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Hurtworld Update #10 – Cars and Dynamite…

Hey Guys,

Fairly productive week all round, finally seeing some of the long backed up content getting into the game, previews below.

Spencer

This week I’ve been working on getting as much unique feel into each of the biomes as possible while keeping the level of polish that our initial desert has.

Something I quickly realized was brightly lit blown out scenes are much more forgiving than more saturated / overcast scenes. Surprisingly, every playtest in Hurtworld that has an overcast / cold  looking scene, nobody wanted to be there. As soon as we put a vibrant sunny beautiful scene back in this went away and we wanted to play for hours. The challenge here is to create harsh areas that give the player new challenges, while still making the player want to claim the space and spend time there. The feature image is my favorite so far, the Australian Desert.

Given this challenge, I’ve been working on polishing up the feel of our different biomes to a point where I want to live there, despite everything wanting to kill me.

While tweaking lighting, I decided to finally make the switch over to linear lighting. This is something that has always been on the todo list but the Unity tree / terrain system shaders had some serious issues when switching over. Sean and I fixed up all the shaders and we are now good to go. Linear lighting changes the way we do lighting calculations to be more physically correct. Long story short, this look a LOT better.

While looking at lighting, I upgraded our tonemapper and added eye adaption to the camera. This simulates the effect of your eyes or the exposure of a camera adjusting to varied levels of brightness. This allows us to push our lighting into much wider brightness ranges, without having to endlessly tweak settings to get it to look right making the biome configuration much more forgiving. As with any new toy, I am probably over using it right now and will dial it back. For now I’m in love with this effect.

Next week I’m planning to completely overhaul the server side vehicle physics. Currently they aren’t much fun to drive due to being too realistic, I hope to greatly simplify things and get a more of an arcade feel.

Cow_Trix

I’ve been blowing stuff up with dynamite this week – our first throwable item. You can mine large resource nodes with these babies, or use them to kill players and destroy machines. Note however that they don’t do damage to structures! You’re still going to need the more expensive C4 for raiding.

Mils

We decided to add skins to our vehicles, giving players a way to customize and differentiate between themselves and others. This will be useful when creating a clan or crew, so you know a friendly when you see one. Sean wrote a custom shader, which after much tweaking allowed us to set a pattern and 3 colors to paint the object. These will translate to discoverable patterns and craftable paints to make that vehicle your own.
We used the RGB channels to define each colour of the mask. It took a while to get right. The layering within the image file was confusing at first but I simplified the process down to something workable.

GoatPaint

Gavku

Lately I have been working on trees via tree creator which is a fairly frustrating tool to use. You can get decent results, but need to be quite strict in how you go about editing the trees you create. Some functions will revert over previous edits, and some times it will just completely shit out useless maps…..I basically now have a unity scene where I’ll build a couple of trees, export them as packages, and bring them into the project. This way if anything breaks its generally easier to track down what and fix it.

Nice trees - pretty when they work

Nice trees – pretty when they work

Broken trees - Normals and shader wrong

Broken trees – Normals and shader wrong

Dazzler

I have been working on driving animations and a laundry list of animation bugs/polish. Among these was doing a more convincing jump that would allow you to crouch mid air. CS:GO videos were a great reference source.

Hurtworld Update #9 – Creature work and…

 

Hello Hurtworlders,

Another busy week as we race towards release. Lots to do and lots being done (not all of which can be shown in this post).

As always, post bugs and feedback to reddit!

Spencer

This week I’ve been implementing some of the backlog of art the rest of the guys have been working over the last few months. Part of which is putting some new systems in place for some cool vehicle stuff. I will do a proper writeup on that next week once it’s more in concrete.

Cow_Trix

Sean has been keeping this show on the road with lots of bug-fixing. Localization is implemented and our volunteers have be doing a great job. Russian, Croatian, Dutch and Italian are pretty much done. Spanish, Ukrainian and Portuguese should not be far off. Still really looking for French and German Volunteers, see stickied post on the subreddit.

LocalizationScreen2

Mils

Mils is still lurking in the shadows like a ninja. All will be revealed sooner or later.

Gavku

Gav made a new friend for you to play with. He is called Yeti until we can come up with something original. He’ll be in game once some programmer time frees up.
Yeti

Dazzler

Chris has done more silliness. He is also getting to work on a trailer.

Hurtworld Update #8 – Making-Of, bug squashing

Hello Hurtworlders,

Very busy week of bug squishing… as always, post feedback and bugs on the subreddit! Bases on the EU server have been looking good ^ … enjoy it while you can, building just got a lot more expensive.

Spencer

Welcome to all our new players in the Alpha, we sent out 3 waves of keys early this week. You guys revealed some new issues we think we have under control now.

Unable to Connect

This was mainly around downloading structures from the server. A few weeks ago I said this was one of the last areas that need some love, yesterday I got the chance to refactor things to what I had in mind. We put out a patch last night and this looks to have solved the problems. If you’re still having connection issues please get in touch.

Server Rollbacks

These suck, we appreciate your patience on this one. There was an issue causing the save game thread to break and never come back, we lost about a day on the EU #1 server and possibly some time on other servers. I put out another patch this morning which should guard against this happening again.

Earlier this week I had some time to start working on some exciting new content involving vehicles. More details on this soon.

Cow_Trix

Sean is working hard on bug squashing, level work and localization code (the latter is pretty much done). He also posted a really informative piece on optimizing occlusion in the level, which you can read here.

 

Mils

Mils is back from exploring Japan and is working on something secretive.

Gavku

Gav is still chipping away at the old block… here are some nice sub-shards of ore.

RockBits2

Dazzler

Chris is working on yet more animation silliness…

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