[PC] Scraps: Modular vehicle combat

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Edit December 2020: Scraps is now complete and out of Early Access.​

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I've been posting in a DevLog thread for years now, but it's time to show Scraps here because

☞☛Scraps is now available on Steam Early Access☚☜​

Yes it's still Early Access, but I've been working on this game for coming up near three years now - it's pretty solid as-is, I just have more still to add.

Early Access Release Trailer:

Scraps is a vehicle combat game where you build your vehicle from parts from the chassis up. Most parts are functional in some way (power, cooling, engines etc), and often inter-dependent (like weapons will require power and/or heat management), but I've also tried to keep things fairly simple. You don't have to wire up components or do anything too fiddly. It's more like building vehicles out of Lego, except you can actually drive them at the end and the pieces actually work.



There's also a heavy physics basis with weight distribution being a big factor and weapon recoil being a notable point to manage.



Gameplay is your typical melee deathmatch sort of thing, where you get x amount (chosen by the host) to spend on your vehicle. During a match you can also collect wreckage and use it to repair/upgrade your vehicle in-game by using an Evac Pad - so it's possible to build a vehicle worth more than your starting allowance, although purchase and repair costs slowly increase as your total worth increases to prevent a snowball effect. If you die, you can respawn with any vehicle worth up to the initial scrap allowance.

There's single-player against AI, Internet play (and it's easy for anyone to create a server that'll show up in the global list), and LAN. The Scraps demo is also a LAN joiner, so people can join your LAN game even if they don't own the full game.

Scraps History

Way back in the 90s I played a bunch of Interstate '76, and I loved how you could customise the weapon loadout and various components of your car and it all really made a difference. Later I played a demo of Lego Racers, and you could totally build your car from the ground up, but I was disappointed that it didn't have much of an effect on the car's performance. It was a step up in customisation but a step down from Interstate '76 and the other sweet demo I had of Stratosphere: Conquest Of The Skies in terms of meaningful build choices.

What I really wanted was a game where you designed your whole vehicle and the parts really mattered - and no-one was making it. Roboforge showed that building your own fighting machines was doable back in 2001, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. Finally in 2012 I had a good opportunity to just start making it myself.

Things have taken a while (I'm making this mostly on my own), and in the meantime vehicle building games have started to pop up everywhere. When I started there was Kerbal Space Program, there was Rawbots (RIP), there was Gimbal, but nothing recent with road vehicles except maybe Gear Up. Now there's Robocraft, TerraTech, Besieged... but Scraps has kept chugging along and now it's really looking pretty solid and a lot like what I always wanted it to be.






"Looks like Robocraft"

This comment is getting more and more common to the point where I know a comparison is going to be asked for sooner rather than later. You may like to try Scraps vs. Robocraft if you'd like to:

* Pay once and get everything rather than the free-to-play model.
* Host your own Internet or LAN games.
* Play against AI.
* Focus more on functional parts and less on building and rebuilding with basic blocks.
* Employ deeper strategy in part choices, with interdependent parts (a weapon might also require power or cooling, for instance).
* Repair and upgrade your vehicle in-game, using scavenged wreckage.
* Put multiple weapon types on your vehicle at once (and they'll all automatically adjust their movement ranges to avoid shooting your own vehicle).
* Have a more detailed physics system. Want to build a vehicle that moves by firing its guns backwards?
* Play a more traditional deathmatch-style game, in the spirit of games like Interstate '76 or Twisted Metal.
* Ram vehicles and do collision damage (without needing a special melee weapon).
* Respawn with a different vehicle design at any time during a match.

Robocraft is cool though, and I'm sure they have their own things they do better. Scraps is definitely not as polished as Robocraft since they have 10x the team I do: I have someone who does the AI and helped with the Internet connectivity, but the rest I'm doing on my own. If you like one game though you'll probably like the other.

Links and stuff

Official site.
TIGSource Devlog that's been going since Dec 2012, if you want to see more history.
Steam store page
Direct Steam app link (opens in Steam)

 

I think this is the first footage of the Internet multiplayer on YouTube:

Gives a decent idea of things, although he only uses the laser weapons.

Edit: Nice video with a bigger vehicle:

 

I've got a plan for improving the scoring system, but I'm also interested in any feedback on why my plan is actually terrible: http://steamcommunity.com/app/350150/discussions/0/535151589889915571

Also, here's a preview of the AI destroying me in low-gravity mode, which is coming in the next update:

 

Nice job mate. Never realised you were a kiwi!

My AI is always destroying my vehicles. its awesome and annoying at the same time. ha

 

Wondering why there's not a Linux release available on steam, I would have definitely purchased it. I've never had to do anything special with my games to get them to work on Linux when developing with Unity, so I'm just wondering if it's something you didn't do because you didn't know if it would work / wasn't tested, or if you had issues / just didn't do it.

If you need someone to test I'll be more than happy to run it for you.

-- Ubuntu Server 14.0x LTS
-- NVidia 750 Ti 4GB graphics.
-- AMD 5800k 4-core 4.4GHz processor.

 

Scraps v0.5.1.0 is up. You can now get assist points for helping to destroy a vehicle so "kill stealing" is less of an issue. I've been thinking about potentially more complex solutions that would also help direct gameplay (as I linked a few posts up), but this should help for now.

There's also a new Low Gravity game modifier that you can select and apply to any game, and for the next 24 hours or so I'm also running an official Low Gravity game server (the LOW GRAVITY ZONE).



