Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Content for the 0.7.1.0 patch is coming along well but we’ve decided to push the release of it back 2 weeks until the next wipe (28th February, we want to get back to Thursday wipes) to give us more time to polish and expand on some of the new stuff that we’re adding that we’re really excited about.
I think this also shows us that 4 week content cycles may be a bit too ambitious for a team of our size and 6 weeks is a much safer bet but we’ll continue to evaluate this as we stabilize and have to do less hotfix emergency repairs.

Speaking of stuff we’re excited about I’ve been working on traps. I started off with creating a fake sleeper trap, this looks just like a regular sleeper when placed but once it is killed it explodes killing nearby players. This should create more interesting choices when encountering sleepers leaning more into a risk/reward dynamic.
After the fake sleeper I created a fake airdrop beacon, planting this one will spawn an airdrop plane that drops a dummy cargo container. This cargo container looks like the real thing but when interacted with it will explode in your face.
I think these items are going to open up new options for players to play mind games with each other trying to bait and then punish players greed, I’m super interested to see what strategies people will come up with.
With the extra time we’ve given ourselves I also want to look into fake loot crates and experiment with traps that do other stuff than just explode, potentially using the tether system that Spencer has been working on.
I’ve also been bringing back the legacy traps, the landcrab mine is working again and I’m hopeful of getting the medusa vines and poison traps in too for 0.7.1.0.

We’ll still be wiping servers with a minor 0.7.0.11 patch today (15th Feb) that has a whole bunch of bugfixes and some balance tweaks. This won’t be an enforced wipe and community servers will be able to carry on their saves if they wish.
In terms of bugfixes I’ve improved the camera collision peeking issues thanks to your reports and I’m cautiously optimistic we’ve now got a proper robust solution, again if I’m wrong please hit me up about it at tom@bankrollstudios.com.
I’ve also been working on the notorious rock issues, the fix for exploiting crouching emotes got released in 0.7.0.10 but I’ve been continuing to investigate and have fixed some incorrect construction validation volumes on a few machines and base parts as well as tweaking sleepers so they work exactly like players in the construction validation check.
I’ve also fixed the Mozzy claim cost not working properly and Mozzy sounds playing at the wrong times.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week I got this rebel gear set I’ve been working on, in game. My idea with this was to potentially have this set replace the heat progression gear as some of our gear is just the same stuff re-coloured, and aside from just needing a bit more gear in general, I felt like the heat progression needed a bit of love. So the separate parts are hat, bandanna, new singlet with arm band and bandages, some roughed up military pants with one knee pad and duct tape on one leg, I wanted it to look like what I imagine a secret island militia would dress in. I think we have needed a bandanna and basic hats for a while now, planning on doing a few different hats, like a flat peak and backwards hat, also with the mesh attachment system can easily do stuff like adding the sunglasses Mills made too the bandanna which will be cool. Would love to do more of these set type things in the future, as an artist I very much want to bring the stuff you actually craft in line with where you are in the progression, for example, starting out naked on the beach, in my eyes it makes more sense that the first clothing you craft is very primal and bush craft sort of thing, rather than just a full on T shirt and Jeans, not that it matters but it’s just something I would like to do haha. Next up is fixing all the skinning on the clothes so there is no where near as many clipping issues.

Mils

Hey Hurters! So this week I had some software issues with 3D Coat that stopped me getting as far as I wanted with this Hurt Voodoo mask but I got there eventually. I’ll be continuing to talk to the Developers of that particular piece of software about the issues that come up so they don’t become the bottle neck on my workflow again.

This came out nicely though, and will go with some of the gear that is already in the game, like the bow and possibly look quite good with the next item I am about to finish off…

…The Annoying Top Hat!

Ever wanted to look like a smooth jerk? Well look no further than this little beauty!

Henry

What’s really hood Hurtworld fam?

This week I am back in the directors chair starting a new in depth trailer that breaks down the fundamentals of the game. Script writing has begun for a voice over that will take the viewer through the mechanics whilst trying not to give too much away.

The video will be longer edits and more game play orientated footage to give a stronger understanding of how the game plays and an insight into some of the systems and how they work. One thing that we will require is a large amount of PVP footage which is hard for us to generate ourselves in a realistic scenario.

So as a result we are calling out to the community to submit their favourite game play moments to demonstrate high skill level playing in the trailer.

We can’t guarantee that everything submitted will be used however the better your footage the higher your chances.
Try and keep your captures close to 60fps at 1080p and fairly high quality settings (No potato mode).

