Spencer

Hi Hurtworldians,

Hey guys, this week I’ve been working on fleshing out some possible PVP concepts that I think will add a lot to our end game following the concept of bragging rights systems that I discussed last week. If you haven’t read last weeks dev blog I suggest you do so first as this system would be fairly rubbish in the current vanilla loot rate (which we plan to increase a fair bit)

Territory Control
The proposed system with populate the map with control points (at this point we are thinking 2 or 3 per biome). Each point will show on the map and indicate which players control it. The markers will be similar to a ownership cell that contains a built in ownership stake. Controlling this marker will give you build authority like a normal build cell.

The catch here is that within this build cell, other players will be allowed to use much cheaper raiding tools to break down your walls making these areas much harder to defend. I imagine something like a much cheaper C4 recipe that can only be used in territory control cells and other raiding mechanics we want to test out.

Rewards
Rewards at this point will be something like a currency over time held used to unlock cosmetics like custom gear shaders, name plates, exclusive team colors etc. Basically bragging rights points that you can show off in the world. You will also have your name on the map that shows how much territory you control which will be visible to all players.

What This Hopes To Achieve
A. Give players that have hit end game meaningful objectives to fight over that don’t make the initial progression harder to balance
B. Create a much lower barrier to entry for playing with raiding mechanics without making it easy for top clans to wipe everyone off the map
C. Give us a lot more room to experiment with base raiding balance and systems to eventually refine standard world raiding
D. Is completely Opt-In, won’t make life any harder for people who aren’t equipped or interested in clan PVP
E. Can be built using mostly existing mechanics

The initial implementation will be pretty straight forward and we will expand from there. Rewards will be limited at first, but if the system works well we will extend them.

The biggest job for the initial rollout of this system is it will depend on a ingame clan management system which we are currently working on. See Tom’s post for details.

Next Patch
We don’t have a specific ETA yet for our next patch, but we hope to have the above systems in some form in early October.

Mils

This week I am revisiting the Core Drill that you all know and love. This machine was made very early on and never got the full treatment that we now have as our standard. This will have a finish much more like the Fabricator which in game is known as the Titranium Workbench. I have added some more meat to the general silhouette which I think really beefs this machine up. Once all the extra normal details have been added this machine should look way more tech than it has previously. Quite enjoying this one.

Here’s a render of the high poly which shows the improved form.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been working on a new character for some of our promo stuff, currently trying to match up the styles with the old characters so there’s no weird disconnect between the faces. I first modelled a normal human face and then started stylising it to match the old characters, I had to do things like sharpen the edges of different features like the nose, eyes, eyebrows etc. to match the old style. There’s definitely a couple weird things that still need to be fixed, focusing a lot of getting nice clean normal bakes so that everything looks clean and nice. Now that the basic head has been re-topologised in a way that properly supports this style, we can start doing a lot of cool new faces and trying to push some character into these new ones. Here’s a couple images of the updates, the first one is the difference between the original topology and new topology (just a look at how the actual bakes came out not the actual topology) and the second one is a look at the stylised zbrush sculpt of a generic male.

Tom

Interaction System Changes

This week I’ve been working on our interaction system adding a new UI panel to show all interactables that have a UI menu (eg. workbenches, storages, vehicles, campfires etc.) in your local range that you have line of sight to.
Another addition is that on opening the character window (tab key by default), the first nearby interactable with a UI window will also be opened (if there is one available). In practice this means if you know there is only 1 interactable near you, you can open it by standing in range and pressing tab. We think this will make things like picking up player loot a bit smoother and will also help with inventory management and crafting as you’ll be able to stand in range of multiple workbenches/lockers/storage chests and then use the new UI tab to switch between them with a mouse click. The handcrafting menu will also be moved into this panel as having it as a character window tab didn’t make a lot of sense when every other tab changed the contents of the character window.
I’ve got this system functional now but it still needs testing and an art pass before its ready to push out.

