Spencer

Hi Guys,

I’ve been a bit slack on the dev blog recently due to the flu running through our team over the last few weeks. We’ve still been cooking up some kickass stuff for you guys.

Next Wipe Patch – 28th of June
Splatt has been pottering away on a new map for quite a while now. Map design is the single hardest thing we do, and I think the most important element in an open world game. We stumble across winning formulas here and there, try to improve on them and somehow lose the magic. This makes the process very time consuming. Internally we’ve been through at least 10 scrap it and start again iterations on our main map, and I think we are starting to understand what works and what doesn’t. We have also spent an enormous amount of dev effort building a set of map tools that allow us to iterate quicker. A new kickass map is the missing link to us finally pushing out ItemV2 to the core branch, I think we are close!

The next patch will if everything goes to plan, will feature this new map Nullius (Yes we used that name once before for a build or 2 but never stuck around, I’m bringing it back)

I’ve dropped what I’m doing to work with Splatt on bringing the final parts of the map to life.

Mils

The Recurve Bow now has a mask for you all to use and colour to your hearts desire. I did a lot of testing with designs on the bow and found that this was going to be a difficult task. Due to the vastly varying normal map details of rough bark and smooth wood to painted fibreglass, for now we are just going to have the Section 8 type mask. This came out nice though and should be in the next patch.
I previously said we were going to work on the shotgun next, but turns out we want to add an old favourite back into the mix. We will be bringing back the ‘Scout’ rifle which is going to work a lot like the old bolt action rifle. We want this to be accessible somewhere early to mid game and should be a fun addition to the arsenal.

Before I get onto the Scout rifle I am making a proper asset for the vehicle airdrop marker. We previously were using a kind of robot chicken placeholder which I have been begging that we change for weeks. That should be done early this week and onto the Scout after that.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, so after many iterations the over all design used in the new start biome has been agreed on, still a couple of really small things to fix up. I added in a bit more trees and made them shorter so they weren’t over powering the mountains behind as well as toning down the bush size and density so you can actually see around you. The ground undulation has been toned down a lot to make open spaces better for building, I ended up finding out the best way to add a sort of bowl shape to open spaces while also keeping the base ground undulation, so that will add a nice feeling to certain areas. I’m currently in the process of fleshing out the other biomes, at first I tried to quickly figure out something I could do for the Dunes but ended up moving on to get more important things done. The best way I’ve found for laying out all this stuff now that we’ve got some form of base rules down is actually using a top down view of the map in Photoshop with cut outs of the mountains and measurements for the open spaces, this allows me to quickly figure out the whole layout without dealing with the stamping process which can cause things to grind to a halt sometimes.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,
This blog I’ll be talking about working on 0.5.8.0/0.5.8.1 plus my short term plans for what I’m working on next.

0.5.8.0

This patch contained a large overhaul to how we handle vehicle persistence, allowing players to respawn destroyed owned vehicles and also allowing them to self destruct their own vehicles in the case of them being stolen (so they will then be available to respawn back under the owners control).
We’ve currently set this timer to 45 mins as we still want there to be value in stealing players cars, this should give a decent amount of time for the thief to go off on their own mission using the vehicle without having to be concerned about losing it. Additionally a percentage of the vehicles respawn cost (% cost of the beacon) is dropped by an owned vehicle when it is destroyed or disassembled giving the thief an extra bonus.
0.5.8.0 also added vehicle chassis farming back into the world, chassis have a very small chance to spawn with parts that can be scavenged without tools. Chassis can also be harvested with the vehicle disassembly wrench in which they have a much greater chance of dropping parts (still relatively small though).
We’ve also added scrap back into the item mix as a sort of vehicle currency, every chassis will drop a small amount of scrap on disassembly plus spare vehicle parts can be recycled into scrap through the right click menu.
With 100 scrap you can purchase a new kind of fragment for vehicle engines that has a chance of adding extra upgrade points to the item but if it fails the item is destroyed opening up a new, risky, long-term progression option.

