Spencer

Hi Guys,

Last week was full steam implementing the territory control system and getting the patch out the door. I’m pretty happy with how it came together and checks another thing off the list of todo before V2 release.

Helicopter
This week I’ve moved onto implementing our first aerial vehicle, the Mozzy (Helicopter). I’m a massive fan of the old Battlefield series choppers (like BFV) in that they were tricky to fly, and in the wrong hands would mean a dead squad. I can’t stand the modern take on choppers that you can’t crash even if you try, so I’ll definitely be making this one a challenge.

Helicopters work fairly similarly to other vehicles in our systems, just a drivers seat, rigidbody and some forces based on input. The biggest challenge is we currently have no mechanism of locking and capture mouse movement on the server for vehicles. To do this we need to clamp the mouse to the center of the screen for specific vehicle seats, then pack our mouse deltas into the direction vector that is usually sent assuming the server knows what to do with it, then not render the client side mouse movements. We are using the mouse to control pitch and roll, A&D as yaw as in most games.

I have a rough prototype working well now, but my OBS is recording at 15fps since reformat so you’ll have to wait until next week to check it out.

Next on the menu is designing the sounds for it, dust particle effects when near ground, and blade animations. I hope to have all this completed this week.

Mils

I’ve been a busy beaver this last week. First up I created the Clan Totem do-over. As I think I may have mentioned previously the first Clan Totem looked a bit Grey against the metal walls inside the construction system. To get around this we created another one and are going to use the original as the Territory Marker so no work wasted there.

This came out pretty nice and is made up of multiple materials, so it will contrast against all the construction wall types.

Next up I remade the campfire still based roughly on the original mesh but with much nicer textures and a more efficient mesh. This was pretty satisfying to work on. I took my time making a nice glowing charcoal material for this and it came out really well.

I also created 3 icons for the Territory System. The bottom three icons will help players discern 3 Binary Effects. These will pop up next to your health bar like the other binary effects such as ‘no build’ etc. These 3 icons (from the left) aim to convey the following information to the player…

1. You are in a Territory Zone.
2. You were killed within a Territory Zone and are taking damage because you are not supposed to be inside there for the time being.
3. You were killed within a Territory Zone and should not be there for the time being.

I also helped Spencer modify our main rocks so that we save a lot on polycount across the map. Hopefully this will yield massive performance increases. Fingers Crossed. 🙂

One Last thing… I also just got this done too. A re-texture of the storage locker. Looks way more interesting, colour should pop out more when in your base.

Henry

Whattado, It has been a great week watching some of the trailer come together. Lots of problem solving working out ways to film live action segments in game engine. But starting to make things really start to pop. Also have been continuing work on the interface and icons for the clan system.

TehSplatt

This week I worked on building some territory stamps for the new system. The idea with these was to block the line of sight of players that had previously died in the zone and were locked out and also provide a flat area for building. The challenges with this was lining up all the build zones with the actual in game build grid. Currently these have a pretty boring design and will be updated with some actual thought put into design. I also fixed up what ever was left with the characters bar a few things which will be fixed this week.

 

 

Spencer

Hi Guys,

Now that we have the foundations of the clan system in place I’ve moved on to the fun stuff… Bragging rights PVP systems to rank clans!

Territory Control
The first of our endgame PVP systems dropping next patch will be the Territory Control System. Scattered throughout the maps will be special build cells in fixed locations that have permanent totems that can only be occupied by one clan at a time. The cell will be surrounded by a significant nobuild area (currently 2 build cells in each direction). Construction is allowed by the controlling clan in the center cell but only with a limited set of prefabs (currently concrete + wood + doors) making it much harder to defend.

Special Explosives
To make things even harder for the defenders, a new type of explosives is craftable that can only be deployed inside territory control cells. The crafting cost is muuuch cheaper than normal C4, meaning holding these points is gonna be a big challenge and we expect them to change hands often.