Clans

The main reason I’ve been working on this interaction UI is to give us a sensible place in the UI to add our new clans feature!
With our incoming end game overhaul focusing on bragging rights, cosmetics and other non-progression bound rewards we realized we would need a grouping/clan/team system to be able to manage this properly.
We haven’t locked down the full set of clan features just yet but we definitely want players to be able to identify clan mates in the world (something like a recolored nameplate that becomes a simplified marker at a distance), be able to see online/offline clan members, be able to define a visual style for the clan (ie. specific clan colors) and be able to claim construction cells with a special clan ownership stake that will authorize all clan members.
There’s much more we’re considering including new gameplay features that rely on clans but it’s still a bit early to spill the beans on these whilst they are still being worked out, I’ll be starting implementation on clans next week so look for more info next blog!

Hotfix?

Last week I mentioned a few bugfixes and debugging features I’d been working on for a potential hotfix build I was hoping to get out this week but the work on extending the interaction system has taken me longer than expected and we haven’t had time to really test these fixes and changes so no hotfix this week.
Because these fixes aren’t for major blockers I’m thinking it’s going to be most efficient to just roll these into the next major experimental patch instead.

Spencer

Hey Hurtworld fam, It’s been another kickass week around the studio as we really start to nail down the final roadmap as we head towards the V2 launch. We’ve had a lot of really good feedback in the forums on what you guys like / think is missing in V2. We’ve also been playing a fair bit around the modded servers and checking out what changes to the meta they bring, and finding some elements that work really well.

With all this discussion and new elements, Tom and I have had our design hats on working to bring the biggest points into the game without disrupting too much of what we already have. In the past we would run with an idea, end up changing 50% of the game and end up with something so different and rushed that we didn’t know what was going on. Our mantra now is to make sure 100% we are only making improvements to the game as we lead up to the V2 launch (that might seem like an obvious thing to do, but while we were doing more crazy experiments we knew some stuff wouldn’t work, for now we’re done with that).

Here are the key elements we’ve been working towards based on feedback and our own discussions:

Farming grind is getting in the way of player interaction
This is a big one that came up a lot in the forums “Farmworld” and we agree that it has a lot of merit. While we don’t think having items that require farm is a bad thing, we need to make sure that we prioritize interaction between players over progression grind. After all, the thing that makes survival games great is the unknown element of the other players in the server. The farm is designed as a proof that you put work into your gear thus giving it value to you and making PVP / raiding more interesting.

Bragging rights / Thrill of the fight for rewards
We definitely lost sight of this a bit, in trying to ensure that every action in game had a tangible reward in the progression. When in reality, things like getting into PVP skirmishes are reward enough in themselves to warrant the risks involved. Take for example raiding: The vast majority of raids that involve C4 end up in a loss of materials given the C4 is so expensive. Rarely will you find more C4 inside the base than you used to get into it.

So why do people raid? This seems pretty obvious when you look at it like that… because its fun as hell, and you can dominate some other crew. In our recent design, this was a missing link in our thinking: That some of the best rewards in the game don’t come in the form of useful loot.

Shortening the grind time to be PVP viable
Something we learned from playing on Hurtfun (4x loot) over the last couple wipes, is the point where you have enough resources to lose in a fight and not care, it opens you up to participating in much more exciting interactions than running around hitting rocks and trying not to get killed. You can go and pick fights, because you won’t have to go back to farming for 2 hours to make up for your losses if it doesn’t go well.

I call this point PVP saturation. The point where you have enough gear to be on reasonably equal footing with others in PVP, and have more insurance money than you will need for a while. In vanilla this takes ages to reach, and a few deaths sets you back a long time making PVP an expensive game to be part of if you don’t always win. We will be working on shortening this time greatly. Firstly by increasing the amber drop rate so that deaths don’t screw you over as much and possibly increasing early farming yield to get you in the PVP game faster.

