Mils

Hey there mi amigo’s. So I got into a jam with 3D Coat, where my layers weren’t exporting to Photoshop correctly. Basically my transparency isn’t working and so I had to ask the experts on the forums what is happening. I wanted to finish the skin designs for the Mozzy but got held up there. In the meantime I have started modeling the bed which looks pretty cool so far. The bed had to be big enough to look reasonable but not too big that it filled a whole foundation cube in space. When I double checked the models I could see that the length of 2 metres actually looks fine, and this happens to be the length of the character so full steam ahead on that one. I had a lot of fun simulating the bedspread with Maya’s nCloth functionality. This can be a dark and winding path but it certainly paid off for me this time. 😛 This is not complete yet but it’s looking good, and I’m getting decent poly counts too.

Okay so managed to finish the bed today (Monday) so snuck it in. Came out well there’s some funny scratchings on it too. You can see the 3 LOD’s that I made for it the closest one is the full mesh, then the 2nd and finally 3rd.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, nothing much to show this week as everything’s been technical fixes to bring the map tools up to good usable point. For the next release my game plan is to make the map a lot more interesting over all, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now but due to the tools not being artist friendly I haven’t been able to do much. The hardest part about taking on this task is making sure I stay focused on the bigger picture, it’s very easy to dump a bunch of time into the art side of things instead of carrying on with the general feel of the map. The stamp tool we have is a pretty huge help with this kind of stuff cause you can stamp subtle changes to height or vegetation without disrupting the other things in the land making everything feel disconnected. Currently I’m in the trail and error phase for a lot of things so probably the most interesting thing I have to show visually is this Substance Designer beach grass I was testing out to replace our pretty out dated old grass. I tried to give it a more stylized and kelpy feel.

Tom

Hey Hurworldians, this week I’ve been continuing the work on item upgrading and crafting.
Crafting times have now been removed from all items and you are able to specify how many times you want to craft a recipe so making full stacks of building materials will be much easier now.
Adding crafting count into the crafting window was done as just a quick change, a proper overhaul of the crafting window to reintroduce categories and probably show more information about what items upgrade into is still part of our plans but won’t be making into this experimental update.

On the item upgrading side of things I’ve been going deep into the configuration of our items, assigning compatible upgrade types for most equippable items (for instance a pickaxe can take upgrade types of weapon, melee weapon, tool and pickaxe). I’ve also been creating more ‘upgrade gems’ (may not be gems by patch release) so that there are many options for every item and just about every stat we use can be altered. We’ll be playing around with the exact mix of stat assignments and upgrade point values (items can only take a limited number of upgrades) through the rest of this week and the next to try and find a decent balance for release.

Unfortunately I didn’t get into expanding item customisation just yet but still hopeful of getting there by the end of this week as thats our internal cutoff for features for the March 15 patch and all the work next week should be bug fixes, testing and polish.

Spencer

Hey guys, this week I’ve been on the respawning refactor. My goals are to continue our work on balancing out the punishment for death and try to eliminate any scenario where death isn’t something you are concerned about.

Death Tax
My original plan was to have the ownership stake consume some resource when ever someone spawns at it, which would have likely been amber. This has a heap of issues like the one idiot who dies all the time burning all your amber, your stake de-authing because respawns consumed all the amber etc.

After more thought I realized that there isn’t really a good reason to couple the respawning mechanics with the ownership of cells, so decided to decouple the 2 functions of the stake and introduce a new machine for each player, the Bed.

Bed
The bed serves as a spawn point for one player, and will have much harsher respawn cooldown requirements than the previous systems. Likely something around 3 mins cooldown after respawning once which will be shared across all beds. For scenarios where respawning quickly is vital I introduced a buyback system similar to DOTA where you can put an amber supply into your bed and depending on how long left your bed has to cooldown, you can consume amber to respawn instantly instead of waiting out the timer. Respawning at the noob beach will always be an option regardless of cooldown.

