Spencer
Hi All,
I spent most of this week working on server stability and some urgent community maintenance. A few bad eggs were attacking our servers via a vulnerability in the Linux implementation of sockets that allowed relatively weak DDOS attacks to bring down our servers along with other attacks against players.
Over the last few months we’ve been trying to avoid dealing with these issues in the hope that the people would get bored and realize there is no chance we will negotiate with malicious people trying to influence our decision with toxicity. It reached the tipping point where we needed to rid the community of them for good.
Our servers (both V2 and V1) should be rock solid again be able to sustain the most common DDOS attacks. We will continue to monitor the situation to ensure our servers remain stable. I am happy we now have this out of the way in the lead up to the V2 launch so we can hit the ground running once our playercount ramps back up.
We will be much harsher on bans from this point on. Anyone caught cheating, deliberately using exploits to their advantage, attempting to bring down servers or setting it community servers that circumvent our protection mechanisms will be permanently banned without warning.
Negativity aside, I would like to thank the majority of the community that helped solve these issues with the many emails of intel and player reports. Its been good to reconnect with the community over the last week. I will be making an effort to be somewhat more involved with discussions that don’t involve excessive toxicity. If you guys would like to keep an open dialog with us, keep it civil. We’re still human, we do this every day aren’t going to constantly sift through abuse. We don’t always have all the answers, we’re still committed to making Hurtworld as kickass as possible and would rather have you guys on our side.
Think V1 is better than V2, Tell us WHY!
I constantly get hurled basic broken sentences like “no v2, fix v1” which is understandable given most of our playerbase is from non English speaking countries. However this doesn’t help us much.
V2 is here to stay, at its core its very similar to V1 with technology upgrades in our equipment and loot systems and a ton of bug and security fixes.
Along the way we’ve explored new game mechanics to try to push the survival genre forward. With some epic failures or boring gameplay or incomplete mechanics to some stuff that we think adds interesting new layers to the game.
We are now in the consolidation phase of reigning back in our experiments, try to integrate the things that worked while rolling the things that didn’t work back to match V1.
I understand not everyone can express exactly what they think should change and most can only come up with “it doesn’t feel right”. These comments don’t make for much of a meaningful discussion so lets keep this thread to thoughtful posts only.
I would like to open a more in depth discussion about what you like about V1 that V2 doesn’t have, and what you like about V2.
If you haven’t played V2 in a while, things change very quickly, so your input probably isn’t very useful. I suggest you jump in on Thursday for the new wipe which contains a my new favorite weapon and 2 new town events. If you are from a country that currently has a low population in HW, I suggest you play on one of the populated EU V2 servers, I have removed the ping restriction on them and you will find our netcode hides high latency better than most games (if not in a vehicle). We play there on 300+ ping from Australia most wipes without issue.
In the interest of keeping this thread on topic, I will be removing posts that don’t contribute to the conversation, are off topic or contain abuse. Try to keep your posts to the point.
Please take into account your bias when thinking about differences that you have 1000+ hours in a game that hasn’t changed much, any change is going to be hard to accept. Some things take adjustment. Try to think as a new player entering the game.
Have you say here:
Steam Discussion
TEHSPLATT
Afternoon, so the town event I’ve been working on is finally finished and ready to be added to the map. We had a pretty decent test play of it and it definitely flows the way I wanted it too. This one is gonna take a bit of learning to get used to, I would suggest learning all the secret little pathways and peaking spots while there’s no event running on the town. This event was made with the new loot frenzy event in mind hence the size and mount of stuff going on, I felt like each position that a loot box spawns in should have a decent amount of strategy available to you even if you’re out of position. It will definitely feel over whelming when you first run around it but if you split it up into section you will see that it’s not as random and messy as it may appear. Keeping loot frenzy in mind I made sure there were enough risk/reward escape routes for solo players. We also tested out the new FR18 and it was fun as hell, it will definitely be my weapon of choice from now on. As I mentioned last week the different paths leading to the capture point in this town play to different weapons strengths and I definitely think the FR18 has it’s strong points in this town. I’m also working on a second town event that was meant to be ready by now but due to limited time stopping me from screwing around with our assets and some technical limitations with low terrain resolution it hasn’t come as far as I was aiming for. Not to mention just some backwards design that I got caught up in but luckily Spencer has a good eye for shooter level design and set me straight.
