Valve have confirmed they're working on fixing it for the next Steam update, however there isn't a solid release date for that yet. In the meantime a temporary workaround is to dequip your skins and cosmetics.


Additions:

• Added water volumes to devkit. [Demos in Devtest4]
  
• Added selection tool options menu.
  
• Added tooltips to devkit.
  
• Added kill volumes to devkit.
  
• Added basis for gamemode mods.

Improvements:

• Improved PEI materials/boulders to more closely match reality.
  
• Improved devkit to save editor position/rotation.
  
• Improved devkit to allow dragging/dropping type references.

Tweaks:

• Tweaked devkit loading window to show editable levels list.

Fixes:

• Fixed spamming swap thirdperson shoulder next to wall to see through it for a frame.
  
• Fixed creating empty assets without hash.
  
• Fixed stuck reloading assets when pressing insert.
  
• Fixed gaps in castle_1 turrets.
  
• Fixed calling card iron sights name.
  
• Fixed to include new trees in examples folder.
  
• Fixed canned ham 2nd LOD color.

It's now possible to have multiple elevations and connected bodies of water in a level using the new water volumes, for example lakes, dams and swimming pools. Previously water was completely flat allowing a simple check whether you were above/below it, so in the transition process a few features might behave strangely but should be easy fixes. You can disable the old flat water completely in your map's config file. Note that multiple water volumes with reflections enabled will kill your performance.


Going forward skin designs (e.g. Hypertech) that have been included in the stockpile won't be considered for inclusion in workshop crates, and vice versa. Preferably workshop crate skins will be more creative and varied similar to those in previous mystery boxes.

Valve have confirmed they're working on fixing it for the next Steam update, however there isn't a solid release date for that yet. In the meantime a temporary workaround is to dequip your skins and cosmetics.


Additions:

• Added water volumes to devkit. [Demos in Devtest4]
  
• Added selection tool options menu.
  
• Added tooltips to devkit.
  
• Added kill volumes to devkit.
  
• Added basis for gamemode mods.

Improvements:

• Improved PEI materials/boulders to more closely match reality.
  
• Improved devkit to save editor position/rotation.
  
• Improved devkit to allow dragging/dropping type references.

Tweaks:

• Tweaked devkit loading window to show editable levels list.

Fixes:

• Fixed spamming swap thirdperson shoulder next to wall to see through it for a frame.
  
• Fixed creating empty assets without hash.
  
• Fixed stuck reloading assets when pressing insert.
  
• Fixed gaps in castle_1 turrets.
  
• Fixed calling card iron sights name.
  
• Fixed to include new trees in examples folder.
  
• Fixed canned ham 2nd LOD color.

It's now possible to have multiple elevations and connected bodies of water in a level using the new water volumes, for example lakes, dams and swimming pools. Previously water was completely flat allowing a simple check whether you were above/below it, so in the transition process a few features might behave strangely but should be easy fixes. You can disable the old flat water completely in your map's config file. Note that multiple water volumes with reflections enabled will kill your performance.


Going forward skin designs (e.g. Hypertech) that have been included in the stockpile won't be considered for inclusion in workshop crates, and vice versa. Preferably workshop crate skins will be more creative and varied similar to those in previous mystery boxes.

The first community-created mystery box is now dropping as the January 2017 Workshop Crate #1! All of the contents were voted on in the curated workshop, and are the first time you can get mythical variants of workshop items!

To open a workshop crate you will need the associated workshop key available from the stockpile. This is because the sales of the special key are split with the creators of the items in the crate. Future non-workshop mystery boxes will continue to use the normal mystery box key, however.


For anyone who worked with the old localization features this should hopefully be a huge upgrade. From the devkit you can now open the new translation editor which automatically handles several annoying tasks from before:

• Misses list shows all translation references that failed to find their text, and gives you the option to add the missing text.
  
• Delta list displays every english token that either doesn't exist in your loaded translation, or has been updated/changed since you last translated it alongside their english counterpart for comparison.
  
