Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been continuing adding persistent town loot back into the game which lead into a deep dive into our spawning system.
After setting up a whole bunch of extra loot spawn points in all the towns (extra points compared to the set that the loot frenzy events run off) and configuring our spawn director to spawn loot into them I noticed that the spawns weren’t really behaving as expected and often the explicitly set loot points weren’t being used and the system was falling back to random positioning instead.
This led to me going deep into our spawning system to find bugs and get to the bottom of what was going on. I ended up finding a couple of problems and regressions since legacy, mainly a race condition with our loot position marker registration and our spawn director initialization, also another bug where SpawnerCellUpdatesPerFrame in ServerConfig was being ignored due to cell updates not being tracked properly.
With the spawn director fixed up I’m now moving onto setting up then iterating over and tweaking the spawn configurations for these towns trying to find the sweet spot in loot density and respawn times.

We’ll be releasing the next experimental patch on Thursday the 13th of December which will include the return of persistent town loot, rebalancing the vehicle system (removal of insurance and vehicle destruction, return of destructible wheels and making building a vehicle more achievable), return of the large mining rocks in the final biomes and craftable dynamite along with a bunch of bug fixes and other small changes.

Henry

Been another interesting week of collecting footage for the trailer with a focus on PVP combat. Last week we found the major dificulty was trying to achieve realistic gameplay footage yet keeping the visuals fluid enough to cut nicely in with rest of the cinematics.
We captured various scenarios including early stage combat, raiding and long range gunplay. As we progress through the trailer we keep finding better techniques during the capture that i want to implement across the board. Was lots of fun, however now I have a heap of footage to trawl through, I better get stuck in.

Spencer

Hey Hurtworld Fam,

This week has involved a lot of trailer footage shooting and more progress on the Mozzy damage model. Things are coming along nicely but won’t be ready for the rolling out in the patch on the 13th. My hopes are that the upcoming patch will put the meta in a state we are happy to officially release V2 to the main branch based on the feedback we’ve been collecting from the commuinity. If everything goes well this will likely be Early Jan. We still need to do a serious optimisation pass and stabilise a few core bugs but nothing I think we can’t handle by then. With Mils working through LODs for everything and Splatt consolidating map resources we should have V2 running faster than V1 by release.

V2 will be rolling out without a “No EAC” version, so if you are still one of the few people who can’t connect to EAC servers please notify us on the forums so we can get it sorted before release.

Mils

Hey ya’ll. So we have some easy wins performance wise that we hope to achieve pretty quickly in regards to poly counts in the game. So far we have made a fair amount of LOD’s (Level of Detail) meshes in Hurtworld, but we haven’t always had time to create LOD’s for everything. Sometimes this is due to not knowing if a mesh will stay in the game long term and sometimes we just need it in game asap and don’t have time to make them.

Good news is, we now are using Simplygon to create our LOD’s and it’s super fast. In the past we have hand built these and it is time consuming. They look great using this method but Simplygon can do this in 10-20 seconds. The results are almost as good too. This was also very daunting when it came to skinned mesh attachments. Skinned mesh attachments are anything that use a skeleton to deform the mesh ie; clothes, body parts etc. Simplygon also instantly creates the skinned mesh LOD’s with some kind of evil beautiful code magic and the new meshes instantly deform just like the original. SO. GOOD.

The past week I have been testing the reliability of the resulting meshes that have been coming out of Simplygon. I’ve been fiddling and tweaking the settings to get a nice custom preset or two which so far creates great LOD’s for all situations.

Below: The top row shows completely Simplygon generated LOD’s and the bottom row shows the same but with hand tweaking of the lowest LOD mesh. In the end you can barely tell the difference and the Simplygon mesh came out less quality but lower, so we’ll automate everything and go back and fix anything that stands out in the game as we play over time.

I have 580 items to check through, not all will need new LOD’s created but a bunch will so I will be busy on that grind for the next week I’d say.

For all you people out there running slower machines, this should really benefit you. Also all you car hoarders who like to keep 50 cars in your garage for bragging rights this will help with that also.

Also I made Coal 😛

The world item that drops on the ground for coal and the Icon looked freaking horrible so I quickly remade this.

