Spencer

Hi yall,

Recently I’ve been working on water mechanics and quality of life fixes. This update I will go into a bit of detail about the next content patch scheduled for Thursday the 30th of May.

Creature Update
Over the new few weeks we will be bringing to life as many of the creatures as possible that have been long in limbo waiting for some upgrades to the AI systems. I have held off putting them into the game thus far as making reskinned boars is pretty boring…

The first member of the team I’ve been working on is a long time favourite of mine, the Skoogler. Heavily inspired by the cassowary and the turkey is a large flightless bird that proper mess your shit up. He will likely come in in later parts of the progression and will be the first creature that constant running away won’t save you.

In addition to being able to run down anything, I’m currently working on a new system to enhance the skoogler AI so they hunt and migrate in packs. They will communicate with each other and try to circle their prey while hunting. Packs will also regenerate members if not completely decimated which may provide benefits for farming, or problems if struggling to fight them off.

Here is a sneak peek of the Skoogler in game:

Other animals on the way are the MonkeyBat, the Big Cat, the Rafaga (Bird) as well as bringing back the Antor (giant mosquito) and the Dart Bug (scorpion type thing).

Theres a ton of work to do getting AI varied on all these creatures as well as filling in missing animations etc, I will aim to get everything in game atleast then possibly iterate over AI further in coming patches.

Mils

Whatup?! So I’ve been working on the MAC10 for a bit and now it’s happily ensconced in the game. I won’t bore you with any details about that because you can play with it now all by yourself. I have been working on some other stuff though.

Firstly something we have wanted back in the game since before the earth cooled is the Glider. We had one of these very early in development and it was a lot of fun to race each other in one of our very early test maps. So I’ve create a basic Glider mesh for Spencer to use as an early prototype. This is similar to a real glider. Whether we change the look of this down the line drastically, we haven’t decided that yet. This is on hold for now but I just wanted to make a mesh Spencer can use to prototype with.

Also we have decided to go ahead with rockets for the Mozzy. These are looking mean in their first stages and should be a lot of fun in game when done.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since the last devblog our plans for an upgrade to Unity 2018 started running into some serious issues. We rolled out an early build to a small test group and quickly discovered several shader compatibility issues as well as a nasty memory leak.
I tried to fix these issues and whilst I made some decent progress into the shader issues, the memory leak refused to show up in any meaningful way in Unity’s profiling and debugging tools.
With tough issues still to fix that were essentially destroying the very reason we were upgrading (performance and stability improvements) we made the tough decision to indefinitely delay the Unity upgrade.
Because we had been working in the 2018 version we had to transfer our work back into the 5.6 version, this was easy enough for the codebase but significant changes in serialization patterns made backporting assets a trickier process that couldn’t really be automated. This is why 0.7.2.0 ended up getting split into 0.7.2.0 and 0.7.3.0 a week later with all the assets.
Going forward we will continue to investigate solutions to our upgrade issues but if we cannot fix the problems on low spec machines we will not be moving ahead with an upgrade.

I’ve also been working on bugfixes to go into the 0.7.3.1 hotfix patch that we just released. The most significant fix there was probably the ‘Roach peeking’ fix.
Because the Roach’s rear seat FPS camera position was outside of the vehicle collider it was possible to position the Roach so the rear seat could see through walls.
To fix this up I changed the Roach’s rear seat into an unsafe entry type of seat that performs an overlap and line of sight check on an entry attempt and blocks the passenger if either of these fail (this makes it work like the Kanga and Goat driver seats).
The other major change was adding an attached body component to the rear seat. Now when a passenger enters the rear seat the vehicle connects another simple capsule physics body to the vehicle via a joint and this simulates the vehicle/passenger connection. If this joint receives too much force it will break (for example, someone trying to push your head through the wall by using a spear on the vehicle) and on breaking it puts the passenger into the crash state.
Kangas and Goats also have this attached body component running on their driver seats.

I’ve also been working on making the tether system more stable, removing the tether break limits and allowing multiple players to have active tethers in the same tether network (think like a tug of war scenario). This change was planned to go into 0.7.3.1 but we found some last minute pooling issues that caused us to delay it until the next hotfix, we are now looking at releasing this fix sometime before the next wipe on the 16th of May.