Full changelog:

2015-07 - 0.5.1.0
- Add Low Gravity game option.
- Added "assist" points for score and XP.
- Redesigned SMG to give it a little left/right movement.
- Balance: Increased engine efficiency multiplier a little. Cars with multiple engines will get a little faster.
- Balance: For Laser and Tesla, see Bug Fixes.
- Balance: Reduced Plasma rotate speed.
- Balance: Reduced Plasma and Large Cannon fire rates a little.
- Balance: Reduced container scrap capacity slightly from 2100 to 2000.
- Weapon damage spread stats look bigger, but the calculation has changed, and things now get knocked around a bit less in general.
- Some improvement for "teleporting" at high latency in multiplayer.
- Re-wrote the modal overlay (loading screen) system to poll state instead of reference count. I knew reference counting would be bug prone and lo, it was.
- Chat stays up a bit longer (you can always see recent chat by pressing T as well).
- Chat text and the round timer on the Build screen don't get in the way of each other quite so much.
- Updated fan translations for Russian, Swedish and Danish, and added a new French translation.
- AI players get a little (AI) designation by their name, and their full difficulty setting info on the leaderboard.
- Some changes to collision damage calculations.
- Started putting full-stops at the end of changelog entries.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed laser and Tesla weapons only draining half the stated power, and laser also doing half damage. Balanced their stats a little after fixing.
- Remove some minor light halo effects due to an old, old Unity engine bug. Thought I had a workaround but apparently not in every situation.
- Fixed player scores not resetting between rounds.
- Fixed scrap and round length settings not applying if the field was still active when Deploy was clicked.
- End Of Round chat font now matches the in-game chat font.
- Fixed minor text misalignment on chat.
- Fixed server list jumping around in the background while entering a password.

It's mostly working, but a few things don't carry across to Linux perfectly, especially when you're doing things in batch mode (for dedicated servers). There's a crash in particular that only occurs on Linux that I need to sort out. Once the Windows version is looking decent and people can see I do regular updates etc, I'll be looking back at the Mac and Linux support - it is coming soon. And the multiplayer is cross-platform as well (Win/Mac/Linux players can all join the same game).

 

New update, v0.5.1.2, brings a new aiming mode which is now the default, where selected weapons will only fire if they're aiming near where you're aiming.



You can press R to switch the mode on and off. It's super useful for vehicles with weapons facing in different directions, and actually pretty useful for any type of vehicle (except ones with no weapons...).

This update also adds score multipliers that come from destroying vehicles without getting destroyed. At the top left you'll see a "x2" etc after destroying vehicles (up to a maximum x3) - if you destroy someone when you're at x2 for instance, you'll get double points.

Basically the idea is to add some incentive to try and stay alive and repair/upgrade when damaged, versus the alternative of self-destructing. Although self-destruct loses you a point and potentially gives a point to someone else, the extra time spent on the Build screen not earning points sometimes offsets that alone. In the future I'm also planning to make repairing able to automatically add back parts that have been destroyed, which should speed up time spent on the build screen a little. Anyway, it's fun to try and stay alive and kicking.

The multiplier system will quite possibly need some tweaking for balance - I'll see how it goes.

Full changelog:

2015-08 - 0.5.1.2
- Added "proximity firing" mode, now on by default. Sets weapons to fire only if they're aiming near the crosshair. Press R to switch.
- Added score multipliers for "killstreaks" - destroying multiple vehicles without being destroyed.
- Changed the assist points system a little in regards to vehicles that destroy themselves.
- Some general wreckage balancing. Also made wreckage easier to pick up.
- Sped up aim around in chase cam camera mode.
- Made game camera always default to the orbit cam on entering a new game. Having the camera save its setting only really caused confusion.
- Balance: Increased collision damage a little.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a bug with terrain dirt FX.

 

I haven't been making a post for each small update but I've made a few recently:

2015-08 - 0.5.1.5 and 0.5.1.6
- Revamped collision damage calculations.

2015-08 - 0.5.1.4
- XP earned now syncs with Steam Cloud.
- Edited a default vehicle and added a new one.



- More minor weapon balancing.
- Maybe a little fewer crazy physics events when colliding with laggy vehicles (there's still SOME crazy physics, but I've been experimenting).
- Removed the old screenshot code - Steam supports this anyway with F12.

2015-08 - 0.5.1.3
- Multiplayer work that should make things generally smoother and improve "teleporting" laggy vehicles.
- Stopped vehicle damage sounds playing when setting initial health on vehicles when joining games.
- "Proximity firing" mode isn't the default anymore, but made the keys to switch it show in the GUI.
- Sped up unlock progress a little again.
- Some minor weapon balancing.
- Updated "how to play" screens with the proximity firing mode key.

Expect new parts in the next serious update: Full turret versions of the MMG and Medium Cannon and a non-turret version of the Large Cannon.

 

It’s been suggested to me that the name “Scraps” on its own is not very searchable. Despite the fact the Google loves to return me Scraps game related results, I’m very much inclined to agree. I must concede that Google certainly knows I search for Scraps the game a lot, and other types of scrap… never.

Therefore Scraps shall henceforth officially include a subtitle: Scraps: Modular Vehicle Combat.



Please remain calm in this time of change. A rose by any other name and all that.

 

Made a video of the Scraps Godlike AI being awesome in low-grav mode:

 

Incidentally what networking solution did you use?

 

Scraps uses uLink, with Steamworks for the Internet play connections. I'm not sure if I'd recommend uLink now: It's been good to use but it's also been quite a while since the creators last updated it. It moves very slowly.

Currently working on full-turret versions of the MMG and Medium Cannon and a non-turret version of the Large Cannon.

 

Yeah I was looking at uLink when I initially started thinking about MP, but that was quite some time ago. I like the idea behind ulink, but if the updates are a bit slow, Ill have to consider alternatives.

Cheers

 

It's been a couple of weeks since the last update so I'd like to show what's going on, even though there's about a week remaining until the next update.

