Spencer

Hi Hurtworldians!

Todays dev update will aim to give you some insight into what our plans are over the next couple of months.

11th April Content Patch

• New Weapon: UZI SMG – A new close range high fire rate high mobility weapon, complete with attachments and customization
• Unity 2018 Upgrade – A long time overdue, we will be finally upgrading to the latest stable version of Unity. This should bring performance improvements and tons of bug fixes we have been waiting on for a while now.
• Water Upgrades – We’ve neglected this for a while, throwing radiation at the edge of the map so we didn’t have to deal with how everything interacts with water. Not to mention potato mode doesn’t even render water at all. This will get an overhaul and pave the way for new things in future patches 😉
• New Town Events – Aiming for 2 fully fleshed out new town events on the road to replacing all the duplicates on Nullius, we also plan to tweak the town event system to make them more engaging and worth while for all players.

Longer Term Plans
We will see how we go with this content patch before planning exact features of future ones, however we have a loose idea of where we want things to go in future patches. Ultimately we feel remaining in early access tag is starting to feel a bit stale, and will be working over the next few content patches to bring the quality of life and stability up to a point we feel we can finally exit early access. We’ve got a bit of work to do here, now we are back in a single branch we feel it shouldn’t take too long to finally fix up all those long standing issues that aren’t game breaking but keep out players that expect a higher level of polish.

Islands
With helicopters in game, and soon to be decent water mechanics we can hopefully push forward with new map design elements we’ve been waiting to play with for a long time: Islands. We feel these should fit into the end game and require high end vehicles like Mozzys to travel to. I imagine them being relatively small, having specific unique traits or resources on them, and could potentially be controlled by a single clan and competed over as part of the endgame meta. This is a fairly long term goal but don’t see why we couldn’t get there in 2 or 3 content cycles.

Territory Control Love
The territory control system is in a bit of a shell state at the moment, there are elements about it that I love, but obviously the execution is pretty placeholder. We plan to flesh out the competition for territory control to be more interesting like town events that require building, and incentivize clan leaders with more than just a point system. Likely something along the lines of purchasable vanity items for the leading clans.

Vehicle Combat
As part of the V2 camera overhaul that I did last year, I invested in making sure we can support things like shooting from vehicles in future. Although there is a fair bit of work to do still, we think adding this element will make fighting out in the world a ton more interesting. This would also include things like rocket pods on the Mozzy which shouldn’t be too hard to execute on. Before you jump to tell us how this will break the entire metagame, we will obviously give it a lot more thought before actually going ahead with it, these are just loose plans.

Raiding
Raiding balance requires a lot of love. It is a very hard thing to balance between big clans, solo players, people who want to farm and people who want to PVP hence why we’ve typically laid on the side of making defence easier than raiding. We are aware of the issues and will definitely spend a proper amount of time designing a more balanced system that hopefully satisfies everyone (I can dream :S).

Creature Limbo
We have a ton of new creatures in the pipeline from years ago, without an animator we’ve been unable to finish them off not to mention the limited AI support to make interacting with them interesting. Splatt has been plugging away at animations and we are almost at a point where we can push forward with getting all our new creatures in game over the next few content patches.

There are a lot of smaller things we’re working on, these are the main big features we want to see in game in the near future. We care about your feedback, drop us a line on the forums with your thoughts. If you want us to take your posts seriously, please be respectful.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since last dev blog I’ve been working on a bunch of different stuff that all went into 0.7.1.0.
I started with bringing back the succulent plants with their consumable sunscreen item. This helps to bring the heat progression more in line with the cold progression to compensate for its environmental pressure being stronger during the day hours and day cycles being longer than night cycles.

Speaking of bringing things back I also spent some time getting the poison trap back into the game. In legacy the poison trap didn’t see a lot of use being a consumable item that didn’t guarantee a kill so we reimagined it as an area denial machine. Now the poison trap isn’t destroyed when triggered allowing it to deny an area until its removed via the machine wrench (the machine wrench not affecting the trap will be fixed in 0.7.1.2)

In order to support the crafting of medusa vines I made some improvements to the item transition system to ensure irradiated owrong seeds would work correctly. First I upgraded our item transition tooltips so the progress bar continued to show on an inactive transition, this allows you to see how a transition’s falloff works as its progress returns to 0 over time when it is inactive.
I also upgraded the entity stats builders for all our storage machines so they are affected by radiation in the same manner as players, this allows you to place a storage (chest/locker) in an irradiated zone to safely irradiate the items within whilst you stand at a safe distance.

