Spencer
This week we’ve all been in polish mode, now that we have something a little more solid to work from, we are going through all the outstanding issues that make ItemV2 less stable than legacy. No mega exciting features from me this week as I’ve been on bug fix duty.
I played a bunch of ItemV2 over the weekend and had a heap of fun, it has definitely re-sparked my inspiration for what is to come in future. The first task for us is to get all our new systems bug free, and our core balance to a point we can build upon.
ItemV2 Wipe and patch this Thursday
Due to the dupe bugs in this weeks experimental build, we will be doing an ItemV2 wipe and patch to address a ton of issues we have found over the last week. Progression will be fairly similar but should be a lot more stable.
Mils
Man playing the new V2 patch on Tthursday & Friday was awesome fun. I am loving where V2 is going now. Still a lot of things to add/fix up but the game is really fun again.
So the Mozzy low poly is now ready with it’s first body kit. Pending Spencer’s approval of the scale of the chopper I will got ahead and start making the high poly. Pretty happy that the initial poly count has come in at around 17,500 tri’s. This is fine considering the size of this vehicle. It will also let the poly count creep up a bit if some of the later body kits have a couple thousand more poly’s. It’s going to look pretty good with all the additional detail that will come with the normal maps. I want this to look scavenged, with weld lines and patches of discoloured rusty metal in spots. This has taken a bit longer than expected but is on track to be finished pretty soon. Spencer said he wants this thing to take a lot of skill to fly and land, so should be a good challenge, especially considering how much access to bases it will provide.
TEHSPLATT
This week was a pretty fun week. I started learning the map magic tools in depth, learning Substance Designer has really helped me feel completely comfortable with node based work flows. I started working on a new version of the start biome as a way to learn Map Magic and because I believe it needs a re-work. First thing I wanted to get done was small consistent rolling dunes in the sand so that you can’t just see for miles over a flat terrain I did this using a mildy tweaked Voronoi node, this creates endless rolling hills of varying size and height. Next up was creating a my own version of the current formula we have for large occlusion, at the moment we use more of a typical hill with rocks scattered around it in a sort of circular form. My version is essentially the same but a bit more random with some character. I acheived this by using another Voronoi node only this time it was a lot more intense with larger and taller hills. I then excessively tweaked a Unity noise node and created a mask to represent the islands. Once I felt it had the right frequency and shapes, I plugged it into the more intense Voronoi node as a mask, thus leaving out certain areas to only be influenced by the less intense base Voronoi. As you can see it leaves a natural path way around all the hills. I then plugged in a bunch of test assets and the newer environment assets I’ve been working on. It was a great little show case for the new terrain chunks and rocks. The overall colour pallet hasn’t been correctly picked yet so lots of stuff is off and some of the assets are just rough ones I had lying around.
Cow_Trix
Heya folks! Not a huge amount to show off this week – although you can now jump in game and explore the new map! This week was mostly polishing the map in preparation for the patch release last Friday. Even with that polish work there were a few areas that I’m not happy with, and that’s part of what I’ll be working on this week. Overall I thought the general layout of the map worked well, and having an in-game minimap has really solved the biggest problem we had with the original Diemensland structure – in that it was good for the micro gameplay, but began to fall apart at the macro level when navigability became an issue. I spent a long time making Diemensland, and I even I couldn’t find my way around the thing.
There’s a few places with floating rocks and road/terrain interaction not working well, so I’ve been going through those spots where I can find them and fixing them up, as well as tweaking a few road settings so they happen less often. The biggest culprits are always when the road dips or banks. Hopefully I will be able to have an improved version of the map for the next build that will fix a few of these glitchy points.
I’ve also been looking into some glitchiness around map markers, and UI focus where things like chat, ownership stake names and signs weren’t managing cursor lock properly.
Tom
Hello Hurtworldians! This last week I’ve been continuing to help setup content for the recently released 0.5.0.0 patch mostly focusing on creature balance. This involved going through the creature stats and rolling them back to legacy levels and correctly setting up spawn builders to spawn variants of the same type (like bors become rad bors when spawned near towns or sasquatches become yetis when spawned in snow).
I also got some quality of life improvements done with removing the random aim offset that was applied when using a scope to aim and reducing the base level scope sway. Also in quality of life improvements I removed the UI swipe circle from appearing when hitting anything but a resource node.
We’ve been pretty happy how this patch has turned out, it isn’t perfect with a few balance issues around the changes from legacy (airdrops, meteors, vehicles and item protection) and some nasty bugs but we will be sticking with this setup and working to fix the bugs and issues rather than trying to overhaul the base game radically again.
