Spencer

ItemV2 has landed. Even in its broken ass state, its been awesome to get back into the rhythm of a playable game and reconnect with the playerbase somewhat. I’ve been madly filling in gaps in the gameplay in the week leading up to the experimental release. Post release we’ve been all hands on deck fixing up all the bugs in our new systems. There is something magical about having a really broken game to fix, the amount you can get done in a day seems so much more than grinding away on a big system.

Things are starting to get a bit more stable in the back end. We’ve been mainly focusing on system issues rather than balance / content issues as most of the current content will be changed week to week as we push out our experimental patches.

Content Patch This Friday
As promised we will be releasing a rather drastic content patch to go out this friday with a wipe. It will include an entirely new map, and change up the gameplay a lot. As we will also be spending a lot of time fixing bugs this week, we don’t have a heap of time to put into the game mode, however we think with some cut corners and art we have up our seleeve we should be able to put something awesome together.

Urban Survival
This weeks experimental map will contain some incarnation of the City Mils was working on a while ago. Guns and vehicles will be plentiful, holding territory will be lucrative and difficult. We basically want to create chaos that will result in lots of:
A) Gunfights
B) Sneaking around
C) Getting killed and raging
D) Trying to jump kangas out of skyscraper windows

What we plan to get out of this experiment, is get a feel for how we are going to incorporate the city into the larger survival game. We will also get a chance to benchmark the performance of the City art and lodding systems, and most of all just get everyone running around it, see what modifications we need to make to get it into the master branch.

It’s experimental. Expect a broken unbalanced fun test of more of our new systems. By the time people figure out how to exploit it and ruin the game, we will be back with another experiment the Friday after! I would throw up some screenshots, but we haven’t even started working on it yet. It should be a good test of how much we can bang out in a couple of days with our new systems.

Last nights patch didn’t work
Some of the files didn’t update from our new build system and didn’t actually get released last night when I pushed out the patch. Guess that’s what I get for doing 4am builds. I have a new patch waiting to go out now which should sort out a lot more issues however steam publishing seems to be offline so I can’t push it out. Will do it asap.

Cow_Trix

Hey folks! Busy week last week getting the ItemV2 experimental build out and fixing all the little bugs that came up in the process. There’s definitely some more work to be done in the map tools, in optimisation, bug fixing and workflow improvements. The map tools unfortunately were not in a state where we could easily and quickly iterate, and we had to leave some stuff out like the roads.

There were loads of little bugfixes here and there, I implemented TehSplatt’s cool new world items, and I reimplemented emotes with a much nicer structure that means that hopefully down the road, when we redo how the player animation is structured, we’ll be able to easily add new emotes as mods. I think the new emote menu is a vast improvement over the old massive one, as well! I also took some suggestions from Spencer and reworked how we setup Item poses and attachments for their world items and icons, so that is a lot more intuitive and simple now. Things like the binary effect UI needed fixing, as well as some savegame serialization issues with binary effects.

Then it was onto localization, which I think we can do a lot better than what we currently do. Currently localization is a community-driven effort, but we’re the bottleneck. In the future, I’d like to allow people to author localization mods on the Steam Workshop that people can subscribe to at will, instead of having a bunch of central embedded localization data included in the game. I’d also like to write a little widget for picking localization keys in the editor, as often we’re setting a field to this very specific type of string data.

This week I’ll be working through bugs you all have raised on the ItemV2 branch! There have been some interesting ones already that should be fixed in the patch coming out today. Please keep them coming on the Steam Forums, it helps us loads.

Mils

It was really good to get the basic ItemV2 to you all last week. While we were rushing around putting last minute stuff into the game we got quite a lot done. Firstly I got the grey boxing on the Recurve Bow to a good place. I made 3 basic sets where all the parts are interchangeable. Below is an image of the breakdown of components that the bow can have. There’s the Riser; the grip part in the middle that the character holds. The Limbs & Strings; a single mesh for both that does all the bending etc. The Arrows; they go ouchies when they are in you. Finally The Rests; the little bit you rest your arrow on.