Large chassis:


Updated turret (full Y-axis rotation) versions of the MMG and Medium Cannon, and a non-turret version of the Large Cannon (cheaper, more snap points):


Plus game performance work. Objects made up of lots of smaller parts, many doing their own movement (turrets etc), all of which need to be able to detect hits individually and operate with appropriate physics has always been a bit of a challenge. I've worked out some potential tricks recently, and learnt a couple of others from people who are better wizards than I. Working on implementing that magic now.

Mac and Linux people, I have not forgotten you. I am putting a tentative release date for the Mac and Linux versions of Scraps at September 29th. Getting all that working perfectly will be the focus after this next update goes out next weekend.

 

Scraps version 0.5.2.0 is now live on Steam. I'll go into some more detail but here's the changelog first:

0.5.2.0
- Added full turret versions of the MMG and Medium Cannon, and a semi-fixed version of the Large Cannon. Balanced other weapons to match.
- Added Large Chassis.
- Some in-game CPU performance improvement, particularly for vehicles with many parts.
- Major in-game GPU performance improvement.
- Switched from DirectX9 to DirectX11.
- Increased max scrap limits a little (40,000->50,000 for 8 players. Select less Max Players for more).
- Build screen inventory shows a little icon next to turrets (weapons with full y-axis rotation).
- Small and Large sizes for the Proximity Firing mode.
- Made the spinning camera effect in menus much slower (it hurt some people's heads).
- Increased max suspension spring value by 25%.
- Darker shadows.
- More outlines on stuff.
- By popular request, leaderboard now only shows while the key (~ by default) is held.
- Background music for Round End and Game End screens.
- Other minor audio changes.
- Changed the angle calculation for projectile weapon trails - looks more "correct" when shot from moving vehicles.
- Added something to the Test Map?
Bug Fixes:
- In-game messages now show the correct amount of points a player earned from destroying another vehicle.
- Fixed weapon "can't fire" sound playing too much.

Weapons and Large Chassis







The new turret versions of the MMG and Medium Cannon can rotate fully around if the space is available, but cost a bit more. They should help in the early game against opponents who've unlocked other turret weapons. The semi-fixed version of the Large Cannon is cheaper and a little stronger.

One minor note: Currently in the "same type" weapon link mode, all the weapons are considered as different, whereas I'm sure it'd be better to have normal and turret types of the same weapon linked together. I'll change that in an update tomorrow.

Performance

The other major work in this update was on performance (check the changelog above for all the other, minor stuff).

I learned some graphics magic and implemented that to drastically reduce draw calls on the GPU, and graphics performance is now much improved. You might get a framerate that's improved 50% or more in some cases.

In fact GPU performance has got so much better, that the game is now often heavily CPU bound when dealing with complex vehicles with lots of weapons, mainly because of all the physics work. I also did some physics optimisation in this update, but it's not as drastic as the graphics improvement. I've pretty much optimised things as far as I can for now, and the next big step might be upgrading to Unity 5, since it's supposed to have that improved physics performance. Unfortunately before I update the game to Unity 5 I need to write a custom wheel collider (or buy someone else's one), because the built-in wheel colliders have changed completely and can't work well with Scraps anymore.

Graphics Batching

A few technical details here, particularly for Unity devs. The graphics improvement came from being able to combine more vehicle parts.

You guys will probably know that static 3D models - things that never move at all - can be marked as Static and get automatically batched by the graphics engine. Separate meshes, as long as they use the same material with the same shader, can be combined into one draw call, which means less work for the graphics card (although I'm no expert on how this stuff works exactly).

All parts on Scraps vehicles use the same material. All the part textures are baked into one big texture atlas image (think like the Minecraft texture file, but much bigger), and data in the vertices of the parts themselves determines whether they're shiny or dull, or damaged, or hot - allowing the whole thing to use the same single shader.

But that's not enough to get batching working on its own. Unity can do a small amount of "dynamic batching" - batching for objects that aren't Static - but its limit is only a few hundred polygons. One vehicle part has a few hundred already.

On the Build screen, your vehicle is always made up of the individual parts that you've placed. But one thing I was already doing is taking all the parts on a vehicle that don't move (I mean, the whole vehicle moves, but those parts all move together with it) and combining them into one big combined mesh when you entered a game. Having one combined mesh is the final tipping point to getting everything batched and reducing the draw calls. (When parts get destroyed I zero the appropriate ones out.)

That helped, but I couldn't combine anything that moved on its own, like weapon turrets and spinning fans, and there was still a lot of that.

Here's the trick. Unity devs, listen up, because I know there are others out there searching for the same powers I was searching for. Even batching stuff on the Asset Store often does less than this.

You can combine everything, and have the GPU do the transforms directly on the vertices of the parts that move to put them wherever they need to be. Create one model and change the model as you go. You could write a shader to do it, but you don't even have to, because Unity has built-in support for it. Ever used SkinnedMeshRenderer to animate something with bones? The transforms of the separate moving vehicle parts can be the bones! The Unify Wiki even has an example of how to do the conversion!

So now I combine everything, and it's real fast. There is a little bit of overhead in doing the transforms: People with DirectX11 or newer cards, you'll be doing it on the GPU (Devs, check your Player settings for the checkboxed to enable this and DX11 mode). Those with DX9 or DX10 cards will be doing it on the CPU. But it's a small amount of extra work either way compared to the gains in total performance.

Please use these powers responsibly.

What's Coming

For the next few weeks I'll be working on the Mac and Linux versions, with a plan to hopefully release those publicly on the 28th or 29th of this month. I'll be seeing how crazy or sane that deadline actually is in the next couple of days as I start testing on those platforms again.

