Spencer

Hello World!

We’re back with another instalment of Bankroll does stuff. Its been a chaotic couple weeks in the studio, we’re still hard at work on the next patch but we’ve been forced to restructure our plans slightly. Unfortunately it looks like Tom won’t be available to work on Hurtworld for the next couple of months at least, leaving us an important man down for the upcoming releases.

To save me a bunch of work so we can still work towards what we’ve been planning for our release to exit early access we’ve decided to roll this Thursdays patch into the next content update. This means there Won’t be a patch this Thursday.

The reasoning for this change is that retrofitting the 5 new creatures into the existing progression, designing the difficulty progress and suitable loot rewards would require reshuffling all our existing progression only to be changed again with the upcoming island hopper update. Instead we’ve opted to leave much of the existing progression as is, and extend the progression into the new islands with completely new endgame content.

Early Access Exit
The good news is we’ve brought forward the next release to be the 18th of June, which if all goes to plan will be our release from Early Access!!

This by no means that we’re done developing Hurtworld, I’m more excited about upcoming features than I’ve been for a long time and we still have some big plans. For the most part, Early Access is just a marketing tag that I think we’ve outgrown. After 3 and a half years of development post Early Access release (5 years total) plus a few quality of life upgrades coming this patch, we think the game is fairly representative of the quality that will continue throughout the rest of development, and we’ve hit every major goal we set out when we entered Early Access.

Island Hopper / Creature Update – 18th June
This is going to be a big one. Content that has been in the works since 2016 all finally rolling in together with systems we’ve been planning since day one. The biggest change is the introduction of islands a long way off shore of the main island of Nullius. These islands will contain new creatures, loot, challenges and mechanics not yet seen before.

PVE Challenge Islands
Some of the islands will exist as PVE challenges that favour creatures and force you to face them head on without construction, vehicles or long range kiting. We’re still working out the restrictions, but likely will contain nobuilds and no fly zones on the island requiring you to take on a large group of enemies head on. This will include creatures in higher numbers than you’re used to, as well as all our new creatures with new attack mechanics. Getting through these challenges will have big rewards.

Clan Islands
What good would adding islands be if baller clans couldn’t take over their own entire island! Utilizing a revamped territory control system, islands will be claimable and show on the map who controls it along with exclusive loot rewards for holding the specific island.

Mainland Scale Down
Nullius has always felt a little large, if we add more islands the map is going to be massive and we don’t want things to feel to sparse. To make up for these things we have scaled down the main island by 25%. Its actually hard to tell anything has changed, it just feels more cosy and running places takes less time. Overall I’m really happy with how it feels, should have done that ages ago.

Mozzy with Rockets?!
This one im particularly excited about. Dropping this patch is our first (hopefully of many) in vehicle weapon system: Rocket pods on the Mozzy.

EDIT: Replaced giphycat with youtube as it is still choppy

Mining with Rockets?!
Haven’t quite figured out how collection will work, but flying around specially built islands in a mozzy sniping resource nodes is stupid fun and has a high skill ceiling, definitely gonna work chopper mining into this patch. We will likely use different rocket types for PVP, mining and base raiding so we can balance the costs. Mining rockets can be dirt cheap allowing you to get tons of practice hitting small targets before trying to chase down a roach in a convoy. I was going to create a physics simulated machine that gathers everything around it that can be tethered to the Mozzy, which dangling it over loot would collect it for you, I think it might be a bit too clunky and get in the way of the fun part which is shooting the fuck out of everything with rockets!

Raiding with Rockets?!
Base destruction is trivial to add to rockets, so we will also include a base raiding rocket variant that can blow through walls instead of using C4.

