Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been fixing bugs, continuing with vehicle work as well as evaluating the recent claiming changes and planning the next experimental patch, 0.6.1.0 which is planned to release on 2nd August.

Bugs

There’s currently a bit of a loophole that allows you turn resources into amber by using amber protection on an upgradeable item. Take the spear for instance, you can craft a stone spear then protect it for one amber. When upgrading to an iron tipped spear the amber protection is transferred. If you then suicide with this upgraded spear and grab the loot you’ll get four amber from the protection drop effectively trading ten wood, flint and shaped iron for three amber.
To close off this loophole in a way that is automatically handled we are now making protected items skip their amber drop if their protection originates from an item upgrade transfer (the item is still protected).

I’ve also fixed some problems with the shack, we now run a terrain overlap check on deployment to make sure the shacks spawn position isn’t intersecting into any level geometry.
I’ve also extended the check for overlapping machines on sleeper spawns to run on shack spawns as well which will stop players spawning into placed C4s and using the depenetration force to push their way into rocks.

I also fixed a bug in the vehicle claiming system where it was possible for your claim to fail but the amber cost would still be consumed (oops! sorry!). I also added a new alert panel that displays when trying to claim a vehicle of a type you already own one of.
We are currently aiming to get these fixes released in time for the weekend.

Vehicles

On the vehicle front I’ve got the slug up and running again internally including the heavy slot mechanics. I’ve also started experimenting with different traction models but there is still much more work to be done here.
We’ve been listening to the feedback on the vehicle claiming changes and understand that many of you haven’t been happy with them so I want to try to explain our reasoning behind the changes.
We want vehicles to be something players invest in over the long term with fragments and visual customisation just like their other items. To achieve this we think vehicles need to be at least as protectable as items, especially when vehicle fragments can be rerolled into other fragments through dust.
We also want to avoid people rage quitting from the game after losing a large investment like a vehicle and this did seem to be relatively common thing in legacy Hurtworld as evidenced by the large numbers of stolen cars in dominant team’s garages (these would despawn if the player continued to play and either claimed a new car or unclaimed the old one).
We also think that the amber drops from vehicles generally have more of a gameplay benefit than having spare stolen vehicles in a garage that usually exist just as trophies.
Vehicle wheel damage was removed due to complications with the insurance system, having no repair method and not having good enough feedback (having to view the vehicle window to see wheel health is kinda sucky)

The two main problems players have with the system seem to be losing the ability to permanently steal other’s vehicles and losing the ability to shoot wheels out.
For the wheels we are definitely not opposed to them being destroyed but due to complications with the insurance system it was quicker to just remove this feature so we could test the insurance system earlier. If we decide to stick with the insurance system we will work through the issues and bring destructible wheels back into the mix.
In terms of stealing vehicles I’m hoping the real value here is the prestige/bragging rights of owning the vehicles as trophies instead of a kind of schadenfreude where players are happy knowing that they depriving a player of their vehicle and making them suffer.
If it’s all about the trophy then I think it might be interesting to do something like drop a placeable number plate style trophy with the owners name on it that you can place in your base to show off.
There’s also the issue of the Kanga and Roach being too grindy and hard to farm but I see this as a balance issue that we can iterate on to find the right level of required farm.
With all this in mind we are delaying further vehicle work to gather more feedback, develop some solutions to these issues and then work on handling updates, new vehicles and claiming overhauls together in the same patch cycle.