05.8.1 Hotfix

On Friday I pushed out a hotfix patch to fix an issue with vehicle mask synchronization. Vehicle masks are supposed to be applied to the chassis item directly and then the mask is synced into all other compatible attachments on the vehicle.
In 0.5.8.0 this mask propagation wasn’t running on the server making the client side version of the item desynced from the authoritative server version. If two mesh attachments share the same mask + other texture map assignments then they can be combined together into the same submesh and rendered with one draw call per rendering pass of the shader. When attachments share the other texture maps we assume the mask assignment is also shared, this desync bug was then violating that assumption causing the mesh baker to lock up and error out. Luckily I think we were able to fix this up before many players got deep into vehicle customisation.
Long term I would like to remove this mask sharing assumption and open the system up so we can support attachments with individual mask assignments, short term however I don’t think this is an essential feature so I would prefer to wait until I do the next pass on customisation so we can look at adding things like custom specular and emissive colors at the same time.
Unfortunately 0.5.8.1 also broke the loot frenzy event loot markers, we will have another hotfix patch to fix this issue very soon.

Next

The vehicle insurance changes took me longer than anticipated to get through and I never really got to give the vehicles the handling overhaul I wanted to. While I was able to tweak some basic stuff to make the vehicles more responsive through increased traction and also making them harder to crash I was hoping to go more in depth, reducing the influence of weight on vehicle handling and reducing the potential range of handling stats instead trying to focus on a tighter acceptable range to give a more consistent experience.
After making those changes then we’ll be ready to bring the Slug back with a more fleshed out role then move onto the Mozzy helicopter (no, we haven’t forgotten or cancelled it!)

Spencer

Hi All,
We’ve been getting heaps of requests to bring back town loot like legacy. This week I’ll be introducing a new type of town event that I think should fill this void. The main thing I want to improve on is the slow constant trickle of loot at towns that means in contested areas there is only a small chance of getting anything on a loot run which results in lots of repetative looping of towns without much risk.

Loot Frenzy
The new event I’m working on will be called Loot Frenzy. This event will frequently activate at all towns, and for a period of time loot crates similar to legacy will spawn at random locations inside the town. The frequency and value with be a lot higher than legacy town loot spawns giving a concentrated burst of good loot that can be contested over by nearby players. Unlike Control Town Events, this loot will not be secured by insurance, meaning you need to escape safely to claim the rewards. It will be up to you to get out with your spoils early or stick around and try to get more. Hunting players will likely be as valuable as hunting loot boxes.

Diemensland Refresh
Splatt has been working on the new map for some time now, its taking a lot longer than expected and mangatang is getting stale. For the next wipe on the 7th we will be releasing a version of Diemensland for our current V2 build to break things up a bit and to also give us a refresh on what worked with Diemensland to aid the redesign of Mangatang

Mils

The Pistol has been completed! The regular 2 skins; Veil and Section 8 have been applied to the components and I added a unique skin named ‘Code’ as well. This should be all good to go barring any last minute changes which may crop up. I also adjusted the base gun materials to break up the samey gun metal and define the shapes a bit more.

I also got into a bit of Graphic Design for the Transitions Spencer mentioned last week. I jazzed up the basic programmer art version of the transitions bars inside the tooltip window. I also thought while I was at it that we darken the background of the tooltip windows so they stand out a bit more when displayed over the rest of the UI.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this past week I’ve been iterating on the new start desert that I had just blocked in last time. After going over a bunch of things and learning a ton, it’s finally starting to take shape as something playable. Some of the main things that I focused on was tightening up the transition zones between open spaces and around roads, other wise they are just wasted space. We’ve been looking a lot at tree density and ground undulation and trying to get those values right, they can make or break the feel of a map. I had a go with trying to make a stamp that could dip the terrain down in a bowl shape but the masking brush doesn’t have enough resolution so it ends up with weird terracing issues, hopefully get that looked at. Also started remaking the hills captured from Deimans Land but making sure they are a lot taller and spread the base out a lot more then use the snap to terrain and terrain offset values to set how tall they are, other wise the changing ground height can cause really annoying artifacts. The next step is going to be fleshing out every other biome as fast as possible so we can actually starting moving this map forward, I feel like I’ve definitely learnt a lot from this starting zone and should be able to get the rest of the biomes up to the same standard in a much shorter time frame. Although it may not look like it, a lot has changed since the first fleshing out of this biome.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