We’ve been getting lots of reports about hit registration errors and our system seems to be a little overly keen to deny shots at the moment, whilst we investigate this properly I’ve made a few changes to the hit feedback logic that should make things clearer.
The crosshair hit marker used to be client predicted meaning that when your client detected a hit it would be instantly shown but the hit doesn’t really take effect until the server registers it as well. If the server disagrees with the hit it denies it and tells your client to show the blue crosshair hit marker but a case did exist where your hit packet would be dropped (eg. corrupted or lost) so the server didn’t know about your hit to send back a deny message.
Now in this new configuration all crosshair hit markers (hits, crits and denies) are driven by the server so you should no longer get any ‘fake’ hit markers appearing. The downside to this is that the hit marker isn’t as responsive but I think correctness is more important whilst we work out the issues with hit registration.

As well as this I’ve been implementing the new vanity gear into the game, working on some smaller bug fixes and investigating the new Unity 2018.3 version as a potential upgrade to bring performance and stability improvements. This has been promising so far so hopefully we’ll be able to roll this out in time for 0.7.2.0

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I worked on getting a female version of the rebel gear set together, it all went pretty smoothly, nice to have a bit of variation between the hot and cold gear. I also fixed a lot of skinning and clipping problems, I would have loved to have gone much deeper on it but the way we do animations with additive animations to create more depth to our animations means that making sure the skinning is perfect all over is actually a pretty difficult job as nailing down exactly what additive animation is causing the problems is gonna need some extra work. I’m now back on map stuff, doing some new town events that actually tie in with the world to get rid of all the duplicates we have, it’s a big job but it will be worth it, the first one I’m doing I’m pretty excited for, it’s very much gonna be based around early game weapons as it’s position in the map is extremely early game. So lots of mobility and spear/bow kills to be done.

Mils

The Tether arrow seems to have gone down well this last week. Some amusing videos have been surfacing which is nice 🙂 The arrow and rope came out well. It was good to get my hands on some skinning work again after so long. Skinning is the process of painting the mesh’s vertices which defines a % between 0.0 and 1.0 value for each vertex. This tells the software which bones affect which parts of a mesh and how the mesh deforms based on those values.

Also I whipped up a nice little tube of sunscreen with some hilarious in-joke art on it which I almost got in the game for the patch before I was struck down mercilessly by a plague Later in the week. I’ll put this in to go out with our next patch.

Also good news for all you gun nuts out there, we are adding another weapon! So I think I’ve posted work on this before, but we never made it a priority to build it. So the gun is going to be the MAC10! There are a whole lot of parts that I’ve already built in low poly for this bad boy. I’ll focus on a base set to be ready by our next content patch. This should be about 6 weeks away, I’ll let Spencer tell you the details about the patch though.

 

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Content for the 0.7.1.0 patch is coming along well but we’ve decided to push the release of it back 2 weeks until the next wipe (28th February, we want to get back to Thursday wipes) to give us more time to polish and expand on some of the new stuff that we’re adding that we’re really excited about.
I think this also shows us that 4 week content cycles may be a bit too ambitious for a team of our size and 6 weeks is a much safer bet but we’ll continue to evaluate this as we stabilize and have to do less hotfix emergency repairs.

Speaking of stuff we’re excited about I’ve been working on traps. I started off with creating a fake sleeper trap, this looks just like a regular sleeper when placed but once it is killed it explodes killing nearby players. This should create more interesting choices when encountering sleepers leaning more into a risk/reward dynamic.
After the fake sleeper I created a fake airdrop beacon, planting this one will spawn an airdrop plane that drops a dummy cargo container. This cargo container looks like the real thing but when interacted with it will explode in your face.
I think these items are going to open up new options for players to play mind games with each other trying to bait and then punish players greed, I’m super interested to see what strategies people will come up with.
With the extra time we’ve given ourselves I also want to look into fake loot crates and experiment with traps that do other stuff than just explode, potentially using the tether system that Spencer has been working on.
I’ve also been bringing back the legacy traps, the landcrab mine is working again and I’m hopeful of getting the medusa vines and poison traps in too for 0.7.1.0.