 

TEHSPLATT

Hello again, this week I’ve run through the rest of this list I have of manual touch ups the map always needed, managed to get through it all and get a good build of the map out. Feels good being able to just hit stamp and know that everything will just work, and even if a couple things here and there screw up, it’s still a million times better than it was before. Fixed up a bunch of biome manager stuff like no builds being slightly off and radiation zones creeping too far on the playable zones. Also blended the biomes a lot smoother so it’s not such an immediate switch from one to the other. Next step is sorting through a bunch of doubled up splats and building LoDs for the town events as they are currently hitting performance quite hard. No pictures this week sorry.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve been pushing forward with the Mozzy detailing. Adding sound effects, designing the destruction model and exploring simulation changes based on destruction. My focus here is finding a balance between realism and arcade fun as to create as many interesting situations as possible. Things like startup time take ages in real life so this is much more on the side of arcadeyness, destruction on the other hand is going to be fairly realistic. Clip a rotor… rotor dead. Tail rotor will send the Mozzy into an uncontrolable spin, main rotor will be falling from the sky. It will be possible to land without a tail rotor if you’re lucky, meaning sending for repair crew to bring you a new one might just save your Mozzy. You will also be fairly careful who you let fly it as clipping a rock could mean the end of your whole team and Mozzy.

Camera Tools
I also spent a bit of time adding some tools for capturing our new trailer which I will be putting out into the game for content creators to use at will.

Something we found after flying the Mozzy around a bit is that it makes an excellent cinematic camera due to the smoothed out controls and aerial perspectives. To help this along I built a body kit for the Mozzy that hides all default parts, essentially making it invisible. I also made a piece of gear for the player to do the same. Lastly I made a handbrake for the Mozzy that allows the pilot to freeze the vehicle in mid air turning off physics temporarily once a desired camera angle has been set. They will require admin access to the server they are on to use, but I think will add a handy tool for youtubers to create cinematic intros etc. The invisible player tool will also be useful for admins to observe without being seen.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week I’ve been touching up the shoreline majorly but this time in a very non-destructive way. I’ve spent a decent amount of time making sure that there’s as little (if any) manual touch up come build time as possible, one of the things that can really tank a release night is finding something wrong with a single stamp and then potentially forgetting to do one small manual touch up job that seemed like a pretty minimal thing at the time but can cause a ton of restamping and recapturing and those small touch ups add up, potentially leaving you with a bunch of shit to do at a very stressful time in the process. I went pretty hard on cleaning up as much of our map stamping process and feel like I really cut down on manual touch ups a lot, still going through some stuff now but can definitely say that the map is in a much better place. I’ve also just been trying to tick off as much small stuff on my To Do lists as possible. Getting through a hell of a lot of stuff. Feels good.

Mils

I’ve been trawling through the icons still and now they are all looking a lot better. These had a base pose that just made sure the object was in the middle of the icon square so you could see it. They also had a very generic lighting angle. I found that by showing a bit more shadow you can actually make out the form of the models and the contrast gives much more punch.

This takes more time than leaving the standard lighting snapshot in place but its well worth the effort when it comes to being able to make out the objects and looking good.

I also did a pass on the world items so they have decent sizes when dropped on the ground and don’t get lost in the grass.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been working on bringing back permanent loot spawns to our towns, polishing up some mozzy issues, improving SDK build times and taking part in the trailer filming session.

I’ve got loot trees setup for town loot crates in vehicle, military and construction themes like I talked about last week.
Construction crates will contain construction materials and construction items (like signs, torches and fireplaces), Vehicle crates will contain vehicle parts, vehicle paint masks and gasoline and Military crates will contain guns (rarely), gun attachments and military themed gear.
All crates also have ammo drops and amber in their loot tree (military ammo rolls will have extra ammo however) as well as a small chance of a detonation cap.
This is just the way things are configured for the time being, we still need to give town loot a few test iterations so this is subject to change. Ultimately we want to try and increase the loot crate spawn rate from legacy but lower the average reward to compensate.

Unfortunately we suffered a bit of a set back on our first planned filming day for the itemv2 trailer when our SDK figuratively caught fire and stopped building anything useful.
Though we lost the day to debugging and fixing problems we were able to return to stability with a few extra improvements to SDK build times thanks to batching unity asset database imports and squashing a bug in the mesh attachment build cache system that would over eagerly invalidate its entire cache.

After we got through the SDK issues we had a lot of fun filming trailer footage including flying the mozzy around which is really coming together well, I think you guys are going to really enjoy it! Here’s a couple of cool clips I managed to capture which probably won’t make the trailer.

 

Henry

What’s good in the world?

Things got really interesting this week as we captured some real time action sequences for the trailer. I am really fortunate to have wizards like Spence & Tom around to help develop tools to assist in the filming process. Spencer developed a transparent chassis for the mozzie and implemented a handbrake so now any angle or movement is possible to capture from the sky. This has allowed for some ultra cinematic moments to be recorded during live game play. 

Can’t wait to share some of the moments with you all. Here is a still from the beach…
 

Spencer

Hi Guys,

Last week has been all about the Mozzy. 90% of systems are complete and gotta say its been so much fun flying around. Definitely my favourite addition to the game since the introduction of Vehicles. I had originally seen the Mozzy as a super rare vehicle that only baller clans would get to, but I’m now leaning towards making it fairly fragile and easy to lose and not too hard build.

