Hello Hurtworlders,
TacticalMyth requested weekly dev updates on our Reddit page, which we think is a good idea. Starting this week, we will give a bit of a rundown of where each of us is at. Not everything that we are working on, just the most interesting.
Spencer
Server Population
Most of you would have noticed the lack of server population in recent weeks. This has been intentional, very few keys have actually been released. To put things in perspective, there are more Hurtworld videos on youtube than there are active keys. We are very happy with the first phase of the Alpha.
We didn’t feel there was much point letting more people in while there were still large outstanding issues.
Today we will be releasing the first set of keys since the Alpha launched. What we need now is to cram as many people into the same server as possible and see how it holds up. While we have run simulations, nothing compares with real people doing real things over real world internet connections. To make it fair on the new players we will be doing a wipe of all official servers. In future we will try to give warning when this will happen / keep to a schedule.
This will also begin the phase of balancing the content for populated servers. There is no point us fine tuning mechanics where there is no threat of being killed by other players just to release chaos and hope it all goes well. We hope to get lots of feedback from you guys on this too, reddit is the place to talk about it.
Roadmap to Steam
We have tentatively set a Steam EA release date for mid November. Steam shouldn’t really affect much in our camp and we know the Steam tools are well battle tested so we won’t be releasing any Steam keys before release.
On the Steam integration front, we are now ready to go. Server browser, friends integration, all the good stuff. You can even see us in the Steam server browser right now!
The Steam release will get our first major content update, we will be releasing details on this over the coming updates.
Modding
A couple weeks ago I came across a request for keys from the dudes over at Oxide Mod. If you don’t know about Oxide, it was originally a Rust Legacy Mod tool (like bukkit for Minecraft) that has been adding support for other games.
I’ve since been working with Wulf to get Hurtworld integrated and am happy to announce we will have Oxide mod support on our Steam release.
We are starting to think about integrating custom made maps and the toolset we can give you, more on this soon.
Server Performance
One of the biggest issues with server performance degradation turned out to have nothing to do with memory leaks or CPU usage. Now that all the other stuff is fixed it became quite clear that the longer a server was running the more jerky animation became.
This was caused by a floating point precision issue that after 3 days of uptime, the clock wouldn’t have enough resolution to interpolate properly. Physical objects, vehicles and other players would stutter like hell until server restart. Clock precision is now good for at least 5 years uptime.
Cow_Trix
Sean is busy writing the code to enable localization.
Sean está ocupado escribiendo el código para permitir la localización
Sean besetzt ist das Schreiben des Codes , um die Lokalisierung zu ermöglichen
Шон занят написанием кода для того, чтобы локализовать
肖恩正忙着编写代码来实现国产化
Gavku
Gav has been working on many things, amongst them… Raaaaawks.
Dazzler
Chris has been working on character incidental animations to fulfill some single instance needs. Like flipping the bird.