We’ll still be wiping servers with a minor 0.7.0.11 patch today (15th Feb) that has a whole bunch of bugfixes and some balance tweaks. This won’t be an enforced wipe and community servers will be able to carry on their saves if they wish.
In terms of bugfixes I’ve improved the camera collision peeking issues thanks to your reports and I’m cautiously optimistic we’ve now got a proper robust solution, again if I’m wrong please hit me up about it at tom@bankrollstudios.com.
I’ve also been working on the notorious rock issues, the fix for exploiting crouching emotes got released in 0.7.0.10 but I’ve been continuing to investigate and have fixed some incorrect construction validation volumes on a few machines and base parts as well as tweaking sleepers so they work exactly like players in the construction validation check.
I’ve also fixed the Mozzy claim cost not working properly and Mozzy sounds playing at the wrong times.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week I got this rebel gear set I’ve been working on, in game. My idea with this was to potentially have this set replace the heat progression gear as some of our gear is just the same stuff re-coloured, and aside from just needing a bit more gear in general, I felt like the heat progression needed a bit of love. So the separate parts are hat, bandanna, new singlet with arm band and bandages, some roughed up military pants with one knee pad and duct tape on one leg, I wanted it to look like what I imagine a secret island militia would dress in. I think we have needed a bandanna and basic hats for a while now, planning on doing a few different hats, like a flat peak and backwards hat, also with the mesh attachment system can easily do stuff like adding the sunglasses Mills made too the bandanna which will be cool. Would love to do more of these set type things in the future, as an artist I very much want to bring the stuff you actually craft in line with where you are in the progression, for example, starting out naked on the beach, in my eyes it makes more sense that the first clothing you craft is very primal and bush craft sort of thing, rather than just a full on T shirt and Jeans, not that it matters but it’s just something I would like to do haha. Next up is fixing all the skinning on the clothes so there is no where near as many clipping issues.

Mils

Hey Hurters! So this week I had some software issues with 3D Coat that stopped me getting as far as I wanted with this Hurt Voodoo mask but I got there eventually. I’ll be continuing to talk to the Developers of that particular piece of software about the issues that come up so they don’t become the bottle neck on my workflow again.

This came out nicely though, and will go with some of the gear that is already in the game, like the bow and possibly look quite good with the next item I am about to finish off…

…The Annoying Top Hat!

Ever wanted to look like a smooth jerk? Well look no further than this little beauty!

Henry

What’s really hood Hurtworld fam?

This week I am back in the directors chair starting a new in depth trailer that breaks down the fundamentals of the game. Script writing has begun for a voice over that will take the viewer through the mechanics whilst trying not to give too much away.

The video will be longer edits and more game play orientated footage to give a stronger understanding of how the game plays and an insight into some of the systems and how they work. One thing that we will require is a large amount of PVP footage which is hard for us to generate ourselves in a realistic scenario.

So as a result we are calling out to the community to submit their favourite game play moments to demonstrate high skill level playing in the trailer.

We can’t guarantee that everything submitted will be used however the better your footage the higher your chances.
Try and keep your captures close to 60fps at 1080p and fairly high quality settings (No potato mode).

Any footage used will be credited and immortalised forever in the video.

Send Dropbox/GDrive/Sendspace links to support@bankrollstudios.com with the subject “TRAILER FOOTAGE SUBMISSION”

I can’t wait to see what you all come up with and piece it all together.

 

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week besides being hammered by DDOS attacks and having to re-engineer our low level network layer, I managed to find some time to make the flagship feature for the next patch which I’m super excited about and have wanted to build for ages: Being able to tie shit to other shit

Its still a very rough prototype, but all the features are working well just needs to visual tweaks. View model will likely change to a bow with a rope bundle and have a short shooting range which allows you to lasso people and drag them round, then also tie them to vehicles and swing them into shit to kill them or fly them home into a prison. Can’t wait to see the possibilities 🙂

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

It’s been a while since our last devblog as we’ve been a bit overwhelmed with the V2 release, our systems haven’t been under this much pressure from player numbers for a while and it’s exposed some bugs and performance issues we weren’t totally aware of. We’ve been working our way through these issues as our highest priority, we’ve already made several improvements and fixed bugs and we’ve got more fixes on the way to roll out soon.

With our servers getting smashed performance has become a major issue and the area we’ve been working on the most post-release. Whilst Spencer has been busy making huge improvements to our networking library in terms of memory allocations I was altering it to decouple the socket read/send operations from Hurtworld’s main thread. My implementation seemed ok in testing but after rolling it out we discovered it had made us more vulnerable to DDoS attacks so we rolled this change back for the time being however I’m working on a more robust implementation now and hope to have socket operations back off the main thread soon.

In more successful performance improvements I’ve also massively improved how meteors and air drop cargo planes are synced. Previously these were sending position and rotation updates every couple of ticks when in reality their movement was deterministic as long as starting position and rotation matched on client and server so I refactored these to just need a setup message rather than several updates per second to all players.