Mils
Good Morning ya’ll. I’ve been adding the Camo skin back onto the rest of the other weapons. Tasty 🙂
This is a more laborious task than it may seem. Because the guns are mechanical models and the way that I personally like to do the UV maps on them creates a lot of UV islands all over the texture map. This is great for baking normal maps, as all the surfaces that need to look flat and have nice hard edges do so without any issues. This makes it harder to add patterns that continuously map over the object. There are two ways of mapping these patterns to the object. The first is to use a cube map method, which has glaring issues as soon as you try to preview it on the object. This causes fades of the pattern around cylindrical or spherical objects. The other method is UV, which is fine but does cut the pattern up and cause a messy effect. I choose to go with the uv method and just do some manual cleanup. The result looks much cleaner and nicer on the eye.
The UV vs Cube Mapping example below:
Tom
Hey Hurtworldians,
This last week I’ve been working on testing the first of Splatt’s new town events with the FR18, Tuning and rebalancing some gun handling stuff to get ready for the fragment changes and pushing out server hotfixes with Spencer’s DDoS patch.
I set up Splatt’s town event he was showing last week in a small GameModeWorldEventDeathmatch map that cycles between running control and loot frenzy events. This town event is working well and feels really different to the others being indoors and closer quarters.
This was also a great opportunity to test out the FR18 which is now fully implemented and just undergoing tweaking. Whilst there weren’t a heap of opportunities to try out the scope in this map (Splatt’s other new town event should be much better for this) but when setup using its iron sights it’s feeling nice, snappy and fast compared to the AWM.
Next up I jumped into our gun handling simulation to make sure I properly understood the systems so I could overhaul the fragments effectively.
I found that accuracy wasn’t working quite how I had expected, most guns were ignoring the hipfire accuracy stat and those that were taking it into account were using the stat in a strange way.
I decided to consolidate the accuracy simulation implementing both hipfire and running accuracy stats for all guns as well as removing the general accuracy stat.
This was removed as the stat was too hard to balance, either it felt like you needed it to shoot straight or you felt like it didn’t do anything if you already could shoot straight. Guns still have different accuracies as defined in their CrosshairProfile but this removes accuracy as a stat on gear.
I also made some changes to the bolt action simulation, fixing the bug where it will continually try to chamber the next bullet with the bolt when trying to sprint only to have it be cancelled by the sprint. I also added a new feature to bolt actions where the next bullet will not be chambered until the primary fire button is released, this allows you to watch the full bullet drop to help you line your shots up over long distances.
With this out of the way I’ve started overhauling fragments and will have this finished soon, here’s what you’ve got to look forward to:
Removal of fragment tiers
Now every fragment can drop in the world and there will only be one fragment case purchasable with dust.
Increase in average fragment power
Way too many fragments felt too weak and like they were only good for dusting so you could roll them into something else. Now all the weak fragments have either been bumped up or removed so it should never feel like a bad move to use a fragment.
Far less available upgrade points per item
Currently we have way too many upgrade points on every item making maxing out a gearset outside the reach of most players (especially if trying to stick to strong T2 or T3 fragments).
This also meant that the gap between full fragments and no fragments could be quite large and it was also opening up some pretty crazy possibilities like stacking move speed every where even if this wasn’t really practical to farm.
With less points per item we can make each fragment more powerful and make each fragment feel like more of a decision because reaching the upgrade limit is no longer far off into the future.
Unique upgrades
Some fragments will only be able to be applied once per item. This allows us to create more powerful fragments ensuring that they have enough stats on them to have a noticeable effect without having to be worried about a player having a few of that fragment in their weapon making it completely OP.
Hope to see you on the 30th!