TEHSPLATT

Hey, this week I’ve been working on creature animations. We are currently trying to get all the old creatures up to scratch, this means figuring out what animations are missing and filling them in while also deciding how exactly their game play is going to work. My specialisation is not in animation so there is a bit of a learning curve but nothing I can’t handle. The hardest challenge going forward will be the Monkeybat as it’s a combination of a two creatures that walk in interesting ways so I will need to do a bit of research and also step up my walk cycle game as this creature is missing pretty much all its animations. Here’s some of the test animations I have been working on. Trying to match the quality of the original creature animations is going to be a pretty hard thing to do but my main focus is just making sure the animations don’t stand out as stiff low quality place holders, more like, medium quality place holders haha.

Spencer

Hi Hurtworldians!

We’ve been a bit slack on the dev blogs the last couple weeks, rest assured we’re hard at work on the content patch dropping this Thursday. Main features include an overhaul of how we handle water including adding swimming mechanics, new town events, a big upgrade of our Unity engine version (about 2 years of updates), the new Mac10 SMG weapon and a ton of bug fixes.

Water
Water has turned out really nice, while this patch mainly focuses on the interaction of water, players, vehicles, animals etc and introduces some basic water features throughout the map, it paves the way for the upcoming islands patch which will drastically change the way that end game is played.

Quality of life
We spent a bunch of time this wipe playing and came across some very annoying bugs like name plates disapearing, re-amber protecting your gear being mega glitchy. Name plates should now always show on other players, we’ve also introduced a protect all feature to amber protection to reduce the friction between respawning and getting back into the fight. By right clicking on a stack of amber, you will see the option to protect all in the current storage.

Thursdays patch will be going out at 5pm Melbourne time and will force a wipe for all severs.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since last devblog I’ve been mostly working on our upgrade to the latest version of Unity (2018.3). This upgrade brings some significant performance improvements, most importantly being the physics engine being upgraded to PhysX 3.4.2 and the terrain rendering system moving most of its processing off the cpu and onto the gpu. This upgrade should also help with stability in the long term because we’ll be back on a properly supported version that is receiving patches and fixes but in the short term there will probably be a bunch of teething issues to sort out when the upgrade goes live, I’m expecting some hotfixes early into the 0.7.2.x cycle.

Most of the upgrade work so far has been updating our tools, dealing with changes to build pipeline and then either upgrading to the latest version or finding replacements for 3rd party tools and middleware that were broken in the upgrade process. Thankfully this has gone well and everything seems mostly stable now, just a few of our replacement screen effects need some extra polish and we have a few shader bugs left to stomp out in the Mac and Linux builds. Workshop mods will need to republished from the upgraded SDK to be 100% compatible with 0.7.2.x and I’ll be pushing out a preview SDK to a steam beta branch ahead of release to help sort out any issues ahead of time and make sure mods are ready to go. If you wish to get involved in this please email me at tom@bankrollstudios.com

As well as the 2018 upgrade I’ve also been working on 0.7.1.x hotfixes mostly dealing with issues in the tether system. Most of the tether issues were due to the joint constraints getting into an impossible to fulfill state which was causing it to create some insane forces and shoot stuff all over the map. Currently to stop this occurring I added in a simple force limit beyond which the tether is broken but in testing I’ve seen promising results from changing the simulation to be 2 bodies connected by one joint instead of 3 bodies connected by 2 joints and also turning off the auto correct impossible configurations system. This more comprehensive fix was put on hold until our Unity upgrade was complete as the physics engine upgrade would mean a bunch of duplicated work to rebalance and retest the system post-upgrade. Unfortunately the Unity upgrade has taken a bit longer than expected so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to implement the true fix for the 0.7.2.0 release but it should make it into a post-release hotfix.

I’ve also been implementing the new Mac10 sub machine gun into the game, which will be a high rate of fire, short to medium range gun introduced at the titranium level of crafting.
Whilst it will be launching with only the base attachments (standard mag and ironsights) and a single flat color pattern we plan to fully stock it out with extra attachments and patterns in future patches.

Mils

So I got the Main part of the MAC10 done this week. The same styling that the other guns have received. This came out nice. I’ll be making a tip, magazine and iron sight at least for the release of this. I’ll get to the other parts after that and the colour masks for everyone to customise their gun. There are some funny inscriptions on this that I’m sure you can just see if you look closely. 😀

I’ll be away taking a holiday for the next 2 weeks, so seeya after that.

Update: So I got back from the holiday and here’s the MAC10 with a few more parts. Coming along nicely.