I’ve also been improving performance of world item generation (whenever an item exits an inventory and enters the world like dropping it from a backpack) by taking our item renderer components from a prewarmed pool rather than creating them on the fly. This helps with both cpu time and memory allocation however our world item generation is still a bit overly complex and there are more wins to be had here, I’ll be making more improvements here soon hopefully.

I’ve also been working on a bunch of bugfixes including improvised bows not being recolorable, Mozzy chassis not being recolorable or maskable, fixing options resetting to default and fixing always getting denies for hits against Mozzy passengers.
I also massively improved our camera collision detection so hopefully abusing strange camera angles and aspect ratios to peek through walls into bases to find ownership stakes is now a thing of the past, if anyone is able to still reproduce this please email me at tom@bankrollstudios.com

In terms of upcoming stuff in the next patch I’ve added an inverted pitch toggle option for helicopter controls, fixed up the in game changelog not displaying properly, attached owrongs and bandages properly to the hand bone of the player skeleton and added proper handling for an error that could occur during shutdown that would stop a server restarting normally.
I’ve also got an entity update timing change which should smooth out low performance situations much better leading to less ‘dropped’ update frames.

Plan of Attack
We will be wiping all official servers Friday 1st Feb (Today) @ 7pm AEDT.
At the same time we’ll also be releasing another small update with bugfixes, improvements and other small changes that will require community servers to wipe when they update to it.

We’ll be merging some of the low population servers and keeping an eye on the situation, spinning up fresh servers where we see demand.
These servers will run a 14 day wipe cycle after which we’ll be releasing a proper content update (0.7.1.0).
After 0.7.1.0 hits we plan to do content updates either on a 4 or 6 week cycle (not 100% sure yet) which will line up nicely with 14 day wipes, on non-content update wipes we plan to make balance changes and other small tweaks to shake it up a bit for the next cycle.
We’re still listening and evaluating demand for other wipe cycles but there are advantages to us being consistent with wipe cycles across official servers (easier to balance for instance).

Mils

As the other guys have mentioned there’s a bunch of stuff backed up from the last Dev Blog, so here it is in one big flood.

The Pickaxe; This took a little longer than expected as I went down a path of trying to make a modular pickaxe that had 1 of it’s diggy bits get swapped out with each tier of pick. I ended up hating this after I realised that if 1 side only changed it made no sense. You would have an iron pick tip on the other side that never changes. We would have to make entirely new tips on both sides and ended up deciding to just make individual cool new Pickaxes down the line. For now the Pickaxe works pretty much like the old one but just looks better and matches up with the other redone tools.

Here’s the concept of the initial idea that I ended up hating.

Here’s the plain Iron looking Pickaxe

Lastly some nice examples of what colours players may choose.

Since this is a late Devblog, I also got the shotgun done 😀

This has been irking me for a while. I like the model but the textures and details just weren’t there because of the shift in style. This now looks really nice and I feel it will make you actually want to use the shotgun again and enjoy owning one.

Also this is the first thing I made after the release of V2. We decided it would be good to be able to store your resource blocks somewhere. Right now the only safe place to store them is on the back of the slug, the blast furnace, which is strange and equipped on your player in your heavy slot to the right of your hotbar.

I also made this mask called ‘Shogun’ I’ll be adding a few new masks this week to give the players more customising options.

And, and, and… I made some sunglasses. 🙂

Made some Shutter Shades today, they’re looking nice too. 🙂

I also made this! This is an off the top of my head design that definitely has some influences from other designs I’ve seen before. Can you figure out what they might be? 🙂

TEHSPLATT

So, lots of stuff has been done leading up to release but you guys have probably seen it all by now so I’ll skim over it, got the map into the best state it’s been in, one of the main things was fixing 99% of the steepness problems around the map, I took all the main hill stamps we use in game and smoothed them out and gave them each a couple interesting features, like flat spots for building bases on. I then spent some time making Kanga jump puzzles that have been placed around the map that give out jump medals when you complete them.

I’m now making some new gear in a way that I originally wanted to do it when I made the military pants and helmet, I wanted to make sets of themed gear but we just didn’t really have time or a huge need for it, but now that V2 has been released it’s a good time to do some pure art stuff and stay out of the way of the programmers.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

The last couple weeks have been flat out keeping everything running in the wake of the massive player number spike. Now that that servers aren’t crashing much anymore I’m focusing on fixing the constant rewinds that happen every 20 seconds or so. We should have a fix for this within the week along with a bunch of other critical bugs and will be able to start moving on to new content.