The vehicle insurance changes have been more complicated than originally planned for so we decided to delay them until the next patch rather than push out something to make the deadline knowing we would have to revisit it anyway.
After delaying the vehicle changes until 0.5.8.0 I spent most of last week working on bugfixes, balance changes and other small tweaks for 0.5.7.0.
Currently the plan is to reintroduce vehicle customisation and world spawns of vehicle chassis along with adding the vehicle insurance system in 0.5.8.0 on the 7th June but more on all that next week.

FRIDGE

We’ve always wanted to bring the fridge back into ItemV2 but we were concerned it didn’t have a strong enough case for existing.
With the recent temperature overhaul however, food has become much more valuable as you start to poke into a new biome where you aren’t quite safe yet, the well fed buff can be the difference between life and death.
Without another use for the coolant consumable we instead switched the fridge over to be powered by fuel. Currently the fridge always tries to approach -11 degrees (the freezing point for steaks), in the future when we have more item transitions that rely on being below a cold temperature we plan to open this up and allow players to set the target temperature along with a proper thermostat system so fuel is only consumed when the fridge is above the target temperature. We hope this will open up a host of emergent gameplay options (eg. Spoiling a players meat by lighting a nearby mondinium fire, overpowering the fridge’s cooling and defrosting and eventually spoiling their steaks)

 

START BIOME SPECIFIC EVENT LOOT

Whilst we’ve been happy with how the airdrop and town event mechanics have been working out the rewards from them can be pretty inconsistent, especially in the early game.
In an effort to smooth rewards out I’ve added a biome filter for airdrop loot (so the plane injects different loot into the air drop crate depending on which biome it gets dropped in) as well as creating a new tier of town event reward case to drop in the start biome.
These starter biome loot trees are similar but with reduced options, all the vehicle attachments have been removed and the only gun items that drop are for the pistol. On top of this the detonation cap has also been removed.
We’re hoping this change will let newer players get loot they can use more consistently from airdrops and town event wins whilst also encouraging experienced players to travel to the far out town events more often.
If this works out well I would like to try setting up another loot tier for the forest and sand dunes biomes or maybe even biome specific loot trees. We’ll also be removing vehicle attachments totally from airdrops and town events and bringing them back to vehicle chassis spawns in the world but more on that next week.

 

C4 EXPLOIT FIX

With the vehicle changes delayed I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to fix an exploit with sleepers and C4.
When a player is in their sleeper form they project a nobuild zone over and above their sleeper stopping any other player from building on top of them so we can make sure the area is free to spawn into when they return.
This exploit arose because C4s do not care about no build zones (this is so crafty players cannot use no build zones to block C4 from being placed at all) so they can be placed over a players sleeper so they log back in inside the C4 collider causing a whole bunch of problems in the physics engine.
Now when a player spawns from a sleeper we perform an additional check for any overlapping machines in the spawn area. If any are found the player will be killed.
With this fix and the recent crash vehicle exploit fix I think all the major exploits in ItemV2 are now closed. If I’m wrong about this please let me know (tom@bankrollstudios.com)!

 

 

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Most of what I’ve been up to has been work that went into the 0.5.6.3 hotfix patch we released on Friday, other than that I’ve started working through the vehicle and visual override changes but we are still iterating over those changes and don’t have them locked down solidly just yet.

Vehicle crash system fix

Because the Goat and Kanga have exposed drivers seats (as opposed to the Roach who’s driver seat is protected and covered by the chassis) we use two special components constructing these vehicles, VehiclePassengerUnsafeEntry (this stops players from entering when the seat is being blocked, for example when the vehicle is upside down) and AttachedBodyCrash.
AttachedBodyCrash attaches another physics body to the vehicle via a joint, this joint simulates the player’s connection to the vehicle and if it breaks due to too much force being applied (usually by catching your head on a low ceiling or landing a large jump) a crash is invoked.
When a crash is invoked with an attached body we were previously assuming due to being fully physically simulated that this attached body would be in a safe location that we could spawn the ‘crash vehicle’ into. Unfortunately this assumption proved to be false so I added an extra safety line of sight check between the vehicle and the crash spawn location, if any terrain, base or machine is in the way then we kill the player instead (it is a crash after all and this almost never occurs unless the player is specifically trying to exploit).
Hopefully this will put an end to the crash vehicle exploits but if you see any more please keep making noise about them, I am determined to wipe them out for good!

