10:26pm EST - My post earlier focused on the new build system but didn’t mention what the team is doing. Some awesome things were accomplished by the team at Facepunch and, rather than wait till tomorrow (which I sense is going to be very hectic), I figured I'd give you a quick update on what was accomplished today...

Unity beta 13

They updated to the newest version of unity beta (13). I don't know the specifics but Garry said there was some cool stuff in it so that sounds good to me! If you're really interested, keep an eye out for the Unity release notes here (the ones for beta 13 havent been posted yet).

Mouse wheel select

Maurino (helkus) has made a comeback and he is adding some awesome new functionality. Yesterday he added door knocking, today he added mouse wheel select. If you're not clear what that is, basically you can scroll up and down to select the items in your belt bar (tool belt, hot bar, whatever you want to call it).

PVP looting disabled

Looting other players while you are both walking around has been disabled (until some other stuff is in place). I understand, it is pretty easy to get looted now and hard to tell it's happening. One of the things they probably want to get in place is the pickpocketing animations.

Name tags are back

After being disabled several weeks ago due to a bug in the Unity UI dll’s, name tags are back. My guess is the new Unity beta 13 fixed something on this front. Good! Until CoherentUI is responsive and reliable, I'm happy with more things being done in the Unity UI!

Deleting dropped items

Up till now, if you drop an item on the ground (like all those useless skulls) it’ll just sit there indefinitely. That was kind of cool from a realism standpoint but not efficient at all (and probably one of the sources of the game performance dipping over time). Now, items will be deleted after a certain amount of time. Word on the street is items disappear after 60 seconds.

Crosshair hidden again

On my previous post about the new building system I mentioned how the crosshair was always on. I had a suspicion this was unintentional and it appears that was the case. The crosshair is back to only being visible when looking at an entity.

Huge chicken!

The running animations for the chicken are in and chickens are huge! Actually, it was just Minh playing around with scaling. Here's the real running animation at scale.

Concept art

Howie posted this excavator concept today. One interesting idea he shared on the trello card was this:

once fixed up could be used to collect stone, metal fragments, etc. at very fast rate