This doesn’t mean we are abandoning the concept of having to farm for something. Some people like the PVE progression, and some items work well having a high proof of work involved in them, not everything will be cheap, but overall we will be shortening the amount of time to get through the basic gear progression.

Fostering a more meaningful End Game
The reason I’ve always leaned on the side of making the progression require a bit of grind is a fear of players getting to the end of the progression too fast and getting bored. In our current meta that makes sense, endgame isn’t particularly interesting. My new approach to this is not to extend the progression but to fix the fact that the end game lacks any meaningful depth. Raiding is sloppy, and given our 100% focus on tangible loot rewards for all actions, endgame without loot rewards didn’t make sense to me.

I now have faith that if we build endgame systems that encourage player interaction, and balance endgame systems to not punish people with massive farm requirements for participating in PVP that we can create much more frequent and much more interesting PVP situations. These systems won’t reward you with guns or build materials but bragging rights.

We are working on some ideas internally for improving endgame and have some cool stuff cooking but is a bit early to discuss, but the key to this process will be fixing raiding mechanics like construction design and unraidable bases along with fixing raiding tool costs to make raiding feasible. More on the bragging rights systems next week!

TL;DR: Get to end game quicker, make endgame not shit.

TEHSPLATT

This week I’ve been working on replacing the characters hands for the first person and third person models. Currently the hands are very square and feel disconnected from the updated designs. The process involved grabbing some old hands I had made and transplanting them onto the current model and then due to the squareness being baked into the normal map of the original hands I had to re-sculpt them to add in some smoother detail. Unfortunately the first person hands don’t line up with the third person hands so I had to do some tweaking to get everything into the correct position then re-skin them again, also finding an actual clean rig file for our v2 character has been a bit of a difficult task so I’ve made one from the pieces of the main character in the project. Here’s some shots of the updated hands (there’s still a couple UV seams on these older pictures).

Mils

I’ve had a crack at the marketing for the V2 release. This was going well but we decided to get Splatt to work on the expression of the character for the promo images for Steam. This makes far more sense as he’s our character specialist. Also we have a new guy starting work with us soon, he’s a gun at video editing, sound production and other very useful skills. He will probably do the work for the other half of the branding, so for now I will be doing some rework on the resource drill and the blast furnace. These have sorely needed a rework for a while and should come up looking something more along the lines of the Titranium Workbench.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

As those of you who have been following the blog recently would know the fragment overhaul I’d been working on didn’t make it into 0.6.2.0. After reviewing the work so far with Spencer we decided it would be better to delay it rather than push out something we weren’t that happy with just to make the deadline.
Since 0.6.2.0 we’ve been evaluating the state of the game and think we need to make some changes to the core of the game (see Spencer’s section for more info on these) that are going to affect the implementation of fragments so we’ve decided to delay the fragment overhaul until we’ve gotten through these other changes.

Whilst we’ve been designing these new changes I’ve also been working on a range of fixes including improved handling of field of view and resolution settings.
I’ve overhauled the ‘setres’ console command so it will only accept resolutions natively supported by your monitor (these are the same resolutions you can choose between in the options menu), I’ve also updated the field of view setting so it now represents horizontal field of view and made weapons sighted field of view setting a multiplier value rather than an explicit number that ignored your field of view setting (ie. the pistol used to set field of view to 40 but instead it now multiplies the current field of view by 0.6 letting it scale better with your configuration).
I also added some extra third person camera collision detection so hopefully after the next hotfix patch peeking through walls will finally be a thing of the past. If I’m wrong definitely let us know as I’m determined to stop this!

As well as the field of view / resolution fixes, I’ve also got the following fixes going into the next patch:

• Bolt pull guns will now require a bullet rechamber (bolt pull) when equipping before they can be fired (fixes speeding up bolt pull refire by swapping between bolt pull guns)
• Removing default attachments from attachment loot tables
• Fixed a bug in how weather system distance falloff was calculated (weather systems now blend in and out over a longer distance)
• World item physics simulation is now forced off 10 seconds after spawn if the object has not yet come to a rest (improves performance)
• Players are no longer forced back to first person perspective on respawn
• Improved server side vehicle performance

We should be rolling out a hotfix patch with these fixes + some extra debugging options to help discover obscure problems in our item management sometime next week. These changes will not require a wipe so official servers will be staying on the same save.