Player Lockouts
PVP in Hurtworld is very rarely a balanced fight, especially online raiding. We expect a lot more online raiding to happen with these mechanics and want to make sure that this isn’t just a numbers game. That annoying scenario where you are fighting 1v3, kill the first two people, battle the last for a bit then finally win the fight 3v1 only to have the first person arrive back and kill you. We can’t do anything about the 3v1 fight to begin with, but we want to try to make it harder for the higher number team from extending the fight indefinitely. To do this we have built a player lockout system, it works like this:

If you are killed inside a territory control cell you will gain a debuff that indicates you are currently locked out of all territory control cells. Entering any of these cells before the debuff wears off will cause you to take lots of damage. This timeout is currently set to 5 mins, we will tune this as we go.

Ultimately if you kill someone in a territory control skirmish, they stay dead for a bit regardless of their bed proxmity / cooldown. This should put everyone on a more even playing field.

In addition to this no beds will be allowed inside territory control cells. If you are killed as a defender safely behind your walls, you are locked out of the cell. No picking up your loot, no running back up to get back in the fight… making online raiding a LOT easier for these bases.

Rewards
Initially the territory control system will purely be for bragging rights. We plan something around 2 per biome that will show clearly on the map which clan holds each one. Territory totems will also accumulate reputation points over time that need to be manually claimed in person periodically. Unclaimed points will show on the map putting a higher bounty on sacking specific territories for enemies.

For the first iteration reputation points will be used to rank clans in the clans window. Over the coming patches we plan to add in clan unlocks that can be purchased with reputation like special clan tags, gear shaders, and vehicle skins so it is obvious when out in the world that your clan is powerful in this server.

Design Goals
As mentioned a few blogs ago, this system aims to achieve a few things:
1. Create a meaningful end game meta for clans to compete
2. Make raiding mechanics more accessable more often and to a wider group of people without making securing bases impossible
3. Broadcasting the narrative of the server to all players (who is attacking who, who is controlling which areas etc) so that solo and casual players get a peek into the higher level play and possibly aspire to participate
4. Mechanics are Opt-In, normal play will not be adversely affected / make life harder for people who aren’t into PVP

Patch Date
We will be rolling out this system on Thursday the 8th of November

Mils

I got the workbench update done this week, I think it came out really nice. The old one had all it’s PBR texture values wrecked between V1 and V2 and while it looked okay, some parts were like mirror chrome. This is pretty much the same mesh, but upgraded and the poly count was optimised. Had fun working on this and it should be in game very soon.

We decided to change the current Clan Totem mesh because of some colour issues we noticed. When the Clan Totem is inside a base with metal walls, the clan totem gets pretty much lost in the same kind of material and colour. This asset will now be used as the Territory Marker, when that comes in very soon. I’ve taken the design from the concepts I did with the odd 7 shaped marker and we will use that as the Clan Totem when it’s complete. This has 3-4 materials, so should contrast nicely with the inside of a base no matter what walls are up around it. Below is the high poly version. I’m getting through this quickly and I’m at the UV mapping stage right now. Should be done with the texturing by Tuesday I hope.

TEHSPLATT

Worked on getting all the character updates in game this week, there were a lot of challenges with weird skinning processes luckily it was stuff that had already been worked out during the female characters. Just need to fix up some texture issues here and there but nothing major, gotta add in all the gear that had to get fixed up to stop any clipping on the new models. Might be adding just a bunch of new heads for some variety while we are already running through this workflow. We shall see.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since last devblog I’ve been finishing up the clans implementation for the 0.6.3.0 patch and then continuing to polish it up further adding better tracking of your clan applications and doing a pass over the new interaction tab UI improving the layout consistency.
With the clan system fundamentals in place we can now start moving onto the exciting stuff we’re planning to build on top of it!

I also fixed a long standing bug in our mesh attachment generation system where skinned mesh attachments would fail to generate correctly if any bones that indirectly affected mesh deformation differed from the skeleton rest pose.
Getting this bug fixed removes the major blocker to getting the updated faces Splatt has been working on into the game.

I’m taking the next couple of weeks off to go on holidays so you won’t hear from me for a little while. Once I get back though it’s full steam ahead with Hurtworld as we’ll be making a big push to get stuff done by the end of the year, hopefully we’ll announce some more specifics about this soon!

Henry

Whattado?