These are the 3 designs that we will be testing. They are very simple geo right now, but we may be adding them to V2 soon to test out.

Lastly, while the coders are mega busy patching and fixing the inital V2 release I’ve been working on this…

Yes it’s the most beloved sniper rifle known to man. We’ll at least to us. The AWM or Arctic Warfare Magnum. Such a beast of gun! Spencer describes it as ‘having chunk’ In the best sense. I agree that it is super satisfying to look at, so we are making this instead of the other thing that was in the Deathmatch build. Below are 3 Stock variations that we can add to it. I felt I should concept these so that we could get a feel for them. The rest of the parts will be easy to copy from reference.

TEHSPLATT

Finished off the the priority world items (Cash, Planks and Cement) last week. I think they came out pretty nice. As some of you may know, Cash has replaced Amber, this was partly due to Amber potentially needing a custom shader to look good, which would have taken too much time for not much gain. The wood planks were surprisingly difficult due to them being so simple and we were originally going to have the world item as a single plank but it was very hard to make it recognizable as just one plank so a stack seemed like the best option. I’m enjoying doing items with branded design layouts on them like the ammo boxes and now the cement, get to hide a lot of dumb jokes in them.

After finishing off the priority world items I went through and set up all the icon lighting and poses. This process took a while as all the items needed to read nicely at smaller sizes without having intense lighting changes that would make them look like they were rendered under noticeably different lighting setups. Items like the Detonator Cap have a different icon to their world item due to readability in the world.

Had a go at re-doing the large fallen tree that players gather wood from. I tried to keep it simple while also adding a bit more detail than the original as it was very lacking in the detail area. I went a bit further and tried to do a different style for each biome. The Beach log is still very similar in terms of look and colour. The Red Dessert log is much lighter in colour due to it having constant direct sunlight a large portion of the time. The Forest log has had it’s saturation bumped up along with the addition of mushrooms and moss to give it a more lively feeling. The Snow log was darkened to make it stand out more among the white and was layered with snow.

Tom

This week we made the big push to get ItemV2 experimental into your hands. First up was implementing sleepers and unfortunately in my rush to get everything ready I made an oversight and forgot to consider the combat logout timer which was disabled in editor mode and ended up creating sleepers at the wrong time leaving both the sleeper and the player in the world until the logout timer ran out. This caused a whole bunch of problems where if you killed the logging out player the items in the loot drop were also in the sleeper and doing things like splitting the stack and throwing the items out into the world were causing a whole bunch of nasty issues including item duplication. We’ve fixed the sleeper creation timing in 0.4.0.2 along with a host of other item/inventory handling bugs to ensure this can’t happen again even if we were to create sleepers at the wrong time.

After the sleepers I gave the vehicles a pass to bring them into line with the live game. While doing this it became clear that vehicles are over complicated to setup and there is too much configuration that has to be duplicated in too many places (for example wheel slot inventory mappings have to be explicitly setup on both the server and client versions of the vehicle when under our new system they can be derived by the vehicle’s storage config object), we definitely need to improve this and derive configuration where we can but obviously we have higher priority concerns right now!

Right now we’re a mix of excited and exhausted, we made a big push to get ItemV2 out to you all and obviously it still has many issues. We haven’t been taking a break though and should be dropping our 3rd bugfix patch around the time this blog goes out.
Speaking of bug fixing we’ve been getting lots of good feedback and error reporting but it could be even more useful if you could include your game log and a dxdiag file (for windows users only, see the pic below). These files can be uploaded to pastebin.com and then linked in the post/email/message/etc.
This gives us way more info to help find and reproduce your error.

Spencer

Hi Guys. Progress feels pretty pathetic this week, I have been testing the shit out of all our systems, raising a truckload of bugs over and over again, doesn’t feel like the list is getting any smaller. I’ve also been sick for the last couple days, hence the blog delay.

We will be doing an internal playtest with whatever broken state we can come up with. If that goes OK, I might put it out mid next week.
Stay tuned.

