Cow_Trix

Hey folks! Back into it after Christmas and the New Year. I’ve been working on the map, extensions to chat and the UI, and some stuff for testing out lighting.

A lesson we’ve learnt over the past few years is that testing lighting is a tricky thing – there’s a million levers to pull, and changing some variable can affect some other thing you never even thought about. Lighting can often regress. To try and help compare “apples to apples” as they say, I built a quick framework for generating screenshots for a level. It sets the quality settings, the skybox, the time of day, and then goes through and takes screenshots at pre-set locations. This means that we can keep archives of what levels looked like, and go back and compare screenshots to make sure we haven’t screwed things up.

I also added a few quick additions to the UI, which I’ve been meaning too for a while. There was a general restructure to extend chat and make it a bit smarter. The big thing was implementing in-text links, which means we can create dynamic, clickable contexts within chat. Basically, we can make any word clickable and functional. You can now mute individual players in chat by right clicking on their name and selecting Mute.

You can also context click any item and send it to chat as a token which can be seen by other players, tooltip and all. ItemV2 is a lot about finding cool loot, and this is a way you can quickly share the cool stuff you find. I also implemented a general-use context menu, which is used for chat stuff but also on items to do things like splitting and dropping without needing to remember key combinations.

Mils

So after much deliberation, we have scrapped the the current weapons that we made and are going to focus on implementing realistic weapons and components. The argument here was that the weapons would take too long to produce whilst trying to copy the functional form of weapons that have evolved in real engineering and manufacturing processes. Such gun designs have been iterated over for decades. We want them to functionally look right. We really don’t have decades and we aren’t engineers. So, the guns will look and feel like guns should and not end up looking like Nerf guns 😛

First in the line of guns is the remade AR15, which I have been making sure lines up as close as possible with a real AR15. I looked at 50 to 100 photo’s and diagrams to make sure this looks as close to the real form as possible. We went for a MAC-10 also, which is a good bridger weapon between a pistol and the AR15.

We want these to be a big part of what makes a satisfying gunplay experience.

Gavku

So after the break I set about making a hoodie for the player model. Below is a pic of the sculpt within mudbox, as well as a lineup of them from within unity setup as a paintable item. Currently it is sitting as a plain/completely paintable object, but it would be easy enough to add prints, trims, patterning etc for increased variation of we decided to go that way.

Tom

After a short break through the christmas/new years period I’ve been back working on ItemV2.
I started the week off trying some melee experiments but quickly ran into issues trying to get animation driven mechanics working and determined it would require too much refactoring so it’s been put on the backburner for now.
Instead I’ve moved back into implementing the rest of the item mechanics for ItemV2, starting with item transitions. Transitions make items transform into other items under the correct conditions. Currently we use this to smelt ores and cook food but it doesn’t need to be tied to temperature, it can reference any stat type and you can turn off the DestroySelf flag to keep the original item. This could allow you to make something like a chicken that lays eggs whenever you’re hungry. Here’s how the setup for a raw steak looks to give an idea on how it works.

Next I implemented consumable items allowing them to modify any stat and add or remove any binary effect (eg. burning, freezing etc.). Here’s the setup for a frozen raw steak giving some nutrition and freezing you at the same time.

Next up was getting crafting working again, recipe lists are now serialized objects and crafting machines (like the workbench) can take any number of recipe lists. This allows us to easily setup new crafting machines so we don’t have to cram everything into the workbench and also allows modders to rebalance crafting costs or create whole new crafting machines themselves. Something like a vehicle crafting station would be easy to implement. Here’s an arrow recipe from the workbench.

I also started getting resource nodes working again as well as getting the spear throw working but these still have some bugs left for me to squash this week.
Also this week I’ll be working on getting a customisation window working that will allow you to pick between the different character models and hair styles Gavku has been working on so you should be seeing that show up in the deathmatch soon.

Spencer

Back into the action today after a relaxing break, and have been looking at the feedback from this weeks ItemV2 deathmatch tests, along with getting upto speed with the rest of the crew and planning our push towards ItemV2.

I’ve also started experimenting with a new item icon renderer that works at realtime based on the mesh data instead of a custom designed icon. We sort of need this considering the amount of customization we are going to add to items, no 2 items will look the same, we want our icons to show it properly.

I also created a combined ItemV2 and Master build on steam and pushed it to the default branch with different launch options, so you can now launch the latest ItemV2 build without ever switching branches. Simply launch the game as usual and select “Launch ItemV2 Experimental” in the dialog.