Mils

The Mozzy now has it’s first body kit. This turned out nice and consists of 5 parts. Front Panel, Roof Panel, Left Side, Right Side & Tail. Now these will get passed onto Tom to implement with the rest of the Mozzy’s Chassis. I’ve started on the skins/designs for the paintwork now too, and I have a tonne of ideas, so we may end up with a lot of designs depending on how they work out.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week has been an intense one. Started added in all the town events using the map tools and after climbing up the learning curve for hours upon hours I eventually got something that resembled a map. It took a ton of iterations  but I got something out that was playable, though it had a few bugs. The map tools have their ups and downs, they do a lot of things well but also do some weird stuff in their current extremely early state. We’re pretty close to having a nice quick map creation work flow in Unity but it definitely needs it’s kinks ironed out. Building maps can be a very long and tiring process, the constant back and forth of building, testing, re-building, re-resting etc. takes its toll. I tried to go back through and rebuild the map from the ground up using the biome specific stamps so that nothing was hacked together but due to previously mentioned kinks, that all went south pretty fast and we had to revert to the original map that was released and then manually change that. I also made a quick scroll world item for the item naming system.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians, this week I’ve been fixing bugs and working on our item upgrading and crafting systems.
For the recent patch release I worked on fixing amber protection for your sleeper, this was a tricky one to track down as everything appeared to be working correctly from the killers end (The loot dropped would contain 80% of the amber protection cost as expected) but the protected items wouldn’t appear when logging back in. This was because after the sleeper was killed the protected items were still inside the sleeper inventory which would destroy all its contents when it was destroyed. Even though we had written the items into the player’s save those items didn’t exist anymore when it came time to load them. We couldn’t move the items into the players inventory either as that only exists when the player is actually logged in, instead we moved to a solution where we spawn a ‘ghost sleeper’ with an inventory to hold on to these items until the player returns.
I also worked on fixing camera smoothing on automatic vehicle perspective changes, fixing shigis in the starting desert dropping the wrong loot and fixing the low level of detail bush billboards not being properly alpha culled (leaf textures would appear with a square green background where they should have been invisible).
Since the patch released on Friday I’ve also worked on a fix for spears doing way too much damage when thrown plus helping to track down the issues with the ‘Servo Wars’ town capture events, these fixes should be going out in a patch later tonight (or are probably out now by the time you read this).

Other than the bugfixing stuff I’ve been working on the next iteration of item upgrading. You’ve seen a rough, early version of this in the most recent patch with the pickaxe attack speed gems. Our plan is to massively expand our range of item upgrades and offer upgrades to most equippable item types across many stats. Applying an upgrade will be worth a certain amount of upgrade points and each item will have a limit of how many upgrade points can be applied.
We’re also going to overhaul crafting, more items are going to become upgrade items like the pickaxe where the base item is part of the material cost to get the upgraded item. As well as this we’ll be transferring your item upgrades from the base item to the upgraded item so nothing is lost (unlike what’s currently live where upgrading your pickaxe will wipe out all the gem upgrades).
We’re also going to be making some other crafting changes I’m sure you’ll be happy about, removing crafting times and allowing you to craft multiples of a recipe at the same time (multiple crafts might not happen for the next update as it requires ui changes but it’s definitely on the way).
As well as the item upgrades I’ll be taking another look at item customisation and allowing players to find and equip their own masks and colors, we’re still in the process of fleshing out exactly how this is going to work so I should have info about that in the next dev blog.
We’re aiming to do the next major experimental release on the 15th of March.

Spencer

This week I’ve been looking a bit further into the future as our experimental branch gets a bit more stable, looking at what we have on the roadmap to implement that will fit well with our current direction and prioritizing development.

Features we plan to get into the game before moving experimental to the core branch:
– Refactor how respawning works
– Flesh out item stat modifier content
– Item / Gear / Vehicle customization of colors and paint masks
– Helicopter
– Slug
– Heavy slot loot
– More World Event Types
– Multiple iterations of map polish / handmade areas
– Rare creature variants
– SDK Documentation / Release of our basecontent mod source

This seems like a lot of work but most of these features are mostly implemented and just need shuffling balance wise to slot into the current metagame. Our main focus here is not trying to change too much in terms of balance, and phasing in new features slowly to ensure we don’t end up too far from the mark.

Once we officially release the Experimental branch we will make an effort to increase our player base once again. For now we are happy with where things are and appreciate the core playerbase that has helped us get this far and provides good feedback each update.

My priority this week is the new respawning mechanics, then I will be moving on to help Tom flesh out item upgrades. That, bug fixes plus a map update will be the majority of next patch going out on the 15th of March.

