Spencer
Hi Fam,
Work is progressing well on the things I spoke about in the last dev blog. So far I’ve mainly been working on long standing annoying bugs that I’ve put off for ever as they didn’t seem that important, I’m still not entirely convinced that this is time well spent but also can’t picture exiting early access with a bunch of broken stuff still in the game regardless of whether it actually affects anyone’s enjoyment.
Progress on the rocket launcher is going well, delving into animation for the first time since Dazzler was part of the team has been a mission, I kinda wish we did it earlier as we’re regaining a lot of skills that would have been handy while choosing which content to develop over the last couple of years.
Rock Exploits
I’m happy to say with some new detection techniques and some heavy bans we have completely eradicated people using rock exploits from the game. Its an ongoing fight but people seem to have finally gotten the message that exploits aren’t going to fly anymore.
When Update
The next update will be the launch from early access, early access exit, V2 Version 1.0 whatever you want to call it. We kinda put ourselves in a corner naming and update in Early Access V2. Hurtworld V2 1.0 sounds dumb enough to work lets go with that. This patch won’t be going out until the end of November, firstly because we need the time to iron out remaining bugs and finish up some content, but also because there is a ton more people playing games around end of year holidays and its a good time for a launch. I personally welcome the breathing space.
Server consolidation
With the quiet of that breathing space comes a decent drop in player numbers as we would expect. Doesn’t make sense to have tons of half empty servers, so we will be consolidating things next wipe. Servers will be less granular region based and more varied on things like wipe times. Wipe wise I will probably create a longer wipe time server as it will be lasting a couple months before a forced wipe.
Mils
I’ve been working on this beast the last few weeks. We will soon have a Rocket Launcher! I’ve been hard at work designing this bad boy which is loosely based off 2 existing rocket launcher designs. We wanted to create something that looks like it’s been manufactured but with our own design twist. It’s been a pleasure to work on and cam up nicely. Spence is in the process of finalising the function and Splatt has been slaving away on the animations so it looks right when used by the player in the game.
I also did some minor project polish on some items in the game like Icon poses and world item scalings. Some of the world items were ridiculously large, so I sanitised them a bit.
TEHSPLATT
I have spent the last month diving deep into our players rig so that we can get a new weapon in the game. The rocket launcher. Our players rig was created before my time and has lay dormant for as long as I can remember. After doing the missing animations for the creatures I decided I could tackle the player rig. It was extremely difficult and there were times I felt like maybe I had made a mistake accepting this task but after hours of slowly chipping away at each little problem we actually have new animations for a new weapon. They may not be the greatest animations as I am not an animator and even if I were, I wasn’t exactly working with the friendliest of rigs but hey, they work. So now I’m just compiling a list of which ones look the worst and going to start polishing them up.
I’m also fixing a few thing with the map, certain towns not having events, floating rocks, things like that. Trying to get any manual fix up work taken care of with the stamping process, which I’ve done before but obviously as we add new stuff new manual work pops up.