Spencer

This week I’ve been tracking down the low hanging performance issues with ItemV2. At the start of last week I released a patch to fix the horrible UI lag in ItemV2 being caused by lots of sleepers being around, however this didn’t fix the core GPU load lower end machines were suffering from.

It has been hard testing on a GTX1080, so I decided to find the oldest piece of crap PC I could find in the office and set it up at my desk. At first I feared I had bitten off more than I could chew as the machine I found barely gets 15fps in legacy Hurtworld and was getting less than 5 fps in ItemV2. It took a little longer than expected, but finally broke the back of it today, getting it upto a completely playable 25-30 fps in ItemV2.

At the other end of the scale, my dev machine now gets a solid 100-110 fps in ItemV2 diemensland compared to a 75-80 fps in legacy.

This won’t be a silver bullet for everyone, but should give good gains across the board. For those who are still struggling, introducing:

Potato Mode
From my time testing on the mega potato, I got a chance to look at Hurtworld from a different perspective. We’ve been spending a bit of time improving graphics and I know there are a lot of people out there that are already just scraping the 18fps required to be able to run around. There is no reason our graphical upgrades should make it so these machines can no longer run the game.

Unity is a very scalable engine, due to the fact that a large part of its customer base is focused on mobile development. With the right settings, we can make Hurtworld run on pretty much anything. The only downside of this is that lots of videos and screenshots of the game will look shit. If the game runs better for lots more people, I say its worth it.

With this weeks patch I will be introducing a Potato mode setting in the graphical options. This setting will override all quality settings with the absolute bare minimum options possible. This mode will focus 100% on performance, with no care for what the game actually looks like. At the end of the day, if you can still participate in the game you don’t really care how it looks.

Not for everyone
The thing we need to protect against here is potato mode giving you a competitive advantage like increased visibility due to no grass, making it so people with their graphics on high have to also go into potato mode to be at an even playing field. To combat this, we will be adding various disadvantages to potato mode like short draw distances for players and bases.

The improvements for bottom end performance coming in this patch are massive, and we have quite a few more things up our sleeve on that front. With some other drastic settings like defaulting back to per vertex lighting and replacing the sky with a simpler calculation, I was able to get upto a solid 60fps on the mega potato. This won’t be released until we get a chance to fix some broken fallback shaders in this mode.

Patch
New patch will be going live on Friday. Tom has been working on the content side for this weeks patch, see his post for details.

Mils

This last week saw me implementing my part of the AWM into the game. This is going to look a bit average animation wise because we are using the current rifle animations and some parts don’t match up. The hand is more horizontal on the original rifle and the bolt is in a different place, so they will be in strange positions and won’t animate correctly. For now these have the standard grey boxing texture on them until we are happy with the design. Tom is going to have a quick look into the programming and stat values for this today.

As Splatt is looking into some other world item designs I took over the fabricator design which we will make a few changes to. You’ll see some grey box shapes below. These are initial ideas with a focus of getting some interesting silhouettes. The poly count on these shouldn’t be too high because there will be a lot of them in the base at any one time. I’m trying to keep it low-ish to save performance a bit. I’ll keep working on these over the next day or two.

Tom

This week I’ve mostly been working on improving the mesh combining system. As it is now in ItemV2 the mesh combiner repeats a lot of work, every time an item is equipped or unequipped that has visuals or a vehicle, creature or player is loaded in (these networked objects only load on the client once you are close enough to need the information) the mesh combiner receives a list of all the mesh attachments to put together for the object’s final look. Due to both moving the combination work to a background worker thread and doing as much as we can ahead of time in the mod build step, combining meshes is very quick but when swapping in and out of a skinned weapon (like the bow which deforms during animation) it triggers a rebake of the whole player mesh.

I’ve been implementing a caching system so we can save combinations and look them up by their list of mesh attachments allowing us to skip any combining job if we’ve already got a matching mesh for the combination. This also makes matching combinations point to the same mesh, this saves on memory which is a boost to low end systems.

Because there are so many potential combinations we need to be able to delete meshes we aren’t using anymore to free the memory, for this I’ve implemented a reference count where other systems like the ragdolls and player renderers register and deregister their use of the mesh. When the cache needs to be shrunk this count is checked to make sure we don’t kill anything we’re using. This allows us to share meshes across different systems for varying timescales.

These changes still need more thorough testing and might not make it to the next patch but it won’t be far off.