Any footage used will be credited and immortalised forever in the video.

Send Dropbox/GDrive/Sendspace links to support@bankrollstudios.com with the subject “TRAILER FOOTAGE SUBMISSION”

I can’t wait to see what you all come up with and piece it all together.

 

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week besides being hammered by DDOS attacks and having to re-engineer our low level network layer, I managed to find some time to make the flagship feature for the next patch which I’m super excited about and have wanted to build for ages: Being able to tie shit to other shit

Its still a very rough prototype, but all the features are working well just needs to visual tweaks. View model will likely change to a bow with a rope bundle and have a short shooting range which allows you to lasso people and drag them round, then also tie them to vehicles and swing them into shit to kill them or fly them home into a prison. Can’t wait to see the possibilities 🙂

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

It’s been a while since our last devblog as we’ve been a bit overwhelmed with the V2 release, our systems haven’t been under this much pressure from player numbers for a while and it’s exposed some bugs and performance issues we weren’t totally aware of. We’ve been working our way through these issues as our highest priority, we’ve already made several improvements and fixed bugs and we’ve got more fixes on the way to roll out soon.

With our servers getting smashed performance has become a major issue and the area we’ve been working on the most post-release. Whilst Spencer has been busy making huge improvements to our networking library in terms of memory allocations I was altering it to decouple the socket read/send operations from Hurtworld’s main thread. My implementation seemed ok in testing but after rolling it out we discovered it had made us more vulnerable to DDoS attacks so we rolled this change back for the time being however I’m working on a more robust implementation now and hope to have socket operations back off the main thread soon.

In more successful performance improvements I’ve also massively improved how meteors and air drop cargo planes are synced. Previously these were sending position and rotation updates every couple of ticks when in reality their movement was deterministic as long as starting position and rotation matched on client and server so I refactored these to just need a setup message rather than several updates per second to all players.

I’ve also been improving performance of world item generation (whenever an item exits an inventory and enters the world like dropping it from a backpack) by taking our item renderer components from a prewarmed pool rather than creating them on the fly. This helps with both cpu time and memory allocation however our world item generation is still a bit overly complex and there are more wins to be had here, I’ll be making more improvements here soon hopefully.

I’ve also been working on a bunch of bugfixes including improvised bows not being recolorable, Mozzy chassis not being recolorable or maskable, fixing options resetting to default and fixing always getting denies for hits against Mozzy passengers.
I also massively improved our camera collision detection so hopefully abusing strange camera angles and aspect ratios to peek through walls into bases to find ownership stakes is now a thing of the past, if anyone is able to still reproduce this please email me at tom@bankrollstudios.com

In terms of upcoming stuff in the next patch I’ve added an inverted pitch toggle option for helicopter controls, fixed up the in game changelog not displaying properly, attached owrongs and bandages properly to the hand bone of the player skeleton and added proper handling for an error that could occur during shutdown that would stop a server restarting normally.
I’ve also got an entity update timing change which should smooth out low performance situations much better leading to less ‘dropped’ update frames.

Plan of Attack
We will be wiping all official servers Friday 1st Feb (Today) @ 7pm AEDT.
At the same time we’ll also be releasing another small update with bugfixes, improvements and other small changes that will require community servers to wipe when they update to it.

We’ll be merging some of the low population servers and keeping an eye on the situation, spinning up fresh servers where we see demand.
These servers will run a 14 day wipe cycle after which we’ll be releasing a proper content update (0.7.1.0).
After 0.7.1.0 hits we plan to do content updates either on a 4 or 6 week cycle (not 100% sure yet) which will line up nicely with 14 day wipes, on non-content update wipes we plan to make balance changes and other small tweaks to shake it up a bit for the next cycle.
We’re still listening and evaluating demand for other wipe cycles but there are advantages to us being consistent with wipe cycles across official servers (easier to balance for instance).

Mils

As the other guys have mentioned there’s a bunch of stuff backed up from the last Dev Blog, so here it is in one big flood.

The Pickaxe; This took a little longer than expected as I went down a path of trying to make a modular pickaxe that had 1 of it’s diggy bits get swapped out with each tier of pick. I ended up hating this after I realised that if 1 side only changed it made no sense. You would have an iron pick tip on the other side that never changes. We would have to make entirely new tips on both sides and ended up deciding to just make individual cool new Pickaxes down the line. For now the Pickaxe works pretty much like the old one but just looks better and matches up with the other redone tools.