Next Patch

For the next patch (0.6.1.0 releasing 2nd August) I’ll be focusing on adding dynamic weather systems (blizzard, sandstorm etc.) back into the game.
Currently we are pretty happy with how the progression transitions you into a new biome by forcing you to ‘poke’ into the new biome during its weak hours (night for heat, day for cold) to gather a new resource that will allow you to craft gear to stay in the biome during its strong hours. This works well but currently there isn’t enough reason to stay in the biome once you’ve managed to stabilize yourself in there and instead it almost immediately feels like you should be poking into the next biome. To mix this up we want to add a second stage to a biomes progression where you can establish yourself more and really thrive rather than just survive.
To achieve this I’ll be shuffling gear balance around along with biome temperature levels and crafting costs so there’ll be more of a farm gate to overcome before being able to poke into the next biome.
The weather systems will affect the temperature of the area which gives a reason for players to take thermal protection beyond baseline survivability levels for the biome. I’m hoping to use this to create more interesting decisions in what pieces of gear a player chooses to craft where they can choose to focus on say thermal protection or combat stats like accuracy and reload speed. Currently you pretty much need to build each item from each tier and there aren’t really any choices to be made until it comes to working out how to integrate toxin/radiation protection into your build or building an all rounder end game set.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I’ve been putting some stuff together for the tropical biome, my original colour pallet was not well received so I’ve been exploring some new colours, trying to reuse assets as much as possible just to get the something out there. I think this biome needs a few rules set in place when using the splats/grass/trees, it seems that the grey cliff rocks really help to sell it, but I think the hills need to be toned down a bit and have slightly less rocks covering them. I feel like it needs 1 or 2 more tree options to help it along so that you don’t just feel like you’re in the green forest with random palm trees, it needs a bit more in the way of grass variation as well, currently it just has a green grass to match the splat and then a slightly greener grass that’s taller and fatter in smaller patches mixed in. The palm trees currently aren’t matched to the rest of the pallet, I would like to add in some lower occlusion tropical bushes as well.

 

To me it looks the most like a tropical biome when you feel like you are enclosed by lush foliage and cliffs, if you imagine it with a few more tropical looking plants in it and some water holes and what not I think it would look pretty nice.

Mils

This weeks biggest challenge was to make a wood that looks like wood and still holds to our art style. I think this is really looking good and should gel well with whats in our game already. The normal baking went well so I got onto the texturing pretty quickly. The wood is the only fully treated material in this shot. The wear passes aren’t done on the other materials, but will be ready in the next couple of days.

I’ll move onto the standard tip for this next and then the magazine after that so if we feel the need we can put it into the game sooner.

La Spencero

Haha! This isn’t Spencer, he’s on Holidays in Italy so if you see him there kick him in the nuts for us! 😛

Spencer

Hi Guys,

It’s been awesome to get the new map out to you guys, feedback has been good overall and it feels like another hurdle behind us towards releasing a kickass V2 version to master sometime soon. There is still a lot of work to do on the map, but what we have will serve as a base that we shouldn’t need to drastically change for a while.

I spent the start of the week working on fixing the root cause of the duplication bug in the Item system that has been discovered in the last week.

Because of this issue we will be doing another wipe on Thursday 5pm Melbourne time with some other balance fixes.

Mozzy
Now we have the new map live, I am starting work on getting the Mozzy in game and to actually have a purpose. Initially this will be the fun part of modeling the flying physics and crashing into stuff, but will also include designing where its parts are found, what it can carry etc. Should hopefully have something cool to show next week.

Mils

This week I finished the high poly modeling on the main part of the FR18. This came out as expected and now I have moved onto the laborious task of UV mapping. The mapping part as always is pretty quick to unwrap, but slows down a lot when you get to straightening the uv islands and fixing up any that came out just plain weird. That part is done. Now I’m onto the UV packing, which seems to be the slowest part of the process. I hand pack the UV’s to get the most efficient layout for our texture size. Auto packing never gives as good a result especially when you want to pack parts logically so it’s easy for other artists to understand if they need to touch them. I’ll get this done today and then can get onto baking the normal maps.

Below you can see an example of how I scale the UV islands that will be closest to the camera. I do this so they look great up close when looking down the iron sights. Adversely I give less texture space to UV islands that you barely see like the parts where the magazine goes in etc.