TEHSPLATT

So this week I’ve been speed building town event levels, got two so far, they are pretty enjoyable, tried to make the way they play match the level of gear players would have in these specific areas. They will both be placed close to the shore line in the jungle areas, which means most players will be coming in with tier 1 bows, spears and hatchets so I’ve made sure the levels have a bunch of tricky routes and decisions to make meaning players with low tier gear can prevail using knowledge of the map. The second map is a pretty weird one, I went with this tree house , multi-level type design, very vertical, which is something I’m interested in exploring more. I would like to get one more event done and then drill down on some modular building assets so I can replace the grey boxes with some actual nice looking assets.

So this is the before and after stage of building the towns, start with a grey box so you can design the actual play-ability of the level without worrying about visuals, then when you feel like you’ve got that sorted, you move on to replacing all the grey boxes with something visually interesting. I also worked on some swimming animations, I’m not an animator but I have bit of a grasp on the basics and understand the general pipeline. I made a breast stroke animation and a wading in water idle animation, I would also like to update the get up from crash animation as well, it’s pretty place holder.

HENRY

What’s really hood?

Been a minute since I’ve been in the blog, but I’m back grinding on this extended trailer. We realised whist the V2 trailer was action packed, fast paced and lots of fun. It didn’t quite communicate some of the best things about Hurtworld, so over the last two weeks we got the squad together and captured some great moments of teamwork, heartache and PVP action.

Aside from this footage I have also captured a large amount of cinematic style shots to assist in showing the games function and features. During the time spent capturing this footage we have worked out there are more things that need to be added to the script, not to mention after hearing my voice overplayed on loop, I am no longer happy with the delivery.

So new words, better internation, longer shots, more gameplay and 5 players worth of footage to go through and edit. I better get back to it.

 

Spencer

Hi Hurtworldians!

Todays dev update will aim to give you some insight into what our plans are over the next couple of months.

11th April Content Patch

• New Weapon: UZI SMG – A new close range high fire rate high mobility weapon, complete with attachments and customization
• Unity 2018 Upgrade – A long time overdue, we will be finally upgrading to the latest stable version of Unity. This should bring performance improvements and tons of bug fixes we have been waiting on for a while now.
• Water Upgrades – We’ve neglected this for a while, throwing radiation at the edge of the map so we didn’t have to deal with how everything interacts with water. Not to mention potato mode doesn’t even render water at all. This will get an overhaul and pave the way for new things in future patches 😉
• New Town Events – Aiming for 2 fully fleshed out new town events on the road to replacing all the duplicates on Nullius, we also plan to tweak the town event system to make them more engaging and worth while for all players.

Longer Term Plans
We will see how we go with this content patch before planning exact features of future ones, however we have a loose idea of where we want things to go in future patches. Ultimately we feel remaining in early access tag is starting to feel a bit stale, and will be working over the next few content patches to bring the quality of life and stability up to a point we feel we can finally exit early access. We’ve got a bit of work to do here, now we are back in a single branch we feel it shouldn’t take too long to finally fix up all those long standing issues that aren’t game breaking but keep out players that expect a higher level of polish.

Islands
With helicopters in game, and soon to be decent water mechanics we can hopefully push forward with new map design elements we’ve been waiting to play with for a long time: Islands. We feel these should fit into the end game and require high end vehicles like Mozzys to travel to. I imagine them being relatively small, having specific unique traits or resources on them, and could potentially be controlled by a single clan and competed over as part of the endgame meta. This is a fairly long term goal but don’t see why we couldn’t get there in 2 or 3 content cycles.

Territory Control Love
The territory control system is in a bit of a shell state at the moment, there are elements about it that I love, but obviously the execution is pretty placeholder. We plan to flesh out the competition for territory control to be more interesting like town events that require building, and incentivize clan leaders with more than just a point system. Likely something along the lines of purchasable vanity items for the leading clans.

Vehicle Combat
As part of the V2 camera overhaul that I did last year, I invested in making sure we can support things like shooting from vehicles in future. Although there is a fair bit of work to do still, we think adding this element will make fighting out in the world a ton more interesting. This would also include things like rocket pods on the Mozzy which shouldn’t be too hard to execute on. Before you jump to tell us how this will break the entire metagame, we will obviously give it a lot more thought before actually going ahead with it, these are just loose plans.

Raiding
Raiding balance requires a lot of love. It is a very hard thing to balance between big clans, solo players, people who want to farm and people who want to PVP hence why we’ve typically laid on the side of making defence easier than raiding. We are aware of the issues and will definitely spend a proper amount of time designing a more balanced system that hopefully satisfies everyone (I can dream :S).