As well as the mesh caching I’ve been working on changes and fixes for the next ItemV2 update coming out Friday. These include:

• Adding the AWM sniper Mils has been working on into the game to replace the FR18
• Fixing bugs with durability on the recurve bow
• Fixing vehicle spawn locations so chassis will once again spawn in towns
• Fixing the resolution options in the menu
• Fixing a bug where seeds could recolour your hat
• Fixing player and sleeper ragdolls sometimes not showing
• Removing our current motion blur effect due to some performance issues
• Simplifying pickaxe research costs so they don’t require a lower tier pickaxe
• Setting up the new vehicle icons and world items

These will show up in Friday’s update along with adding item repairing to the fabricator machines (the ones used to create the blueprint items).
Repairing won’t cost any resources but it will take some of your blueprints durability, currently we’ve got it set so you get about 4 full repairs for the same durability cost as crafting one item.
Keep in mind that the installed blueprint of the fabricator has to match the item you are trying to repair.
As well as repairing I’m going to give a balance pass to the early game, expect to see initial base construction get easier and food become easier to find.

TEHSPLATT

This week I made the 9mm ammo box, this has probably been my favourite one so far in terms of design. Each cardboard ammo box should be easily recognizable now based on colour alone, this is so you don’t have to sit there trying to read the boxes to find out what bullets they contain as this would be bad in a life or death situation. The muted and weird colour scheme came out nice and adds to that vintage ammo box feel which I really like.

I also made some new world items for the current vehicles as the old ones were just ripped straight off the vehicles themselves, where as these ones are a bit more manageable. As a car guy I love engines but as a 3D artist I hate them, they have so many little lumps and bumps they can easily eat up your poly budget. The large holes running along the sides/top looked terrible when they were just blobs of black texture pretending to be holes but I found a solution that wouldn’t destroy my poly budget, it involved using an alpha cut up across the top and cones with a gradient to give the holes a sense of depth, this worked out really well which is nice.

Here’s a picture of the engine and transmission together. The rust was was done for both stylistic, practical and logical reasons. One of the main reasons was I felt shiny objects this large rolling around the world wouldn’t look so great and a few tests proved I was right, this is also the real state that these parts would be in if they were just left half buried in conditions like Hurtworld’s. I also think contrasting PBR materials works really well so having the matte rust mixed with the shiny paint adds something interesting for the eye.

Spencer

The first week of our aggressive experimental development cycle has been a challenging one. With bug fixes from the first release we only had a couple of days for the new build. Half of the features didn’t make it in which we have been working on over the last few days. We will put out a patch tomorrow that will add some point to playing on the experimental servers this week.

We’ve been collecting performance data from people on the city build, and as expected we have a lot of optimization to do there.

Experimental Content Update 3 Plans
This Friday we are heading back to the land of survival. We will be introducing some new blueprint mechanics, doing some more work on our procedural map workflow to hopefully make the map much more interesting (and big, and improve performance). Our aim is to start tweaking the balance of full loot so that its not so punishing as you progress further into the game.

Nullius Tests
Something new I tried with the current map is adding more negative space to the playable area by adding very large wasteland type areas around focal points that require vehicles to traverse. As there weren’t really much reason to move between cities, these didn’t serve much purpose.

I did however end up pushing our tech a bit further with support for very large maps. The current nullius is 12km x 12km, I am going to keep this size for week 3, and add back in some of the classic Hurtworld biomes as smaller chunks among larger wasteland.

Mils

What an epic week! So we bit off a bit more than we could chew this week, but we still got some stuff out there to test with the community. It was an epic push on Friday to get as much of our stuff into the test map to try and see how it runs. While we saw a lot of problems with the build we made, we learnt a lot from it. This was the idea. I learned that my cities are waaaaaay too big. While we will keep the big city asset in case we want to use it later, we may be removing a lot of height from it, by knocking out the filler floors. We quickly found that running up all those stairs was just so tedious. Not necessarily the running up, but definitely the running back down. Also the size horizontally may be too much as well. I had to do a specular & gloss map for the city textures. This is no small feat. The Albedo (Colour) map is 259 layers by itself. The Specular & Gloss texture is that but x 2 so 520-ish layers for that one. Man what a mission. The reason for this is because the city runs on 4096 textures, to improve performance and use less draw-calls. This was quite a slog to get everything not only looking right but looking the same. Not only are there these mega-layered textures, but parts of the city have tiled versions of the texture within the 4096 texture sheets but as separate textures. These were created to save poly counts on places like the outer windows on the building exteriors. These also had to look the same as the other textures. Example of the Cities’ 4096 textures below.

