Spencer

Hi Guys, this week we’ve all been flat out on the new map. When we couldn’t get it finished last week I decided to put all hands on deck to get it out the door this week. Our current plan is to get the map out early on Friday.

The big focus of the last couple of weeks on the map have been trying to put as much manual love into different areas as possible. In the past we have always favored automated process over manual work, mainly because manual work is a destructive process with the tool sets we had. Destructive in this context meaning that once we paint some trees or height manually, the generated parts of the map can not be changed without losing the manual work we had done.

We’ve spent more time than I would like to mention working on our tools to make this not the case. The new map tools allow for a non destructive mix of manual and automatic process, and using this we’ve been going through each area one by one and making sure there is something unique in each one. We are still dining out on a lot of the same assets, we are trying to use them in unique ways. Once you see the new map I think you’ll agree it makes a massive difference.

Multiple formulas per Biome
As I’ve been working on the start desert, and T1 hot and cold biomes I’ve been doing my best to create drastically varied feels throughout. We initially replaced the Dunes with the yellow forest for T1 hot biome, but I decided that there was enough room to have both, giving further choices about how you progress through the game.

yellowforest

Vehicle Friendly
If you spent much time in mangatang, you would have realized vehicles feel not that useful given how enclosed everything is. Our aim with the new map is to open out a lot of areas, allow more awareness of your surroundings so that vehicles feel safer. With that in mind we have kept the enclosed areas as well for solo players that want to move around un noticed.

arches2

I’m pretty excited to get this map out in the wild, Its been a long time coming and I think it will really open things up for our next phase of content design in a push to get V2 on the master branch.

See you out there.

Mils

Hey there amigos. So I have been working on a scout rifle, even though I mentioned we were going to upgrade the shotgun, that was changed and thought we’d add a traditional bolt action rifle back into the game. This one is going to be a more lightweight old school style one with a focus more on iron sights. This will still get at least one scope but it won’t be the guns main purpose. This will be more of a run and gun rifle where you will be at medium range trying to blast other players. The AWM can then take it’s rightful position as a long range sniper.

This gun’s body is mostly modeled exactly off an M1A rifle, but we wanted it to have a bolt so I modded that general design in from another rifle. The iron sights are also taken from a different rifle again and the rear sight is placed mid gun as some of the older style rifles are. These sights will be permanent and so the scope/s will sit high enough to accommodate then without them appearing in the scopes viewfinder. This has gone through a few iterations of redesign over the last couple of weeks, but I am now onto the high poly. I also modeled a new suppressor for this one that may be fitted to the AR15 and AWM if they don’t obstruct the viewfinder of the scopes on those.

FR18LowComplete

FR18Tips

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

For 0.5.9.0 my main focus was trying to fix all regressions in vehicle handling since legacy as well as fixing up a few issues introduced in 0.5.8.0

Vehicles now behave a lot more consistently now across different configurations as all vehicle systems now scale forces by vehicle weight. This means that things like suspension force and traction have the same effect on the vehicle no matter the panels that are attached or how many passengers are on board.
While variable weight would’ve been good to achieve it was too hard for us to balance in a reasonable timeframe to make sure the whole range of configurations felt ok, now weight is just used to resolve physics collisions and vehicles are much easier to tune around one handling profile per vehicle type.
The other major change to vehicle handling was to adjust the force application point of vehicle wheels. Previously traction and suspension forces were being applied to the center of the wheel when at full suspension compression. Moving the force application point to the wheels point of contact would’ve been correct simulation wise but instead I moved it to be inline with the center of mass height, this removes unwanted pitch and roll forces due to traction leading to a less physically correct but more controllable and consistent vehicle.

I also got through a bunch of bugs related to the 0.5.8.0 vehicle changes, Kangas no longer freeze sometimes when trying to stand them back up, passengers exiting a vehicle no longer turns them off, vehicle engines no longer appear black, vehicle health should now always sync correctly with the UI, made vehicle airdrops 100% accurate and stopped footsteps from playing when entering a vehicle while sprinting.
I also closed off a cheeky amber farming method where players were carrying around a full set of vehicle parts, using them to claim chassis spawns out in the world then taking the parts off before disassembling for the amber then finally unclaiming the disassembled vehicle so it can start all over again.
We didn’t hotfix this right away as we thought it would be kept somewhat under control by the fact you had to risk many vehicle parts to pull it off plus you would also drop the amber collected from the run so far. Ultimately though it was too powerful when the danger from other players wasn’t there like in the servers off-peak hours and it also broke our concept of using amber as a kind of proof of work item. Now to claim a chassis spawn you need to pay the amber cost up front (Goat spawn beacons still automatically claim).

Recently I’ve been learning our map tools and workflow and starting to help the other guys test and polish up our next map iteration which we are planning to push out to you guys this week.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, recently I’ve been working on the two outer biomes, the Snow and Red Desert, these are interesting ones because most players this far in the progression will have vehicles so they need to be a lot more open compared to the start and mid tier biomes. I started with rough unplanned layout I showed last dev blog and then focused on 2 or 3 main areas and started opening them up to allow more breathing room for larger bases and better visual awareness for those driving vehicles. Currently working on opening up the Red Desert some more to give it a pretty desolate feeling, I’ve been trying to stay true to some tropes you would find in a desert environment like this such as long, generally flat, open roads cutting through valleys instead of hugging the mountains like in the snow biome, also things like the overall ground noise being much flatter in a lot of parts, still working out the best way to make these different ideas look good. Unfortunately I can’t get decent in game screenshots of these biomes just yet so this is going to have to do. The snow biome now has these small hills that just barely occlude the player with clumps of trees on top of them, this works really well and can help bring in a large valley, still trying to figure out the red desert version of those to help bring in those larger valleys without actually making them smaller. Still lots of work to do but feeling confident.

SnowandRedesertUpdate1