Spencer
Hi Guys,
Last week has been all about the Mozzy. 90% of systems are complete and gotta say its been so much fun flying around. Definitely my favourite addition to the game since the introduction of Vehicles. I had originally seen the Mozzy as a super rare vehicle that only baller clans would get to, but I’m now leaning towards making it fairly fragile and easy to lose and not too hard build.
Refuelling
We’ve been looking for gameplay mechanics to bring into the heavy slot system we tested a few months ago, and refuelling Mozzys will be the first. Avgas that runs the Mozzy will be refinable from other materials only at some of the territory control points around the map. Transportation of this fuel will only be able to be done by heavy slot. A player can only hold 1 heavy slot item at a time, and can only walk at a slow pace while holding it. The fuel can be loaded directly into the Mozzy or can be alternatively shipped to your hangar using… “The Slug”!
The Slug
The Slug has been waiting in the wings for a while which we plan on releasing with the Mozzy very soon. For those who don’t know, the slug is a heavy truck designed for transportation of speciality items that can’t be carried by players or other vehicles. It will be vulnerable to highjack but successful convoys across the map will yield big benefits. The slug struggles off road so camping out the road network with fast vehicles waiting for convoys will hopefully be a profitable exercise.
Next Patch
We haven’t yet locked down what will be going out next patch, it will be sometime early December. Stay tuned.
Mils
I’ve been in a bit of an Icon Fiesta this last week. We had some issues with the system being a bit broken but figured out what was up with it. I’m going to spend the next couple of days making sure they all look much better than they have in the past. We have an automated system that will put the object in front of the camera and record that camera position and that will create an Icon Pose which will show the object. This doesn’t yield optimum results so it’s good to go through it every now and then and give each item a nice angle and some good lighting to make the items pop.
I did also fix up some things on the Mozzy (Helicopter) so that it would look even better in-game. We flew the Mozzy on Friday and I can say it’s hard but fun as hell!
Below: This is the mesh & texture that swaps in when the helicopter’s rotor blades reach a certain speed (fast mode). They change from real geometry to a blurred alpha faded mesh and texture. We were getting some issues with the shaders we were using so we had to separate the blurred blade parts into their own mesh and apply the standard unity spec shader instead of our custom ‘Hurt Uber Shader’. We then added the mesh parts near the centre of the ‘slow mode’ mesh and I did some sneaky re-uv mapping so that the mesh looks like it blurs out (left two images vs right two images)
Tom
Hey Hurtworldians,
This week I returned from holidays and got stuck back into the vehicle system. We’ve been reviewing your feedback and agree that we’ve missed the mark and ended up with a system that isn’t as fun as legacy. With this in mind we’re rolling several changes back in the hope of returning to a place where stealing vehicles is more impactful and farming up vehicles from world chassis spawns is more achievable.
Here’s a full list of the vehicle changes made so far:
- Roaches, Goats and Kangas will no longer be destructible (The Mozzy helicopter will still be destructible)
- Vehicle self-destruction and vehicle insurance beacons removed
- Vehicle inventory locking removed
- Vehicle wheels are destructible again
- Scrap removed
- Vehicle crafter removed
- Vehicle wrench moved into wood workbench
- Added map marker tracking for claimed vehicles
As well as these changes we’re also going to shake up the spawns a bit and get those back closer to legacy as well. Currently the vehicle chassis are spawning at semi-random points around the road network but we’ll be changing it so they spawn in and around certain towns.
Along with this change we will also be bringing back town loot outside of event times, our current plan is to try and have three different ‘flavors’ of loot: Vehicle, Military and Construction with the different types coming from different towns. I’ll be working on setting this all up this week.
TEHSPLATT
This week I fixed an extremely annoying problem with the new characters, the way I had gone about doing the head and neck had caused a pretty bad seam. This was something I tried to prevent during the process but I guess what ever I did didn’t really work and the seam just slipped through the cracks. I ended up having to merge up the neck and head instead of having them as separate models and rebake just those two pieces together then splice the fixed seam into the old normal texture. It worked but it was annoying. I then had to do the same thing with the female hands due to the same problem but after just running through that problem it was pretty easy.
I’ve also been fixing the shoreline because it’s been horrible for a very long time now. This was also a bit of an annoying problem, I could have hacked something together that lasted a while but that can be a very dangerous way of working so I actually took some time to test out different approaches and found one that worked the best, it now looks much better and isn’t a destructive process that get’s reset every time I need to make a change in the final map.
Henry
Howdy world of hurt,
Exciting times around the office this week seeing the team’s hard work come to fruition. Experimenting with the mozzie and how I will capture footage of it for the trailer is a lot of fun, I cant wait to blast “Ride of the Valkyries” and fly over the palm trees of the beach.
Today we get to put V2 to the test as we are all set up to capture for the trailer. Its gonna be a blast and a lot of footage to log after.