Here’s a shot of me over halfway done with the UV packing. You can see logical groups separated and placed out of the way while I pack the preceding groups. I start packing with the biggest parts with the biggest islands in the top left corner. I pack these based on groups and their proximity on the model to each other. For example I clumped all the parts from the rear bolt/firing assembly pretty much together. I break this rule for the smallest UV islands which I use to fill the big gaps around the largest islands. No other way to do it without wasting texture space really.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, so we finally got a playable map out the door and people seem to be enjoying it, obviously there’s a lot of places that need polishing and reworking, and that is exactly what I’ll be getting up to for a while. Currently I’m attempting to splice in the tropical biome I was working on a while ago. Trying to be a bit smarter about it this time now that I know the tools better, If I manage to get everything in looking the way I want then it should be a really cool little zone to come across, I think the idea based on what we have discussed as that this biome will be the actual beach where you spawn and then lead into the current noob desert with the tropical biome scattered through it, hopefully it all blends nicely. Currently I’m still in a testing phase of getting all my nodes and assets set up so here’s a few pictures of the old original tropical test to jog your memories.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Unfortunately I caught the flu going around last week and didn’t get much done in map work other than some small changes to the snow zone like introducing some ground texture variation.
I also made some small balance changes increasing Yeti health and removing vehicle loot from air drops but otherwise have been trying to rest up and get better.

This week we’ve been reviewing the vehicle handling changes and whilst we have been making improvements we aren’t totally happy yet so I’ll be going back in for another round of changes.
The main areas we are looking to improve are acceleration response (getting into top gear happens too fast, needs more build up into top speed) and drift handling (right now it’s too easy to turn a vehicle once its in a slide, entering a slide should be easy but once in a slide you shouldn’t be able to continue to turn into the slide without regaining traction first).

Speaking of vehicles I’ve started to bring the Slug (truck) back in and get it up to speed with the recent changes. Once thats out of the way I’ll be reintroducing the heavy slot mechanics to ensure the Slug has a strong gameplay niche of its own.
I’ll also be doing some more work on the Mozzy (helicopter), right now it’s a very basic skeleton of a vehicle waiting to have the simulation code written for it. Spencer is going to be writing the simulation and I’ll get everything else ready for it in the meantime (like creating the panels and masks).

Spencer

Hi Guys, this week we’ve all been flat out on the new map. When we couldn’t get it finished last week I decided to put all hands on deck to get it out the door this week. Our current plan is to get the map out early on Friday.

The big focus of the last couple of weeks on the map have been trying to put as much manual love into different areas as possible. In the past we have always favored automated process over manual work, mainly because manual work is a destructive process with the tool sets we had. Destructive in this context meaning that once we paint some trees or height manually, the generated parts of the map can not be changed without losing the manual work we had done.

We’ve spent more time than I would like to mention working on our tools to make this not the case. The new map tools allow for a non destructive mix of manual and automatic process, and using this we’ve been going through each area one by one and making sure there is something unique in each one. We are still dining out on a lot of the same assets, we are trying to use them in unique ways. Once you see the new map I think you’ll agree it makes a massive difference.

Multiple formulas per Biome
As I’ve been working on the start desert, and T1 hot and cold biomes I’ve been doing my best to create drastically varied feels throughout. We initially replaced the Dunes with the yellow forest for T1 hot biome, but I decided that there was enough room to have both, giving further choices about how you progress through the game.

Vehicle Friendly
If you spent much time in mangatang, you would have realized vehicles feel not that useful given how enclosed everything is. Our aim with the new map is to open out a lot of areas, allow more awareness of your surroundings so that vehicles feel safer. With that in mind we have kept the enclosed areas as well for solo players that want to move around un noticed.

I’m pretty excited to get this map out in the wild, Its been a long time coming and I think it will really open things up for our next phase of content design in a push to get V2 on the master branch.

See you out there.

Mils

Hey there amigos. So I have been working on a scout rifle, even though I mentioned we were going to upgrade the shotgun, that was changed and thought we’d add a traditional bolt action rifle back into the game. This one is going to be a more lightweight old school style one with a focus more on iron sights. This will still get at least one scope but it won’t be the guns main purpose. This will be more of a run and gun rifle where you will be at medium range trying to blast other players. The AWM can then take it’s rightful position as a long range sniper.

