Mils

So I got the masks for the AR15 and the AWM sorted out last week. These are in the game now and are looking nice. The colour schemes as I said recently are selected by me and are not as ‘Eye Cancer-y’ as the early testing colours that were way too bright for the most part. There are 3 Tiers for the colour schemes right now as you can see in the image below. These colours get brighter as they go up the tiers and have more varying colours. When combined with the different masks it makes for a fair bit of variation. We will add more colour schemes in the future, but have more pressing items to get on with right now.

I am starting to re-texture the Slug, which is our big hauler truck that has so far never made it into the game. It has been sitting mostly complete for a while but the textures need work. I will be changing the vehicle texture style to come into line with our newer more polished texture style. We will be pushing the stylized PBR workflow into this vehicle and will probably rework the other vehicle textures later on. These shouldn’t drift too far from the current vehicle textures, the main difference will be the wear marks on the paint, and the use of more correct PBR material types. We are going to implement the ‘Heavy Slot’ with this vehicle. The Heavy Slot will be applicable to the player also and will be used to haul large objects. The Slug will act as a multi heavy slot hauler that can move bulk items in large quantities. We hope this will create road war type situations that will require large groups to move the truck and other large groups to attack the truck. This should create some interesting encounters between players. Can’t wait to go full road wars!

Tom

This week I finished up work on the 0.4.7.0 patch that released last friday.
This involved setting up the item mutators for each item with visual options. The mutators ended up being great for this purpose as their generic tree/node structure doesn’t lock us into any specific setup. This allows us to give completely different options to different gear sets, we can have as many different rarity levels as we choose and structure the mutator however we want. For instance the AR15 is setup to mostly appear as stock without any custom colors or patterns but has a chance to roll some custom colors. We’ve separated the colors into tiers of rarity as well (as you can see in Mils’ post), tier 1 rolls set one custom color channel, tier 2 sets two and tier 3 sets all 3 channels to custom colors. The mask/pattern selection occurs separately to the color selection but is also broken down into tiers, this is something I think I will be tweaking in the coming week as some of the more complex patterns can look a little strange without all the color channels set so I think linking the mask selection so the rarer patterns are much more likely on a tier 3 color roll would be for the best

I also spent some time setting up the attachments for the AR15 and AWM.
First up was creating the crossover attachments (ie. the red dot sights for the AWM and the scope for the AR15). Ideally we would’ve been able to leave these items as the same item that can be applied to either gun but although we have most of the visual side of that tech working we also need to extend the gameplay systems so we can do things like define separate sight offsets based on the root item.
Once the items were created I setup the stats for the items, currently the AR15 attachments are intended to be a kind of side grade where you pick the attachment depending on your playstyle and what you are doing, there shouldn’t be a clear winner (except maybe for sights). Because of this the stock AR15 selects its attachments randomly but I restricted the more interesting sights like the red dot and scope to be found in drops only.
The AWM is setup a little differently, its base attachments are always the same and will not be found in town loot. The town loot attachments are intended to be minor upgrades.
Unfortunately the silencers didn’t make it into this patch as we weren’t ready on the tech side of things just yet but Spencer is working on that now so hopefully we can push them out to you soon.

This coming week I’ll be starting off working on bugfixes for the latest build, so far I’ve fixed a bug that was causing players to appear with missing body parts in rare circumstances and another problem where player renderers could be culled when they were really still visible.
I’ve also found the cause of the vehicle windows appearing and am working on a fix for it now, these fixes and more will be pushed out in a bugfix patch later this week.

Spencer

This week I’ve been working on bugs and fixing up a bunch of PVP stuff. I’ve decided not to go 100% on the PVP iteration right now as the dynamic hotspot changes will shake up the game a fair bit so its probably better to refine raiding balance once those things are in game.

Things I am fixing up in PVP are implementing the silencer properly, going over conflicting states like sprinting while reloading, and doing a pass on basic recoil and weapon damage.

Thanks for all the bug reports, we are doing our best to work through the list.

Later in the week I will start implementing the Air Drop system.

TEHSPLATT

This week I got started on the Air Drop assets, which include a parachute, cargo crate and cargo plane. I started with the parachute due to it being more inline with the stuff I usually do (clothing/organic stuff). The reference parachutes had a lot more segments which I reduced to keep it stream lined for the games style and also so it wasn’t as noisy while in the air. This was a pretty straight forward asset.