• Tree editor groups all tokens in english or your translation language from any official and mod namespaces installed to quickly modify text, and will update version numbers for translators to find changed tokens.

Note that only the newer features are currently using the upgraded translation system, and that you can still manually modify translation files in the Unturned/Translations folder.


Additions:

• Added January 2017 Workshop Crate #1.
  
• Added translation editor to devkit.
  
• Added feedback link to singleplayer maps menu.

Improvements:

• Improved road normals to match terrain normals. [Does this look better?]
  
• Updated to Unity 5.5.0p4.

Tweaks:

• Removed Arms Shipment Mystery Box from drops.

Fixes:

• Fixed roads to shine more naturally at oblique angles.
  
• Fixed bedroll placement restrictions to help prevent some exploits.

The first community-created mystery box is now dropping as the January 2017 Workshop Crate #1! All of the contents were voted on in the curated workshop, and are the first time you can get mythical variants of workshop items!

To open a workshop crate you will need the associated workshop key available from the stockpile. This is because the sales of the special key are split with the creators of the items in the crate. Future non-workshop mystery boxes will continue to use the normal mystery box key, however.


For anyone who worked with the old localization features this should hopefully be a huge upgrade. From the devkit you can now open the new translation editor which automatically handles several annoying tasks from before:

• Misses list shows all translation references that failed to find their text, and gives you the option to add the missing text.
  
• Delta list displays every english token that either doesn't exist in your loaded translation, or has been updated/changed since you last translated it alongside their english counterpart for comparison.
  
• Tree editor groups all tokens in english or your translation language from any official and mod namespaces installed to quickly modify text, and will update version numbers for translators to find changed tokens.

Note that only the newer features are currently using the upgraded translation system, and that you can still manually modify translation files in the Unturned/Translations folder.


Additions:

• Added January 2017 Workshop Crate #1.
  
• Added translation editor to devkit.
  
• Added feedback link to singleplayer maps menu.

Improvements:

• Improved road normals to match terrain normals. [Does this look better?]
  
• Updated to Unity 5.5.0p4.

Tweaks:

• Removed Arms Shipment Mystery Box from drops.

Fixes:

• Fixed roads to shine more naturally at oblique angles.
  
• Fixed bedroll placement restrictions to help prevent some exploits.

Additions:

• Added Scalar to airdrops. [IDs 1447-1449]
  
• Added vehicle perspective option which limits third person to vehicles only.

Improvements:

• Improved singleplayer menu to categorize map types. [Hawaii and other upcoming community-created updates will belong to the Curated category.]

Tweaks:

• Cleaned up after festive event.

Fixes:

• Fixed precision building mode sometimes getting scrambled when moving large numbers of objects between tiles.
  
• Fixed to remove grass under bases again. [Forgot to add this feature to the new system last week!]
  
• Fixed to pad character buildable obstruction bounds slightly.
  
• Fixed sticky grenade getting stuck midair immediately after throw.
  
• Fixed new foliage wind off on low setting.
  
• Fixed unable to toggle lasers/lights in safezone.
  
• Fixed new candycane skins' descriptions.
  
• Bullet-proofed many custom asset/content related features.

We're off to Vancouver visiting family the next few days so the update is earlier this week, but next Friday everything should be back to schedule.


Valve has added support for mystery boxes containing community-created items, so if you're working on some cool skins make sure to get them on the workshop soon! I'll be aiming to set one of these up in the next couple weeks looking for a wide variety of gun skins and potentially a few cosmetics.

Additions:

• Added Scalar to airdrops. [IDs 1447-1449]
  
• Added vehicle perspective option which limits third person to vehicles only.

Improvements:

• Improved singleplayer menu to categorize map types. [Hawaii and other upcoming community-created updates will belong to the Curated category.]

Tweaks:

• Cleaned up after festive event.

Fixes:

• Fixed precision building mode sometimes getting scrambled when moving large numbers of objects between tiles.
  