Creature Limbo
We have a ton of new creatures in the pipeline from years ago, without an animator we’ve been unable to finish them off not to mention the limited AI support to make interacting with them interesting. Splatt has been plugging away at animations and we are almost at a point where we can push forward with getting all our new creatures in game over the next few content patches.

There are a lot of smaller things we’re working on, these are the main big features we want to see in game in the near future. We care about your feedback, drop us a line on the forums with your thoughts. If you want us to take your posts seriously, please be respectful.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since last dev blog I’ve been working on a bunch of different stuff that all went into 0.7.1.0.
I started with bringing back the succulent plants with their consumable sunscreen item. This helps to bring the heat progression more in line with the cold progression to compensate for its environmental pressure being stronger during the day hours and day cycles being longer than night cycles.

Speaking of bringing things back I also spent some time getting the poison trap back into the game. In legacy the poison trap didn’t see a lot of use being a consumable item that didn’t guarantee a kill so we reimagined it as an area denial machine. Now the poison trap isn’t destroyed when triggered allowing it to deny an area until its removed via the machine wrench (the machine wrench not affecting the trap will be fixed in 0.7.1.2)

In order to support the crafting of medusa vines I made some improvements to the item transition system to ensure irradiated owrong seeds would work correctly. First I upgraded our item transition tooltips so the progress bar continued to show on an inactive transition, this allows you to see how a transition’s falloff works as its progress returns to 0 over time when it is inactive.
I also upgraded the entity stats builders for all our storage machines so they are affected by radiation in the same manner as players, this allows you to place a storage (chest/locker) in an irradiated zone to safely irradiate the items within whilst you stand at a safe distance.

We’ve been getting lots of reports about hit registration errors and our system seems to be a little overly keen to deny shots at the moment, whilst we investigate this properly I’ve made a few changes to the hit feedback logic that should make things clearer.
The crosshair hit marker used to be client predicted meaning that when your client detected a hit it would be instantly shown but the hit doesn’t really take effect until the server registers it as well. If the server disagrees with the hit it denies it and tells your client to show the blue crosshair hit marker but a case did exist where your hit packet would be dropped (eg. corrupted or lost) so the server didn’t know about your hit to send back a deny message.
Now in this new configuration all crosshair hit markers (hits, crits and denies) are driven by the server so you should no longer get any ‘fake’ hit markers appearing. The downside to this is that the hit marker isn’t as responsive but I think correctness is more important whilst we work out the issues with hit registration.

As well as this I’ve been implementing the new vanity gear into the game, working on some smaller bug fixes and investigating the new Unity 2018.3 version as a potential upgrade to bring performance and stability improvements. This has been promising so far so hopefully we’ll be able to roll this out in time for 0.7.2.0

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I worked on getting a female version of the rebel gear set together, it all went pretty smoothly, nice to have a bit of variation between the hot and cold gear. I also fixed a lot of skinning and clipping problems, I would have loved to have gone much deeper on it but the way we do animations with additive animations to create more depth to our animations means that making sure the skinning is perfect all over is actually a pretty difficult job as nailing down exactly what additive animation is causing the problems is gonna need some extra work. I’m now back on map stuff, doing some new town events that actually tie in with the world to get rid of all the duplicates we have, it’s a big job but it will be worth it, the first one I’m doing I’m pretty excited for, it’s very much gonna be based around early game weapons as it’s position in the map is extremely early game. So lots of mobility and spear/bow kills to be done.

Mils

The Tether arrow seems to have gone down well this last week. Some amusing videos have been surfacing which is nice 🙂 The arrow and rope came out well. It was good to get my hands on some skinning work again after so long. Skinning is the process of painting the mesh’s vertices which defines a % between 0.0 and 1.0 value for each vertex. This tells the software which bones affect which parts of a mesh and how the mesh deforms based on those values.

Also I whipped up a nice little tube of sunscreen with some hilarious in-joke art on it which I almost got in the game for the patch before I was struck down mercilessly by a plague Later in the week. I’ll put this in to go out with our next patch.

Also good news for all you gun nuts out there, we are adding another weapon! So I think I’ve posted work on this before, but we never made it a priority to build it. So the gun is going to be the MAC10! There are a whole lot of parts that I’ve already built in low poly for this bad boy. I’ll focus on a base set to be ready by our next content patch. This should be about 6 weeks away, I’ll let Spencer tell you the details about the patch though.