Unturned II Devlog #004
January 25th 2018 by SDGNelson
It's been a while, and a lot has happened!
I hope you all had a fantastic break over the holidays! I'm been back to work on Unturned II the past week following the big 3.x Greece/Crafting/Stat Counter updates, and I'm planning to make it my main focus for the next week or two as well.
Once again a disclaimer upfront: All of these assets are placeholder and/or work-in-progress and nothing’s off the table to improve. Keeping that in mind please share your feedback and suggestions! This also means there's likely a few bugs in the videos (after reviewing them I spotted a few).
Quite a few smaller features have been coming together in that time which I'm pretty excited about. My highlights are:
- Items can have randomized properties associated with them which are currently used for clothing colors/patterns and holographic sight reticules/colors. This will open up a lot more customization options like harvesting plants to create dyes for your clothes (potentially paints too?), and make content creation a lot faster - in 3.x there are 8 versions of each item for each color which is a nightmare to maintain.
- Ballistic simulation bullet penetration. Different surfaces have different penetration properties (e.g. harder to travel through concrete than thin wood), and eventually ammunition types will handle these surfaces differently. One of my future goals here is to have ammunition tiers such as crafted 5.56mm bullets have worse armor penetration than military-grade than FMJ, so on and so forth.
One pretty crazy idea I've been tossing around in my head lately and would love for your feedback on (note we're nowhere near implementing this yet) is: What if you could choose to play as an animal when joining a server? My thought process here is that while Unturned II's animal AI will be a lot better than 3.x's, nothing beats fighting against real, smart, opponents, and not only would it be fun to play as an animal but a lot more challenging to hunt. Assuming they'd have similar health/life stats this would also encourage more in-depth natural survival features since animals can't eat canned beans.
Inventory Management
This first video shows some of the new work on storage and clothing:
I'm pleased to have the 3D item inspections in, and am planning to have more details in those description type boxes such as stats (food, water, damage, etc) or detailed contents information like which bullets are in which order in a magazine (tracer, normal, tracer - not implemented yet), or inserting items like batteries to a flashlight.
One of my big focuses has been keeping the inventory code very robust, and also open to all kinds of modding. For example multiple players can be using the same storage at the same time which opens lots of highly requested possibilities such as looting through a player's clothes on their corpse rather than a hard-to-sort lootsplosion, or inspecting a surrendered player's backpack contents. All of this code works regardless of context as well, so e.g. you can attach a sight to a gun that's sitting on the ground without picking it up.
The large number of wearable item slots (14!) makes designing a character layout for them a little tricky (it clips off the bottom of the screen at the moment) so if you have an idea/mockup I'd be interested to take a look! Right now I'm planning to show unused slots underneath the main inventory with the item icons + drag/drop on each storage category.
Locomotion
This video showcases new character animations and FX:
You may not have thought about it before, but in 3.x your legs are always walking forwards regardless of your current direction. What?! This week I went through and animated moving in each direction in each stance at each different speed, and afterwards wasted a ridiculous amount of time running around having fun enjoying the animations. 🙂
There's all kinds of new animations (pre/post jump, different falling animations while crouched/prone), but gameplay wise: you can now sprint no matter your stance. (And when swimming's implemented I plan to carry it over to that as well.) You get a 60% speed boost if you sprint while moving forward - no sprinting backwards anymore.
Each surface reacts to these uniquely as well. In the video you can see grass blades getting kicked up while running and falling, and water makes weightier splashes the deeper you are.
Adios until the next post! It should be a much shorter wait than between the last and this one.