Mils

So I finished the Mozzy chassis last week and it’s looking very tasty. The texturing all came out well and fits our style as usual. I really like the instrument panels in the cockpit. The PBR workflow for vehicles changed a bit beginning with the Slug and has continued onto the Mozzy. I will probably go back and make some changes to the texture style on the previous vehicles at some point to bring them in line. I added a bit of base level dirt to the vehicles in this new style, we previously planned to down the track add dirt via a texture that would increase over time, giving a worn look, which may tie into a degradation system. This stuff is all theoretical right now, so I thought to filth them up I would add some toned down dirt to the base textures. I’m onto the first body kit now and hope to have that finished in the next couple of days, end of week the at the latest.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians, this past week I’ve been refactoring our vehicle code to more sanely support air vehicles and other non-car vehicles.
Because of the way Hurtworld has evolved most of the vehicle code assumed a 4 wheel car type vehicle as the standard base with other vehicles like the Kanga or the crash vehicle (an invisible cylindrical vehicle you get placed inside during a crash) being specializations of that base with overridden functions to skip over the car specific stuff (such as setting up anti-roll bars to compress wheels on the same axle).
Adding the helicopter gives me a good opportunity to go and clean some of this stuff up, creating a simpler vehicle base class just containing shared functionality like physics overrides, vehicles seats, lights, a sleep system so they don’t hog all the resources when not in use, etc.
From the base we diverge into vehicles with almost completely custom handling (like the crash vehicle or the new Mozzy) and another path into the standard, powered, grounded, wheeled type of vehicle.
Now we have a nice Mozzy skeleton prefab that can be entered, exited, blown up, parts equipped etc, that we need to write the physics simulation for, really looking forward into playing around with that soon.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I’ve been gathering all the knowledge for the final hand over from Cow_Trix, it’s been tough but I think I have a decent understanding of how the stamping system works and have started building mini towns and some polish stamps. I’ve moved on from those to work on the higher priority. The town events. We’ve set up the first town event map I made (Fight Yard Out Post) with the event system on it, it runs a capture the point game mode where you have to hold a designated area for an amount of time we set. It was pretty fun to play, it works well with people turning up at different times and takes skill to stay on the point. I’ve started working on a new town for the event stuff, this one seems a lot bigger and a lot crazier. It will definitely suit bigger groups of players. It’s currently in a grey box state and I’m playing with different ways to make walls without just sticking walls around the whole thing. Looking forward to playing this one. Hopefully I will have 3 towns ready for the next patch, one of them might still be in it’s grey box form though. You can see some progression between the grey box process and replacing the objects with proper assets.

Spencer

This week I’ve been working on the world event system and fleshing out the game mode wrapper that runs town events continuously. For the initial release there will be two types of town events available.

Control Point Event
This event will require a single player to hold a control point for a period of time by being the only player in range of the control collider. On Completion the winning player will be rewarded with a loot cache that comes with amber insurance and will not drop on first death. Meaning if you die after winning the event, you will keep your loot (provided you don’t open the cache until you get home)

Loot Frenzy
This event will work fairly similar to legacy towns, except on crack for a short period of time. While active, loot caches will spawn around a town containing valuable loot at high frequency. Controlling the town and accumulating loot for the duration of the event will be very profitable, however the longer yous stay, the more people will show up and try to take what you’ve collected. There isn’t a single winner, escape with whatever loot you can or risk it all.

We are starting with some pretty simple events, we plan on introducing more complex events involving creatures and possibly travelling between multiple towns in future. We will see how these go in rotation to begin with.

We will be putting lots of duplicate towns across mangatang for this build that will allow us to test the town running meta before going deeper on town design. In future we expect them to all be unique.

Respawn Refactor
This week I’ve been working on how we can refactor the mechanics of re-spawning slightly. It’s still a bit too easy to throw up a stake and use it to respawn rapidly without cost. This will become worse once the town event system gets up and running. What we are looking at is decoupling spawning from the stake, and requiring that you drop a bed in an owned cell for each person. The first death will be an instant respawn, after that there will be a longer wait time of around a few mins before you can respawn there again. There will be an option to fill your bed with amber and buy back instantly and skip the cooldown similar to the buyback mechanic in DOTA. This won’t be going into this patch, likely the next one.