I'm also aware that the multiplayer has gone quiet recently. I always feel especially sorry for that lone person on a server when the stats read 1/8 (sometimes I join for a few minutes ). I've been doing what I can with both some paid and unpaid marketing, and I have more to do, but the best thing I can really continue to do now is make the game as good as possible.

So the next major thing I'm currently planning to focus on after the Mac and Linux releases will be some expanded single-player content. I have a plan but I won't elaborate on that just now. That way even if things don't pick up multiplayer-wise there'll be more fun single-player stuff to do, so you shouldn't miss out too much either way.

Of course there's already the AI (and you can always Multiplayer -> Internet -> Host A Game with AI to play against, that's open to humans to join as well), and the Scraps demo can also join LAN games - so only one person needs to own the full version to play on LAN. Or if you can find some people that do have the full version, you can also host your own Internet games and they can join.

Thanks for continuing to follow Scraps.

 

Just a short announcement that the Scraps Mac and Linux versions are set for a Monday September 28th release on Steam, and are looking good.

Some Scraps players on the forum have also been organising a time to join multiplayer, so if you want to get in some multiplayer when there're people on, check out this thread: http://forum.scrapsgame.com/t/weekly-games/335

The scheduled one right now is for 8pm EDT on the 19th. That's midnight UTC. Here's a timezone converter that should tell you when that is in your local time.

 

Actually had lots of people on for the organised game above. Would be good to do it again sometime.

I did some recording while I was on:

 

The Scraps "weekly game" is happening again this week, where everyone is invited to join the multiplayer at roughly the same time to get some people on playing together.

The main one is again at 8pm EDT on Saturday (that's midnight UTC). But if that's out of your timezone or you just want to play twice, try coming on 12 hours earlier at 8am EDT (midday Saturday UTC).

I've added both to the Steam events calendar which should also auto-convert to your timezone: http://steamcommunity.com/games/350150/events

 

People are starting to filter in for the weekly game time. Come join!

 

Right, packages are updated, depots uploaded, game updated etc and Scraps versions for Mac and Linux are now available alongside Windows. They're all fully cross-compatible so you should be able to play in the same game with people from all three OS's.

There are just a few known issues right now:

Known Issues

Windows:
- None.

Mac:
- When playing singleplayer or hosting a multiplayer game, a Scraps Server icon appears and sits bouncing in the dock.

Linux:
- MSAA anti-aliasing settings may not work in-game. You may be able to work around this by manually enabling AA in your graphics driver settings. e.g. For Radeon cards, open Catalyst Control Center and go to 3D -> Anti-Aliasing, then set Mode to "Override application settings" and set Level where you like (4x is nice).
- On multi-monitor setups, screen resolutions may show up as options that are higher than your main monitor's resolution. If selected they'll look wrong and you'll just need to change it back to a lower resolution.

Changes

I've also had time to make a few updates to the game:

Aiming

This was partly a performance choice (the new system requires a few less checks), but the aiming system now works a little differently. Whereas all the little weapon cross-hairs used to show what they'd actually hit if firing in a straight line, they now essentially just show the aim direction of that weapon. Theoretically that sounds worse, but in practice the old system was often a bit confusing when trying to aim at something, and it caused some issues like getting really close to a vehicle and having your cross-hairs sort of sweep out of the "proximity aiming" circle range. Bullet drop from some weapons also sort of negated its usefulness. See what you think.

Aiming things with a camera that's at a different place than the things is always a little complicated. Some games just cheat and shoot everything straight out of the camera, but that causes some other issues - you get people doing stuff like shooting over walls they're hiding behind.

Health info for key parts



As shown above. Gives a better idea of things than just the damage textures. Showing health for all parts on the vehicle is a bit much, but the cockpit and chassis are the ones that actually get you destroyed, and they also tend to have the most HP, so they're useful to see in more detail.

The labels and icons over enemy vehicles fade in and out at different distances, to try and avoid blocking your view. All the bars are also sized based on total HP - that is, stuff with more HP starts with a bigger bar, and the same amount of damage will also take off the same chunk.

Blocks



Lots more basic block shapes.

Full Changelog

2015-09 - 0.5.2.5
- Added cross-platform Mac and Linux OS support!
- Updated player name labels and added health info for their key parts under the label.
- Also added health info for the player's own key parts into the GUI.
- Rounded off the bridge on SandyBridge a little (less getting stuck on the corner).
- Reticles (crosshairs) for active weapons now show them aiming at infinity, instead of showing them on what they'll actually hit if firing straight.
- Added several additional basic blocks.
- The "wealth multiplier" that increases costs for rich players now (more logically) only takes vehicle value into account, rather than total wealth.
- Vehicle scrap value now also takes part damage into account (damaged parts have less value).
- Reduced max collision damage a little.
- Updated Russian translation text.
- When choosing an initial game resolution, if your native res is ridiculously high (looking at you, Retina displays!), the game looks for a good lower one at the same ratio so you're not squinting at tiny menus. On Linux Scraps will actually start windowed the first time it boots instead to avoid the following known issue. You can still set fullscreen and any resolution in the game options.
Bug Fixes:
- Scrolling the inventory no longer also zooms the vehicle camera.
- Fixed a server memory leak that I accidentally introduced in the previous release.
- Fixed loading text not updating to the new language right away when the language was changed.

 

It's pretty cool! The only thing that's annoying me a bit is how dull the environments are, you could add props to it, wooden houses, trees, cactuses (or cacti?), a lake (or oasis in the desert), and so on

 

Looks amazing, hopefully you'll make it. I played robocraft for a while, stopped and tried continue playing again. They ruined the game imo. So we need a new one, hehe

 

Agreed that the maps could do with more detail. I'm getting better at the stuff, and I do plan to give the existing maps a bit of a makeover at some point. Although I don't want it too cluttered either, because it's good to have plenty of room to maneuver without hitting things (unless they're simple instant-knock-over props).

