Spencer

Hi Hurtworldian fam!

We’ve been a bit slack lately on the old postey postey, rest assured we have not forgotten about you and are cooking up some awesome stuff as we inch closer to the ItemV2 release to our core branch. A couple of us took a quick vacation to brush off the cobwebs before our concerted efforts to push V2 into mainstream life and we are now refreshed and ready to mingle once again.

I’ve been working on progression design and how the FR18 will fit into the game with Tom, as well as a bunch of bussinessy stuff that we will be announcing in the coming months.

Next Patch
The next V2 update will be rolling out on Thursday the 30th, which will contain the new FR18 rifle, a refactor of fragments and 2 new town events integrated into the map.

Mils

Scope this out. 😉 I got the ‘Locus’ Scope finished this week and it’s looking rather nice. This is a more simplified style scope to match with the oldschool feel of the FR18. It’s a simple tube style with all metal parts that these older weapons generally had. The offset mounting also gives this a unique silhouette once this is implemented it should be a lot of fun to use. It should be slightly better than the bow in terms of progression. This will be more of a scrapper rifle that you can get into medium range fights with. Can’t wait to try it out.

Below are the 4 skins for the main body of the rifle. The top is the new ‘Camo’ then ‘Section8’ below that the ‘Veil’ and then lastly ‘Goreng’ because it reminds me of Mee Goreng noodles.  These are looking cool.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week I’ve been designing two new town events. When we originally decided to implement the town events we didn’t know if they were going to work as well as they do so the designs for them weren’t overly ambitious but the current town event I’m working on has a pretty decent amount of effort put into it. The other two town events that are currently in game have capture points sitting up high with minimal cover so it’s easy to get shot down by a long range weapon, these latest two town events however, require you to get indoors and hold the point with a more up close and personal style. I wanted the entry points of these town events to be based a little more on play style, for example if you feel that you are a shotgun god then you will take the path to the capture point that’s much more enclosed and maze like with a ton of close quarter areas, where as if you feel you’re better at a mid range run and gun style with the AR then you’ll take a path that suits that more. The current town event I’m working on is 3 story high and has a decent amount of decision making in terms of where you enter from and how you exit the event. Another focus with these new town events is making them a bit better for the Loot Frenzy event because the first two events were made with the capture point mode in mind. Here’s some pictures of the town event I’m currently working on.

I also felt like I was wasting a ton of time trying to make occlusion out of the assets we had as they weren’t really made for the work flow I’m using. So I made some different sized crates to fix that problem and I can already see how much faster putting these events together is going to be.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Bit of a short one from me this week as I’ve been taking a short break to recharge and refresh myself. Since being back I’ve been working on implementing the new FR18 rifle Mils has been working on which is looking real nice.
We’re setting up the FR18 to be a mid to long range gun that will be available in the iron tier of equipment. We’re going to set it up with 30 pvp damage which will put it just outside of 1 headshot kills, we made this decision to allow bows to remain dominant in short to mid range encounters before the bows slow projectile speed becomes too much of a disadvantage at greater distances.
We decided on placing the FR18 in the iron tier with a significant iron and leather cost to try and open up more options in the progression, now you might not want to push into the Titranium biomes ASAP and instead set yourself up near an iron hotspot to farm up the FR18 first.
I’ve also been improving our scope implementation changing it so the zoom amount stat is now directly related to the zoom level (eg. zoom amount 2 = 2x zoom) whereas before the zoom level was reevaluated in a custom function to ensure a diminishing return on zoom amount (so each point in zoom stat is worth less as you have more of them).
These zoom levels will then be setup on the scope attachments and we’ll be removing the zoom amount fragments as well so the zoom level will be controlled 100% by what sight attachment the gun is running.

Speaking of fragments, I’ll be doing another balance pass through these after finishing implementation of the FR18. Right now there are way too many of these that feel weak and there are also way too many available upgrade points on items, we want to try rebalancing these so each fragment has a perceivable impact and feels worth using within the right context.
We’ve got a few ideas about how we can achieve this, more on this next week!

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Last week I finished implementing the weather system and delivering the 0.6.1.0 experimental update.
The new weather events play a bunch of client side effects as well as affecting temperature inside their range. This allows players some new options like being able to poke into the next biome earlier by using a weather system that reduces the environmental pressure, be careful though as others may have this same idea. Vise versa a weather system that increases the environmental pressure can serve as a nice safe zone if you have enough protection to survive it.
I’ve seen several players questioning why we chose to display the weather systems on the minimap and much of the reason was to allow players to spot those opportunities so they can plan and make decisions on how to best utilize the systems. The other major reason is that we didn’t want to spawn a weather system on top of a player when it could kill them without 1. Some kind of a warning and 2. An indication of where the weather systems end so the player can find their way out without guessing.