TLDR
No patch this Thursday, we’re throwing everything into the big one on the 18th of June. Lets do this :0

Mils

So I’ve been busy making Rocket Pods for the Mozzy. These should cause some pretty funny scenarios I think. These were pretty straight forward to design and are loosely based on real rocket pods. We added the wings to the sides so you can easily see if a Mozzy flying above you has them mounted and GTFO before you get blown to pieces. Not sure how these will interact with players/vehicles/bases yet, as that will be decided by Spencer. We may do a variants guided and non-guided, but as I said nothing set in stone. We’ll have to play test it and see what feels good.

TEHSPLATT

Since the last blog I’ve finished off all the animations needed to get the creatures in game. Once we see the animations in their different game play situations we can tweak them from there. Animating the Bandril (MonkeyBat) was an interesting challenge as I have never animated a quadruped before, took a lot of research and terrible run cycles but I eventually ended up with something acceptable. The Skoogler leaping kick was definitely the most difficult, the timing for a bird jumping while also flapping it’s wings enough to keep it air born longer than it’s typical jump arc was something I was not prepared for. I have also been working on implementing islands around the out skirts of the map, these islands will host different game play challenges that mid/end game players can experience by flying out to them with the Mozzy. I’m currently designing how the islands will look and play, I want them to feel different to the main map and their being clear differences between the islands extending from different biomes. Mills is working on some unique assets to spice the islands up a bit while I use place holder assets to work out the game play. Here are some images of the new creatures hanging out on these islands.

Spencer

Hi yall,

Recently I’ve been working on water mechanics and quality of life fixes. This update I will go into a bit of detail about the next content patch scheduled for Thursday the 30th of May.

Creature Update
Over the new few weeks we will be bringing to life as many of the creatures as possible that have been long in limbo waiting for some upgrades to the AI systems. I have held off putting them into the game thus far as making reskinned boars is pretty boring…

The first member of the team I’ve been working on is a long time favourite of mine, the Skoogler. Heavily inspired by the cassowary and the turkey is a large flightless bird that proper mess your shit up. He will likely come in in later parts of the progression and will be the first creature that constant running away won’t save you.

In addition to being able to run down anything, I’m currently working on a new system to enhance the skoogler AI so they hunt and migrate in packs. They will communicate with each other and try to circle their prey while hunting. Packs will also regenerate members if not completely decimated which may provide benefits for farming, or problems if struggling to fight them off.

Here is a sneak peek of the Skoogler in game:

Other animals on the way are the MonkeyBat, the Big Cat, the Rafaga (Bird) as well as bringing back the Antor (giant mosquito) and the Dart Bug (scorpion type thing).

Theres a ton of work to do getting AI varied on all these creatures as well as filling in missing animations etc, I will aim to get everything in game atleast then possibly iterate over AI further in coming patches.

Mils

Whatup?! So I’ve been working on the MAC10 for a bit and now it’s happily ensconced in the game. I won’t bore you with any details about that because you can play with it now all by yourself. I have been working on some other stuff though.

Firstly something we have wanted back in the game since before the earth cooled is the Glider. We had one of these very early in development and it was a lot of fun to race each other in one of our very early test maps. So I’ve create a basic Glider mesh for Spencer to use as an early prototype. This is similar to a real glider. Whether we change the look of this down the line drastically, we haven’t decided that yet. This is on hold for now but I just wanted to make a mesh Spencer can use to prototype with.

Also we have decided to go ahead with rockets for the Mozzy. These are looking mean in their first stages and should be a lot of fun in game when done.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since the last devblog our plans for an upgrade to Unity 2018 started running into some serious issues. We rolled out an early build to a small test group and quickly discovered several shader compatibility issues as well as a nasty memory leak.
I tried to fix these issues and whilst I made some decent progress into the shader issues, the memory leak refused to show up in any meaningful way in Unity’s profiling and debugging tools.
With tough issues still to fix that were essentially destroying the very reason we were upgrading (performance and stability improvements) we made the tough decision to indefinitely delay the Unity upgrade.
Because we had been working in the 2018 version we had to transfer our work back into the 5.6 version, this was easy enough for the codebase but significant changes in serialization patterns made backporting assets a trickier process that couldn’t really be automated. This is why 0.7.2.0 ended up getting split into 0.7.2.0 and 0.7.3.0 a week later with all the assets.
Going forward we will continue to investigate solutions to our upgrade issues but if we cannot fix the problems on low spec machines we will not be moving ahead with an upgrade.