 

I think mad max could be a good inspiration for you. They have those rocky areas that add a lot to the feel of the map.

 

Woah that's a cool screenshot.

 

Scraps v0.5.2.7 http://www.scrapsgame.com/scraps-v0-5-2-7

Also not sure if the "weekly game" will happen this week but if people come it will happen. Join Scraps MP in about 15 minutes from right now.

 

I will definately keep following you and hopefully soon play it. Guess I am too late now for the MP hehe.

 

The time where everyone tries to come on together has been a weekly thing recently. Not sure if it'll happen today but it's had a decent amount of people on each time for the past three weeks. Details here: http://steamcommunity.com/games/350150/events/105063526136670299

 

Apologies or the lateness of this update. I wasn't able to do Scraps work last week due to some real life events, and this week is going to be the same. Rather than having to push the next update way back, I've managed some time to clean up and release a smaller update today that still has the two major features I mentioned last time, plus a few other things as well.

Full changelog:
2015-10 - 0.5.2.9
- ## Added ability to rebuild as well as repair damaged vehicles while in-game.
- ## Wreckage pickup is easier, it kind of "attracts" towards you.
- Some general balance tweaks to wreckage.
- Improved the AI's weapon selection methods.
- Different sounds for each type of vehicle warning.
- Parts now sell for their purchase value, taking any wealth tax into account, so you never lose money.
- Increased steering speed for keyboard controls a little.
- Refreshing the server list clears the old list when it was user-prompted, just so it's more obvious that it's doing something.
- Updated Steamworks.NET and uLink versions.
Bug Fixes:
- Workaround for an issue in Steam where sometimes only the first two lobbies got returned.
- Spawn FX no longer show when creating existing vehicles as a player joins a game that's already in progress.
- Vehicle labels no longer show on top of loading screen dialogs.
- Fixed AI looking as if they repair right before they evac, instead of after.
- Fixed audio screeches and other silliness that sometimes occurred when entering maps.
- Fixed a bug with part costs and wealth tax when ctrl-placing parts.
- Fixed another bug with wealth tax when calculating estimated repair costs.


Rebuilding


You can now rebuild lost parts automagically after using evac pads (if you can afford it).

There are several ways this could work. As with my general philosophy for Scraps I've tried to balance functionality against complexity. At the moment it works like this:

• Parts lost in-game count as ones to rebuild. Parts you manually remove on the Build Screen don't.
  
• Removing a part on your vehicle on the Build Screen doesn't clear the rebuild list, but if parts in the rebuild list depended on that removed part, they'll fail to get added back. You won't be charged for those failed parts.
  
• Adding a part to your vehicle on the Build Screen clears the rebuild list and sets the current vehicle as the "base" vehicle that'll be rebuilt to. This means you can build on your saved vehicle during a game and rebuild back to your temporarily improved one after you lose parts in battle, but it does also mean that adding a part when you have parts to rebuild will lose you that rebuild list. It's a compromise because once you start trying to handle these sort of branching trees of vehicle designs the complexity of the system skyrockets.

The Scraps Community
Just a note on the Scraps community in general: You guys are the best. While other people are complaining about their toxic game communities and "it broke plz fix" bug reports, Scraps players are sending me bug reports with a video of the bug happening. Recently I got a bug report that came with a suggested fix that was actually a good solution! In game dev circles that's usually accompanied by pigs flying.

It was so nice to come back after not being able to check up on the game for a few days to see three new super nice reviews (especially coming not too long after one that began with "honestly the worst game I have ever played..."). It's always especially cool to hear from people that have been following things since the early Builder Demo-only days. I know Scraps dev can be slow so I appreciate the people that keep checking back even more.

 

I've added a new map called RiverRift to the game. It's got jumps as shortcuts, water, and a big rift in the ground that you can shove vehicles in to destroy them.









Skidmarks are finally back (see my post here for a technical writeup on the skidmarks effect).



And leaderboards now show whether other players have their vehicles currently in-game.





Icons are a vehicle on terrain for in-game, a spanner & hammer for build screen, and a dash for no vehicle.

I've also adjusted vehicle speeds a little: Very light vehicles will be a little slower, but heavier vehicles will generally be a bit faster now with the same engine configuration. Mass in general had a little too much effect on speed.

The first time I made the change I set the multiplier too high. Actually so high the frame optimisation ruined this gif I tried to make of it:



You'll also find a little more wreckage drops in general, due to a change of calculation for drop amount from reliant parts (when a part is destroyed that has other parts that are reliant on it for their connection to the vehicle).

Full Changelog
2015-11 - 0.5.2.11
- New engine power calc. Very light vehicles are now a little slower, but heavy vehicles are significantly faster.
- Vehicles with a high centre of mass are a bit less prone to tipping over.
- Better wreckage spawn calculation; reliant parts get sorted by cost.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed SFX volume, which was no longer affecting all sounds.
- Better collision damage calculation in some cases.

2015-11 - 0.5.2.10
- ## New Map - RiverRift.
- ## Skidmarks make a triumphant return, now without the ridiculous garbage generation.
- Minor work on existing terrain FX.
- Improved game camera obstacle avoidance.
- Added icons to leaderboards to show player's vehicle state (none/in-game/building).

A little driving tour of the new map:

 

Smallish update today:

2015-11 - 0.5.2.13
- AI is much, much less likely to follow you off a cliff
- Added top speed guess to the Build screen stats
- Performance: More efficient terrain rendering
- Reduced HP on Medium and Heavy cockpits
- Made heavy vehicles a little faster

You can now see a reasonable estimate of your vehicle's top speed in the build screen stats:


It'll show up in mph if you have that set instead.