Next on the list was a cargo crate, we had a look at a few different ones and I decided on the style of the model pictured below. When I was modelling it I knew how big it was meant to be but once it got attached to the parachute and hung in the air with nothing around it, the scale suddenly made no sense and was mainly seen as a small container a single person could lift, which was not the intention. I will be modelling a new crate the looks more like a military cargo drop, sitting on a wood pallet, tied down with straps.

A crucial part of the Air Drops is the plane, I’ve modeled a pretty standard cargo plane, due to it being so far away it doesn’t have to be insanely detailed which works out well for me. With all these assets, finding the perfect scale for all the different objects in the Air Drop should be a breeze.

Cow_Trix

Heya folks! I took most of last week of, so not very much from me this devblog. This week I’ll be revamping weather, and implementing a map for the game – two things that we hope will be pretty big changes in the way you play. Firstly, in terms of the design of weather, we’re going to move away from weather events where it’s hard to tell what’s going on, or some very light environmental pressure is applied. It might be realistic to have a rainstorm make you slightly wet and cold, but it’s about as interesting and fun as getting rained on in real life. So we’re going to try out rare but much more dangerous and explicit weather events, in which you will either need some item or to do something to survive. So poison clouds, irradiated rain, and solar flares here we come!

One of the things that came up in this discussion (and previously) is that we really should have a minimap. It would mitigate some navigability options we have in the map, give us the ability to clearly communicate where interesting things are happening (like weather events) and mean you can be a lot less scared of getting lost. We’ve decided to make it a core functionality – as in you won’t need an item to access a map – and to possibly retire the compass into the map system as it develops. Of course, community server owners will be able to disable players having access to the map if they want. More on all of this stuff next week!

Mils

We decided against using patterns on the clothes at least for now as we didn’t want the clothes looking too noisy and ‘el cheapo’ We are going to run with large block colours that will be hand picked by myself or TehSplatt. This should guarantee a colour set that doesn’t look like a clown spewed all over your outfit. I started sorting through the textures for the player making sure that all the clothes/gear that are currently in ItemV2 have a colour mask which we will use to vary the colours of the characters in the game. I also scaled down some of the textures that were a bit big. This will shrink our ever-expanding content data a little and boost performance.  After confirming that all the items have at least 1 mask, I laid out the array you can see in the pic below. I’ve picked colours that aren’t too saturated as I think they look better in the game. I’ll be handing the scene over to Tom so he can extract the colour info and correctly author the items in the game. The rarity of these colour schemes will be chosen by us based on our preference.

Tom

This week I’ve been continuing work on the upcoming 0.4.7.0 patch which we’ll be releasing this Friday, the 6th of October.
I’ve been focused on implementing the design I spoke about last week where items can randomly roll their appearance. I’ve been doing this using ItemObjectMutatorStacks which are assets that can be attached to our item generators to alter the item based on context. This context can be rarity, biome (of where the item was spawned) or random. We use the random context to pick the items look based on probability weighting.
Currently I’ve got a few test items setup with some placeholder looks to test the system out and after working through a few tricky bugs related to nested item serialization it appears to be working well.

Tomorrow I’ll be setting up the items following this pattern with the appearances that Mils has been picking out and also tweaking the town loot so attachments can be found there.
Once that’s all done I’ll be able to get an internal build done so we can start the testing and refining cycle.

0.3.8.9 OSX Issues

I also spent some time last week removing the bakenavmesh console command in legacy Hurtworld (not ItemV2) that some players were using to crash the construction system leaving bases invisible on the client.
Unfortunately it looks like the 0.3.8.9 build has some problems on OSX where the input manager doesn’t resolve correctly. We’ll try and push out a fix for this with Friday’s patch, our build process has gotten pretty complex running both branches simultaneously on the one install so it’s a big time saver for us to wait and roll it all into the one update.

TEHSPLATT

Well Hi there, this week I spent a good while cleaning up all the mess I’d made during the creation of the new build biome, lots of files all over the place and things named weirdly and just bad organization, not to mention important files mixed with junk spread across two desk tops. So after the cleansing I started wrapping up some lose ends here and there, mesh and texture fixes, sizing issues, that sort of stuff just tying everything up before taking on another big chunk of work. I made some new world items, more building resources, might need to iterate on them a bit more due to similarities to other icons, but there’s some easy fixes to that sort of stuff like stacking the objects to make them look more like building materials. Metal has it’s challenges when using PBR in a stylized world, if you make the metal look too much like metal it becomes realistic and weird looking among the other items but if you hand paint it, it can look too cartoon-ish, so it’s always interesting finding that middle ground.