Refuelling
We’ve been looking for gameplay mechanics to bring into the heavy slot system we tested a few months ago, and refuelling Mozzys will be the first. Avgas that runs the Mozzy will be refinable from other materials only at some of the territory control points around the map. Transportation of this fuel will only be able to be done by heavy slot. A player can only hold 1 heavy slot item at a time, and can only walk at a slow pace while holding it. The fuel can be loaded directly into the Mozzy or can be alternatively shipped to your hangar using… “The Slug”!

The Slug
The Slug has been waiting in the wings for a while which we plan on releasing with the Mozzy very soon. For those who don’t know, the slug is a heavy truck designed for transportation of speciality items that can’t be carried by players or other vehicles. It will be vulnerable to highjack but successful convoys across the map will yield big benefits. The slug struggles off road so camping out the road network with fast vehicles waiting for convoys will hopefully be a profitable exercise.

Next Patch
We haven’t yet locked down what will be going out next patch, it will be sometime early December. Stay tuned.

Mils

I’ve been in a bit of an Icon Fiesta this last week. We had some issues with the system being a bit broken but figured out what was up with it. I’m going to spend the next couple of days making sure they all look much better than they have in the past. We have an automated system that will put the object in front of the camera and record that camera position and that will create an Icon Pose which will show the object. This doesn’t yield optimum results so it’s good to go through it every now and then and give each item a nice angle and some good lighting to make the items pop.

I did also fix up some things on the Mozzy (Helicopter) so that it would look even better in-game. We flew the Mozzy on Friday and I can say it’s hard but fun as hell!

Below: This is the mesh & texture that swaps in when the helicopter’s rotor blades reach a certain speed (fast mode). They change from real geometry to a blurred alpha faded mesh and texture. We were getting some issues with the shaders we were using so we had to separate the blurred blade parts into their own mesh and apply the standard unity spec shader instead of our custom ‘Hurt Uber Shader’. We then added the mesh parts near the centre of the ‘slow mode’ mesh and I did some sneaky re-uv mapping so that the mesh looks like it blurs out (left two images vs right two images)

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I returned from holidays and got stuck back into the vehicle system. We’ve been reviewing your feedback and agree that we’ve missed the mark and ended up with a system that isn’t as fun as legacy. With this in mind we’re rolling several changes back in the hope of returning to a place where stealing vehicles is more impactful and farming up vehicles from world chassis spawns is more achievable.

Here’s a full list of the vehicle changes made so far:

• Roaches, Goats and Kangas will no longer be destructible (The Mozzy helicopter will still be destructible)
• Vehicle self-destruction and vehicle insurance beacons removed
• Vehicle inventory locking removed
• Vehicle wheels are destructible again
• Scrap removed
• Vehicle crafter removed
• Vehicle wrench moved into wood workbench
• Added map marker tracking for claimed vehicles

As well as these changes we’re also going to shake up the spawns a bit and get those back closer to legacy as well. Currently the vehicle chassis are spawning at semi-random points around the road network but we’ll be changing it so they spawn in and around certain towns.
Along with this change we will also be bringing back town loot outside of event times, our current plan is to try and have three different ‘flavors’ of loot: Vehicle, Military and Construction with the different types coming from different towns. I’ll be working on setting this all up this week.

TEHSPLATT

This week I fixed an extremely annoying problem with the new characters, the way I had gone about doing the head and neck had caused a pretty bad seam. This was something I tried to prevent during the process but I guess what ever I did didn’t really work and the seam just slipped through the cracks. I ended up having to merge up the neck and head instead of having them as separate models and rebake just those two pieces together then splice the fixed seam into the old normal texture. It worked but it was annoying. I then had to do the same thing with the female hands due to the same problem but after just running through that problem it was pretty easy.

I’ve also been fixing the shoreline because it’s been horrible for a very long time now. This was also a bit of an annoying problem, I could have hacked something together that lasted a while but that can be a very dangerous way of working so I actually took some time to test out different approaches and found one that worked the best, it now looks much better and isn’t a destructive process that get’s reset every time I need to make a change in the final map.

Henry

Howdy world of hurt,

Exciting times around the office this week seeing the team’s hard work come to fruition. Experimenting with the mozzie and how I will capture footage of it for the trailer is a lot of fun, I cant wait to blast “Ride of the Valkyries” and fly over the palm trees of the beach.

Today we get to put V2 to the test as we are all set up to capture for the trailer. Its gonna be a blast and a lot of footage to log after.