• Fixed to remove grass under bases again. [Forgot to add this feature to the new system last week!]
  
• Fixed to pad character buildable obstruction bounds slightly.
  
• Fixed sticky grenade getting stuck midair immediately after throw.
  
• Fixed new foliage wind off on low setting.
  
• Fixed unable to toggle lasers/lights in safezone.
  
• Fixed new candycane skins' descriptions.
  
• Bullet-proofed many custom asset/content related features.

We're off to Vancouver visiting family the next few days so the update is earlier this week, but next Friday everything should be back to schedule.


Valve has added support for mystery boxes containing community-created items, so if you're working on some cool skins make sure to get them on the workshop soon! I'll be aiming to set one of these up in the next couple weeks looking for a wide variety of gun skins and potentially a few cosmetics.

Unturned has been nominated for the "I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award" award alongside Starbound, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Stardew Valley and Paladins!



Edit: Voting for this award has now closed. Congratulations to the developers of Euro Truck Simulator 2 for winning the award!

Huge thanks to everyone who voted for Unturned in the nominations and this final round, I never imagined Unturned would be in the running for an award so this is absolutely mind blowing! Regardless of whether or not we win the award, I'm very humbled by all your awesome support and proud to see Unturned in the company of these other amazing games!


Additions:

• Upgraded all official maps to use the new landscape and foliage features.
  
• Added wizard to help convert existing terrain to the new systems.
  
• Added miscellaneous features required for the upgrade to the foliage editors and devkit.
  
• Added graphics option to draw foliage when aiming scope or binoculars.
  
• Added alert to the main menu when BattleEye is not running.
  
• Wrapped up presents under trees on Festive Russia map.
  
• Accepted a few more festive themed curated workshop skins.

Improvements:

• Updated to Unity 5.5.0p3.

Tweaks:

• Tweaked new tree roots/stumps to look nicer on hills.

Fixes:

• Fixed placing doors/gates/shutters that open/close into a wall.
  
• Fixed foliage bounds getting reset to origin. (caused it only to stream in when looking at origin)
  
• Fixed edgecase incorrect foliage tiles passed into landscape foliage bake.
  
• Fixed undo/redo transactions with >1 depth.
  
• Fixed Pine_06 and Birch_03 using wrong shaders.
  
• Fixed House_1 using wrong fortification slots.
  
• Fixed to split in-game update notes paragraph meshes. [last one hit 65k vertices]
  
• Fixed old trees using new tree hitboxes but not new tree trunk scale.
  
• Fixed wrong name shown in some cases when cursor hovering over object.
  
• Fixed a problem with the NPCs object filter.
  
• Fixed projectile launchers to check for nearby surfaces similar to grenades.
  
• Fixed a lighting related crash when loading very very old maps.

All of the official maps have been converted! Check out the shoreline of Russia and the overhangs especially, I'm really happy with how it looks now. For a full rundown of the benefits of these improvements check out the Foliage section of last week's post.

Note that the old Ultra grass setting is about equivalent to somewhere between the new Medium/High settings, so you might want to tune it down. Enabling the scoped foliage option can also be expensive because it requires loading and drawing 2x as much grass.

If your GPU doesn't support instancing Unturned will show a warning next to the grass setting to let you know you probably don't want to enable it, although my guess is that if you were in that case you probably didn't have it enabled in the first place.

Unturned has been nominated for the "I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award" award alongside Starbound, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Stardew Valley and Paladins!



Edit: Voting for this award has now closed. Congratulations to the developers of Euro Truck Simulator 2 for winning the award!

Huge thanks to everyone who voted for Unturned in the nominations and this final round, I never imagined Unturned would be in the running for an award so this is absolutely mind blowing! Regardless of whether or not we win the award, I'm very humbled by all your awesome support and proud to see Unturned in the company of these other amazing games!


Additions:

• Upgraded all official maps to use the new landscape and foliage features.
  