I’m also progressing nicely on the AWM Sniper Rifle. Top is the High Poly, Bottom is the Low. I really like this gun. *drool

Tom

This week I’ve been working on bugfixes and our experimental city survival map type.
Unfortunately we bit off a bit more than we could chew trying to get a new game mode happening in about 2 days and we weren’t able to get everything in that we’d planned leaving it feeling a bit empty and aimless.
We’ve got an update coming out very soon which should start to address some of these issues, the compass is working now (see below) and will show the locations of all machines within 2km. Gear machines sell gear crates, gun machines sell gun crates and ATMs allow you to deposit and withdraw scrash (although the ATMs have a few bugs still to address).
I’ve also given the guns a balance pass cranking up the power of the ar15, fr18 and shotgun, I’m interested to hear what you think of them now.
We probably won’t do too much more work on this gamemode this week, just whatever things will port over to the main game like balance changes.

I’ve also been working on a bunch of ItemV2 changes and bugfixes including changing structures with an attachment dependency (like a door or a window) to depend on its attachment even when the construction cell is claimed. We made this change because we think bases constructed this way look odd, don’t make sense and we don’t want such an unintuitive tactic becoming the dominant strategy.
Another change we made was reducing the maximum field of view we support from 100 to 80. We made this change because we think 100 vertical field of view is excessive for a standard 16:9 setup and it was causing us issues with people being able to see through walls with their fov cranked right up. Rather than make the character controller fatter or bring the camera’s near culling plane in closer (which would reduce the precision of the depth buffer causing more shadow flickering problems) we thought this was the best solution.
I’ve been seeing reports however that this isn’t working so well for our players on ultra-wide screen setups so we’ll look at switching it over to a horizontal field of view picker and limiting it this way.

This week I’m going to start working on the performance issues, continue to build on our loot trees and item rolling and keep working through the backlog of bugs and changes.
I also plan to patch some exploits that have popped up in our main branch and roll this update into the experimental map update at the end of the week.

Cow_Trix

Hey folks. This week I’ve been searching for memory leaks, getting the city experiment out, and looking into changing the road workflow into something less destructive.

Firstly we had some nasty memory leaks on the server that needed a look. It turned out we weren’t pooling some high frequency objects correctly, namely the paths that creatures used to navigate the world. So every time you chased a creature, the server would leak. This was an easy fix at least. The second biggest leak was items, which Spence made some good optimisations for.

We got the city out to you all on Friday, and I had a good play Saturday. Definitely a long way to go, but an interesting experiment that definitely stress tested our pipeline and showed the places that needed improving. One of these places is with elements of our map creation process being destructive, especially with the road tool. To mitigate this I’ve started putting together a non-destructive workflow where the road tool captures snapshots of an area, and only stores deltas when it makes changes. With this, we can let the road tool mess around with the terrain as much as we want without worrying about having to regenerate the map all over again. Check out a gif of it in action above.

TEHSPLATT

Pushed out a lot of assets this week trying to get all the assets we need for these experimental game modes. Balancing fast production and assets that don’t look awful can be difficult. The funnest things this week were definitely the Utility box and ATM machine. The Utility box was/is going to be used as a minable resource node in the city, so it had to stand out while also fitting in. I’m terrible at any sort of Graffiti, so the graffiti was done by Mills and is all Hurtworld related which is cool. The ATM machine (and slot machines not shown) were needed straight away due to it being the night of the build so we agreed a back alley make believe style ATM would be a great fit, the slot machines were done in the same style but if they are going to become a permanent part of the game I would like to re-do them as proper slot machines.

Next on the list was making a new loot crate that looked like the old one but was much lower in poly count. The original box was about 1200 triangles while the new box is a mere 12 triangles and with the help of a normal map comes out looking pretty similar even with 6 flat faces. I also made a small scrap metal pile world item, it kind of looks weird when it’s upside down but it’s not too bad, I would like to touch up the specular map a bit.

I finally got to something that’s been on my to-do for a while now, re-UVing the military vest. The military vest was one of the first assets I made and I was still in the habit of optimizing every single bit of UV space for mobile platforms, this creating horrible symmetry on the camo patterns, so I’ve finally gotten round to fixing it and I’m much happier with the result.