 

Just a Scraps Weekly Game reminder.

A while ago a few people organised an unofficial "Weekly Game" where people would try to come onto Scraps multiplayer at the same time to play together. These have been going on for a while now and they're sometimes more popular than others, but if you're looking for people to play against, coming on at one of these times is probably your best bet:

• The main one is at midnight Saturday UTC. That linked Steam event will automatically adjust its timezone to match the region you have set in Steam if you're logged in.
• If that doesn't work for you, there's an alternate time 12 hours earlier at midday Saturday UTC.

There's no official server to join - either people join one of my official ones or they create their own with custom settings. Again these are just unofficial things - no guarantees of attendance - but it's been good fun in the past.

 

Here's a bit of a look back at three years of Scraps development: http://www.scrapsgame.com/three-years-of-scraps-development

 

not sure if you meant this link... http://www.scrapsgame.com/three-years-of-scraps-development

The one you posted is interesting though as it points out something. Why you havnt done much to visual improvements. With a few shaders and effects it can could look quite different.

I know inferno in my sig looks rubbish without the over done image effects

 

Well, because I kinda like simplicity, because the complex vehicles and existing effects (hard edges + outlines = extra verts) can be challenging performance-wise on their own (although I've got that a lot better recently), and because I'm no artist and whenever I've tried adding post-processing before it's either made things look worse or affected gameplay (e.g. motion blur looks cool but makes it harder to aim at speed).

Having said that I also realise the game still looks a bit blah and that decent graphics are a major selling point.

 

Scraps v0.5.2.15

This update is mainly lots of bug fixing and code cleanup behind the scenes. I also did a smaller v0.5.2.14 update that I didn't make an update post for earlier, which improved CPU performance.

The specifics:

2015-12 - 0.5.2.15
- Added heavy armour part
- Better support for XBox 360 controller on Mac and Linux. Separate default key bindings keep actual inputs the same on all platforms
- Engine sounds with multiple of the same engine work together better
- Removed an annoying ridge in the RiverRift terrain
- Added some subtle fades between scenes
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed occasionally coming back from testing vehicles to the build screen and your vehicle has flown off into space somewhere
- Removed more false positives and not-really-bad words from the swear filter
- "Open save folder" button now working on Linux
- Fixed the loading screen getting stuck if your vehicle spawned in right as a round ended
- Fixed visual glitch between light beams and edge wall glass
- Fixed screen staying white if your vehicle was destroyed right at the moment of evac completion
- Fixed game modifiers (low gravity) not being unapplied on connected clients if the server shut down
- Fixed SkinnedMeshRenderer errors being generated in-game (in the background) if a vehicle had no moving parts
- Lots of refactoring and fixing issues with chassis, propulsion systems and their hit points and other values
- Tooltips for chassis select now include the extra HP gained from the wheels (so they show the actual full chassis HP now)

2015-12 - 0.5.2.14
- CPU performance improvements due to physics and rendering optimisation work
- Tweaks to the RiverRift map layout
- Swedish translation update

Have a good Christmas everyone. Thanks everyone who reported bugs that are fixed here.

 

It's been a bit longer than usual since the last Scraps update, so I just want to give some reassurance that I'm still working hard on things. There was a little time off over Christmas and New Years, but recently I'm working on something that I've alluded to a little in the past: A major new single-player game mode. My thoughts are that it should help a lot to flesh out the game content whether or not Internet multiplayer numbers pick up. I won't go into details of how it'll play just yet because I'm still testing things out myself, but I will in the near future. I think it'll be a lot of fun.

The new mode is pretty major, and is going to take several months to finish completely. I'll attempt to get some stuff out to try earlier, but I'll also keep doing some smaller game updates in the meantime regardless. The next game update will be next weekend but it'll be mostly bug fixes and minor improvements. Still, things are happening, and I'll have more to show soon.

 

Wow great job! This is one of the most creative games I've ever seen.

 

The latest Scraps release is again focused on fixing bugs and generally making the core game better. In the background I've also been working on the new Singleplayer mode, but that's not ready to show off just yet.

0.5.3.0
- More efficient shader/material usage for environmental stuff
- Bigger shockwaves move faster (just looks better)
- Some new destruction FX
- Fixed some lightmapping glitches and improved some normal maps on terrain
- Added some new stuff on the test map that I've been creating for the upcoming singleplayer game mode
- Using the lowpassed music track in the lobby instead of the full one, it's more chill
- Added an additional vertical adapter block
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed multiple issues where games could get stuck at Dropship In Transit when starting games. Please let me know if this happens to you after this update
- Fixed AI sometimes being lazy and just hanging out until being destroyed for the first time, causing it to henceforth spring into life
- Fixed game start failing if scrap limit was changed lower, then deploy clicked right away, causing the limit to lower and make a vehicle selection invalid
- Fixed some incorrect cube weights on the Test Map
- Fixed shockwaves sometimes not showing up when they should

Two Dropship In Transit bugs - one that happened on going from menu to lobby, and the other while going from lobby to game - were horrible timing bugs that only occurred when the stars were aligned just right. The issues I found are definitely fixed now, but please let me know if you still get stuck at a loading screen in the future. Of course, report any bugs you find - I do try to fix things!

 

0.5.3.1

Today's Scraps update doesn't change anything exactly, but the install size of the game is now almost half what it was!

Basically there was a lot of duplication between the main game and server components. This was OK when the game was very small anyway, but it's been getting steadily bigger, so I've refactored things so there's no separate server app at all anymore. Now a server is just the main game with a server flag passed in, and all the duplication is gone. You can still host a game and play on it at the same time.