After a busy week of getting stuck into the UI, updating icons and refining the clan windows, it is time to get back on the V2 trailer.
We have a loose storyboard on the go and have been throwing around ideas to capture the vibe of V2 and everything the lads have been working on.
Lots of capturing footage and setting the tone with placeholder music ahead.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve been working on implementing the new clan totem and bringing our new recruit Henry up to speed on all things Hurtworld. The clan totem works very similarly to the standard totem. When you auth or de-auth on a clan totem, you act for the entire clan. Only officers or above can mess with the clan totems. Multiple clans can be authorized on a totem, we figured us disallowing this would end up with people just using standard totems anyway.

The last feature for clan totems I want to add before Thursday is the ability to set a minimum clan rank for players to be allowed build permission. This way you could allow the use of doors but not construction. In the next patch we will be introducing rank restricted doors to reduce the risk of recruits stealing yo shit.

We are still on track for Thursday at this point but will likely be a fairly rough implementation of the Clans UI. I figure it will reach stability quicker if we put it out in a slightly broken state and iterate on it quickly throughout the week as opposed to delaying the release again.

Mils

This week I finished up the Clan Totem. This came out nice and should fit in well with the rest of our assets. I the image below you can see that it’s the same dimensions as the Territory Marker.

The next item on my list you will be VERY happy to know about….

METAL DOORS! Yes we know you have all wanted these for ages and now they will be added to one of the patches coming up soon (not this one though) I believe metal roofs are also going to be added probably when the doors are, but we’ll see what the programmers end up doing. So these came out nice and fit well with our existing construction suite. This door has a couple more texture maps than the regular wooden door, we may bring the wooden door up to spec later.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been updating the 3 male characters, I’ve been trying to match the original style of clean lines and strong forms. One of the hardest things with these type of models is keeping the normal maps from getting lumpy, this requires certain techniques in the sculpting process to smooth things out. The main problem I always found with the old models was their lack of eye lids, they always looked on edge. Going to have to go through and fix the snood and potentially other hats/masks now but that’s not a big deal as I’ve run through that process so many times. Got some stuff to fix up on the Dundee model and then I’ll be moving on the Mclaren model. After these I’ve got a few things to clean up in the map project like duplicate splats and unused textures, then I’ll be moving onto gear and potentially hat hair so characters don’t look so bald with hats on.

HENRY

Whats good fam?

My name is Henry, and I am lucky enough to be new newest member of the of the Hurtworld crew. I come from a motion & graphic design background and have worked in the music industry for the past decade.

Spencer has recruited me to help with a wide range of of tasks from UI design to editing trailers and anything else that comes up relevant to my skill set. This week I have been getting settled in the office whilst helping Tom out with the inventory interface & icons. Our main focus is to keep the style consistent and improve navigation.

Here is an example, as always it is a work in progress and subject to change:

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I’ve been continuing on with clans UI implementation and polishing up the interaction UI changes. I’m still running behind where we want to be unfortunately after a couple of reworks of the clan UI and Unity’s UI being a little tricky to work with (nested prefabs are going to make this so much better! I can’t wait!) but we are still committing to releasing Thursday the 18th of October. There will surely be a few bugs and teething issues with the new systems so expect hotfix patches to follow.

INTERACTION UI

The interaction UI changes have worked out really well I think with Henry’s design tweaks adding some nice clarity and consistency to the windows.
Now that we have a ‘dynamic’ header showing the name of the moused over interaction tab or the opened window if no tabs are hovered over we require a window to always be open to make room for this text. To ensure this is the case when opening the character window (default ‘tab’ key) the interaction system will try and open the nearest interaction (like a workbench, vehicle or player loot crate), if there are no nearby interactables then the system falls back to opening the handcrafting menu (which has moved out of the character window tabs and into the interaction tabs) ensuring there is always a left hand side window open.

CLANS

The initial clans implementation will have 3 ranks, recruit, officer and admin. Clans can only have one admin (essentially acting as the clan owner) but this role can be transferred between players.
Recruits are just basic members, they will be authorized for all clan totems their clan is authorized to, be able to view the clan roster, see online clan mates on the map and have UI overlays to identity nearby clan mates in the world.
Officers get all of the above plus the ability to authorize/deauthorize the clan on clan totems and also view, accept and deny applications to the clan.
Admins can do all of the above plus change recruits to officers and vice versa. They can also kick members, change the clan tag, change the clan color, change the clan description, disband the clan and transfer the admin role to another member.
All these functions are driven through the clans UI which is opened through the new interaction tabs.