Unturned News

Support for switching between the older (IMGUI) and newer (uGUI) HUD implementations has been added. This is intended for players experiencing visual artifacts and flickering with uGUI until an engine fix is available, or if you really prefer the old one. Note that some menus like crafting and the inventory behave slightly differently between the two. If you would like to use the old HUD:

1. Right-click Unturned in your Steam library
2. Click "Properties..."
3. Click "Select Launch Options..."
4. Add "-Glazier=IMGUI" without quotes

Click here to read further details.

Added:

• Command-line option (-Glazier=IMGUI) to use IMGUI rather than uGUI.
  
• Button on server info screen to view workshop item details.
  
• Kick messages for the different lost position in queue reasons.
  
• Negative color option for UIs which used red.
  
• Noto Sans Thai font for Thai players.
  

Changed:

• Improved scaling of in-game map menu at higher resolutions.
  
• Moved first-person light source (e.g. headlamp) to camera position.
  

Fixed:

• Scroll wheel handling while mouse is over inventory grid.
  
• Crawling prone underwater into a slanted surface entering swimming stance.
  
• Exception when chat message was received while loading.
  
• Unable to reload assets after exiting level editor.
  
• Async image downloads dirtying pooled images.
  
• Async item icon capture dirtying pooled images.
  
• Exception when alt-tabbing while re-joining singleplayer.
  
• Delay when rapidly selecting items in inventory.
  

Edit: a bug with cooldowns when changing stances was introduced in the update. Previously there was a 0.75 second cooldown on standing up, i.e. you could go prone, stand up and then go prone again before hitting the cooldown. After the update this cooldown was accidentally applied when going prone/crouching as well. In the patch this has been fixed, the cooldown has been decreased to 0.5 seconds, and the server-side handling of crouch/prone inputs was improved to feel more responsive.

This update aims to address the feedback following the patches to the HUD update last week.

One of the major points was text legibility. In large part because the softer shadows could make it appear blurry. The shadowing has been revised, and much of the UI has been adjusted to only use them where necessary, for example on colored text and against colorful backdrops where the contrast is needed. Otherwise menus have been reworked to contrast with the text without shadows, and colored text usage has been reduced in favor of other indicators like disabling buttons.

Performance was another big concern, so there have been a lot of optimizations to the UIs that were causing hitches. As an example opening a storage locker with hundreds of items in IMGUI could spawn all of the UIs in a single frame because there was no overhead, whereas with uGUI there is a lot of setup required - to mitigate this there are a certain number of item UIs created per frame now, and all of the components needed (e.g. images, text, buttons) are recycled between usage (pooled) to reduce the setup time - this extends to all the UIs in the game.





danaby2 released an update to Elver with decorations, new quests, items, and more! Click here to read the update notes.

Throughout the winter holidays each level is sporting some seasonal decorations. In particular PEI is temporarily covered in snow. Gifts containing high-tier weaponry can be found under christmas trees on official maps, and the NPCs have donned their santa hats.



Added:

• Per-storage horizontal inventory scrollbar.
  
• Light theme only color preference for rarity backdrops.
  
• Option for custom text shadow color.
  
• Accepted a few new skins from the curated workshop.
  

Changed:

• Revised text coloring and contrast throughout UI.
  
• Improved scaling of inventory grid sprites.
  
• Optimized creating and destroying basic UI elements by pooling them.
  
• Optimized initialization of UI components before reparenting them.
  
• Improved performance opening large storage by time-slicing the item UI creation.
  
• Improved nearby inventory performance by time-slicing the refresh.
  
• Text chat entry field uses color preference rather than admin/gold colors.
  
• Loading screen bar uses foreground color preference rather than difficulty color.
  

Fixed:

• Hide menus off-screen for a single frame when they are enabled to hide uGUI activation artifacts.
  
• Second line of Chinese text in chat being truncated.
  
• Right-clicking outside item popup box now closes the popup.
  
• Several straggling hotkeys triggering while typing in text fields.
  
• Plugin UIs visible while finishing loading.
  
• Pooled UI list using cached viewport height causing a hitch after big data change.
  
• Exception in UI when picking up destroyed items.
  
• Hitch after death caused by skills menu refresh.
  
• Exception updating item icon after item was destroyed.
  
• Potential negative explosion damage multiplier.
  
• Right-click highlight for buttons.
  
• Removing entries from spawn tables editor.
  
• Vertical offset of drowning status icon.
  
• Buildable attachment to train carriages.
  
• Pressing escape to cancel pending chat message.
  
• Swapping items of different slot types within grid.
  

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.