• Added wizard to help convert existing terrain to the new systems.
  
• Added miscellaneous features required for the upgrade to the foliage editors and devkit.
  
• Added graphics option to draw foliage when aiming scope or binoculars.
  
• Added alert to the main menu when BattleEye is not running.
  
• Wrapped up presents under trees on Festive Russia map.
  
• Accepted a few more festive themed curated workshop skins.

Improvements:

• Updated to Unity 5.5.0p3.

Tweaks:

• Tweaked new tree roots/stumps to look nicer on hills.

Fixes:

• Fixed placing doors/gates/shutters that open/close into a wall.
  
• Fixed foliage bounds getting reset to origin. (caused it only to stream in when looking at origin)
  
• Fixed edgecase incorrect foliage tiles passed into landscape foliage bake.
  
• Fixed undo/redo transactions with >1 depth.
  
• Fixed Pine_06 and Birch_03 using wrong shaders.
  
• Fixed House_1 using wrong fortification slots.
  
• Fixed to split in-game update notes paragraph meshes. [last one hit 65k vertices]
  
• Fixed old trees using new tree hitboxes but not new tree trunk scale.
  
• Fixed wrong name shown in some cases when cursor hovering over object.
  
• Fixed a problem with the NPCs object filter.
  
• Fixed projectile launchers to check for nearby surfaces similar to grenades.
  
• Fixed a lighting related crash when loading very very old maps.

All of the official maps have been converted! Check out the shoreline of Russia and the overhangs especially, I'm really happy with how it looks now. For a full rundown of the benefits of these improvements check out the Foliage section of last week's post.

Note that the old Ultra grass setting is about equivalent to somewhere between the new Medium/High settings, so you might want to tune it down. Enabling the scoped foliage option can also be expensive because it requires loading and drawing 2x as much grass.

If your GPU doesn't support instancing Unturned will show a warning next to the grass setting to let you know you probably don't want to enable it, although my guess is that if you were in that case you probably didn't have it enabled in the first place.

The improved BattlEye security this update has made it harder for cheaters to break into the game, but it's also had the unexpected side effect of blocking the Steam overlay due to the order in which Unity starts up the game. Unfortunately this means it can't be fixed from within Unturned itself in a patch, but we've come up with a few ideas and hope to have it working properly again for the next update.

Edit: This has been fixed in the 3.17.10.1 patch.


Russia has frozen over for the winter! It's cold enough that a swim is an easy way to freeze yourself, but on land you should be fine - aside from the restricted visibility! The Festive Gift Present is also dropping again with some new skins and elf outfit, although at a 50% chance rather than the usual 100% because the event is longer than previously. A few curated workshop items were accepted this week, but there will be another wave next week so get yours in as soon as possible if you're working on a holiday themed item!


Additions:

• Added Festive Russia map.
  
• Added Festive Gift Present to drops with some new items inside.
  
• Added 10x higher detail versions of every tree model and option to enable them.
  
• Added graphics option for wind quality, low being the old windy foliage option.
  
• Added rewritten higher performance/quality grass/foliage system, more info below.
  
• Accepted a few festive themed curated workshop skins.

Improvements:

• BattlEye security update. (for all BattlEye protected games)

Tweaks:

• Tweaked several large boulders to have landmark LODs.
  
• Temporarily disabled ambient occlusion in forward render mode.

Fixes:

• Fixed items in storage getting dropping in the wrong spot when an attached vehicle was destroyed.
  
• Fixed standing inside door when placed.
  
• Fixed unable to interact with mannequins.
  
• Fixed dropping window tabs into the wrong slot.
  
• Fixed loading BattlEye from non-ANSI paths.
  
• Fixed another animation issue with left-handed driving.
  
• Fixed connect screen missing gold message.
  
• Fixed mixed-up insanimus grizzly IDs.
  
• Fixed 4th terrain mask sampling 3rd.
  
• Fixed slightly incorrect landscape splatmap to world coordinates.
  
