Mils

So it seems my estimation on how long the LOD Fiesta I started mid last week would take was way off. I got it all done by Thursday night 🙂 Was in the zone something fierce.

Since then I’ve been fixing up a couple of minor things like the pistol icons and some world item scale issues.

I replaced the placeholder Clan Creator with a super sexy, metal, military medal style asset. This was a lot of fun to make and I dusted off my old skills from my days working as a collectible coin designer back in 2006. Really happy with this.

Next up I’ll be going over a bunch of old assets to bring their texturing and models in line with all our current gear. I’ll be changing the Stone Hatchet, the Axes and the Pickaxes. I may even get round to a redo of a couple of other things but this will keep me busy for a week or two.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve been polishing off the mechanics for the Mozzy. I went pretty hard on the simulation tip with destruction, making it so clipping parts of your blades on anything will apply forces to your main body as well as eventually destroy the blade item after enough contact with objects.

Once you lose a rotor you will lose the simulated function of that blade completely. Losing your main rotor will make you fall out of the sky with your tail rotor skill throwing you into a spin, losing your tail rotor will cause you to spin uncontrollably but can still be landed safely if you’re lucky.

Impacts with the body are split into 3 damage curves: Skids, Body and Tail, Each one becoming more fragile. Reaching zero health will cause the vehicle to explode in a fireball depending on the amount of fuel you have left.

Engine of the Mozzy can also be shot out to kill power to the rotors and this power will scale down depending on the durability of the engine meaning well places sniper shots will force a pilot to land their helicopter making it possible to steal instead of blowing it up. Hopefully this will create some gameplay situations.

In all this thing gonna kill you lots, which makes us able to distribute them fairly easily without worrying they are too powerful. Bring the chaos!

TEHSPLATT

Hello! haha, this week I had a bit more of a look into LoDing the town events and we decided it was a bit more of a programmer job. I ended up moving onto a bunch of other stuff on my list, one of the things we have needed for a while now is “Hat Hair” for the characters, so I ran through and set up a basic hair style to fill out the hats so all the characters don’t just look bald. Definitely a much needed fix, don’t really know how that’s gonna be controlled for those who want to be bald with hats on but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. I also did the LoDs for the male and female character for our performance pass, they were a bit of a mess and there were some problems so first up I had to organise and fix the characters up a bit, but the actual creation of the LoDs went really smoothly with the settings Mills set up. Next up will be cutting down the amount of rocks in all the mountain stamps and reordering them in a potentially better design.

Henry

Whatado Hurtlawds?
Another week has come and it’s time to start tying up loose ends of the past couple months. Preparing all the new menu assets to be implemented, finalising UI icons for the Mozzie and Slug.

The audio on the trailer is something else that has needed attention. I have been checking all the recorded audio and making sure it is audible over the music and in a lot of cases I have replaced audio due to it being muffled by other effects or environmental noise.

Next week we get stuck into the soundtrack,

 

Tom

This week I’ve been continuing on setting up persistent town loot and working on vehicle implementation.
Progress has been a bit slower than hoped as making changes to Nullius was a more complicated process than I assumed and so I decided to fix a few bugs in our map tools to allow us to speed up the iteration process.
This means I haven’t been able to iterate over the balance of the new persistent town loot very much to find the right values for things like spawn density, respawn timers, loot table quantities and probabilities.
I’m still going through testing and tweaking these values now and should be able to get them to a decent spot for tomorrow’s experimental patch release but don’t be surprised to see some hotfixes next week further refining these values. I think this is a better way forward than delaying the patch to give us more time, plus it gives you guys an opportunity to give us feedback and influence our direction with the balance.

I’ve also been making some fixes to clan totems and territory control totems, now you’ll be able to authorize onto a clan totem and capture territory control points as a recruit (was previously restricted to officers and owners).
This allows recruits to still get involved in the action without an officer online and means clans no longer have to promote all members to officer just to have more hands capable of capturing the objective. Deauthorization is still restricted to officers and above to prevent recruits double crossing a clan by deauthing them from their home totem.
Territory control points will also reset their minimum rank build restriction to the recruit level after being captured, this stops clans setting the build restriction to clan owner as a defensive tactic as when capturing an owner restricted territory you would not be able to build your own defenses without your clan owner online and close by.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been continuing adding persistent town loot back into the game which lead into a deep dive into our spawning system.
After setting up a whole bunch of extra loot spawn points in all the towns (extra points compared to the set that the loot frenzy events run off) and configuring our spawn director to spawn loot into them I noticed that the spawns weren’t really behaving as expected and often the explicitly set loot points weren’t being used and the system was falling back to random positioning instead.
This led to me going deep into our spawning system to find bugs and get to the bottom of what was going on. I ended up finding a couple of problems and regressions since legacy, mainly a race condition with our loot position marker registration and our spawn director initialization, also another bug where SpawnerCellUpdatesPerFrame in ServerConfig was being ignored due to cell updates not being tracked properly.
With the spawn director fixed up I’m now moving onto setting up then iterating over and tweaking the spawn configurations for these towns trying to find the sweet spot in loot density and respawn times.