Minor 0.5.6.3 changes

• Made beds rotatable
• Updated to Unity 5.6.6f2 (If using the SDK please switch over to this Unity version)
• Fixed shack markers disappearing on server restart
• Setup Beretta ironsight world items and icons
• Fixed some minor SDK issues (world items now add any missing required components @ build time rather than runtime and passive equip effects now automatically display their tooltip rather than having to explicitly opt in)

0.5.7.0

So far I’ve been merging in the vehicle refactor I did a few months ago to make things less of a tangled mess in the backend, make setting up vehicles in the SDK easier (still a lot we can improve here but we are moving in the right direction) and making it easier for us to add new vehicle types. This has gone really smoothly and I’m back to parity with the pre-refactor code, this means I’m ready to start rebalancing handling and crashing as well as adding vehicle insurance and full customisation.
I’ve also been setting up the extra Beretta attachments Mils has been working on, 0.5.7.0 will add the red dot sight plus 2 silencers to the Beretta.

Mils

I got the cute little Red Dot for the Pistol done this week. Came out nice and should make aiming down the sights a much nicer experience for the anyone playing in First Person (I dislike Ironsights personally) This Red Dot will just look cool in general on the gun as well as be functional. We’ve gone about as far with parts as we are willing to go right now. I’m onto making the masks/designs for now. I’ll be adding the usual Veil and Section 8 skins while adding a custom design also. I already have a couple of good candidates.

I’m also working on some UI stuff to make transitions between item states more visual and less wordy. This will save us from having to convert this information to other languages and hopefully make the information easy to decipher.

TEHSPLATT

Played a ton of Hurtworld over the weekend to gather some information on what we need for a good map. I learnt a lot and also had a lot of fun. During my play time I noticed myself returning to specific spots to gather resources and realized that these spots followed the formula we have been discussing, large open areas that allow you to mine safely and see who’s coming. These large open areas are also great for building and just existing in in general but in the current Mangatang map there is a lack of those areas, and I constantly find myself subconsciously drawn to areas where I can see who’s around me while mining. Mangatang also has a lot of transition zones that do nothing more than act as the in between for gameplay/playable areas and this can make a lot of the map feel like you’re in limbo. I’m currently working on keeping these transition zones as small as possible in the new map I’m working on, and trying to keep these large open areas as frequent as possible while also trying to balance not making the map feel empty. I’ve attempted to tie the town events into the world a lot more, so they don’t feel so disconnected, this will work better when I create new town events  that I can design for specific biomes and parts of the map. We are restructuring the shape of the map to make it easier to reduce/increase the size for varying player numbers. Something else I’m focusing on in this map is making sure the roads feel good and actually feel like they belong where they are placed. Here’s some pictures of stuff and things including the general idea of the new Mangatang layout.

Spencer

This week I’ve been hunting down the last of the localization issues, in the process rebuilt the way we display item transitions. Item transitions are the ways items can become other items like steaks getting cooked, ore smelting, owrongs going moldy etc.

Previously we had just a bit of text that had to be hand written for each item, this was a pain in the ass to translate, it also told you very little about what was actually going on with such transition. Part of ItemV2 added the ability to synchronize more complex item data to the client for tooltips like the state of each transition, we just hadn’t built a UI to display it.

Here is my programmer art version of some transition panels which Mils is reskinning now to be a bit prettier.

These now show how long until something will change state as well as if it qualify’s for the transition. Mechanics are exactly the same, you can just see whats going on.

With better transparency we can now introduce more interesting item effects like for example rare loot that explodes and kills you after an amount of time if above a specific temperature, food being poisoned by toxin etc. Nothing in concrete yet.