Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week we’ve been pushing towards the Clans patch release. I’ve been adding clan tracking to the map as well as working on overhead markers so you can see who your homies are in the world.

Patch Delay
We haven’t made as much progress as we originally hoped this week, so we are going to delay the clans update until the 18th of October.

Mils

I got stuck into the Clan Totem this week. I firstly started with some concepts which as always gets all the bad ideas out and allows you to explore and come up with some much better stuff. The first thing I illustrated looked like a strange wooden chopping board (which we all had a laugh at) After that I got 3 solid designs down as you can see below…

We chose the metal slab to the right that has been shot through with some seriously powerful ordnance. The lion statue may also get used as the territory marker later on too.

Next up I got really stuck into the high poly sculpt, which I haven’t really ever gone this deep on, and not with cracked metal type stuff either. Because I mostly do our mechanical modeling stuff I prefer to do the low poly mesh and turn it into a high poly later. In this instance I worked the other way around, because it made more sense to me.

Below: The low poly mesh after it’s first bake, seems to have come out great. Will give it a bit more of a look over next and make sure there are no bake errors.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been focusing on the expression for the promo art. We ended up settling on a style for the hair, basically the original style where it’s more like a silhouette than an actual sculpted blob with large volume strands. We figured that this hair looks perfectly fine and spending a bunch of time on something that will most likely be covered up is pretty pointless. For the facial expressions I’ve been looking at the original promo art to try and nail that cheeky look, I originally tried to sculpt the expression but the process was taking way too long for something that would need to be tweaked anyway. I started just pushing verts around in Maya and that worked (almost) perfectly, but it was still a pretty slow destructive process. We talked about potentially having two characters in the promo art so I figured that it would be better if we could easily test out a bunch of different expressions with ease in a non destructive way, so I set up blend shapes for the character, blendshapes store vertices translation information and then allow you to blend between the original position and the new position, meaning you can make blend shapes like “eye brow left raise” and “eye lid upper right close” and then using sliders, tweak mix and match them to get an expression you want.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This week I reworked how the clan system was syncing data from server to client. Previously I was syncing up a ‘thin’ view of the clan for non-members and the full clan data to members whenever this data changed and when first connecting to the server.
After discussing it with Spencer we decided that the clan data doesn’t always need to be in sync as clan features like map tracking and ui overlays are easier to manage, less bug prone and more compatible with our network culling (players and other networked entities are not synced beyond a certain range so clients only receive relevant data) when driven by the server rather than running client side only and relying on the local clan data being correct.
Because of this clans are now synced only when clan UI windows are open by sending their last synced timestamp every few seconds, the server then compares that timestamp to the clans last updated timestamp and will resync only if out of date.

I’ve also been swapping out the programmer art in the clan UI windows and the new interaction tabs (that I discussed in blog #138) to match our standard UI style. Unfortunately this has been a bit more fiddly than I anticipated and needs a little more work before its ready to show off.
We’ve fallen behind our schedule a bit and haven’t been able to do a full playtest of all the new systems yet so we’ve decided to delay the clans patch (0.6.3.0) a week so the new date is the 18th of October.
We’re sorry about this but think its better in the long run to spend a little more time getting this stuff right so we can build the new end game on top of it.

Spencer

Hi Guys,

This week I’ve continued work on the map marker system which required some upgrades to network object culling scope. These upgrades allow us to do arbitrary distance culling rules for individual entities that require more complex logic for who should be able to see them. Previously we could only cull based on grid cells of a fixed size. Now an entity can specify its own culling logic implementation.

Long story short, needed low level upgrades to support what we wanted to do which will also improve network performance in other places. Nothing particularly exciting to show.

We are still on target for the 11th for the clans patch.

Mils

The Blast Furnace is looking really nice and is ready to go into the project. I was asked by Spencer to make this one look nice and grimy and I reckon it hits the mark. We added some windows to either side so you can see light spilling from them when the furnace is on.  I added a nice molten ore texture that will switch on and off with the function of the furnace also. This looks much less like an upside down rocket ship :P. I’m tidying up some other assets to round out the week and then onto the next thing.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This past week I’ve been working on the clan system and making some good progress.
Right now I’ve got all the basic clan functionality up and running on the backend (things like clan creation, applying to a clan, accepting/denying applications, promoting/demoting members etc.) and a working front end (UI windows, clan creation consumable item) for basic clan management although they are very much still using programmer art so aren’t quite ready to show off yet. This coming week we’ll be testing all of this and then I’ll be iteratively making improvements as well as hopefully implementing the real art for the UI.

Clans Window

The first of the new UI windows to manage clans is a generic clans window that shows all the clans registered on the server. If you are not currently a member of a clan you can use this window to apply to join a clan and if your application is accepted by an online member with the right permissions then you will join the clan. We chose this over sending out invites as it was easier to implement (no need to add some kind of view of all online players in game) and we think it’s much easier for new players to discover clans and find friends this way.
Later down the track the clan window will also double as a kind of scoreboard for clans allowing you to see how they rank against each other but the gameplay systems to support that aren’t going to be ready for the next patch (pretty confident that they are going to be worth waiting for though!)

My Clan Window

The other new UI window is actually a new tab for the character window, the button for this is going to take the place of the handcrafting button (which is moving to the interaction tab system). When selected this window will show you all the relevant information about the clan you are in. From here you’ll be able to see which members are online and offline and see their ranks, you’ll also be able to leave your current clan from here.
If you have sufficient permissions you’ll also be able to view all applications to join the clan and choose to accept or deny them. With sufficient permissions you’ll also be able to promote, demote and kick clan members from this screen.