We also found an interesting problem with specular values coming in far too shiny, so now I correct the values in Photoshop after exporting from Substance Painter and it seems to work pretty well. As you can see here the one of the left has a very wet look too where as the one on the right feels more like a scratched up helmet would. I’ve had to run through a few old assets fixing this little problem. Once I get the last of this stuff wrapped up I’ll be moving onto some Air Drop assets which should be interesting.

Spencer

This week I’ve been doing some house cleaning in ItemV2 and working through some long standing + critical bugs. I’ve also been talking to members of the community on the best ways to solve balance around divided issues like loot balance and bunnyhopping.

In this weeks patch there will be a new console variable bhopfriction <1/0>. When turned on, bunnyhopping will not be possible. This will hopefully give people options while we come up with a solution that everyone is happy with.

I’ve also added some new loot modes to playerlootmode:
Backpack Only
Backpack +1
Backpack +2
Backpack +3

These will be reminiscent of infamy, like everybody has the same amount of infamy already. You will always drop resource items (even in hotbar) and any gear in your backpack. Modes with +1,2 or 3 will drop the corresponding amount of secured items from your hotbar and equipped gear.

PVP Iteration
I am now moving on to the PVP iteration. I will be looking at making PVP great again, incorporating the new more powerful weapons into the gameplay so they are balanced and useful. I’ve only been in a a gunfight a few times in Hurtworld, mainly because the cost of weapons don’t make sense to not take a bow. I want this to not be the case. Part of this iteration will be fixing up some stuff that needs polish like recoil, gun sounds, silencer functionality, raiding balance, weapon damage, PVP armor etc.

First on my list of functional changes is solving the issues around third person camera shooting projectiles from a magical point over your shoulder, making it possible to hit people that can’t see you

SDK Update
Today I pushed out a big ItemV2 SDK update. This can be downloaded by switching the SDK branch to ItemV2 in steam tools. In the update you will find the complete configuration source to our basecontent project to be used as a reference of how we build vanilla Hurtworld. Tutorials on how to use each part of the SDK are coming soon, for now if you want to jump in and have a poke around now is the time.

Cow_trix

Away this week

Spencer

Hi Guys!

Welcome to the 100th episode of “Hurtworld Dev’s ramble about their week”! Hard to believe we’ve written 100 of these things, I wanted to announce the release of ItemV2 on to our main branch with this update, however I think we are still too experimental to lock down an exact date that we think everything is going to be awesome enough to hype up again.

Our nicely planned out 2 week release schedule has been good to give us a push to get things playable and out in the wild, it makes it hard for us to ever really iterate on what we put out because we are working on new features right away. We will still be doing our best to push out a wipe update every 2 weeks, we will however be trying to do things a little more free form. What makes it in makes it in, what doesn’t will get pushed back to the next release.

I’ve spent the first half of this week sick, now am moving on to some much needed bug fixes. I’m hoping to fix bugged creatures today (something that’s been on my list since 2015, just haven’t gotten around to it).

Next I will be moving on to PVP, thinking about all elements from the ground up and hopefully refining some issues with the equipment system animations, recoil and weapon balance.

Random Location Loot
We’ve always had points of contest in Hurtworld maps, and have struggled for ages to make them a fair engagement and stop people just building next to them and taking no risk. We added nobuilds, but this didn’t solve the problem. We made entire biomes no builds, this made it a running simulator.

Something we’ve always had half implemented is meteor showers that provide rare resources at a random location, this is a no brainer and is proven to work. You can’t build next to it as you don’t know where it is, it funnels larger maps into not only geographical hotspots but time based hotspots. Unlike a town, where you might see someone there if they come at the same time as you, there will pretty much always be a contest at an airdrop or meteor strike.

We will be phasing these in over the next month and moving a large source of loot into these sources. Then heavily relaxing the nobuild requirements.

Tom

This week I’ve been continuing to work on item customization and attachments.
The tech side of stuff has taken me longer to get through than I had hoped, originally the plan was to use MaterialPropertyBlocks to override the mask being passed to the shader but unfortunately they are set on renderers rather than materials. Because the mesh baker combines mesh parts into a single renderer, setting a mask override here would override the mask on every mesh part (and this isn’t what we want because we can’t do something like apply a beanie mask onto a jumper because their UV mapping doesn’t match up even if the pattern looks compatible).
Instead of using the property blocks we’ll create a new material for each mask and when the meshes are being baked together each mesh part looks up it’s material assignment based on the mask assignment in its parent item.
I also made some changes so nested items (like scopes, silencers and other attachments) cannot be separately customized but will instead inherit these settings from their parent item (ie. the gun’s receiver), we thought individual customization of attachments would be confusing to manage and 9/10 times would result in an inconsistent look that was worse.