• Fixed a splatmap brush blending issue, added normalize button for repair.

TL;DR: Try out "New Trees - Blending Off" with wind quality "Low" and see if your computer can handle it!

You might remember a bit over a year ago I experimented with some alternate appearances for the trees which got everyone excited, but this week I actually upgraded every single tree and got them into the game! There are two graphics options related to these: tree quality and wind quality.

Legacy tree quality will use the original models. Blending off uses the new models, but with sharp transitions between LODs, whereas blending on smoothly grows out tree details as you get closer at a significant performance cost. Changing tree quality requires a game restart to take effect. Using the old tree models will still use the new tree hitboxes, however.

Wind quality is the bigger peformance drain. Low is equivelant to the old windy foliage setting, but won't apply any wind to the new tree models. Ultra looks really fantastic especially in very windy conditions like in a storm or next to a helicopter hovering - the trunk bends to the wind, branches swaying slightly and leaves rustling.

Comparison picture:




TL;DR: If your GPU supports instancing check out the higher performance/quality grass on Devtest4! Note that the new grass wind/displacement shader isn't properly finished yet, however.

This is where I spent most of my time this week, rewriting the grass/foliage system. The current maps PEI, Washington, etc all use Unity's built-in terrain grass (Devtest4 is using the new system), but this rewrite is a big upgrade in every way:

The old grass has a significant FPS stutter when a new camera is enabled (equipping a scoped weapon) and when moving around the terrain, which are no longer present in the new one. Foliage information occupies only a small amount of memory and is streamed in/out on a separate thread as you travel the map.

Rendering is done with hardware instancing, although note that this means grass performance will likely be worse than before for you if your GPU doesn't support instancing (and much better than before if it does). You can check the instancing performance difference with the foliage.force_instancing_off command.

Another limitation of the built-in terrain grass was that it could only be placed/baked onto the ground, but now the new grass will automatically be generated both on the landscape and any surface with foliage information like the grass meshes used for overhangs or above tunnels/caves.

Foliage baking rules are also much better than before where each surface (terrain material, object) references a foliage collection asset which contains a list of different foliage asset types like grass, rocks, bushes, trees, etc which then can each have different rules about where/how they are placed. Those classes can also be extended for very customized situations.

The next terrain upgrade will focus on:

• Making all these assets easy to create.
  
• Converting trees to the new system. (same baking rules as other foliage, for example: create a grass object, bake foliage and automatically the grass object will have grass/pebbles/trees/bushes on it)
  
• Hopefully adding the foliage brush. (paint foliage/trees wherever you like, useful for foliage covered cities, not removed when baking)
  
• Minor features like a graphics option to draw grass at scope focus. (zoom in with binoculars far away and still load grass there)
  
• Most importantly: starting to convert the existing official maps to the new landscape and foliage features.

If you try baking foliage in the devkit on a custom map it will currently freeze up for a while, but don't worry it hasn't crashed. A future update will add a progress bar for this.

The improved BattlEye security this update has made it harder for cheaters to break into the game, but it's also had the unexpected side effect of blocking the Steam overlay due to the order in which Unity starts up the game. Unfortunately this means it can't be fixed from within Unturned itself in a patch, but we've come up with a few ideas and hope to have it working properly again for the next update.

Edit: This has been fixed in the 3.17.10.1 patch.


Russia has frozen over for the winter! It's cold enough that a swim is an easy way to freeze yourself, but on land you should be fine - aside from the restricted visibility! The Festive Gift Present is also dropping again with some new skins and elf outfit, although at a 50% chance rather than the usual 100% because the event is longer than previously. A few curated workshop items were accepted this week, but there will be another wave next week so get yours in as soon as possible if you're working on a holiday themed item!


Additions:

• Added Festive Russia map.
  
• Added Festive Gift Present to drops with some new items inside.
  
• Added 10x higher detail versions of every tree model and option to enable them.
  
