The time is finally upon us.

Hurtworld V2 update goes live on our main branch on Saturday the 12th of January.

Those of you who haven’t been keeping up with our progress, Hurtworld V2 is a massive update 2 years in the making, free to all existing owners. We’ve been refining the gameplay mechanics in a separate branch, to keep the core experience stable and to give us room to push the boundaries of the survival genre. We tried a bunch of stuff, learnt lots from the things that didn’t work & found a bunch of things that we think elevate the game without compromising the core experience.

More recently we’ve been working with the community to ensure these big updates stay true to the roots of what worked so well in our Early Access launch.

It’s been a long road & now we’re super excited to share Hurtworld V2 with the world!

Character customization / Item customization / Graphical upgrades

We rebuilt our character and equipment systems from the ground up allowing players to fully modify their appearence through character customization. Fly the colors of your clan with every weapon and piece of clothing now fully paintable. Name your items that will persist long after your enemies have stolen them.

PVP Upgrades

We’ve doubled down on PVP gunplay by rebuilding the ballistics system from scratch to include a detailed recoil model and server verified bullet projection. We then redesigned all our weapons to be completely modular with upgradable sights, stocks, attachments and other stat modifiers making no two weapons the same.

Beyond weapon customization, we took a deep look at how PVP should flow, spending countless hours refining respawn mechanics, death punishment and player loot to replace the controversial infamy system from legacy.

New Vehicles

Vehicles have always been at the heart of Hurtworlds progression which we’ve extended to include a truck capable of carrying high value “heavy slot” items, as well as a punishing to fly but rewarding multiseat helicopter. Like always you can customize these to your hearts content.

Expanded World

Server performance upgrades have allowed us to expand the max players per server greatly and to support this we built a new map from the ground up to support the increased server population. Nullius expands into new biomes, a new layout and adds lots of new towns to be contested. While maintaining the existing gradual town loot, we’ve added random town events with large rewards to insight more meaningful PVP conflicts for those who want to jump in.

Throughout the world you’ll find rich meteor showers, air drops and rare creatures that will constantly keep you on your toes.

Clans can now be made official, allowing tracking of clan mates on the map, clan driven ownership of bases and server rankings. Literally make your mark on the map by competing with other clans for control over territory in special areas that crank PVP and raiding up to 11.

On January 12th Hurtworld V2 will become the default launch option in Steam. For those who love Hurtworld the way it is, the legacy branch will remain accessible through a Steam launch option.

See you out there!

Spencer

Hi guys,

The finished touches are on the Mozzy ready for the next release! This week I’ve moved on to an optimisation and stability pass on V2 in the leadup to the official V2 launch coming very soon. My goal is to ensure that V2 is a performance boost from V1 for all players before we release it. I don’t think we are far off from that. Our main regressions are an increase in town rocks, terrain texture counts and poor town event optimisation.

I’ve spent a lot of time working on a utility for MadMaps that managed the consolidation of terrain textures and grass details.
Mad Maps is our in house level editing tool, available free in our map SDK and available on the Unity Asset Store for third parties. As our map is made up of over 250 stamp assets it has become a pain to manage linking up every asset using the same output texture and grass definition. Too many of these end up adding draw calls to the Unity terrain renderer that can be costly on low end systems. We previously had about 19 textures being written to the terrain requiring 5 separate draw passes (4 per pass), we hope to consolidate that number to 8 ideally which should speed up minimum performance greatly.

I’ve also been working on ensuring our network infrastructure is as solid as possible in preparation for the influx of players after the release. There are still some niggling issues that came out of the structure manager load balancing updates that possibly cause structures to not load properly that I want to get sorted.

The Mozzy patch will be launching early Jan, I will announce an exact date after the new year.

Mils

I need to Axe you a question…

I got stuck right into the old models that you see quite early in the game this week. Firstly the Stone Hatchet which was looking like it was out of the pre-v1 alpha (and probably was) This bad boy was fairly quick to redo. Having my custom materials is great because where things can be reused I do reuse them and when I want something fresh or a bit different I have a good base to build from. Using existing materials I can then assume that they convey the same reflection and gloss values that have previously worked for that kind of material.

The Stone Hatchet pretty much used materials I have used before so was super quick to get this one ready.

Next up was the redo of the Axe, this one also used materials I have used before with exception to the wooden handle. I wanted a more wood grain stripey wood for this one with a very matte untreated look. This came out really nice and the RGB mask we will use to colour the higher tier axes looks nice too.

Tom

Since 0.6.5.0 release I’ve been scrambling to fix all the problems for the follow up 0.6.5.1 patch.
Between disappearing vehicles and some overly generous weapon drop rates in towns we figured rather than pushing a hotfix ASAP we would spend a little more time tweaking the balance numbers and delay 0.6.5.1 until Thursday the 19th of December where we will wipe the servers again to bring everyone back to a sane baseline and be able to test the new loot balance properly.

I’ve fixed the disappearing vehicles (sorry about this one, bad slip up on my part) and also rebalanced the vehicle distribution somewhat. Whilst all vehicle types were spawning properly inside the ‘Servo Wars’ towns the randomly scattered chassis spawns around the map weren’t spawning Goats leading to an imbalance in the opposite direction to what was intended (Goats should be easier to attain than the other vehicles).
In 0.6.5.1 Goat spawns both in and out of towns have had their probability bumped up above the other two vehicle types and this is also reflected in the loot crates dropped in the vehicle towns.
I’ve also toned down the drop rate for vehicle masks and removed the vehicle protection fragment from the fragment loot trees.
Map markers for vehicles have also been fixed so owned vehicles should always appear on the map as long as you are within 500 meters of it (before this fix the vehicle would have to move with the owner in range for it to display).