I know last week I said the customization would work like it does for vehicles but after discussing it we think that would be too hard to implement properly in time for the patch. Currently in itemv2 items are essentially throwaway with a low cost to craft, durability and no current way of repairing.
This doesn’t work well with a system that asks you to invest items (masks, paints) because you’re never going to feel like it’s worth it and you also end up not wanting to use your cool items because you don’t want to ‘waste’ their durability.
Instead we’re going to make items ‘roll’ their appearance when they are created. Basically each item will have a series of looks defined by a custom color set and a mask, rather than pick these options in an even distribution there will be common and rare types.

The other thing I’ve been working on is the item inspection window, currently this gives a preview of the inspected item and shows any available attachment slots. You can drag and drop compatible attachments over the slots to equip them. The item being replaced will be consumed, this adds a nice overhead cost that makes picking a setup more of a decision, reduces inventory maintenance type tasks for players (like swapping your good parts out before the weapon collapses) and makes duplicate attachments still valuable to the player in some way.
There’s still some work to go here, the window is still in ‘programmer art’ stage and I’d also like to extend it to show more information about the inspected item kind of like a tooltip+.
Then we can use the item mouseover tooltip to compare against whatever item is inspected (when it makes sense).
At this stage though I think the comparison is a nice to have feature that might not make it into this next patch.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I did some running around in the build/green biome to see how it felt, at the time some areas felt empty (that’s not the case now thanks to Cow_Trix and increasing the overall amount of trees). I started looking into ways to make it feel like you were moving through different sections of land, specifically in the dead areas. I added a brown bush and some dead looking plants that would only appear on patches of dead ground with no green. I also scattered some of the new rocks I made around (you can’t really see them in this image) to give certain areas some more interesting features. This worked alright but as the week  went on the map got filled with more interesting features and the original stamps I made to achieve interesting areas worked pretty well with new focal points on the map and once the decision to increase the tree count was applied it instantly solved a lot of the scale issues and weird empty feeling. I also need to iterate on the cliff rocks I did as they give off a weird scale due to their noise frequency.

Still working on world items in the back ground. This week was trying to get Amber to look decent without using a custom shader for things like translucency. The current texture is too realistic but I have other ways of toning that down, the main problem here is that it doesn’t really pop. It just feels like a brownish blob.

Mils

I worked on bringing the AWM up to speed and now it is fairly in line with the AR15. I have migrated the parts between the two guns that cross over between them. Items such as Scopes, Red Dots, Muzzle Brakes & Suppressors’s are now authored to both weapons. Mostly it was bringing the AR15 components over to the AWM but I did add the scope to the AR15 also. I also got two of the masks complete for the AWM and these will be generic masks now that they are shared between the two weapons. They will be shared between all the weapons  in the future, and I am also working on another one. I am going to shift gears and move onto making some colour masks for the players clothing this week. These are supposed to blend with the environment more, so as to not stand out like Canine Cojones when traversing the dangerous wilderness.

Cow_Trix

Heya folks! This week was spent refining and polishing the new version of the map. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out, especially the central build biome, which has turned out a lot more interesting than other map areas we’ve made before, in my opinion. I think a big part of this was the workflow of having these negative-space “decorator” stamps, in this case things like a field of long grass surrounded by a fence, or a change in ground texture. These stamps just modify the ground scattering and micro details. I think this workflow works really well for adding interest and dynamicness to the map, and so hopefully I’ll be able to bring this into other biomes in the near future.

The road tool earned it’s keep in this iteration, with the current version of Mangatang featuring over 1000 nodes – pushing, pulling and tweaking the map all in various different ways. One use that Spencer discovered, that turned out to be a pretty awesome tool, was the ability to use the road tool to plant tree lines and occlusion lines. This was an easy, non-destructive and fast way to block off areas that were too open, and just reinforces that the road tool is more like a general spline tool, which can do roads with the correct set of components.

This week I’ll be continuing polish on the map, trying to apply some of the lessons we’ve learned to the weaker areas. I’ll also be seeing about getting the Raid Drill back up and working, improving performance and fixing up as many bugs as I have time for.