Tom
Hey Hurtworldians,
Most of what I’ve been up to has been work that went into the 0.5.6.3 hotfix patch we released on Friday, other than that I’ve started working through the vehicle and visual override changes but we are still iterating over those changes and don’t have them locked down solidly just yet.
Vehicle crash system fix
Because the Goat and Kanga have exposed drivers seats (as opposed to the Roach who’s driver seat is protected and covered by the chassis) we use two special components constructing these vehicles, VehiclePassengerUnsafeEntry (this stops players from entering when the seat is being blocked, for example when the vehicle is upside down) and AttachedBodyCrash.
AttachedBodyCrash attaches another physics body to the vehicle via a joint, this joint simulates the player’s connection to the vehicle and if it breaks due to too much force being applied (usually by catching your head on a low ceiling or landing a large jump) a crash is invoked.
When a crash is invoked with an attached body we were previously assuming due to being fully physically simulated that this attached body would be in a safe location that we could spawn the ‘crash vehicle’ into. Unfortunately this assumption proved to be false so I added an extra safety line of sight check between the vehicle and the crash spawn location, if any terrain, base or machine is in the way then we kill the player instead (it is a crash after all and this almost never occurs unless the player is specifically trying to exploit).
Hopefully this will put an end to the crash vehicle exploits but if you see any more please keep making noise about them, I am determined to wipe them out for good!
Minor 0.5.6.3 changes
- Made beds rotatable
- Updated to Unity 5.6.6f2 (If using the SDK please switch over to this Unity version)
- Fixed shack markers disappearing on server restart
- Setup Beretta ironsight world items and icons
- Fixed some minor SDK issues (world items now add any missing required components @ build time rather than runtime and passive equip effects now automatically display their tooltip rather than having to explicitly opt in)
0.5.7.0
So far I’ve been merging in the vehicle refactor I did a few months ago to make things less of a tangled mess in the backend, make setting up vehicles in the SDK easier (still a lot we can improve here but we are moving in the right direction) and making it easier for us to add new vehicle types. This has gone really smoothly and I’m back to parity with the pre-refactor code, this means I’m ready to start rebalancing handling and crashing as well as adding vehicle insurance and full customisation.
I’ve also been setting up the extra Beretta attachments Mils has been working on, 0.5.7.0 will add the red dot sight plus 2 silencers to the Beretta.
Mils
I got the cute little Red Dot for the Pistol done this week. Came out nice and should make aiming down the sights a much nicer experience for the anyone playing in First Person (I dislike Ironsights personally) This Red Dot will just look cool in general on the gun as well as be functional. We’ve gone about as far with parts as we are willing to go right now. I’m onto making the masks/designs for now. I’ll be adding the usual Veil and Section 8 skins while adding a custom design also. I already have a couple of good candidates.
I’m also working on some UI stuff to make transitions between item states more visual and less wordy. This will save us from having to convert this information to other languages and hopefully make the information easy to decipher.
TEHSPLATT
Played a ton of Hurtworld over the weekend to gather some information on what we need for a good map. I learnt a lot and also had a lot of fun. During my play time I noticed myself returning to specific spots to gather resources and realized that these spots followed the formula we have been discussing, large open areas that allow you to mine safely and see who’s coming. These large open areas are also great for building and just existing in in general but in the current Mangatang map there is a lack of those areas, and I constantly find myself subconsciously drawn to areas where I can see who’s around me while mining. Mangatang also has a lot of transition zones that do nothing more than act as the in between for gameplay/playable areas and this can make a lot of the map feel like you’re in limbo. I’m currently working on keeping these transition zones as small as possible in the new map I’m working on, and trying to keep these large open areas as frequent as possible while also trying to balance not making the map feel empty. I’ve attempted to tie the town events into the world a lot more, so they don’t feel so disconnected, this will work better when I create new town events that I can design for specific biomes and parts of the map. We are restructuring the shape of the map to make it easier to reduce/increase the size for varying player numbers. Something else I’m focusing on in this map is making sure the roads feel good and actually feel like they belong where they are placed. Here’s some pictures of stuff and things including the general idea of the new Mangatang layout.
Spencer
This week I’ve been hunting down the last of the localization issues, in the process rebuilt the way we display item transitions. Item transitions are the ways items can become other items like steaks getting cooked, ore smelting, owrongs going moldy etc.
Previously we had just a bit of text that had to be hand written for each item, this was a pain in the ass to translate, it also told you very little about what was actually going on with such transition. Part of ItemV2 added the ability to synchronize more complex item data to the client for tooltips like the state of each transition, we just hadn’t built a UI to display it.
Here is my programmer art version of some transition panels which Mils is reskinning now to be a bit prettier.
These now show how long until something will change state as well as if it qualify’s for the transition. Mechanics are exactly the same, you can just see whats going on.
With better transparency we can now introduce more interesting item effects like for example rare loot that explodes and kills you after an amount of time if above a specific temperature, food being poisoned by toxin etc. Nothing in concrete yet.