• Added graphics option for wind quality, low being the old windy foliage option.
  
• Added rewritten higher performance/quality grass/foliage system, more info below.
  
• Accepted a few festive themed curated workshop skins.

Improvements:

• BattlEye security update. (for all BattlEye protected games)

Tweaks:

• Tweaked several large boulders to have landmark LODs.
  
• Temporarily disabled ambient occlusion in forward render mode.

Fixes:

• Fixed items in storage getting dropping in the wrong spot when an attached vehicle was destroyed.
  
• Fixed standing inside door when placed.
  
• Fixed unable to interact with mannequins.
  
• Fixed dropping window tabs into the wrong slot.
  
• Fixed loading BattlEye from non-ANSI paths.
  
• Fixed another animation issue with left-handed driving.
  
• Fixed connect screen missing gold message.
  
• Fixed mixed-up insanimus grizzly IDs.
  
• Fixed 4th terrain mask sampling 3rd.
  
• Fixed slightly incorrect landscape splatmap to world coordinates.
  
• Fixed a splatmap brush blending issue, added normalize button for repair.

TL;DR: Try out "New Trees - Blending Off" with wind quality "Low" and see if your computer can handle it!

You might remember a bit over a year ago I experimented with some alternate appearances for the trees which got everyone excited, but this week I actually upgraded every single tree and got them into the game! There are two graphics options related to these: tree quality and wind quality.

Legacy tree quality will use the original models. Blending off uses the new models, but with sharp transitions between LODs, whereas blending on smoothly grows out tree details as you get closer at a significant performance cost. Changing tree quality requires a game restart to take effect. Using the old tree models will still use the new tree hitboxes, however.

Wind quality is the bigger peformance drain. Low is equivelant to the old windy foliage setting, but won't apply any wind to the new tree models. Ultra looks really fantastic especially in very windy conditions like in a storm or next to a helicopter hovering - the trunk bends to the wind, branches swaying slightly and leaves rustling.

Comparison picture:




TL;DR: If your GPU supports instancing check out the higher performance/quality grass on Devtest4! Note that the new grass wind/displacement shader isn't properly finished yet, however.

This is where I spent most of my time this week, rewriting the grass/foliage system. The current maps PEI, Washington, etc all use Unity's built-in terrain grass (Devtest4 is using the new system), but this rewrite is a big upgrade in every way:

The old grass has a significant FPS stutter when a new camera is enabled (equipping a scoped weapon) and when moving around the terrain, which are no longer present in the new one. Foliage information occupies only a small amount of memory and is streamed in/out on a separate thread as you travel the map.

Rendering is done with hardware instancing, although note that this means grass performance will likely be worse than before for you if your GPU doesn't support instancing (and much better than before if it does). You can check the instancing performance difference with the foliage.force_instancing_off command.

Another limitation of the built-in terrain grass was that it could only be placed/baked onto the ground, but now the new grass will automatically be generated both on the landscape and any surface with foliage information like the grass meshes used for overhangs or above tunnels/caves.

Foliage baking rules are also much better than before where each surface (terrain material, object) references a foliage collection asset which contains a list of different foliage asset types like grass, rocks, bushes, trees, etc which then can each have different rules about where/how they are placed. Those classes can also be extended for very customized situations.

The next terrain upgrade will focus on:

• Making all these assets easy to create.
  
• Converting trees to the new system. (same baking rules as other foliage, for example: create a grass object, bake foliage and automatically the grass object will have grass/pebbles/trees/bushes on it)
  
• Hopefully adding the foliage brush. (paint foliage/trees wherever you like, useful for foliage covered cities, not removed when baking)
  
• Minor features like a graphics option to draw grass at scope focus. (zoom in with binoculars far away and still load grass there)
  
• Most importantly: starting to convert the existing official maps to the new landscape and foliage features.

If you try baking foliage in the devkit on a custom map it will currently freeze up for a while, but don't worry it hasn't crashed. A future update will add a progress bar for this.