I'm unsure why it only affected some players though. Perhaps different floating point UV behaviour on different GPUs/drivers? Curious to hear if anyone knows the answer.