Let me know in the ItemV2 feedback forum if you have issues launching the Experimental branch from OSX or Linux.

Merry Christmas!

So we all took a few days off between Christmas and New Years, we all relaxed a lot in preparation for the onslaught of work coming to get the ItemV2 Update finished. We also released the first version of the Deathmatch Mode for your testing pleasure.

We had a little Christmas party and in the spirit of the new gun systems that are being built we went and shot Clay Targets. It was a lot of damn fun and Tom (that lucky bastard) won the competition at the end of the session.

We’ll be back to regular Devblog updates early next week and hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year.

Spencer

Fairly slow progress this week due to end of year stuff. I’ve been madly fixing bugs to get the deathmatch preview into a not so shit state… its getting there, but still a long way from being production release quality. Either way, I promised I would release it before the end of the year so I will open the ItemV2 branch and spin up some servers for you guys to have a play around with over the xmas newyears break.

Keep it mind, heaps of stuff is still broken, we will be constantly iterating over the ItemV2 build in the coming weeks. You can consider it our public test realm, we will expand what you can get your hands on as we flesh out features.

The current build will stay as is on our default branch in steam, you can keep playing that without doing anything. If you want to check out the ItemV2 test servers, you will need to switch to the ItemV2 branch. This can be done under the Hurtworld properties in Steam, under the betas tab. Note: You will have to switch back to the default branch if you want to continue playing on existing survival servers.

New Skybox Stuff

The ItemV2 preview build contains the new skybox and lighting system. As we aren’t sure exactly how this will perform we have added a configuration setting under options, which will allow you to switch back to the old skybox if you have performance issues. We recommend everyone give the new model a try (Tenkoku) and report via the forums if it causes large FPS drops.

Bug reports

I have created a new ItemV2 feedback sub forum on the steam discussions here. Feel free to post any feedback or bugs you encounter. This includes feel of guns, crashes, and anything else you think we should know.

Known issues

Sound is really broken right now, I need to write a system that can re-route audio sources from our content projects into our game mixers. Don’t have time to do that now, so some sounds won’t obey the volume controls. Will fix that asap.

Update:
Been waiting on Steam to come back online so I can push out the update. Its now 5am here, need some sleep. Will check back tomorrow and try to get things rolling.

Mils

I have been pumping out some more weapons ‘a la greybox’. I came up with a Pump Action Crossbow and a Semi Auto Pistol. I have also been iterating on the Assault Rifle also, which is getting closer to a more final design. I’ll let the images do the rest of the talking…

Gavku

So I rounded out doing 4 hair sets for our female hair. These being a ponytail, spikey style, flat/short style, and a mid length style. Here are some images of the sculpts, and then their corresponding game mesh’s sitting in our mesh viewer ( with in unity )

Tom

Last week after fixing a few bugs left in the construction system in ItemV2 I moved on to working on the melee items like the spear and the axe. With our new item simulation layer it’s a lot easier to make items do complex things so I’ve been experimenting with some new melee mechanics.
First up is a new combo system, upon landing a hit players are given a small window to hit attack again to move to the next step in the combo, attacking too early or too late closes the combo window so spamming attack won’t work. Currently I’ve setup a spear combo that loops around on itself increasing in speed every step of the combo eventually getting too hard to maintain. I also want to make the attacks increase in damage but need to add in some back end code to make it work which I’ll be doing this week.

I’ve also been playing around with charge up attacks where you have to hold down attack to build up power and release at the right time to get the maximum benefit. This works similar to throwing dynamite except I’ve set it up so you can overcook it and then it will either start looping again (meaning you have to wait again to build power) or just have it run the attack without the boost. We can also set it up to branch into different attacks depending on power level and/or mix it up into the combo system as well.

Another possibility under the new system is taking away control from the player briefly and letting animations move and rotate the player. This allows us to do some interesting moves like big leaping attacks or sprinting charges.

This week I’ve got some more things I want to try out with the melee system, creating some animation driven attacks, creating a state machine action to force a quick blend in and out of third person perspective so we can show off flashy moves and also save on not having to animate first person perspectives for all attacks. I also want to experiment with how melee hits register by creating a different kind of attack event that will run over multiple frames but only be able to hit a character once, this should allow us to have more accurate hit detection for melee weapons.
I’ll also be putting these mechanics together into a few items so they can be tested in the deathmatch build and we can find what works well and what doesn’t.