Spencer
This week has been getting everything up and running again after migrating everything to the SDK in preparation for ItemV2. We now have the game running with every piece of Hurtworld content loading from the SDK. We should soon be able to start throwing out ItemV2 experimental builds to a new steam branch. Initially in a very broken state, we are keen to get you guys in on the process as soon as possible.
Kanga release
We will be releasing an update with the Kanga included on Monday the 3rd. This will include a wipe of all official servers. At this point the wipe is optional and shouldn’t cause issues on community servers should they want to keep their savegame.
Mils
So the Kanga is now finished on my end. The pics below show some of the colour variation on the 5 Skins. I also designed the icon sets for the body kits, skins, wheels, engine and gearbox. This came out great and fits well with the other vehicles.
This brings me to my new shiny project, GUNS! This is something that I think a lot of kids have enjoyed drawing over the years including me (the big kid). I have been tasked with coming up with some new weapons. These guns will have to take into account the many attachments they will have while fitting into a few set character animations. It is very important that the detail be focused on areas that the player will see the most. The sight area, the left side of the gun and the silhouette when viewed from both third and first person must be interesting. I am designing the gun body first. From here I will design add on parts much like the vehicle system has a core chassis and then components can be added on or switched out. This should make for some very different looking guns, and I am already scheming up some beauties. 😀
Gavku
OK so I am back from a couple of weeks off and straight on to more character gear! Initially I was exploring how to try and do hard surfaced armour type pieces in Marvelous Designer, but was unable to find any workflow that ended with a result I was happy with. So next item up was to be a bomber jacket, which will hopefully read quite different from some of the other clothing pieces. After this I will be moving on to some jackets with more of a combat feel. Adding a bunch of attachments like pouches and straps to try and break up the shape and give t shape and style that reads nicely.
Sketch over a Marvelous Designer base.
In game Bomber Jacket mesh.
Bomber Jacket sculpt.
Initial textures in unity.
Cow_Trix
It’s been a busy week, fixing up a lot of broken parts of the game as well as continuing with getting a macro outline of the map going.
Entity stats are coming together now in an ItemV2 architecture. We’ve got the basic stats working again, with effects, modifiers, all the good stuff. Players can get hungry, cold, hot, and take damage again. Now I’m looking at binary effects – things like hyperthermia, or irradiation, or broken legs. As with the old stat effects like health, binary effects were defined in scripts rather than as moddable objects. Now this has changed, and binary effects are coming across to a completely moddable, extensible way of doing things. There’s still a few places where responsibilities aren’t really clear, and the entity stats system will need a bit of a restructure later on I think to make the structure of it a bit neater and clearer, we are one more significant step closer to getting back to baseline with the ItemV2 branch.
I definitely want to do more with stats and binary effects with the ItemV2 redesign. We haven’t really pushed the limits at all of what this system can do. Items that give you temporary buffs, debuff weapons, potion-like items, diseases – all very cool things that we are wanting to play around with and try out!
The map tools have definitely matured. I’ve been playing around with workflows to mash the different terrain biomes together. Check out the screenshot above! This won’t be the layout of the map, but it’s a proof of concept for the tools. We can easily change the shape and location of these zones just by altering a single mask texture and regenerating. Hopefully this will make it both trivial for mod makers to make their own maps, and super fast and easy for us to iterate over map layouts and designs.
Tom
This week I’ve been working on the release candidate for the Kanga patch and we’re super close!
I managed to get through a few builds this week and the other guys have been helping me give them a good thrashing. After each test I end up with a list of bugs and change requests to work on and round and round we go until we are all happy.
Right now I think I’ve finally gotten rid of all the regression bugs we could find (although our players will no doubt find a few more) and what we’ve got left to do is some fine tuning (tweaking things like spawn rates, handling stats, crash parameters etc.) as well as getting the final crash animations sorted.
Speaking of balance, the Kanga fits into the vehicle line up as the fastest vehicle and also the most agile (it’s a complete mountain goat) but it won’t be the best outright for everything.
It can’t take any passengers so the Roach is a better choice when travelling with mates. The Kanga also leaves you very exposed making you a much easier target in pvp situations. Speaking of pvp, we imagine the Roach will still be the ‘weapon’ of choice here for the above reason plus the bigger hitbox makes it a lot easier to run your enemies down.
You also run the risk of crashing while on the Kanga which can give your opponents the window they need to easily kill you or even just quickly pinch your bike.
The Roach also comes with storage slots whereas the Kanga only gets storage through the Raider rear panel.
The Goat is now essentially an easier to obtain cross between the Kanga and Roach. It isn’t as volatile as the Kanga as it’s much harder to crash but at the same time it’s still an exposed riding position and it’s also slower than the other two vehicles although it is lighter, smaller and more agile than the Roach.
We’ve still got some tweaking and testing to do and still need to put the latest build through its paces but I’m hopeful of getting it signed off on this week.