TEHSPLATT

Hellooo, this week I’ve been working on finding a good consistent style for the hair, this has proved to be a pretty hard challenge because we need something that’s reasonably quick to do. The main thing I’ve been trying to do is cut down on noisy details that create a fuzzy mess when you aren’t up close, this creates another problem how ever, as those finer details give us something that represents hair, so currently trying to find a good balance with that. Also been doing a bunch of tests to see if I can get hair looking good with some shine from the standard Unity shader and so far, it hasn’t been great. It’s pretty easy to make jet black hair look good with basic specular but as soon as you move into lighter colours it all falls apart, so I’ve concepted some looks that we might be able to build shaders for to get away from the matte blob look. I also finished swapping out the FPS hands to slightly less square and sharp ones, still having problems with the 3rd person swap though.

Spencer

Hey guys,

This week I’ve been working on support systems for the upcoming clans feature. The main focus has been revamping how our map markers are managed across the network so they are efficient enough to handle tracking large numbers of clan mates without performing badly.

Localizing Events
While I’m at it adding support for better proximity limiting markers so we can start concentrating localized events. So far I think our events work well but are far too infrequent within running range. Part of this is limited by out ability to notify only people nearby on the goings on. You don’t particularly care about a meteor shower 3 biomes away, once we can limit these better and tie chat / ping notifications to them, we can increase the frequency without drowning you with notifications and events should make the world feel a lot more alive.

Improving Marker API
The existing marker API was pretty rubbish for doing anything other than static objects. I had a look through some community mods to see how they used the system and have had reports that performance was being destroyed doing anything substantial. I’ve spent a bit of time restructuring how the map markers are interfaced with by Oxide mods so they are A: Heaps simpler, and B: use far less resources and scale up easily.

Next Patch
Our next experimental patch which will contain the new clans system will be released on the 11th of October.

Mils

I’ve been a busy beaver this last week. I finished the Drill do-over and it came out aces. This looks a lot more meaty and tech now. I gave this matte paint job which I then went back and adjusted the Titranium Workbench to match. I also overhauled the drill’s colours and created a colour mask texture that utilises our Uber Shader. This will save an extra texture in the project as I only had to make one texture to get as many colours out of the drill as we want. This will be even more beneficial in future should we add another rare ore and drill to go with it.

I also go started on a redo of the Blast Furnace. The old one had been designed with a pipe network in mind, which we may still add in the future but not yet. I kept the core of the furnace intact but just made the peripheral parts more real world. Also it got scaled down from 2.6 metres to 2 metres making it the same height as the player. This should make having it in the base a bit less chaotic. I got the Low and Hi poly modeling done already and am now in the UV mapping stage. Really smashing it this week 🙂

TEHSPLATT

This week I finalised the topology for the updated face I’ve been working on, the main challenge with this was making sure that the face could have main features like the nose, mouth, eyes etc. changed with ease and then the low poly could be changed extremely fast to match any changes and bake out perfectly. This works really well currently, we still have some testing to do with style and new characters and stuff like that but in general the updated face handles changes really well. I did a bit of an extreme test to see how well it all worked which I will show below. Also currently working on a good way to do hair, as some of the hair I’ve been doing lately looks pretty gross when it intersects with the head, it gets an aliased jagged look, so, still trying to work out the best way to do that but I have some ideas and think I can make it work, with things like this it’s generally not a big deal to make them look nice, the challenge comes from finding an efficient repeatable way to do so.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Interaction System
Work on the interaction system is continuing along well, after some testing and review with Spencer we found a few bugs and things that weren’t working as smoothly as they should so I jumped back into it to fix them up. We’re not considering these interaction changes and the clan system an experiment, because we know we need these changes we’re taking some more time with the implementation to ensure it is done correctly rather than just trying to prove the concept as fast as possible.
Now the interaction system is ready for a second review and assuming it passes that it will just need an art pass to be ready for release.

Performance Improvements + Small Fixes
Whilst profiling performance on the interaction system changes I noticed some unexpected issues with our rendering. Several materials that could be setup for GPU instancing to save on draw calls didn’t have that option enabled and I also realized that we could save a draw call in our uber shader when not rendering backfaces (backfaces meaning the ‘other side’ of a polygon, usually these are culled for performance but we draw them on some items like world items so you can see the inside of a tshirt).
As well as these performance improvements I’ve also been resighting the AR15 and AWM sights as these guns have been scaled up slightly as they didn’t appear beefy enough in relation to the player.

Clans
This week I started working on the clan system although its still fairly early days on this due to having to do a bit more interaction fix ups than expected.
For the initial implementation I’m focusing on clan registration, applying to clans, managing applications to your clan and managing clan permissions.
Players will have 2 clan related windows to interact with, Clans (ie. a list of all clans, clan ranking and other clan info will be shown here, unclanned players will be able to apply to clans through this menu) and My Clan (ie. info about the clan the player belongs to, this will include the clan roster + rank management and application management if you have the permissions for this).
Whilst I’m working on this side of things Spencer is working on the more ‘in-game’ clan features like identifying teammates via UI overlay + tracking online clan mates through the map system, hopefully we can make some great progress on clans this week!