Image credit: Bug

20.02: February 2020 Devblog

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Written by: CosmicCoincidence

Slow, steady, and humble, we shall not stumble.

February Recap

This month, we've continued chugging along making progress in core features, which is really exciting (more info below)! Seeing progress on core features is also a good opportunity for programmers or Unity enthusiasts to get their feet wet in RE:SS3D.

With progress on features, comes the process of resolving any issues that arise from it over time. Obviously, as many issues as possible will be flushed out initially but often times many bugs get overlooked. This comes the need for people to playtest the game, report bugs, and help fix bugs. If you want to help, there's currently several 'good first issues', tasks, bugs that need confirming and reporting on our issues page.

Rounds

Em3rgency, after being an absolute workhorse last month, has slowed down a bit this month but still decided to invest the time to implement basic rounds for the game. The round time starts right after the server is launched and you can see a timer in the top right corner. Currently, the rounds are limited to just 5 minutes before the server resets, due to there not being much to do right now anyway. If you can't wait the 5 minutes, there is also a manual server reset button, but is only visible to the hosting player.

Lights/Shadows

New this month, Lazerballs has decided to address blob shadows and deferred lighting. After adding a hint of ambient occlusion on top and it really changes the atmosphere of the station. If you don't remember what it looked like before, just look at the video above.

Interaction

If you remember last month, we had just introduced a new, basic interaction system but was still lacking our combat system. Well this month, Nonanon replaced it with another, new, less-basic interaction system. It should be more user-friendly when adding new interactions and also introduces the beginnings of the context menu.

Currently, the primary things that are implemented in the new interaction system are, picking up/dropping items, using storage containers, and constructing/deconstructing walls (crowbar) and tables (wrench). Unfortunately, the new system doesn't include our drawing system like the old one yet, nor does it reintroduce our basic combat system yet.

Models

Also form Lazerballs this month, some very nice botany plants, specifically bananas (banana, mimana, and bluespace banana) and wheat (wheat and meat wheat).

New this month, Marbles contributed this great t-ray scanner.

Back this month, Eiko has contributed a gas giant planet, wood floors, mulebot, peacekeeper borg, newscaster and newspaper!

This month Hummus has concentrated on traitor items, by providing a stun prod, breaching charge, teleport gun, holoprojector, mini-bible, dart gun with darts, and a pickpocket gun.

ComradeCheeki provided some captain's medals and storage box, as well as some various medical things (chemical dropper, bottle, and med patches) and security things (baton and telescopic shield).

Some more plants this month from Bug including melons (watermelon and holy-melon) and cannabis (weed, omega weed, life weed, death weed, and rainbow weed) with help from CosmicCoincidence.

A fancy server and laser cannon from Kiwav this month.

Textures

Sanuki made a really cool rock floor this month a baked out a texture for us to use on our floor tiles, along with a normal map to give the flat surface 3D shading.

Graphics

Konstantin3001 continuing to provide 2D artwork. This month, some paper and book cover textures, and a bunch of various separated graphics of which only a few are displayed here. Several of the organs are used from the artist Jakob Vogel on thenounproject.com.

Artwork

Bug simply won't stop making really cool animations, regardless of how many times we tell him to.

Website

Something that gets less attention, but deserves some every now and again is our website. Over the last couple of months, it has received formatting and documentation updates from both Nonanon and CosmicCoincidence. A few other updates this month, include a new header using the logo he made last month, a new 404 page, art page, and updates to all of our primary pages. The most notable one being our home page, which now includes a big link for downloads, and provides an appropriate home for our (unofficial) trailer.

Notes

As mentioned above, we have continued working hard on updating documentation, not just on our website, but also on our other sites, to help make the contribution process easier for everyone.

Well, that wraps up another month here at RE:SS3D, if you are curious about more content from us, or want to contribute to the project yourself, come visit our Discord!