I’ve also been working on bugfixes to go into the 0.7.3.1 hotfix patch that we just released. The most significant fix there was probably the ‘Roach peeking’ fix.
Because the Roach’s rear seat FPS camera position was outside of the vehicle collider it was possible to position the Roach so the rear seat could see through walls.
To fix this up I changed the Roach’s rear seat into an unsafe entry type of seat that performs an overlap and line of sight check on an entry attempt and blocks the passenger if either of these fail (this makes it work like the Kanga and Goat driver seats).
The other major change was adding an attached body component to the rear seat. Now when a passenger enters the rear seat the vehicle connects another simple capsule physics body to the vehicle via a joint and this simulates the vehicle/passenger connection. If this joint receives too much force it will break (for example, someone trying to push your head through the wall by using a spear on the vehicle) and on breaking it puts the passenger into the crash state.
Kangas and Goats also have this attached body component running on their driver seats.

I’ve also been working on making the tether system more stable, removing the tether break limits and allowing multiple players to have active tethers in the same tether network (think like a tug of war scenario). This change was planned to go into 0.7.3.1 but we found some last minute pooling issues that caused us to delay it until the next hotfix, we are now looking at releasing this fix sometime before the next wipe on the 16th of May.

TEHSPLATT

Hey, this week I’ve been working on creature animations. We are currently trying to get all the old creatures up to scratch, this means figuring out what animations are missing and filling them in while also deciding how exactly their game play is going to work. My specialisation is not in animation so there is a bit of a learning curve but nothing I can’t handle. The hardest challenge going forward will be the Monkeybat as it’s a combination of a two creatures that walk in interesting ways so I will need to do a bit of research and also step up my walk cycle game as this creature is missing pretty much all its animations. Here’s some of the test animations I have been working on. Trying to match the quality of the original creature animations is going to be a pretty hard thing to do but my main focus is just making sure the animations don’t stand out as stiff low quality place holders, more like, medium quality place holders haha.

Spencer

Hi Hurtworldians!

We’ve been a bit slack on the dev blogs the last couple weeks, rest assured we’re hard at work on the content patch dropping this Thursday. Main features include an overhaul of how we handle water including adding swimming mechanics, new town events, a big upgrade of our Unity engine version (about 2 years of updates), the new Mac10 SMG weapon and a ton of bug fixes.

Water
Water has turned out really nice, while this patch mainly focuses on the interaction of water, players, vehicles, animals etc and introduces some basic water features throughout the map, it paves the way for the upcoming islands patch which will drastically change the way that end game is played.

Quality of life
We spent a bunch of time this wipe playing and came across some very annoying bugs like name plates disapearing, re-amber protecting your gear being mega glitchy. Name plates should now always show on other players, we’ve also introduced a protect all feature to amber protection to reduce the friction between respawning and getting back into the fight. By right clicking on a stack of amber, you will see the option to protect all in the current storage.

Thursdays patch will be going out at 5pm Melbourne time and will force a wipe for all severs.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since last devblog I’ve been mostly working on our upgrade to the latest version of Unity (2018.3). This upgrade brings some significant performance improvements, most importantly being the physics engine being upgraded to PhysX 3.4.2 and the terrain rendering system moving most of its processing off the cpu and onto the gpu. This upgrade should also help with stability in the long term because we’ll be back on a properly supported version that is receiving patches and fixes but in the short term there will probably be a bunch of teething issues to sort out when the upgrade goes live, I’m expecting some hotfixes early into the 0.7.2.x cycle.

