Got a few questions and a statement for the core SDG team:
1)
With the recent tree and stacking commissions/collabs, I’ve been wondering something. What’s SDG’s opinion on commissioning some coders to optimize/fix stuff like the netcode?
I’d suggest that Nelson himself go back and optimize the code but he really should be doing the other projects y’all are working on (updates, the new curation system, open sourcing, etc) and isn’t exactly an amazing coder. I personally feel like the best thing to do would be to hire/commission some coders (even just 1) to optimize the old code, but I’d love to hear what you think about it
2)
On another note, has there been any discussions about hiring a marketing person? One of the biggest issues I’ve seen with the game is that it isn’t promoted anywhere. Basically nobody knows that this game still exists. The only outreach we have is YouTubers, which can only do so much
Statement)
I understand that y’all want to keep SDG small and don’t want to become managers, but the game really needs help whether it be more commissioned work or more SDG employees. We’ve reached a dangerous low and need something to get new or old players back onto the game. The reputable player count is now below 2k and is only dropping
Considering increased requests from the community lately regarding performance, we have increased priority of that work. The next update has a lot of nice improvements including:
Grouping foliage instances until the maximum instancing batch size is reached (particularly useful with sparse instances like flowers, or at lower foliage quality).
Eliminating some wasteful memory allocation in the netcode (replacing all lambda functions with a separate callback and user data parameter).
More efficient physics material custom data lookups which has helped vehicle wheel performance quite a bit.
When rewriting old systems (e.g., the upcoming crafting update) we’re typically able to significantly improve performance. Many features touched by this have seen a speed up: from searching the inventory for items, to evaluating blueprints, to refreshing the crafting UI.
Although we don’t currently have any coding commissions lined up, it’s not necessarily out of the picture. We’re not 100% sure about handling code contributions once the code is available, but it’s possible we’ll be able to work something out there—we’ve previously received some performance-related suggestions through our GitHub Issues.
Marketing
Ideally, we’d like for the content to speak for itself and be worthy of word-of-mouth marketing. I.e., “build it and they will come.” (Not to mention advertising is extremely expensive!) That said, it’s understandable that bug fixes, QoL improvements, and features intended for use by WIP custom maps aren’t drawing anyone in. Some of our plans for the future in this area include:
Restoring more focus to vanilla. Improving the base game experience will hopefully benefit more players, and potentially interest new and returning players alike.
Updating our marketing materials and online presence. We intend to create an Unturned website to promote the game separately from the SDG website (updating the SDG website to be more-so about our company). Including a photo gallery with submissions from the screenshot contest!
Player Count
We’ve seen the player count vary a lot over the years, including similar levels back in late 2014 and in early 2019. We’ve heard anecdotally that the BattleMetrics tracker isn’t catching servers using Fake IP, but haven’t verified this. Ultimately, we’re in this for the long haul, we’re optimistic about our future plans and the maps releasing this year (e.g., Limestone), and will keep putting in our best.
I think you shouldn’t be focused on word of mouth advertising. The game is hard to get into I have tried to play with some friends who hadn’t played the game before and they just got frustrated with some of the weird systems. Not to mention how the vanilla and curated maps differ in progression, vanilla and curated maps can feel like different games at some point. I’m not sure how you feel optimistic seeing as how the latest curated map was practically DOA and you’ve screwed over most if not all of your talented developers.
The “word of mouth” I’ve seen lately is just unturned videos that do not depict gameplay of a standard full vanilla servers and videos focusing on an update for a map (even as misleading to the point where I see fan-made reworks of a map being promoted as actual official updates to the official map. i.e Arid Reborn and Arid+)
The game is KNOWN about from my various conversations with people outside of unturned (i.e Games Unite or the various artists I’ve met on twitter), but as far as I am concerned, no-one really plays it.
From what I understand, Arid doesn’t have its curated status anymore and the people who made it no longer do stuff for this game. A certain server network I used to play on always had the majority of its players on Arid, it had plenty of people even late into the night. With the developers departing from the game and other people picking up their torch, the server swapped Arid to Arid Reborn and people stayed (I won’t be surprised if the switch was due to the public’s demand), so in that regard I do treat these new maps as an update of sorts. I never really played Arid so maybe I’m not to judge, idk.
I would like to see an increase in performance on the CPU side, as the game doesn’t seem that GPU intensive and I don’t really see a reason for the heavy intensity on the CPU side. Maybe you could look into that when Unity 7 comes out with the unified rendering pipeline. Looking forward to that, might give me a reason to get back into the game again.
On another note, I would like to see you, Nelson, personally make a map from scratch with new assets that you design. I know you don’t have that much time on your hands anymore and are trying to involve the community more through the commissions, but I would like to see the vanilla artstyle come back with more vanilla assets (that shouldn’t be a problem, since multithreaded loading was introduced) and maybe some new mechanics. When you make a map or a mod, you often can get frustrated with the limitations or the bad performance of the game and you either have to use a workaround or just accept the bad performance, so you personally experiencing those issues might help you understand the position of modders and mappers better. This could be a chance for you to connect more with the community and maybe introduce some new features, like you did for Russia for example with the Anastasia mod hooks or something in that direction.