Here’s the concept of the initial idea that I ended up hating.

Here’s the plain Iron looking Pickaxe

Lastly some nice examples of what colours players may choose.

Since this is a late Devblog, I also got the shotgun done 😀

This has been irking me for a while. I like the model but the textures and details just weren’t there because of the shift in style. This now looks really nice and I feel it will make you actually want to use the shotgun again and enjoy owning one.

Also this is the first thing I made after the release of V2. We decided it would be good to be able to store your resource blocks somewhere. Right now the only safe place to store them is on the back of the slug, the blast furnace, which is strange and equipped on your player in your heavy slot to the right of your hotbar.

I also made this mask called ‘Shogun’ I’ll be adding a few new masks this week to give the players more customising options.

And, and, and… I made some sunglasses. 🙂

Made some Shutter Shades today, they’re looking nice too. 🙂

I also made this! This is an off the top of my head design that definitely has some influences from other designs I’ve seen before. Can you figure out what they might be? 🙂

TEHSPLATT

So, lots of stuff has been done leading up to release but you guys have probably seen it all by now so I’ll skim over it, got the map into the best state it’s been in, one of the main things was fixing 99% of the steepness problems around the map, I took all the main hill stamps we use in game and smoothed them out and gave them each a couple interesting features, like flat spots for building bases on. I then spent some time making Kanga jump puzzles that have been placed around the map that give out jump medals when you complete them.

I’m now making some new gear in a way that I originally wanted to do it when I made the military pants and helmet, I wanted to make sets of themed gear but we just didn’t really have time or a huge need for it, but now that V2 has been released it’s a good time to do some pure art stuff and stay out of the way of the programmers.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

The last couple weeks have been flat out keeping everything running in the wake of the massive player number spike. Now that that servers aren’t crashing much anymore I’m focusing on fixing the constant rewinds that happen every 20 seconds or so. We should have a fix for this within the week along with a bunch of other critical bugs and will be able to start moving on to new content.

The time is finally upon us.

Hurtworld V2 update goes live on our main branch on Saturday the 12th of January.

Those of you who haven’t been keeping up with our progress, Hurtworld V2 is a massive update 2 years in the making, free to all existing owners. We’ve been refining the gameplay mechanics in a separate branch, to keep the core experience stable and to give us room to push the boundaries of the survival genre. We tried a bunch of stuff, learnt lots from the things that didn’t work & found a bunch of things that we think elevate the game without compromising the core experience.

More recently we’ve been working with the community to ensure these big updates stay true to the roots of what worked so well in our Early Access launch.

It’s been a long road & now we’re super excited to share Hurtworld V2 with the world!

Character customization / Item customization / Graphical upgrades

We rebuilt our character and equipment systems from the ground up allowing players to fully modify their appearence through character customization. Fly the colors of your clan with every weapon and piece of clothing now fully paintable. Name your items that will persist long after your enemies have stolen them.

PVP Upgrades

We’ve doubled down on PVP gunplay by rebuilding the ballistics system from scratch to include a detailed recoil model and server verified bullet projection. We then redesigned all our weapons to be completely modular with upgradable sights, stocks, attachments and other stat modifiers making no two weapons the same.

Beyond weapon customization, we took a deep look at how PVP should flow, spending countless hours refining respawn mechanics, death punishment and player loot to replace the controversial infamy system from legacy.

New Vehicles

Vehicles have always been at the heart of Hurtworlds progression which we’ve extended to include a truck capable of carrying high value “heavy slot” items, as well as a punishing to fly but rewarding multiseat helicopter. Like always you can customize these to your hearts content.

Expanded World

Server performance upgrades have allowed us to expand the max players per server greatly and to support this we built a new map from the ground up to support the increased server population. Nullius expands into new biomes, a new layout and adds lots of new towns to be contested. While maintaining the existing gradual town loot, we’ve added random town events with large rewards to insight more meaningful PVP conflicts for those who want to jump in.

Throughout the world you’ll find rich meteor showers, air drops and rare creatures that will constantly keep you on your toes.

Clans can now be made official, allowing tracking of clan mates on the map, clan driven ownership of bases and server rankings. Literally make your mark on the map by competing with other clans for control over territory in special areas that crank PVP and raiding up to 11.

On January 12th Hurtworld V2 will become the default launch option in Steam. For those who love Hurtworld the way it is, the legacy branch will remain accessible through a Steam launch option.

See you out there!