Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve been working on implementing the new clan totem and bringing our new recruit Henry up to speed on all things Hurtworld. The clan totem works very similarly to the standard totem. When you auth or de-auth on a clan totem, you act for the entire clan. Only officers or above can mess with the clan totems. Multiple clans can be authorized on a totem, we figured us disallowing this would end up with people just using standard totems anyway.

The last feature for clan totems I want to add before Thursday is the ability to set a minimum clan rank for players to be allowed build permission. This way you could allow the use of doors but not construction. In the next patch we will be introducing rank restricted doors to reduce the risk of recruits stealing yo shit.

We are still on track for Thursday at this point but will likely be a fairly rough implementation of the Clans UI. I figure it will reach stability quicker if we put it out in a slightly broken state and iterate on it quickly throughout the week as opposed to delaying the release again.

Mils

This week I finished up the Clan Totem. This came out nice and should fit in well with the rest of our assets. I the image below you can see that it’s the same dimensions as the Territory Marker.

The next item on my list you will be VERY happy to know about….

METAL DOORS! Yes we know you have all wanted these for ages and now they will be added to one of the patches coming up soon (not this one though) I believe metal roofs are also going to be added probably when the doors are, but we’ll see what the programmers end up doing. So these came out nice and fit well with our existing construction suite. This door has a couple more texture maps than the regular wooden door, we may bring the wooden door up to spec later.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been updating the 3 male characters, I’ve been trying to match the original style of clean lines and strong forms. One of the hardest things with these type of models is keeping the normal maps from getting lumpy, this requires certain techniques in the sculpting process to smooth things out. The main problem I always found with the old models was their lack of eye lids, they always looked on edge. Going to have to go through and fix the snood and potentially other hats/masks now but that’s not a big deal as I’ve run through that process so many times. Got some stuff to fix up on the Dundee model and then I’ll be moving on the Mclaren model. After these I’ve got a few things to clean up in the map project like duplicate splats and unused textures, then I’ll be moving onto gear and potentially hat hair so characters don’t look so bald with hats on.

HENRY

Whats good fam?

My name is Henry, and I am lucky enough to be new newest member of the of the Hurtworld crew. I come from a motion & graphic design background and have worked in the music industry for the past decade.

Spencer has recruited me to help with a wide range of of tasks from UI design to editing trailers and anything else that comes up relevant to my skill set. This week I have been getting settled in the office whilst helping Tom out with the inventory interface & icons. Our main focus is to keep the style consistent and improve navigation.

Here is an example, as always it is a work in progress and subject to change:

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been continuing on with clans UI implementation and polishing up the interaction UI changes. I’m still running behind where we want to be unfortunately after a couple of reworks of the clan UI and Unity’s UI being a little tricky to work with (nested prefabs are going to make this so much better! I can’t wait!) but we are still committing to releasing Thursday the 18th of October. There will surely be a few bugs and teething issues with the new systems so expect hotfix patches to follow.

INTERACTION UI

The interaction UI changes have worked out really well I think with Henry’s design tweaks adding some nice clarity and consistency to the windows.
Now that we have a ‘dynamic’ header showing the name of the moused over interaction tab or the opened window if no tabs are hovered over we require a window to always be open to make room for this text. To ensure this is the case when opening the character window (default ‘tab’ key) the interaction system will try and open the nearest interaction (like a workbench, vehicle or player loot crate), if there are no nearby interactables then the system falls back to opening the handcrafting menu (which has moved out of the character window tabs and into the interaction tabs) ensuring there is always a left hand side window open.

CLANS

The initial clans implementation will have 3 ranks, recruit, officer and admin. Clans can only have one admin (essentially acting as the clan owner) but this role can be transferred between players.
Recruits are just basic members, they will be authorized for all clan totems their clan is authorized to, be able to view the clan roster, see online clan mates on the map and have UI overlays to identity nearby clan mates in the world.
Officers get all of the above plus the ability to authorize/deauthorize the clan on clan totems and also view, accept and deny applications to the clan.
Admins can do all of the above plus change recruits to officers and vice versa. They can also kick members, change the clan tag, change the clan color, change the clan description, disband the clan and transfer the admin role to another member.
All these functions are driven through the clans UI which is opened through the new interaction tabs.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week we’ve been pushing towards the Clans patch release. I’ve been adding clan tracking to the map as well as working on overhead markers so you can see who your homies are in the world.

Patch Delay
We haven’t made as much progress as we originally hoped this week, so we are going to delay the clans update until the 18th of October.

Mils

I got stuck into the Clan Totem this week. I firstly started with some concepts which as always gets all the bad ideas out and allows you to explore and come up with some much better stuff. The first thing I illustrated looked like a strange wooden chopping board (which we all had a laugh at) After that I got 3 solid designs down as you can see below…

We chose the metal slab to the right that has been shot through with some seriously powerful ordnance. The lion statue may also get used as the territory marker later on too.

Next up I got really stuck into the high poly sculpt, which I haven’t really ever gone this deep on, and not with cracked metal type stuff either. Because I mostly do our mechanical modeling stuff I prefer to do the low poly mesh and turn it into a high poly later. In this instance I worked the other way around, because it made more sense to me.