I’ve also rebalanced the military town loot as we were a little overly generous with the guns that were dropping. Whilst the chance of having a gun drop is staying more or less the same we’ve changed the drop rates between the different types. Now you’ll be be much more likely to find a pistol than anything else and both the AR15 and AWM have been significantly reduced so they’ll be rare drops. Weapon attachment drops have had the same changes made (pistol attachments are common, AR15/AWM are rare).
We didn’t want to totally remove the powerful weapon drops, aside from them being an exciting item to get we think their power is mitigated especially in the early game by players not being able to afford to protect them (so it will drop if you can get the kill) as well as not being able to craft any ammo and having to rely on looting it instead.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been carrying on with helping out with the optimisation pass, I had to go through the Outpost town event stamp and replace a ton of stuff with the crates I made. All these town events are built using basic Unity primitives at first to map out different lines of sight and make changing areas an easy task. When it comes time to polish these events all those basic primitives need to be replaced, unfortunately, during early stages of making these events we didn’t really have any good assets for filling out spaces so without thinking,  I kind of just jammed a ton of small assets together and ended up blowing out the poly count by way too much, especially for such a small event. Those crates I made are very low poly and fill in a good chunk of space, not to mention they have been correctly sized to the player to make designing cover easier. Managed to shave the poly count of the Outpost by almost 50%, so that’s good. Also getting ready to start running every prefab used in the town events through simplygon so we can start loding them to really help with performance. Reorganised all the splats and details in the project, had a few hiccups with that, cut down heaps of duplicates. Currently re-stamping everything and trying to work through a couple problems.

Mils

So it seems my estimation on how long the LOD Fiesta I started mid last week would take was way off. I got it all done by Thursday night 🙂 Was in the zone something fierce.

Since then I’ve been fixing up a couple of minor things like the pistol icons and some world item scale issues.

I replaced the placeholder Clan Creator with a super sexy, metal, military medal style asset. This was a lot of fun to make and I dusted off my old skills from my days working as a collectible coin designer back in 2006. Really happy with this.

Next up I’ll be going over a bunch of old assets to bring their texturing and models in line with all our current gear. I’ll be changing the Stone Hatchet, the Axes and the Pickaxes. I may even get round to a redo of a couple of other things but this will keep me busy for a week or two.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve been polishing off the mechanics for the Mozzy. I went pretty hard on the simulation tip with destruction, making it so clipping parts of your blades on anything will apply forces to your main body as well as eventually destroy the blade item after enough contact with objects.

Once you lose a rotor you will lose the simulated function of that blade completely. Losing your main rotor will make you fall out of the sky with your tail rotor skill throwing you into a spin, losing your tail rotor will cause you to spin uncontrollably but can still be landed safely if you’re lucky.

Impacts with the body are split into 3 damage curves: Skids, Body and Tail, Each one becoming more fragile. Reaching zero health will cause the vehicle to explode in a fireball depending on the amount of fuel you have left.

Engine of the Mozzy can also be shot out to kill power to the rotors and this power will scale down depending on the durability of the engine meaning well places sniper shots will force a pilot to land their helicopter making it possible to steal instead of blowing it up. Hopefully this will create some gameplay situations.

In all this thing gonna kill you lots, which makes us able to distribute them fairly easily without worrying they are too powerful. Bring the chaos!

TEHSPLATT

Hello! haha, this week I had a bit more of a look into LoDing the town events and we decided it was a bit more of a programmer job. I ended up moving onto a bunch of other stuff on my list, one of the things we have needed for a while now is “Hat Hair” for the characters, so I ran through and set up a basic hair style to fill out the hats so all the characters don’t just look bald. Definitely a much needed fix, don’t really know how that’s gonna be controlled for those who want to be bald with hats on but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. I also did the LoDs for the male and female character for our performance pass, they were a bit of a mess and there were some problems so first up I had to organise and fix the characters up a bit, but the actual creation of the LoDs went really smoothly with the settings Mills set up. Next up will be cutting down the amount of rocks in all the mountain stamps and reordering them in a potentially better design.

Henry

Whatado Hurtlawds?
Another week has come and it’s time to start tying up loose ends of the past couple months. Preparing all the new menu assets to be implemented, finalising UI icons for the Mozzie and Slug.

The audio on the trailer is something else that has needed attention. I have been checking all the recorded audio and making sure it is audible over the music and in a lot of cases I have replaced audio due to it being muffled by other effects or environmental noise.

Next week we get stuck into the soundtrack,

 

Tom

This week I’ve been continuing on setting up persistent town loot and working on vehicle implementation.
Progress has been a bit slower than hoped as making changes to Nullius was a more complicated process than I assumed and so I decided to fix a few bugs in our map tools to allow us to speed up the iteration process.
This means I haven’t been able to iterate over the balance of the new persistent town loot very much to find the right values for things like spawn density, respawn timers, loot table quantities and probabilities.
I’m still going through testing and tweaking these values now and should be able to get them to a decent spot for tomorrow’s experimental patch release but don’t be surprised to see some hotfixes next week further refining these values. I think this is a better way forward than delaying the patch to give us more time, plus it gives you guys an opportunity to give us feedback and influence our direction with the balance.

I’ve also been making some fixes to clan totems and territory control totems, now you’ll be able to authorize onto a clan totem and capture territory control points as a recruit (was previously restricted to officers and owners).
This allows recruits to still get involved in the action without an officer online and means clans no longer have to promote all members to officer just to have more hands capable of capturing the objective. Deauthorization is still restricted to officers and above to prevent recruits double crossing a clan by deauthing them from their home totem.
Territory control points will also reset their minimum rank build restriction to the recruit level after being captured, this stops clans setting the build restriction to clan owner as a defensive tactic as when capturing an owner restricted territory you would not be able to build your own defenses without your clan owner online and close by.