 

The last couple of weeks of dev have been a bit frustrating. I came up against an engine feature that I wanted which - my mistake - I had thought was in Unity 4 but was actually only introduced in Unity 5. Scraps has been halfway converted to Unity 5 for a while so I did a bit more on that conversion, tested the stuff I needed, and realised it still wasn't going to work anyway. Not a real loss of time because I'll most likely need to move the game from Unity 4 to 5 eventually anyway, but annoying because I want to get new content out as much as the next person.

I can actually show some work on content rather than code for once though. You may have seen the new pile of crates and barrels on the Test Map in the last update:



In the editor the crates look like the left image, but when the game is run they take on some random colour variation to look a little more interesting. Giving them all different Materials with different tints would blow out the amount of draw calls in the scene, so instead they all share the same Material, and the tint colour is set via the vertex colour on the mesh itself. Pretty simple code:

Code (CSharp):

1. void SetTint(Mesh mesh) {
2.     // Tint is set via mesh vertex data rather than in the shader properties,
3.     // so that we can still use the same shared single material instance on everything!
4.     byte colour255 = (byte)(Random.value * 255);
5.     Color32[] colors = mesh.colors32;
6.     for (int j = 0; j < colors.Length; j++) {
7.         colors[j].b = colour255; // Setting the blue channel
8.     }
9.     mesh.colors32 = colors;
10. }

The meshes are simple so running through the array is super fast - but it only runs once on level load anyway. Then in the surface shader I use the blue vertex's blue colour channel value to do whatever - it's really just a way of getting information from the game to the shader.

Code (shader):

1. // Any extra tint stored in BLUE channel  
2. // fmod is % (mod). Using it to map all possible RGB values
3. float4 tint = 0.7 + float4(IN.color.b, fmod(IN.color.b * 2, 1), fmod(IN.color.b * 4, 1), 1) * 0.3;
4. if (IN.color.b > 0) {
5.     c.rgb *= tint;
6. }

You may wonder why I set just the blue channel and then calculate a colour tint based on that rather than setting the whole vertex colour RGB and setting the tint to that value.

The reason is that a lot of things in Scraps are actually done this way - heat effects on vehicle parts, damage texturing on everything, and how shiny vehicle parts are (specularity) are all specified by modifying the different colour channels in the mesh vertex data, so that each vehicle can be shown with one Material and the environment can be drawn with another. So I need the red and green channels for other things. Otherwise every time something got damaged or heated up, it'd have to use its own Material and have its own draw calls, making graphics performance a lot worse.



I also made these barrels. The red one explodes of course. I wrote a generic script that I can attach to any world object to make it explode when destroyed and damage surrounding stuff.



Driving a vehicle by ScrapsEnthusiast there. Yesterday I also added subtle air control to the game, so that'll be in the next update. It's tuned more for gameplay than being realistic, but you can at least pretend it's created from the torque of the wheels spinning in the air.



And I made some light beam/forcefield-style walls that I can use to create more subtle level borders for some levels. Functionally they work the same as the current walls.



For the next game mode I need lots of terrain, so I've been improving my terrain creation workflow. I can now take a basic low-detail terrain and put it through my Scraps-specific World Machine setup to get out a terrain fairly quickly with erosion and varied texturing.



OK, the bottom one still doesn't look amazing yet, but that's without any grass, fog, sky, etc etc. It's a lot better than the top one considering the minimal manual effort involved. One thing that's not obvious in the screenshot is that the "after" terrains also have more fine detail - so I can map out a fairly low-res base terrain and then run erosion on it to make it into a more fully detailed one.

 

The latest Scraps update adds a little air control, a save format upgrade, tweaked weapon hit forces, and a terrain graphics upgrade.

Full changelog:

2016-3 - 0.5.4.0
- Terrain graphics upgrade. But no more switching to greyscale terrain when in low grav mode I'm afraid
- Magically, vehicle save files are now also PNG image screenshots of the vehicle itself
- Separated weapon recoil and hit force, so they don't have to be the same anymore. Reduced hit forces in general - should help with Medium Cannon spam in particular
- Rewrote the weapon movement range calculation AGAIN. More bugs fixed with it. Hopefully very correct and consistent now
- Added a little air control: Pitch = Throttle forward/back. Roll = Throttle + Steering. More engine power gives more control
- Finally the test map side road is actually 100% flat, right up to the ramp
- Updated uLink and Steamworks.NET to their latest versions
- Added grass density graphics option
Bug Fixes:
- Tooltips now update their text to match language changes without requiring a restart
- Fixed mass from held wreckage not being subtracted after wreckage was offloaded on evac
- Stopped evac pad ambient sound from playing when the pad is turned off (Test map)

Air control


I showed this off in the last update, but now it's live. You can control your pitch with throttle and your roll with turning. You can't control yaw - it's a car, not a plane OK? Practising in Low Gravity mode is a nice way to get the hang of it.

Recoil
Weapon recoil and hit forces used to always be the same, which was arguably more realistic, but it meant that if I wanted a big kick on a weapon it also had to have a big hit. Often because of hit angles and multiple shots hitting in one spot, the hits would end up even worse than the recoil.

I've changed it so that I can set them separately, and reduced some hit forces. Hopefully there's less of a problem with Medium Cannons and Plasma in particular throwing vehicles around now. Of course you can still push your enemies around to some extent.

Save Format


Those are actual save files. When you save vehicles now they'll end up in a new format, which is also a png image - so now it's easier to see what a vehicle is if you're sharing it around.

The easiest way to see your vehicle saves is probably to open the Save/Load dialog in the game and click the button at the top right which takes you straight there.

Hosting these on an image host will most likely break them - you can try, but you're probably better off using a file host of some sort. Anything that won't try to modify or re-encode the image file.