Spencer

Hi All,

I spent most of this week working on server stability and some urgent community maintenance. A few bad eggs were attacking our servers via a vulnerability in the Linux implementation of sockets that allowed relatively weak DDOS attacks to bring down our servers along with other attacks against players.

Over the last few months we’ve been trying to avoid dealing with these issues in the hope that the people would get bored and realize there is no chance we will negotiate with malicious people trying to influence our decision with toxicity. It reached the tipping point where we needed to rid the community of them for good.

Our servers (both V2 and V1) should be rock solid again be able to sustain the most common DDOS attacks. We will continue to monitor the situation to ensure our servers remain stable. I am happy we now have this out of the way in the lead up to the V2 launch so we can hit the ground running once our playercount ramps back up.

We will be much harsher on bans from this point on. Anyone caught cheating, deliberately using exploits to their advantage, attempting to bring down servers or setting it community servers that circumvent our protection mechanisms will be permanently banned without warning.

Negativity aside, I would like to thank the majority of the community that helped solve these issues with the many emails of intel and player reports. Its been good to reconnect with the community over the last week. I will be making an effort to be somewhat more involved with discussions that don’t involve excessive toxicity. If you guys would like to keep an open dialog with us, keep it civil. We’re still human, we do this every day aren’t going to constantly sift through abuse. We don’t always have all the answers, we’re still committed to making Hurtworld as kickass as possible and would rather have you guys on our side.

Think V1 is better than V2, Tell us WHY!
I constantly get hurled basic broken sentences like “no v2, fix v1” which is understandable given most of our playerbase is from non English speaking countries. However this doesn’t help us much.

V2 is here to stay, at its core its very similar to V1 with technology upgrades in our equipment and loot systems and a ton of bug and security fixes.

Along the way we’ve explored new game mechanics to try to push the survival genre forward. With some epic failures or boring gameplay or incomplete mechanics to some stuff that we think adds interesting new layers to the game.

We are now in the consolidation phase of reigning back in our experiments, try to integrate the things that worked while rolling the things that didn’t work back to match V1.

I understand not everyone can express exactly what they think should change and most can only come up with “it doesn’t feel right”. These comments don’t make for much of a meaningful discussion so lets keep this thread to thoughtful posts only.

I would like to open a more in depth discussion about what you like about V1 that V2 doesn’t have, and what you like about V2.

If you haven’t played V2 in a while, things change very quickly, so your input probably isn’t very useful. I suggest you jump in on Thursday for the new wipe which contains a my new favorite weapon and 2 new town events. If you are from a country that currently has a low population in HW, I suggest you play on one of the populated EU V2 servers, I have removed the ping restriction on them and you will find our netcode hides high latency better than most games (if not in a vehicle). We play there on 300+ ping from Australia most wipes without issue.

In the interest of keeping this thread on topic, I will be removing posts that don’t contribute to the conversation, are off topic or contain abuse. Try to keep your posts to the point.

Please take into account your bias when thinking about differences that you have 1000+ hours in a game that hasn’t changed much, any change is going to be hard to accept. Some things take adjustment. Try to think as a new player entering the game.

