Unturned News

If you have been playing Unturned for a long time then you know that the menus and HUD have rarely changed. And at first glance that is still the case. Nevertheless there has been a major rewrite of the UI systems which has released with this update. I always find it annoying when software changes the UI for seemingly no reason, so preserving the existing (albeit questionable) appearance, design, and functionality was a top priority.

Across the board the menus and HUD should look and feel "better". Some players will notice a performance boost: in particular the compass, hotbar, and map overlay were optimized. Rich text in the chat fades out properly. Crosshair animations finish properly. Tons of Mac and Linux bugs have been fixed (e.g. the wonky gamma on Mac). Lots (but not all) of the UI spaghetti code has been untangled.

On the technical side: prior to this update the game was still using IMGUI from Unity 4. Unity replaced IMGUI with uGUI in 2014-2015, and are now even planning to replace uGUI with "UIElements". With this in mind I decided to abstract the underlying Unity UI implementation, so it will be easy to integrate UIElements once it is stable. I had been wanting to upgrade from IMGUI for years, but with the amount of work required it kept getting pushed down the road. In the end if took one month of refactoring, and then one month of intermittent development on the beta branch.



Added:

• Events for vehicle locking/unlocking and local driver.
  
• Valid_Speed_Horizontal for modded vehicles with speed the server cannot predict e.g. force applying components.
  

Changed:

• Whitespace and newlines are trimmed from start and end of sign text.
  
• Swimming while snowing with Snow_Affects_Temperature disabled no longer causes freezing damage.
  
• Clamp item drop multipliers for enemies to prevent huge values (100+) from stalling the game.
  

Fixed:

• AI problems with unbaked navmeshes in the level.
  
• Dialogue with message-response pairings out of bounds.
  
• Display of custom item action text and tooltips.
  
• Warning for rocket launcher firing sound.
  
• Spinning while leaning to glitch nearby inventory through wall.
  
• Workzone highlight camera defaulting to enabled.
  
• Default value of Allow_Horde_Beacon should have been enabled.
  
• Box-selecting objects without gameobjects in devkit.
  
• Moving devkit objects in and out of regular level bounds.
  
• Potential cleanup bug causing gun effects to be claimed by two guns at once.
  
• Placing items in object windows after the transform hierarchy optimizations.
  
• Selecting the sky in workzone mode after the transform hierarchy optimizations.
  
• Improper handling of BOM/preamble in dat files.
  
• Gap in cliff near PEI lighthouse.
  
• Several gaps in Germany caves.
  

This patch prioritized all the game-breaking bugs that had been reported so far, as well as some color preference issues that made the HUD look really bad. Rest assured that there will be a 2nd patch relatively soon addressing the minor issues like alignment differences and inconsistencies. I know there has been some negative feedback like "I hate this update!", but chances are that the issue was unintentional or will be adjusted based on your feedback, so if you dislike something please describe what it is.

Fixed:

• Unable to interact after re-joining a server after hovering player hint.
  
• Background was visible for empty tooltips.
  
• Hotkeys triggering while typing in inventory and sign text fields.
  
• Cursor sorting behind some plugin UIs.
  
• Gun HUD breaking when using a rangefinder.
  
• Loading screen tip box not using background color preference.
  
• Empty Steam inventory slots not using color preferences.
  
• Inventory, crafting and skills backgrounds not using color preferences.
  
• Non-item inventory headers not using color preferences.
  

Remember in 2018 when the crafting buttons were split into two smaller buttons? (unpopular change) That was to workaround an issue with the nested checkbox. Thanks to the rewrite the smaller buttons can be merged back into the main button again.

Thank you to everyone who has shared constructive feedback about the HUD issues so far. I will continue reading it, and there will be further refinements and improvements in the next patch/update.

Added:

• "Enable_Fade_Out" text chat option to preferences. Defaults to true.
  

Changed:

• Small crafting buttons merged back into main button like good old times.
  
• Inventory headers scale to match scroll view width.
  
• Darkened oxygen bar to make text more legible.
  
• Server name and listing use preferred color.
  
• Interaction hint uses preferred color except for items and vehicles.
  

Fixed:

• Updating crafting list after inventory/state changes.
  
• Dragging items onto eachother to swap them.
  
• Minimum handle size for large scroll boxes.
  
• Vertical alignment of '+' buttons on server screen.
  
• Horizontal alignment of in-game groups menu.
  
• Padding inconsistency in crafting list.
  
• Chat field is cleared after send.
  
• Alignment of columns when server list scrollbar is hidden.
  
• Variety of elements using white rather than preferred color.
  
• Debug camera asccending/descending while typing in chat.
  
• Potential fix for flashing / random sprites in UI.
  
• Dragging item into scroll region of inventory should drop it.
  
• Debug FPS / ping text spacing.
  
• Performance of editor objects list.
  
• Right-clicking enumeration buttons to cycle backward.
  
• Appearance and group menus not updating on character load.
  

Vehicles, items, zombies, etc. were all nested in an unnecessarily deep transform hierarchy. Almost everything has been reworked to exist at the root level now which enables some multithreaded Unity optimizations, granting a +10-20% performance increase to CPU-bound multicore systems.

