For a long while now we've wanted to make an update to the economy and CWU systems, but something so ambitious would take us a considerably long time. This would lead to us neglecting other suggestions and feedback from the community because we would be too busy with that update, which is something we did not wish to do. For this reason, we have seen fit to put together an assortment of wanted features and complete them in a (somewhat) quick manner before we begin our large project. This way, we can work on our own projects while also satisfying the community's needs. And hence, The Steamroller Update was born!
People often times carry around things that would otherwise be visible without needing to explicitly state that they are carrying them. Examples include stoves, workbenches, liquid tanks, and more. This has now been added in the form of a line of text that shows up when you look at a character — no more stealing stoves in secret.
Up until now, the real name and fake name recognition buttons were merged into one, forcing you to remove your fake name in order to tell somebody your real one, or vice versa. This is no longer the case, as they have been completely separated, making their use easier.
We have added functional Playing Cards! We chose to keep them as simple items instead of building complicated mechanics around them because it would allow players to play a large assortment of card games (Patience, Poker, Rummy, BlackJack, Crazy Eights, and many more) as opposed to being limited to only the ones we add support for. As an added bonus, players can take random cards from the deck, and dropped cards that are facing away from the player will hide their information, as demonstrated in the video above.
There are now actual armband items that show up when you look at a character. We would've loved to do proper models for them, but due to limitations with Source as well as likely clipping issues, we have opted not to do that for the time being. Perhaps something for the future, though.
Before, Cigarette Packs were just items that you used and a cigarette item would be placed in your inventory. It was simple and worked. However, this prevented people from putting back cigarettes (if they wanted to finish them later or just took them out by accident), which took up extra slot space in their inventory. This is no longer the case, as we have converted them into 'bags', similar to the Card Deck mentioned above, albeit restricted to only accept a specific set of items. This allows players to put cigarettes back into the pack, as well as make the experience better in general. We plan to adapt this bag system to more things in the future, like ration packets, and more.
You can now create a 'Scene-Text' that is bound to your character and seen by others above your head wherever you go. This can be used for displaying a continuous action, like pushing around a cart, collecting junk off the ground, or for displaying something that would be immediately noticeable by somebody without needing to read through your description - like a missing limb, for example.
Our Vortigaunt friends have a few more animations to play with!
Players can now create custom counterfeit identity cards. These cards look identical to and are indistinguishable from the real ones, but they cannot be used in any Combine machinery, like the Ration Dispenser, Workshift Terminal, etc.
A while ago we added attribute-based rolls. Now we added skill-based rolls. They work the same way as attributes, but for skills.
As Willard is now running for a full year, we are starting to run into some new issues. One thing is that we don’t always have specific mechanisms in place to clean up things once they are no longer needed. This bloat then causes issues in the form of Lua errors, bad server performance, or even just a shitty user experience.
Returning from i17 to C24 one thing became awfully clear: the C24 slums are littered with containers. In every nook and corner, you can find one. And a good portion of them are unused, the owner is either PK’ed or no longer active. Running the numbers on this, we are spawning in a good 550+ containers, a lot of which also have a second lock entity associated with them. That is a lot of entities being used that we could use for other things.
The absolute metric fuckton of containers currently on the map
So time for a container rework. Not to change how containers work for players, but to make it so admins can actually properly manage containers without too much manual labor. For this, we introduced a new container entity that works basically the same for players but has some big differences under the hood for admins.
First of all, containers now have a type (or a mode, however you want to see it). We added roughly 5 different types, each shown with their own colors to the admins to easily distinguish them:
- Public containers, which are owned by no-one
- Group/faction containers, which are owned by a group or faction
- Private containers, which are owned by a single person
- Note that multiple people can still use them
- PKHOLD, a private container for which the owner got PK’ed and may still have a pending appeal
- Cleanup, for containers that are no longer used and to be removed
All containers get created as a public container and then changed to the other types as needed. When we make changes to these types, we now ensure certain ‘rules’ are enforced. A big example here is that public containers cannot have a password, or that it is mandatory for admins to set the owner of a container (either the character for private containers, or the group/faction name for group/faction containers).
It is mandatory to select a character from the list to make a container private.
Next up we also moved the OOC ownership tracking information of containers into text that only shows to admins in observer. In the past, we had to use the name of the container for this (for the owner’s steam id/character name), but that is no longer the case. Activity is also better tracked and shown to admins here to get a good indication of whether or not a container is in use.