We’ll be releasing the next experimental patch on Thursday the 13th of December which will include the return of persistent town loot, rebalancing the vehicle system (removal of insurance and vehicle destruction, return of destructible wheels and making building a vehicle more achievable), return of the large mining rocks in the final biomes and craftable dynamite along with a bunch of bug fixes and other small changes.

Henry

Been another interesting week of collecting footage for the trailer with a focus on PVP combat. Last week we found the major dificulty was trying to achieve realistic gameplay footage yet keeping the visuals fluid enough to cut nicely in with rest of the cinematics.
We captured various scenarios including early stage combat, raiding and long range gunplay. As we progress through the trailer we keep finding better techniques during the capture that i want to implement across the board. Was lots of fun, however now I have a heap of footage to trawl through, I better get stuck in.

Spencer

Hey Hurtworld Fam,

This week has involved a lot of trailer footage shooting and more progress on the Mozzy damage model. Things are coming along nicely but won’t be ready for the rolling out in the patch on the 13th. My hopes are that the upcoming patch will put the meta in a state we are happy to officially release V2 to the main branch based on the feedback we’ve been collecting from the commuinity. If everything goes well this will likely be Early Jan. We still need to do a serious optimisation pass and stabilise a few core bugs but nothing I think we can’t handle by then. With Mils working through LODs for everything and Splatt consolidating map resources we should have V2 running faster than V1 by release.

V2 will be rolling out without a “No EAC” version, so if you are still one of the few people who can’t connect to EAC servers please notify us on the forums so we can get it sorted before release.

Mils

Hey ya’ll. So we have some easy wins performance wise that we hope to achieve pretty quickly in regards to poly counts in the game. So far we have made a fair amount of LOD’s (Level of Detail) meshes in Hurtworld, but we haven’t always had time to create LOD’s for everything. Sometimes this is due to not knowing if a mesh will stay in the game long term and sometimes we just need it in game asap and don’t have time to make them.

Good news is, we now are using Simplygon to create our LOD’s and it’s super fast. In the past we have hand built these and it is time consuming. They look great using this method but Simplygon can do this in 10-20 seconds. The results are almost as good too. This was also very daunting when it came to skinned mesh attachments. Skinned mesh attachments are anything that use a skeleton to deform the mesh ie; clothes, body parts etc. Simplygon also instantly creates the skinned mesh LOD’s with some kind of evil beautiful code magic and the new meshes instantly deform just like the original. SO. GOOD.

The past week I have been testing the reliability of the resulting meshes that have been coming out of Simplygon. I’ve been fiddling and tweaking the settings to get a nice custom preset or two which so far creates great LOD’s for all situations.

Below: The top row shows completely Simplygon generated LOD’s and the bottom row shows the same but with hand tweaking of the lowest LOD mesh. In the end you can barely tell the difference and the Simplygon mesh came out less quality but lower, so we’ll automate everything and go back and fix anything that stands out in the game as we play over time.

I have 580 items to check through, not all will need new LOD’s created but a bunch will so I will be busy on that grind for the next week I’d say.

For all you people out there running slower machines, this should really benefit you. Also all you car hoarders who like to keep 50 cars in your garage for bragging rights this will help with that also.

Also I made Coal 😛

The world item that drops on the ground for coal and the Icon looked freaking horrible so I quickly remade this.