I also did a small rebalancing pass over the gear progression trying to simplify it a bit by removing a few pieces and combining some others. I also changed the Titranium Workbenches cost to have a much larger titranium ore cost, this was done to give more reason to live in the Titranium biome for longer. Previously as soon as you had stabilized in the Titranium biome you didn’t really have a reason to be there any more and should be thinking about poking into the end biomes.
I think whilst the workbench cost change does give a reason to stick around and establish yourself more in a zone it does so in a way that makes it a requirement rather than a choice which isn’t ideal (although a choice is harder to balance to make sure all options are viable).
Ideally unlocking this ‘gate’ would also open up new opportunities rather than just more of the same stuff but with bigger numbers, for instance I think this might be an interesting point to first introduce dynamite and using it to farm specific resources.
The progression balance still isn’t locked down so it’s likely we’ll be making more tweaks here soon.

I’ve also been working on a small bugfix patch I hope to be able to push out to you guys extremely soon to fix some map issues (like the spawn point on ‘death rock’ and the shrunken town event indicators) as well as fix a nasty bug where vehicle inventories could cause items to disappear sometimes when auto-moving or splitting items.

Mils

Hey ya’ll. I got the suppressor named ‘ Jacket’ for the FR18 95%of the way finished this week. It’s looking sexy, really enjoyed working with fabric on this one. Was a challenge to get the fabrics looking right. There’s still a couple more minor passes for this one but it’s very close.

I also got the first mag called ‘Rack’ done as well. This was pretty easy as it’s very similar to the basic mag for the AWM. Got this done nice and quick. I should be onto the scope for the FR18 next week, which is going to look quite cool and old school. Probably minimal plastic parts and that old school scope styling.

Spencer & Splatt

We have been on holidays for the last week, and are back in the office at full strength today. More from us next week.
 

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I’ve been implementing the tropical zones into the main map, I was originally going to manually paint all the tropical areas but in the end that seemed like a bad idea, so I ended up taking our current hills and dressing them up with the tropical assets. I also modified them a bit to get rid of some steepness problems. There’s a lot more I want to do with the layout of the tropical zone but unfortunately I have to go away for a week. So I don’t know how much of this tropical zone is going to end up being a place holder but it currently feels cool to run around so it should hold you over. Hopefully performance is alright, the assets are all pretty low poly but there are a lot of trees. When I get back from my trip I’ll be polishing the map up a lot and creating some new interesting town events, so that should be fun and add some much needed variety into the map events.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been mostly doing bugfixing after having a bunch of issues pop up on our featured servers.

The first bug I dealt with was what was commonly being referred to as the ‘graphics bug’. What would happen is that sometimes during server startup an error would occur that would prevent the default content mods from being loaded correctly, then when a player joined a server because they couldn’t be loaded in properly they’d instead be stuck under the world with no input. It turned out this error was occuring from within Oxide/uMod and so after some back and forth with the Oxide/uMod guys we were able to get this fixed up.

Next up was looking into why world items would sometimes fall through the ground instead of colliding with them properly. It turned out we had a bunch of safety checks running in our item display data manager that would try to detect if a mesh baking job had stalled (the meshes get baked together to determine the look of the item + its colliders) and then cancel the job if it had. Unfortunately the job cancellation had regressed and the system couldn’t recover from a cancelled job, to make this even trickier to track down the cancellation code was only running in the built game and not in the Unity editor. Now the system is fixed up so it works the same in editor as well as the final build and items should always have their colliders built.

I also looked into a bug that occurs when the server already has a player session stored for a connecting player’s SteamID and will disconnect them with the message: “Active session with same SteamID”. Whilst I didn’t manage to reproduce this bug I analyzed how we were accessing our collection of SteamID sessions and found a few potential places where a new SteamID could be accidently added at the wrong time. I’ve closed down all these potential holes so hopefully this will see the end of that issue, please let us know if you continue to see it.
As well as the SteamID session issue I also added an option for servers to disable ‘item pinging’ where players can link their items in chat.

I also managed to squeeze in a decent performance boost to the 0.6.0.3 patch through some physics optimization. Previously we had our ladder trigger volumes able to be triggered by just about anything including level geometry and other triggers, in practice this meant most ladders always had ‘something’ in their trigger volume causing Unity to report an OnTrigger event. Between all the ladders in the level and all their collisions this was adding up to a fair bit of work so I shuffled things around so our logical triggers layer only generated collisions with a much smaller subset of objects. This should lead to performance increases on all servers + any cpu bottlenecked clients.

I’ve also started implementing dynamic weather systems for 0.6.1.0, currently they are spawning correctly, influencing temperatures, playing client side particle effects, affecting the skybox and showing on the map correctly.

Next up is balancing their spawn rates + temperature levels then making the temperature and balance changes I talked about last week. I had hoped to have this finished by this week but I got sidetracked by all the bugfixing work so I’m going to try and get these changes ready over the weekend so we can give them a good test internally before rolling out to you guys on the 2nd of August.

Mils

Sup?! So I got the main body of the FR18 done this last week. It’s looking pretty damn tasty. I’m now flying through the other basic components. I got the first tip done which extends the barrel and will be a base tip that will always be on the end of the gun. This will be swapped out when another tip, suppressor or muzzle brake is on there. I also got more than halfway through the Magazine. I got the first normal baking done on the mag today and need to adjust a couple of bits that have drifted and do a rebake come monday. I’ll move onto the scope or suppressor next once the mag is done.