All of the game APIs which returned organizational transforms for plugins have been deprecated, but will create placeholders when called to prevent exceptions. Functions for finding the root transforms of entities have been updated accordingly.



Previously the server advertised every config value and the client would find the differences to display in the config screen. This was problematic if the data was mismatched between client and server. Now the server only advertises the differences (compared to default), and the client looks up the property by path. The config screen also categorizes them to clarify variables with the same name.

• Flattened transform hierarchy to leverage parallel transform processing.
  
• Improved server config diffing and display for server lobby menu.
  
• Included Russia boulders in example assets package.
  
• Fixed unable to cook using campfires and ovens on vehicles.
  

This update serves primarily to upgrade the game engine from Unity 2018 LTS to 2019 LTS. It should be a seamless transition and does not require changes from modders. The main benefit will be the upcoming user interface rework, which is available on a beta branch if you are interested in trying it out:

1. Right-click Unturned in your Steam Library
   
2. Select Properties and switch to the Betas tab
   
3. From the dropdown select "glazier"
   

Added:

• Bypass_Allowed_To_Damage_Player per-weapon setting.
  
• Ignore_Children_File_IDs to workshop download config. Useful if creator is using dependencies as advertisements.
  
• Imported adjustments by Renaxon to California messenger bag and armor rig.
  
• Accepted four new curated workshop skins.
  

Changed:

• Enabled new Steam networking as the default transport layer (again). Huge thanks to Miku from Pandahut for extensive help testing!
  
• Included mannequin in example assets.
  
• Convert news feed usage of Steam web request to Unity web request.
  
• Enabled rich text for quest interactables.
  
• Failed console command outputs the input string.
  
• LogSteamNetworkingSockets accepts a verbosity integer.
  

Fixed:

• Gap along the edges of the 7x scope lens.
  
• Leaning through invisible walls.
  
• NPC enum parsing exceptions.
  
• Two tiny gaps in the PEI pirate cove.
  
• Using rest gesture in shallow water.
  
• List translation differences on separate lines.
  

Autumn leaves coat the ground, the smell of pumpkin spice lingers in the air, and the turned are roaming the streets... it must be Halloween!



Until November 1st the event is active:

• Spyjack is updating Tales of Terror with new quests, items, and monsters each Thursday leading up to Halloween!
  
• Decorations festoon the towns of official maps, as well as Elver in an update soon.
  
• NPCs are wearing their Halloween costumes.
  

Happy Halloween!

Edit: All bundles on the Stockpile are now discounted for the Steam Halloween Sale!

Miscellaneous Changes:

• Accepted several new skins from the curated workshop.
  
• Hosting dedicated servers using the client files has been deprecated since June 2019 and is no longer supported. Please use the standalone dedicated server app instead.
  
• Added Min_Stealth_Radius setting to level asset.
  
• Added helper methods for getting remote address if available.
  
• Added Horizontal_Attack_Range, Horizontal_Vehicle_Attack_Range, and Vertical_Attack_Range animal settings.
  
• Added Spread_Sprint, Spread_Crouch, and Spread_Prone gun settings.
  
• Added Recoil_Sprint, Recoil_Crouch, and Recoil_Prone gun settings.
  
• Converted berry bushes to use spawn tables.
  
• Exclude bots from server list player count.
  
• Menu remote images are hidden until download is finished.
  
• Menu was loading in the wrong order rarely.
  
• Fixed character list on menu not properly populating.
  
• Fixed unable to deselect item by clicking character.
  
• Fixed missing text for server config without display names.
  
• Fixed potential exception when enabling/disabling skins in-game.
  
• Fixed potential exception when player dies partway through shooting.
  
• Fixed potential issues reading corrupted Groups.dat file.
  

Autumn leaves coat the ground, the smell of pumpkin spice lingers in the air, and the turned are roaming the streets... it must be Halloween!



Until November 1st the event is active:

• Spyjack is updating Tales of Terror with new quests, items, and monsters each Thursday leading up to Halloween!
  
• Decorations festoon the towns of official maps, as well as Elver in an update soon.
  
• NPCs are wearing their Halloween costumes.
  

Happy Halloween!

Miscellaneous Changes:

• Accepted several new skins from the curated workshop.
  
• Hosting dedicated servers using the client files has been deprecated since June 2019 and is no longer supported. Please use the standalone dedicated server app instead.
  
• Added Min_Stealth_Radius setting to level asset.
  
• Added helper methods for getting remote address if available.
  
• Added Horizontal_Attack_Range, Horizontal_Vehicle_Attack_Range, and Vertical_Attack_Range animal settings.
  
• Added Spread_Sprint, Spread_Crouch, and Spread_Prone gun settings.
  
• Added Recoil_Sprint, Recoil_Crouch, and Recoil_Prone gun settings.
  
• Converted berry bushes to use spawn tables.
  
• Exclude bots from server list player count.
  
• Menu remote images are hidden until download is finished.
  
• Menu was loading in the wrong order rarely.
  
• Fixed character list on menu not properly populating.
  
• Fixed unable to deselect item by clicking character.
  
• Fixed missing text for server config without display names.
  
• Fixed potential exception when enabling/disabling skins in-game.
  
• Fixed potential exception when player dies partway through shooting.
  
• Fixed potential issues reading corrupted Groups.dat file.