11/2 - Foundations Update

Today, we’re excited to introduce the long awaited **Foundations Update**! During the past couple of months, we’ve spent a lot of time rearchitecting NervBox’s core systems, from building the next generation of our player ragdoll to streamlining the netcode and interaction systems. These changes have been made with the goal of addressing player pain points and performance challenges while laying the groundwork for many future improvements and content additions.

The next-gen ragdoll has an all-new avatar and hand poses, plus improvements to animations and the muscle simulation system. It runs faster and smoother while also being easier for us to work with and tune. The new flexibility of these systems paves the way for highly requested features such as, player-to-player grabbing, custom avatars, and much much more. It’s still a work in progress (notably the legs and movement core need some more love), so please let us know what you think and expect a whole lot of changes in the near future!

In addition to the reworked ragdoll, we’re introducing a new cornerstone feature: **The Sandbox Gun**. The sandbox gun will be players’ primary multitool going forward; the plan is to introduce more modes and functionality over time and to have it serve as the portal to modded content in the future. This is only the first version and we’re excited to see what you are all able to do with it!

These 2 major features are just the tip of the iceberg with this update and we’re excited to see what new things you'll achieve!

As per usual, make sure you check out our roadmap so you can follow along with what we’re currently working on and what we plan on doing next: https://trello.com/b/EZ9qQMyu/nervbox-roadmap If you have any questions, feedback, bug reports, or suggestions, or just want to chat and hang out, join our discord! https://discord.gg/EkRXj9YxXD

Hope you enjoy this update!

-Quantum Lion Labs Team

Changenotes

Player

• New avatar model and shaders.

• Handposes have been redone for every item.

• Entire upper body is now fully articulated. This allows for more natural twisting and swinging with punches, ensures accurate collisions, improves aim feel and more.

• Arm and hand physics reworked.

  • Hands now attempt to reach the controllers with more realistic forces throughout the arm.

  • Inertia tensor compensation is now applied to the entire arm, this should improve how melee

  weapons feel and behave.

• Added a new virtual controller aiming system to replace the legacy system.

  • This now can override tracking data to improve aiming comfort and feel.

  • Held weapons when released with their primary hands will keep their offsets.

  • Gun Slides now no longer move the weapon around.

  • This will continue to improve over time. Expect softer grabbing, shouldering, and more.

• Greatly improved player death ragdolls

• Adjusted how height-scaling works.

• Smoothed out player teleportation which solves players launching on respawn.

• Rewrote climbing sensors; to initiate a mantle, have both arms extended, and push down.

• Fixed players glitching in shopping carts.

• Player synchronization improvements.

• Improved player leg representation.

• Minor improvements to player animation.

• Grip Squeeze for Index Controllers is now factored into grab logic.

• Re-worked body slots inserting, removing and sync.

• Moved hip-holsters to underneath armpits. Magazines are still accessible from anywhere.

• Fixed death related crashes.

• Improved jumping height control.

• Added hand swapping logic to various grips, smaller objects can now no longer be held with two hands if unrealistic (magazines, knife).

• Adjusted IK targets and controller targets.

• Adjusted weapon offsets to better align weapons with controllers for aiming.

• Players now automatically stand upon spawning if playing seated.

• Many other changes internally to help with stability and future expansion of player capabilities.

Sandbox Gun

Press and hold the Y or X button while holding the Sandbox Gun to open the radial menu, then release the button to choose a mode. Within a mode, press the Y or X button again to change different behaviors, since as freezing held objects, or creating different types of joints. There are currently 4 modes:

Spawn Mode:

Pressing the Y or X button will open the spawn menu, where can select and spawn in any item from the vending machine, anytime, anywhere.

Despawn Mode:

Made a mess? Want to start from scratch? Simply use the despawn mode and pull the trigger to delete objects.

Joint Mode:

We’ve noticed that players love building using the weld gun and wanted to expand upon that, so we’ve added several different types of joints to play with.

• Linear Joint: A joint that keeps the two objects together within a certain distance, but they are free to rotate.

• Weld Joint: A joint that locks two objects together, just like the weld gun.

• Spring Distance Joint: A springy joint that keeps two objects together via springs, allowing for some bounce movement.

• Position Locked Joint: A joint that locks two objects together, but allows free rotation between them.

• Rotation Locked Joint: A joint that locks two objects together, but allows free movement between them.

• Velocity Locked Joint: A joint that mimics a retractable leash.

• Delete Joint: Deletes the nearest joint.

Telekinetic Mode:

• Pick up, throw, and align any physics object!

• Press the Y or X button to freeze/unfreeze an object upon release.

We plan to further expand upon the Sandbox Gun’s feature set and further improve ease of movement with manipulating objects.

Items/Interaction

• Added Desert Eagle

• Replaced Model 12 with Nova

• Added Katar

• Fixed gun collision with body occasionally getting lost upon releasing weapon with secondary hand.

• Fixed magazines sometimes colliding with the arms or body when being inserted.

• Fixed magazine pouches occasionally spawning two magazines instead of one.

• Added a degree of looseness to held objects. Things like rifles should now be more comfortable to aim.

Levels

• Improved Main Menu and Empty World grid visual to remove uncomfortable aliasing.

Networking

• Object sync now takes velocity into account for smoother movement.

• Object sync has been reworked to feel more responsive for objects held by other players.

• Other players now look and move better, and now no longer glitch after longer play sessions.