Below: The low poly mesh after it’s first bake, seems to have come out great. Will give it a bit more of a look over next and make sure there are no bake errors.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been focusing on the expression for the promo art. We ended up settling on a style for the hair, basically the original style where it’s more like a silhouette than an actual sculpted blob with large volume strands. We figured that this hair looks perfectly fine and spending a bunch of time on something that will most likely be covered up is pretty pointless. For the facial expressions I’ve been looking at the original promo art to try and nail that cheeky look, I originally tried to sculpt the expression but the process was taking way too long for something that would need to be tweaked anyway. I started just pushing verts around in Maya and that worked (almost) perfectly, but it was still a pretty slow destructive process. We talked about potentially having two characters in the promo art so I figured that it would be better if we could easily test out a bunch of different expressions with ease in a non destructive way, so I set up blend shapes for the character, blendshapes store vertices translation information and then allow you to blend between the original position and the new position, meaning you can make blend shapes like “eye brow left raise” and “eye lid upper right close” and then using sliders, tweak mix and match them to get an expression you want.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I reworked how the clan system was syncing data from server to client. Previously I was syncing up a ‘thin’ view of the clan for non-members and the full clan data to members whenever this data changed and when first connecting to the server.
After discussing it with Spencer we decided that the clan data doesn’t always need to be in sync as clan features like map tracking and ui overlays are easier to manage, less bug prone and more compatible with our network culling (players and other networked entities are not synced beyond a certain range so clients only receive relevant data) when driven by the server rather than running client side only and relying on the local clan data being correct.
Because of this clans are now synced only when clan UI windows are open by sending their last synced timestamp every few seconds, the server then compares that timestamp to the clans last updated timestamp and will resync only if out of date.

I’ve also been swapping out the programmer art in the clan UI windows and the new interaction tabs (that I discussed in blog #138) to match our standard UI style. Unfortunately this has been a bit more fiddly than I anticipated and needs a little more work before its ready to show off.
We’ve fallen behind our schedule a bit and haven’t been able to do a full playtest of all the new systems yet so we’ve decided to delay the clans patch (0.6.3.0) a week so the new date is the 18th of October.
We’re sorry about this but think its better in the long run to spend a little more time getting this stuff right so we can build the new end game on top of it.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve continued work on the map marker system which required some upgrades to network object culling scope. These upgrades allow us to do arbitrary distance culling rules for individual entities that require more complex logic for who should be able to see them. Previously we could only cull based on grid cells of a fixed size. Now an entity can specify its own culling logic implementation.

Long story short, needed low level upgrades to support what we wanted to do which will also improve network performance in other places. Nothing particularly exciting to show.

We are still on target for the 11th for the clans patch.

Mils

The Blast Furnace is looking really nice and is ready to go into the project. I was asked by Spencer to make this one look nice and grimy and I reckon it hits the mark. We added some windows to either side so you can see light spilling from them when the furnace is on.  I added a nice molten ore texture that will switch on and off with the function of the furnace also. This looks much less like an upside down rocket ship :P. I’m tidying up some other assets to round out the week and then onto the next thing.

 

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This past week I’ve been working on the clan system and making some good progress.
Right now I’ve got all the basic clan functionality up and running on the backend (things like clan creation, applying to a clan, accepting/denying applications, promoting/demoting members etc.) and a working front end (UI windows, clan creation consumable item) for basic clan management although they are very much still using programmer art so aren’t quite ready to show off yet. This coming week we’ll be testing all of this and then I’ll be iteratively making improvements as well as hopefully implementing the real art for the UI.

Clans Window

The first of the new UI windows to manage clans is a generic clans window that shows all the clans registered on the server. If you are not currently a member of a clan you can use this window to apply to join a clan and if your application is accepted by an online member with the right permissions then you will join the clan. We chose this over sending out invites as it was easier to implement (no need to add some kind of view of all online players in game) and we think it’s much easier for new players to discover clans and find friends this way.
Later down the track the clan window will also double as a kind of scoreboard for clans allowing you to see how they rank against each other but the gameplay systems to support that aren’t going to be ready for the next patch (pretty confident that they are going to be worth waiting for though!)

My Clan Window

The other new UI window is actually a new tab for the character window, the button for this is going to take the place of the handcrafting button (which is moving to the interaction tab system). When selected this window will show you all the relevant information about the clan you are in. From here you’ll be able to see which members are online and offline and see their ranks, you’ll also be able to leave your current clan from here.
If you have sufficient permissions you’ll also be able to view all applications to join the clan and choose to accept or deny them. With sufficient permissions you’ll also be able to promote, demote and kick clan members from this screen.

TEHSPLATT

Hellooo, this week I’ve been working on finding a good consistent style for the hair, this has proved to be a pretty hard challenge because we need something that’s reasonably quick to do. The main thing I’ve been trying to do is cut down on noisy details that create a fuzzy mess when you aren’t up close, this creates another problem how ever, as those finer details give us something that represents hair, so currently trying to find a good balance with that. Also been doing a bunch of tests to see if I can get hair looking good with some shine from the standard Unity shader and so far, it hasn’t been great. It’s pretty easy to make jet black hair look good with basic specular but as soon as you move into lighter colours it all falls apart, so I’ve concepted some looks that we might be able to build shaders for to get away from the matte blob look. I also finished swapping out the FPS hands to slightly less square and sharp ones, still having problems with the 3rd person swap though.