TEHSPLATT

This week was an interesting one for me, I’ve started doing a decent amount of hard surface modelling and while I’ve done a fair amount of hard surface modelling in the past I primarily focused on characters and organic modelling but I do enjoy the challenge and the practice of hard surface. The yellow pistol case is what’s now being used as the detonator cap world item, this is due to the size and design of the actual detonator cap being far too difficult to see in game. The bright yellow case is much better as it stands out in the world and can be easily recognized. The actual icon is basically a 3D rendition of the original icon.

As you can see here I’m also working on an ammo case for 5.56 ammo. These are the high poly models for the detonator cap world item and the 5.56 ammo world item. I like to add a lot of thickness to my models to give them a good silhouette in game, I find when if everything’s too thin then by the time you build the low poly and get it in game you are left with a very weak looking model.

Cutting the high poly models down to a suitable amount of polys for the game can be a very difficult process, you need the models to retain their thickness and silhouette while simultaneously cutting out as many polys as possible. Normal maps are super helpful in this process as you can keep a lot of detail while losing a lot of polys. These two renders are from substance painter, I’m not particularly happy with the ammo case texture, I feel it’s too noisy and possibly too realistic, but it’s not a hard fix.

Mils

This week I have been wrastling with a pit viper called Autodesk Maya. While Maya is a powerhouse in games and film it is also super frustrating sometimes. I learned to do a bunch of Skinning  with it’s proprietary ‘Paint Skin Weights’ tool. I have to say it isn’t as bad as some of the tools Maya has (I’m looking at you Boolean Modeling Tool) It does have it’s quirks and illogical not-so-easy-to-use interface. Aside from Maya being interesting to deal with I also had to get used to setting up the configs in Unity which were actually pretty easy. The coders made our Item Configs as easy for an art brain like myself to use as possible. Thanks gang! Now I don’t blow a brain-valve every time I deal with setting up items.

This next image shows a Sock Puppet (low poly simplistic mesh) which I used to get a nice smooth gradient across the Bow limbs. This helped a lot because setting and painting the weights of a higher poly object takes a lot longer to do. This method also helps all the vertices move together without detaching or doing strange stuff.

Below is the final skinning I came up with that gave me a good result for the Limbs and String. This part of the Bow is influenced by two joints, so there are 2 weight maps assigned to it. There was a little tweaking where the Limbs meet the Riser or Grip bit in the middle and was also some tweaking where the string meets the limb tips.

Here’s a final animation of them working.

Cow_Trix

Stress testing has been colorful!

Hey folks, not really any pretty pictures from me this week, as I’ve mostly been in script land. This week I’ve been wrestling with some caching issues with the item rendering system. This system has turned out to be more complex than I first thought, and has taken a lot of thought and almost working versions to get to a good point. I did a stress test this week that placed significant load on the system, rendering a few hundred icons a frame, and I discovered that the caching key recycling was not working as intended. I’ve realized it’s really asking for it to pool a key object that you use in a high-frequency cache, and that you have to be very careful about how you manage and invalidate those objects. I was incorrectly keying the results of the icon renderer and world item builder in several places that only became evident when placed under high load. Asynchronous character mesh baking has also been thrown a few spanners in the works, as I naively put in some shared resources where I shouldn’t have when first designing the system as a synchronous, single threaded process. I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel here, I’ve just had to build a few test cases to push things to the limit. I’ve definitely learned a lot about this specific problem, multi-threaded systems and caching!

Tom

This week I’ve been working on ItemV2 helping to push it closer to being ready for the experimental release.
After finishing up the mesh attachment build changes to speed up our mod build times I’ve moved onto cracking through our buglist with the other coders.
Because of the bugs occurring in the item icon system I wrote a stress testing tool for our mesh combiner/baker that we can use to verify the stability of the system. This stress test scene loads up all our content packages then pulls all the mesh attachments from them and bakes random selections of them together as quick as it can. Because the test loads everything this includes some half setup attachments and old attachments with deleted references, this is good for our test so we can make sure the system wont come crashing to a halt due to an incorrect configuration. After running the test for a while we also use memory profiling tools to check for leaks.

We’ve been making good progress and it looks like we’ll be able to do a test release to an experimental branch on Steam this week! I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think.