For private containers, some extra features were added. Admins can mark private containers as premium containers now for Galunga-tier subscribers. When their subscription runs out, these automatically become one-way containers where items can only be taken out. Also, a command was added to get a quick and easy overview of all of a player’s private containers across all of his characters. Both are meant to help admins enforce the container limits as stated in the rules, but without putting hard limits in place yet to allow exceptions as needed.
- Public containers do not get automatically cleaned up, but admins are essentially allowed to remove them as needed.
- If anyone wants to keep them, they own them and should ask the type to be set to either group/faction or private. It is possible to have these types without a password on them so they are ‘public’ but with a clear owner.
- Group/faction containers track which characters use them and which of their users get PK’ed or deleted. If there is no active user for the past month, the container gets unlocked and put into cleanup mode.
- Private containers only track the owner character’s activity.
- If the owner goes inactive, the container is soft-deleted: we remove the entity but keep the inventory. Admins can then later restore this inventory if the owner becomes active again.
- Upon a PK or character deletion, the container goes into PKHOLD.
- It is impossible for other characters of the owner to use this container
- PKHOLD containers are essentially locked for a week in which nobody can use them to allow for PK appeals. After the week is over they unlock and go into cleanup mode.
- Cleanup mode containers no longer allow you to put items inside, only to take them out. A notification is also shown to anyone who opens them when the container gets removed. After a week, regardless of if they are empty or not, they get hard-deleted.
Of course, some existing features also needed to be changed for this.
- - The padlock item was made compatible with the new containers and will turn any public container into a private container and allow you to set a password (or allows you to set a password on a private container you already own).
- - Using a padlock on an unlocked group container lets you set its password as well.
- - Changing the container password for private containers was also updated so the owner can easily change it via the context menu.
- - The ‘Check Owner’ context menu option was added to the new containers.
What is next with this? Well, this update has been live on the server for a good 2 weeks already. Some new containers have already been set up using the new system and some have already been converted. This was to test the stability and finish up all the little details that go into this. We’re finally at a point where we are ready to roll this out to all containers. So we will begin converting containers (there already is a tool to make this relatively painless to do) one by one. And any containers that are left after a given period we will remove as the owner is inactive.
The Steamroller Update comes with an assortment of bug fixes, including but not limited to:
- Your character's legs now properly update when you change clothes.
- Fixed an item duplication bug.
- Image Panels should no longer flicker as much when viewed from further away.
- Patched a storage exploit.
- Fixed paper angles breaking during restarts.
- Patched some smuggler exploits.
- Fixed healing in S2K.
- Death Refunds should now be more reliable.
- Fixed a character unloading error.
- Removed the ability to load infinite ammunition.
- Other small bug fixes.
- - Donators can now place down additional scene texts.
- - Zippo Lighters can now be refilled using alcohol.
- - Combine Lock Buster alerts are now more subtle.
- - Players can no longer use entities while holding the Physics Gun.
- - Players can now change their writing font at will through the /ChangeHandwriting command.
- - Pizza can now be shared.
- - Added new 'Rave' drug.
- - Water Bottles have a new 'Drink Till Quenched' option, allowing players to drink exactly as much water as they need in order to satisfy their thirst.
- - Text can now be selected and copied (with right click) from writing items (books, papers, notepads, and newspapers).
- - Drug Status will no longer appear if one's identity is concealed.
- - Some uniform outfits can now equip filters without the need for additional gas mask items.
- - Added Binoculars.
- - Added new languages (Serbian, Turkish, Romanian, Filipino).
- - Limited certain chat classes from being used out of turn during TBC.
- - CPs & OTA now drop items on death.
- - Added loot crates.
- - Added new CP & OTA voice lines.
- - Transaction logs have been restricted to CCA characters.
- - Combine Lock activity no longer shows up in the Stabilization Readout.
- We believe that we have made some good progress toward implementing community suggestions this past month. We are adding new features and squashing bugs while also slowly starting to do some cleanup on the back-end to improve performance and stability. We will now be mainly focusing our efforts on the next big update, which will include many changes to how workshifts are done, as well as introducing a proper, dynamic economy to the server, as well as Part 2 of the Model Update, which will introduce a lot more character customization (even some that you may not expect). Look forward to it, it's going to be good.
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