Dev note: There are several ways to do something like this. Gimbal has awesome image saves, as does the Spore creature creator. One potential method is to use the image's metadata fields to add your custom data, although sometimes those have size limits. Another method is to use something in the image itself that's invisible or hard to see, like something in the alpha channel or the least significant bits. Or even just extend the image to have the data encoded in an extra part of it, using all the available colour data.

However, I've done this with the dumbest and simplest method possible: Just dumping all the save data at the end of the file! It was one of the options I've read about so it's not totally unheard of. Sure image hosts will probably break it but all those other methods get broken by image hosts anyway. Seems like as long as you still end the png part of the file properly (works for JPEG too!), every PNG reader that I've come across reads the files with no problem. Scraps just ignores the image part and looks for my special marker, then starts reading the save from there.

Graphics
Scraps' terrain graphics have always been pretty meh, and I wanted to get a better system for new stuff, so I've also back-ported that to the existing maps.





What's actually better? Well, there's nice perlin shadowing on things (how much there is varies with the terrain texture):



Although I had to get rid of the black outline FX on terrain.

Bumpy stuff is... bumpier:



And you can see there that the grass is better too, not just denser. The default Unity grass shader is a simple cutout thing: It takes a texture and says OK, if the alpha value is above whatever, I'll show that pixel, otherwise I won't show it. That gives really crisp but jagged looking grass. It also means that when the terrain engine tries to fade out distant grass, instead of getting semi-transparent grass you get grass that sort of gets cut down more and more at the edges.

I did a literally one-minute edit to the grass shader to make it do "proper" transparency, and the difference is huge!



I don't think Unity has updated their grass shader for a long time. There's a comment about Mac OS 10.4 in there. I was sure I must've killed performance as a tradeoff, but if anything the grass performance seems to be slightly better. Here's my replacement WavingGrass.shader and WavingGrassBillboard.shader if any Unity devs want them, it's like jumping from 2002 to 2012 in one fell swoop.

There's also now texture blending based on heightmaps:



What's happening above is, when there's a mixture of two different terrain textures, it used to just blend, but now it'll show the higher parts of the texture first (based on a greyscale height map I supply it), so the new texture sort if "raises up" out of the other one as it increases in opacity. For Unity devs, most of these new features come from using Tomasz Stobierski's Relief Terrain Pack (it's not exactly drop-in-and-your-terrain-looks-amazing, but it is very good once you bend it to your will).

I also wrote some custom terrain editing tools of my own to let me make stuff faster:



The heightmaps and splatmaps (texture layout) used there are pre-created - my tools aren't that amazing - but it automates a whole bunch of stuff that was previously tedious. It also means I can edit heightmaps and splats and basically just click to update. Without much more work a terrain like the one above starts looking pretty good:



Still working on a new single-player mode.

 

- Main Menu layout changes
- AI players now show in the server info
- If an AI player gets kicked from a game by a human player joining with no free slots, when a slot is free again they'll now come back... for revenge
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed rotation range calc bug
- Fixed "aim sphere" rotation range visual bug
- Fixed null reference exception that occurred on dedicated servers in no-GUI mode with the new terrain
- Fixed music player playing the wrong track if the track was changed and then changed back to the original track while the original track was still fading out

The main menu looks different, but it's actually the same functionally. The main aim is just to sort of encourage starting games that other people can join, but it also makes room for introducing a new game mode later.

Equivalents:

Playing single-player:
Old: Singleplayer
New: Play->Start A Game, have "Allow other players to join" unticked.

Joining an Internet game:
Old: Multiplayer->Internet->Join A Game
New: Play->Join A Game

Joining a LAN game:
Old: Multiplayer->LAN->Join A Game
New: Play->Join A Game, select the LAN tab

Hosting an Internet game:
Old: Multiplayer->Internet->Host A Game
New: Play->Start A Game, have "Allow other players to join" ticked, and set to Internet

Joining a LAN game:
Old: Multiplayer->LAN->Host A Game
New: Play->Start A Game, have "Allow other players to join" ticked, and set to LAN

"Allow other players to join" is ticked by default, but it remembers what you last set, so if you always play Singleplayer for instance it'll stay unticked once you've set it that way.

 

I just wanted to do a small fix-up update today to tidy some things up:

2016-3 - 0.5.4.2
- Some performance improvements, mainly on CPU (the previous terrain graphics upgrade made CPU performance worse)
- Added some grungy texture to scene objects in general
- No more lag spike (one-frame FPS drop) the first time wreckage spawns
- Added a little help dialog thing when first playing a game to point out adding AI players
- Added hover tooltips to the server list that show the full game name, in case it doesn't fit
Bug Fixes:
- Got rid of grass growing through evac pads on the test map
- Missing button click sounds added to lobby screen
- Fixed AI info in the server list going away after 30 mins when the lobby refreshed

By the way, I'm also aware that running the game in DirectX 9 mode (if you don't have a DirectX 11 compatible graphics card) at the moment causes some issues with how the terrain looks. I'm looking into it.

 

Super secret new content preview, #1/10.

 

Scraps got through to be one of the games in the Play By Play exhibition in Wellington later this month.

Play By Play is a new little games expo this year, started by a few locals: http://playbyplay.co.nz/schedule/

It should be a pretty cool showcase of locally-made games. Stuff like Swordy, Poly Bridge, Automation... and there's an Australian games section too!



Scraps please don't crash because I won't actually be there to check on it.

 

Congrats on the nomination - well deserved!

 

I'm not going to push this because I hate it when games win on popularity or nepotism, but you can vote for your favourite game on the list here, and one of them is Scraps:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1kEq72hgREAEVGU2Z-DBBntMeUHO9aBhzi32Irw5UgVA/viewform?c=0&w=1

 

This reminds me of Robocraft. Nonetheless good job and well done!