unitystation

September '19 - Bounty Report

Added 2019-10-01 04:18:47 +0000 UTC

A quick update for the month of September:

Networking:

The first week was spent replacing the networking layer in unity from UNET (Unity's depreciated networking layer) with Mirror (an open source community maintained net library). This allows us to upgrade the game engine itself to newer versions and should make short work of the bugs that were initially caused by UNET itself.

Sprites Refactor:

Bod9001 has put in a huge effort over the past few months to refactor the way sprites/textures are stored and handled in the game itself.

The changes at a glance:

Sprites have been separated from the original texture sheets found in the TG source code and have all been categorized and placed in relevant folders along with their animation meta data
Each sprite used in the game itself is then added to about 6 large atlas sheets using Unity's built in texture packer
Changing to this new approach has significantly reduced the draw call rate in the game itself (from between 160/260 calls down to 60/80) which leads to higher fps
Replacing sprites is now as simple as dropping the new sprite in and pressing play in the editor. This will make it easy for forks to start customizing right away.

Other Additions:

Moses added the body bags to medbay so the corpses of the dead are not left out to stink up the hall ways
Chairbender added the ability to mine plasma from rocks found on the asteroids
Bod9001 cleaned outpost station map in preparation for the alpha release
YotaXP added the ability to use the right click radial menu on inventory items

Other then that most of this month was spent on getting Mirror integrated and ironing out networking bugs.

Next month we should start seeing some of the NPC AI work being completed along with the Game Mode system and an improved HUB for the server browsing.

October will be the last month that we focus on features after which we will be spending one or two months on bug fixing and polishing before we launch the public alpha version!

Thanks to all for the support.

- Doobly

p.s. The video above was created by foma