2:45pm EST - With one day before this weeks big update, the team is focusing on putting the finishing touches on new functionality and thankfully, some performance enhancements. So far, all signs point to no wipe being forced tomorrow, and, given we wiped yesterday due to a fucked save file, performance will hopefully be holding up just fine. That said, if performance starts dropping, we may consider a fresh wipe going into the weekend. As always, I’m playing this one by ear and will keep you posted. Let’s get into it...

Map fixes

Andre committed a temporary fix for players spawning at the world origin (in the fucking sky) on some seeds. Given this has been the biggest issue people have been having with running non-default map sizes, servers will hopefully be able to get back to their larger map sizes tomorrow.

Player skin updates

The team is doing some cleanup on the new character skins which were added the other day. Tom is doing some work in the background on skin shaders and player materials while Garry has made it so the arms on your viewmodel match your players skin color.

Punch feedback

Helk has added an effect to make it a bit more apparent when you're wrecking the shit out of a tool by using it the wrong way (aka hitting ‘wrong’ nodes). So now if you try to say, hit a tree with a pickaxe, your aim will be shifted up and to the right a bit.

Performance enhancements

Garry has done some work on improving performance today. Along with some more profiling for the AI, he has disabled dynamic batching. Dynamic batching is a process which automatically adds similar objects into the same draw call. This could have been one of the sources of the big hitches we see when coming into view of large buildings, so hopefully running around a crowded map will be smoother once this is live.

Procgen7

Andre has started work on the next iteration of procedural map generation. With 12 commits and counting, the progen7 branch aims to improve river generation, island and lake shapes, lower the max slope angle, fix some spawn points, and likely a whole bunch of other stuff. Like its predecessors, this branch will probably encompass several weeks of work and get us one step closer to the goal of unsucking the environment.

The future of rooftops

Vincent has posted a plan for changing the rooftops to a 3x3 grid and slope. Here’s a visual he uploaded:

Edit: For the record, I have no clue what the implementation of this is going to look like. It does appear this will allow roofs to be more roof-like though.

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