Gestures Update

Gestures

You can now express yourself with a new selection of gestures, available to everyone in a simple popup menu during gameplay. Just press B (by default) to open the menu and look at your options. These new gestures have been built to be used in first person, so you get nicely animated hand movements instead of just seeing your shadow gesture. This new system for gestures is a bit more flexible than the old system, and it has already supports some future features like looping animations and third person gestures.

A core goal of this new gesture system was reducing as much risk as possible when using them during tense gameplay. Gestures will now no longer unequip your weapon and can be cancelled at any point, with a small (~0.2s) delay before your weapon is fireable again. Feel free to wave at your victims when roof camping!

Fun fact: these gestures are all left-handed because they were initially meant to be used while holding the weapon at the same time (which is generally in the right hand), however we felt it limited our future options for gestures - clapping with one hand is tricky.

As we felt that the quality of the legacy gestures weren't up to scratch compared to these new animations, we've made the decision to remove support for playing the old gestures. You can however still bind these new gestures using the same commands/keybinds if you don't want to use the gesture wheel.

Poker Tables

We've added Poker Tables to Bandit Town this month, completing our casino barge overhaul that we started last month. You'll find a variety of tables supporting anywhere from two to six players.

Deposit at least 100 scrap to the storage at your seat to get started. Once you're in a game, use the button prompts on the right of the screen to play. Standard Texas Hold 'Em rules apply. Be sure to take your winnings at the end of your session!

While in a poker game you'll have access to a poker chat window for you to chat with your fellow players, and you can also use your mic.

Server Optimizations

We've made a variety of optimisations on the server to improve performance when lots of players are online:

• Floating junkpiles will no longer process buoyancy if no players are nearby

• Better balanced server load when lots of turrets are scanning for targets

• Upgraded SQLite and removed lots of GC allocations in the connector code

• Update Facepunch.Steamworks with buffer pooling for swnet (Steam Networking only)

• Rewrite NetWrite to have less CPU overhead

• Add caching to TechTreeData since it could cause short CPU spikes on the server

• Got rid of some small GC allocations that happened every frame

Slot Machines

The Slot Machines we added to Bandit Town proved popular last month, but I wanted to make some changes to make it a more interesting experience. I've rebalanced the payout scale to have fewer possible rewards, but the chance of getting a proper payout (three matching symbols) should be much higher than before. The majority of scrap payed out last month was via the wildcard symbols which felt a bit unexciting.

I've also added a multiplier option, so you can increase your bet and multiply your winnings accordingly. You can change the multiplier on a machine when depositing your scrap. Be sure to check the spin cost before spinning on a new machine!