Spencer

Hi All,
We’ve been getting heaps of requests to bring back town loot like legacy. This week I’ll be introducing a new type of town event that I think should fill this void. The main thing I want to improve on is the slow constant trickle of loot at towns that means in contested areas there is only a small chance of getting anything on a loot run which results in lots of repetative looping of towns without much risk.

Loot Frenzy
The new event I’m working on will be called Loot Frenzy. This event will frequently activate at all towns, and for a period of time loot crates similar to legacy will spawn at random locations inside the town. The frequency and value with be a lot higher than legacy town loot spawns giving a concentrated burst of good loot that can be contested over by nearby players. Unlike Control Town Events, this loot will not be secured by insurance, meaning you need to escape safely to claim the rewards. It will be up to you to get out with your spoils early or stick around and try to get more. Hunting players will likely be as valuable as hunting loot boxes.

Diemensland Refresh
Splatt has been working on the new map for some time now, its taking a lot longer than expected and mangatang is getting stale. For the next wipe on the 7th we will be releasing a version of Diemensland for our current V2 build to break things up a bit and to also give us a refresh on what worked with Diemensland to aid the redesign of Mangatang

Mils

The Pistol has been completed! The regular 2 skins; Veil and Section 8 have been applied to the components and I added a unique skin named ‘Code’ as well. This should be all good to go barring any last minute changes which may crop up. I also adjusted the base gun materials to break up the samey gun metal and define the shapes a bit more.

PistolSkins01

I also got into a bit of Graphic Design for the Transitions Spencer mentioned last week. I jazzed up the basic programmer art version of the transitions bars inside the tooltip window. I also thought while I was at it that we darken the background of the tooltip windows so they stand out a bit more when displayed over the rest of the UI.

Transitions

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this past week I’ve been iterating on the new start desert that I had just blocked in last time. After going over a bunch of things and learning a ton, it’s finally starting to take shape as something playable. Some of the main things that I focused on was tightening up the transition zones between open spaces and around roads, other wise they are just wasted space. We’ve been looking a lot at tree density and ground undulation and trying to get those values right, they can make or break the feel of a map. I had a go with trying to make a stamp that could dip the terrain down in a bowl shape but the masking brush doesn’t have enough resolution so it ends up with weird terracing issues, hopefully get that looked at. Also started remaking the hills captured from Deimans Land but making sure they are a lot taller and spread the base out a lot more then use the snap to terrain and terrain offset values to set how tall they are, other wise the changing ground height can cause really annoying artifacts. The next step is going to be fleshing out every other biome as fast as possible so we can actually starting moving this map forward, I feel like I’ve definitely learnt a lot from this starting zone and should be able to get the rest of the biomes up to the same standard in a much shorter time frame. Although it may not look like it, a lot has changed since the first fleshing out of this biome.

Map Latest

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

The vehicle insurance changes have been more complicated than originally planned for so we decided to delay them until the next patch rather than push out something to make the deadline knowing we would have to revisit it anyway.
After delaying the vehicle changes until 0.5.8.0 I spent most of last week working on bugfixes, balance changes and other small tweaks for 0.5.7.0.
Currently the plan is to reintroduce vehicle customisation and world spawns of vehicle chassis along with adding the vehicle insurance system in 0.5.8.0 on the 7th June but more on all that next week.

FRIDGE

We’ve always wanted to bring the fridge back into ItemV2 but we were concerned it didn’t have a strong enough case for existing.
With the recent temperature overhaul however, food has become much more valuable as you start to poke into a new biome where you aren’t quite safe yet, the well fed buff can be the difference between life and death.
Without another use for the coolant consumable we instead switched the fridge over to be powered by fuel. Currently the fridge always tries to approach -11 degrees (the freezing point for steaks), in the future when we have more item transitions that rely on being below a cold temperature we plan to open this up and allow players to set the target temperature along with a proper thermostat system so fuel is only consumed when the fridge is above the target temperature. We hope this will open up a host of emergent gameplay options (eg. Spoiling a players meat by lighting a nearby mondinium fire, overpowering the fridge’s cooling and defrosting and eventually spoiling their steaks)

 

START BIOME SPECIFIC EVENT LOOT

Whilst we’ve been happy with how the airdrop and town event mechanics have been working out the rewards from them can be pretty inconsistent, especially in the early game.
In an effort to smooth rewards out I’ve added a biome filter for airdrop loot (so the plane injects different loot into the air drop crate depending on which biome it gets dropped in) as well as creating a new tier of town event reward case to drop in the start biome.
These starter biome loot trees are similar but with reduced options, all the vehicle attachments have been removed and the only gun items that drop are for the pistol. On top of this the detonation cap has also been removed.
We’re hoping this change will let newer players get loot they can use more consistently from airdrops and town event wins whilst also encouraging experienced players to travel to the far out town events more often.
If this works out well I would like to try setting up another loot tier for the forest and sand dunes biomes or maybe even biome specific loot trees. We’ll also be removing vehicle attachments totally from airdrops and town events and bringing them back to vehicle chassis spawns in the world but more on that next week.

 

C4 EXPLOIT FIX

With the vehicle changes delayed I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to fix an exploit with sleepers and C4.
When a player is in their sleeper form they project a nobuild zone over and above their sleeper stopping any other player from building on top of them so we can make sure the area is free to spawn into when they return.
This exploit arose because C4s do not care about no build zones (this is so crafty players cannot use no build zones to block C4 from being placed at all) so they can be placed over a players sleeper so they log back in inside the C4 collider causing a whole bunch of problems in the physics engine.
Now when a player spawns from a sleeper we perform an additional check for any overlapping machines in the spawn area. If any are found the player will be killed.
With this fix and the recent crash vehicle exploit fix I think all the major exploits in ItemV2 are now closed. If I’m wrong about this please let me know (tom@bankrollstudios.com)!