This gun’s body is mostly modeled exactly off an M1A rifle, but we wanted it to have a bolt so I modded that general design in from another rifle. The iron sights are also taken from a different rifle again and the rear sight is placed mid gun as some of the older style rifles are. These sights will be permanent and so the scope/s will sit high enough to accommodate then without them appearing in the scopes viewfinder. This has gone through a few iterations of redesign over the last couple of weeks, but I am now onto the high poly. I also modeled a new suppressor for this one that may be fitted to the AR15 and AWM if they don’t obstruct the viewfinder of the scopes on those.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

For 0.5.9.0 my main focus was trying to fix all regressions in vehicle handling since legacy as well as fixing up a few issues introduced in 0.5.8.0

Vehicles now behave a lot more consistently now across different configurations as all vehicle systems now scale forces by vehicle weight. This means that things like suspension force and traction have the same effect on the vehicle no matter the panels that are attached or how many passengers are on board.
While variable weight would’ve been good to achieve it was too hard for us to balance in a reasonable timeframe to make sure the whole range of configurations felt ok, now weight is just used to resolve physics collisions and vehicles are much easier to tune around one handling profile per vehicle type.
The other major change to vehicle handling was to adjust the force application point of vehicle wheels. Previously traction and suspension forces were being applied to the center of the wheel when at full suspension compression. Moving the force application point to the wheels point of contact would’ve been correct simulation wise but instead I moved it to be inline with the center of mass height, this removes unwanted pitch and roll forces due to traction leading to a less physically correct but more controllable and consistent vehicle.

I also got through a bunch of bugs related to the 0.5.8.0 vehicle changes, Kangas no longer freeze sometimes when trying to stand them back up, passengers exiting a vehicle no longer turns them off, vehicle engines no longer appear black, vehicle health should now always sync correctly with the UI, made vehicle airdrops 100% accurate and stopped footsteps from playing when entering a vehicle while sprinting.
I also closed off a cheeky amber farming method where players were carrying around a full set of vehicle parts, using them to claim chassis spawns out in the world then taking the parts off before disassembling for the amber then finally unclaiming the disassembled vehicle so it can start all over again.
We didn’t hotfix this right away as we thought it would be kept somewhat under control by the fact you had to risk many vehicle parts to pull it off plus you would also drop the amber collected from the run so far. Ultimately though it was too powerful when the danger from other players wasn’t there like in the servers off-peak hours and it also broke our concept of using amber as a kind of proof of work item. Now to claim a chassis spawn you need to pay the amber cost up front (Goat spawn beacons still automatically claim).

Recently I’ve been learning our map tools and workflow and starting to help the other guys test and polish up our next map iteration which we are planning to push out to you guys this week.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, recently I’ve been working on the two outer biomes, the Snow and Red Desert, these are interesting ones because most players this far in the progression will have vehicles so they need to be a lot more open compared to the start and mid tier biomes. I started with rough unplanned layout I showed last dev blog and then focused on 2 or 3 main areas and started opening them up to allow more breathing room for larger bases and better visual awareness for those driving vehicles. Currently working on opening up the Red Desert some more to give it a pretty desolate feeling, I’ve been trying to stay true to some tropes you would find in a desert environment like this such as long, generally flat, open roads cutting through valleys instead of hugging the mountains like in the snow biome, also things like the overall ground noise being much flatter in a lot of parts, still working out the best way to make these different ideas look good. Unfortunately I can’t get decent in game screenshots of these biomes just yet so this is going to have to do. The snow biome now has these small hills that just barely occlude the player with clumps of trees on top of them, this works really well and can help bring in a large valley, still trying to figure out the red desert version of those to help bring in those larger valleys without actually making them smaller. Still lots of work to do but feeling confident.