Most of the upgrade work so far has been updating our tools, dealing with changes to build pipeline and then either upgrading to the latest version or finding replacements for 3rd party tools and middleware that were broken in the upgrade process. Thankfully this has gone well and everything seems mostly stable now, just a few of our replacement screen effects need some extra polish and we have a few shader bugs left to stomp out in the Mac and Linux builds. Workshop mods will need to republished from the upgraded SDK to be 100% compatible with 0.7.2.x and I’ll be pushing out a preview SDK to a steam beta branch ahead of release to help sort out any issues ahead of time and make sure mods are ready to go. If you wish to get involved in this please email me at tom@bankrollstudios.com

As well as the 2018 upgrade I’ve also been working on 0.7.1.x hotfixes mostly dealing with issues in the tether system. Most of the tether issues were due to the joint constraints getting into an impossible to fulfill state which was causing it to create some insane forces and shoot stuff all over the map. Currently to stop this occurring I added in a simple force limit beyond which the tether is broken but in testing I’ve seen promising results from changing the simulation to be 2 bodies connected by one joint instead of 3 bodies connected by 2 joints and also turning off the auto correct impossible configurations system. This more comprehensive fix was put on hold until our Unity upgrade was complete as the physics engine upgrade would mean a bunch of duplicated work to rebalance and retest the system post-upgrade. Unfortunately the Unity upgrade has taken a bit longer than expected so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to implement the true fix for the 0.7.2.0 release but it should make it into a post-release hotfix.

I’ve also been implementing the new Mac10 sub machine gun into the game, which will be a high rate of fire, short to medium range gun introduced at the titranium level of crafting.
Whilst it will be launching with only the base attachments (standard mag and ironsights) and a single flat color pattern we plan to fully stock it out with extra attachments and patterns in future patches.

Mils

So I got the Main part of the MAC10 done this week. The same styling that the other guns have received. This came out nice. I’ll be making a tip, magazine and iron sight at least for the release of this. I’ll get to the other parts after that and the colour masks for everyone to customise their gun. There are some funny inscriptions on this that I’m sure you can just see if you look closely. 😀

I’ll be away taking a holiday for the next 2 weeks, so seeya after that.

Update: So I got back from the holiday and here’s the MAC10 with a few more parts. Coming along nicely.

TEHSPLATT

So this week I’ve been speed building town event levels, got two so far, they are pretty enjoyable, tried to make the way they play match the level of gear players would have in these specific areas. They will both be placed close to the shore line in the jungle areas, which means most players will be coming in with tier 1 bows, spears and hatchets so I’ve made sure the levels have a bunch of tricky routes and decisions to make meaning players with low tier gear can prevail using knowledge of the map. The second map is a pretty weird one, I went with this tree house , multi-level type design, very vertical, which is something I’m interested in exploring more. I would like to get one more event done and then drill down on some modular building assets so I can replace the grey boxes with some actual nice looking assets.

So this is the before and after stage of building the towns, start with a grey box so you can design the actual play-ability of the level without worrying about visuals, then when you feel like you’ve got that sorted, you move on to replacing all the grey boxes with something visually interesting. I also worked on some swimming animations, I’m not an animator but I have bit of a grasp on the basics and understand the general pipeline. I made a breast stroke animation and a wading in water idle animation, I would also like to update the get up from crash animation as well, it’s pretty place holder.

HENRY

What’s really hood?

Been a minute since I’ve been in the blog, but I’m back grinding on this extended trailer. We realised whist the V2 trailer was action packed, fast paced and lots of fun. It didn’t quite communicate some of the best things about Hurtworld, so over the last two weeks we got the squad together and captured some great moments of teamwork, heartache and PVP action.

Aside from this footage I have also captured a large amount of cinematic style shots to assist in showing the games function and features. During the time spent capturing this footage we have worked out there are more things that need to be added to the script, not to mention after hearing my voice overplayed on loop, I am no longer happy with the delivery.

So new words, better internation, longer shots, more gameplay and 5 players worth of footage to go through and edit. I better get back to it.