Mils
Bonjour! So I tackled re-texturing the roads this week. This was not an easy task. We had a fair bit of back and forth not only with the art side of the texturing, but the technical implementation itself.
The challenge was to see if we could get the road mesh to blend with the textures underneath the road mesh without having a visible seam. You can see below that this was pretty much impossible to achieve without shader magic. We tried making textures that are very similar and making the colours the same. We also tried to layer the exact same texture as the terrain texture into the road texture. These attempts still resulted in a seam between the two. Pretty hard to avoid because the two normal directions of the road mesh and the terrain mesh would reflect light at different amounts. While on one side of the road this would be close to invisible, on the other side of the road the seam would be fairly obvious. Spencer ended up making a road shader that by using a mask texture for the edge of the road, the road mesh would then inherit the terrain texture underneath. This is a truly quality solution to the problem and looks great. I’ll let him show you the spiffy images in his part of the Devblog.
This is the last version of the road meshes that are going into this Friday’s build. There’s still a bit of work to do on this but that will come online with the next experimental release. The new shader won’t be in this build either, we need a bit more time to iron out the kinks. I have some work to do on making sure the mesh has enough ‘shoulder’ so that it doesn’t stick out of the terrain where there are large dips.
I also got some work done on the next stock for the AWM. This stock isn’t an AWM stock, but I have modified it to fit. Should lock down the low poly today then jump back on the roads tomorrow.
Tom
This week I’ve been continuing bugfixing resulting in the 0.4.3.3 patch we released last friday (patch notes here).
The hammer exploit was a particularly tricky one where if you equipped a construction hammer and put it in removal mode then stood facing somebodies shack and then switched from first to third person perspective you could make the construction hammer get a lock on any removable machines inside. This happened because we were applying an offset forward to the third person camera line of sight check so you don’t hit anything between the camera and your player. Unfortunately this lead to a strange race condition for one frame on perspective switch where the construction hammer would update, see that the perspective was now in third person and apply an offset to camera position. The camera position however would still be in the first person position as camera updates run at the end of frame so we can make sure the camera position is up to date after applying animations and other position updates to entities. This meant that first person position + an offset was ahead of the character and when facing a shack while being close to it, it was inside the shack!
This problem was then made worse because the next frames hammer update would be from the correct position but find the shack during its line of sight check. Because the shack is a type of machine that doesn’t have a removal point the hammer wouldn’t find a new target so the machine inside would stay selected as the removal item.
To fix this one up I’ve removed the offset from the third person camera and also made the construction hammer reset itself (dropping the target) when it hits a machine without a removal point. Big thanks to everyone who pointed out this bug to me, it would have been very hard to find without reports.
Although the bugfixing has been taking most of my time I’ve also been working on a new healing item to go into 0.4.4.0 on friday. The item is used by holding down your fire button and this starts the circular progress bar filling up, while waiting for it to fill you cannot move. After the progress bar fills up the item is consumed and you are healed.
We are still working on tuning the numbers for both charge time and heal amount.
Cow_Trix
Hey folks. This week I’ve been working on the next iteration of the map, which has some substantial and very experimental changes that I’m excited to finish and play. If all goes well, this map should be out in a week or so. The biggest change to this map iteration is that there is the addition of Splatt’s new biome, which is looking pretty awesome. In terms of gameplay, something we’re going to try out is that this central biome will be the only place in the map where you can build a base. This “build biome” concept is pretty new to us and we’re not sure how it’s going to play yet. It will mean all players will be building bases in close proximity, which will hopefully mean easier and more frequent PVP encounters. You’ll want to build your base, and then make expeditions outwards to collect rare resources, loot towns and get the best cars. Take a look at the basic layout below. The brown, boring bit is currently just radiation, but in future that’s going to be a parallel string of biomes that have a parallel progression.
This map progress has meant working on tools, fixing a lot of bugs and performance. There’s a lot still to be done on this, and Mangatang is a big, complicated level. Currently spending a bit more time than I’d like looking at progress bars, but when a map needs to be done I’ll prioritise stability with seat-of-my-pants optimisation anyday. Still, looking forward to further optimising the whole process. Mils has been working on new road assets that are looking sick, and we’re finally getting some decent looking intersections in game. In fact, I’d say that this build of the map has the most complex use of the road tool yet. Good to see it getting pushed to it’s limits!
Spencer
I spent most of this week working on creating a generator for Splatts new biome in WorldMachine / MapMagic. Part of this involved a little project to do better rock placement for slopes so they don’t get put underground and don’t hover above the ground. This ended up being an iterative solver that works quite well. We configure each surface rock with 3 points that all need to intersect the terrain.
Road Blending
I also spent a bit of time working on building a shader our roads can use to blend properly with the terrain splats without needing heaps of different road textures. The result came out pretty good and can be used on other things that should blend with the terrain like rocks possibly.
Voip
Voip has been broken in ItemV2 forever, I thought I fixed it a while ago, turns out my PC is the only one in the world that works fine with our ingame voice. This makes it really hard to debug. Nevertheless I’ve been digging to the bottom of it and should have a solution very soon.
We are on track for our experimental wipe release this week. I’ve been pushing to get better at planning what we’re doing, step one is getting the build ready ahead of time so we can announce the time, lets see how we go.
Next weeks experimental wipe will be released at 5pm Melbourne time (which is 7:00 am UTC)
TEHSPLATT
Hello people, this week I’ve been setting up little scenes to stamp into the new biome, trying to keep them semi realistic and in line with the actual buildings and areas that exist in the real world version of this biome like farms and little out posts. I’ve been trying to add some easter egg and skill based loot hunt areas to each scene although I didn’t get time to go as in depth as I’d like with it on all of them, I would love to make it so you actually have to solve a little jump puzzle that involved advanced movement while finding the best way to get to the loot boxes. Just about to look into building some more world assets to help out with making these scenes because we have stretched these current assets pretty far. Here’s a few examples of the scenes for stamping.
I also sliced up the cliff rocks ready for Spencer’s placement system so we have some interesting rock formations on top of some of the larger hills which will add some cool areas that are great for stalking far away targets from. I really like the way the placement on these rocks works with the placement tool, it immediately places them how I would have placed them manually which is perfect.