 

TEHSPLATT

Hello again, this week I’ve run through the rest of this list I have of manual touch ups the map always needed, managed to get through it all and get a good build of the map out. Feels good being able to just hit stamp and know that everything will just work, and even if a couple things here and there screw up, it’s still a million times better than it was before. Fixed up a bunch of biome manager stuff like no builds being slightly off and radiation zones creeping too far on the playable zones. Also blended the biomes a lot smoother so it’s not such an immediate switch from one to the other. Next step is sorting through a bunch of doubled up splats and building LoDs for the town events as they are currently hitting performance quite hard. No pictures this week sorry.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve been pushing forward with the Mozzy detailing. Adding sound effects, designing the destruction model and exploring simulation changes based on destruction. My focus here is finding a balance between realism and arcade fun as to create as many interesting situations as possible. Things like startup time take ages in real life so this is much more on the side of arcadeyness, destruction on the other hand is going to be fairly realistic. Clip a rotor… rotor dead. Tail rotor will send the Mozzy into an uncontrolable spin, main rotor will be falling from the sky. It will be possible to land without a tail rotor if you’re lucky, meaning sending for repair crew to bring you a new one might just save your Mozzy. You will also be fairly careful who you let fly it as clipping a rock could mean the end of your whole team and Mozzy.

Camera Tools
I also spent a bit of time adding some tools for capturing our new trailer which I will be putting out into the game for content creators to use at will.

Something we found after flying the Mozzy around a bit is that it makes an excellent cinematic camera due to the smoothed out controls and aerial perspectives. To help this along I built a body kit for the Mozzy that hides all default parts, essentially making it invisible. I also made a piece of gear for the player to do the same. Lastly I made a handbrake for the Mozzy that allows the pilot to freeze the vehicle in mid air turning off physics temporarily once a desired camera angle has been set. They will require admin access to the server they are on to use, but I think will add a handy tool for youtubers to create cinematic intros etc. The invisible player tool will also be useful for admins to observe without being seen.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week I’ve been touching up the shoreline majorly but this time in a very non-destructive way. I’ve spent a decent amount of time making sure that there’s as little (if any) manual touch up come build time as possible, one of the things that can really tank a release night is finding something wrong with a single stamp and then potentially forgetting to do one small manual touch up job that seemed like a pretty minimal thing at the time but can cause a ton of restamping and recapturing and those small touch ups add up, potentially leaving you with a bunch of shit to do at a very stressful time in the process. I went pretty hard on cleaning up as much of our map stamping process and feel like I really cut down on manual touch ups a lot, still going through some stuff now but can definitely say that the map is in a much better place. I’ve also just been trying to tick off as much small stuff on my To Do lists as possible. Getting through a hell of a lot of stuff. Feels good.

Mils

I’ve been trawling through the icons still and now they are all looking a lot better. These had a base pose that just made sure the object was in the middle of the icon square so you could see it. They also had a very generic lighting angle. I found that by showing a bit more shadow you can actually make out the form of the models and the contrast gives much more punch.

This takes more time than leaving the standard lighting snapshot in place but its well worth the effort when it comes to being able to make out the objects and looking good.

I also did a pass on the world items so they have decent sizes when dropped on the ground and don’t get lost in the grass.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been working on bringing back permanent loot spawns to our towns, polishing up some mozzy issues, improving SDK build times and taking part in the trailer filming session.

I’ve got loot trees setup for town loot crates in vehicle, military and construction themes like I talked about last week.
Construction crates will contain construction materials and construction items (like signs, torches and fireplaces), Vehicle crates will contain vehicle parts, vehicle paint masks and gasoline and Military crates will contain guns (rarely), gun attachments and military themed gear.
All crates also have ammo drops and amber in their loot tree (military ammo rolls will have extra ammo however) as well as a small chance of a detonation cap.
This is just the way things are configured for the time being, we still need to give town loot a few test iterations so this is subject to change. Ultimately we want to try and increase the loot crate spawn rate from legacy but lower the average reward to compensate.

Unfortunately we suffered a bit of a set back on our first planned filming day for the itemv2 trailer when our SDK figuratively caught fire and stopped building anything useful.
Though we lost the day to debugging and fixing problems we were able to return to stability with a few extra improvements to SDK build times thanks to batching unity asset database imports and squashing a bug in the mesh attachment build cache system that would over eagerly invalidate its entire cache.

After we got through the SDK issues we had a lot of fun filming trailer footage including flying the mozzy around which is really coming together well, I think you guys are going to really enjoy it! Here’s a couple of cool clips I managed to capture which probably won’t make the trailer.

 

Henry

What’s good in the world?

Things got really interesting this week as we captured some real time action sequences for the trailer. I am really fortunate to have wizards like Spence & Tom around to help develop tools to assist in the filming process. Spencer developed a transparent chassis for the mozzie and implemented a handbrake so now any angle or movement is possible to capture from the sky. This has allowed for some ultra cinematic moments to be recorded during live game play. 

Can’t wait to share some of the moments with you all. Here is a still from the beach…