Have you say here:
Steam Discussion

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, so the town event I’ve been working on is finally finished and ready to be added to the map. We had a pretty decent test play of it and it definitely flows the way I wanted it too. This one is gonna take a bit of learning to get used to, I would suggest learning all the secret little pathways and peaking spots while there’s no event running on the town. This event was made with the new loot frenzy event in mind hence the size and mount of stuff going on, I felt like each position that a loot box spawns in should have a decent amount of strategy available to you even if you’re out of position. It will definitely feel over whelming when you first run around it but if you split it up into section you will see that it’s not as random and messy as it may appear. Keeping loot frenzy in mind I made sure there were enough risk/reward escape routes for solo players. We also tested out the new FR18 and it was fun as hell, it will definitely be my weapon of choice from now on. As I mentioned last week the different paths leading to the capture point in this town play to different weapons strengths and I definitely think the FR18 has it’s strong points in this town. I’m also working on a second town event that was meant to be ready by now but due to limited time stopping me from screwing around with our assets and some technical limitations with low terrain resolution it hasn’t come as far as I was aiming for. Not to mention just some backwards design that I got caught up in but luckily Spencer has a good eye for shooter level design and set me straight.

Mils

Good Morning ya’ll. I’ve been adding the Camo skin back onto the rest of the other weapons. Tasty 🙂

This is a more laborious task than it may seem. Because the guns are mechanical models and the way that I personally like to do the UV maps on them creates a lot of UV islands all over the texture map. This is great for baking normal maps, as all the surfaces that need to look flat and have nice hard edges do so without any issues. This makes it harder to add patterns that continuously map over the object. There are two ways of mapping these patterns to the object. The first is to use a cube map method, which has glaring issues as soon as you try to preview it on the object. This causes fades of the pattern around cylindrical or spherical objects. The other method is UV, which is fine but does cut the pattern up and cause a messy effect. I choose to go with the uv method and just do some manual cleanup. The result looks much cleaner and nicer on the eye.

The UV vs Cube Mapping example below:

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

This last week I’ve been working on testing the first of Splatt’s new town events with the FR18, Tuning and rebalancing some gun handling stuff to get ready for the fragment changes and pushing out server hotfixes with Spencer’s DDoS patch.

I set up Splatt’s town event he was showing last week in a small GameModeWorldEventDeathmatch map that cycles between running control and loot frenzy events. This town event is working well and feels really different to the others being indoors and closer quarters.
This was also a great opportunity to test out the FR18 which is now fully implemented and just undergoing tweaking. Whilst there weren’t a heap of opportunities to try out the scope in this map (Splatt’s other new town event should be much better for this) but when setup using its iron sights it’s feeling nice, snappy and fast compared to the AWM.

Next up I jumped into our gun handling simulation to make sure I properly understood the systems so I could overhaul the fragments effectively.
I found that accuracy wasn’t working quite how I had expected, most guns were ignoring the hipfire accuracy stat and those that were taking it into account were using the stat in a strange way.
I decided to consolidate the accuracy simulation implementing both hipfire and running accuracy stats for all guns as well as removing the general accuracy stat.
This was removed as the stat was too hard to balance, either it felt like you needed it to shoot straight or you felt like it didn’t do anything if you already could shoot straight. Guns still have different accuracies as defined in their CrosshairProfile but this removes accuracy as a stat on gear.
I also made some changes to the bolt action simulation, fixing the bug where it will continually try to chamber the next bullet with the bolt when trying to sprint only to have it be cancelled by the sprint. I also added a new feature to bolt actions where the next bullet will not be chambered until the primary fire button is released, this allows you to watch the full bullet drop to help you line your shots up over long distances.
With this out of the way I’ve started overhauling fragments and will have this finished soon, here’s what you’ve got to look forward to:

Removal of fragment tiers
Now every fragment can drop in the world and there will only be one fragment case purchasable with dust.

Increase in average fragment power
Way too many fragments felt too weak and like they were only good for dusting so you could roll them into something else. Now all the weak fragments have either been bumped up or removed so it should never feel like a bad move to use a fragment.

Far less available upgrade points per item
Currently we have way too many upgrade points on every item making maxing out a gearset outside the reach of most players (especially if trying to stick to strong T2 or T3 fragments).
This also meant that the gap between full fragments and no fragments could be quite large and it was also opening up some pretty crazy possibilities like stacking move speed every where even if this wasn’t really practical to farm.
With less points per item we can make each fragment more powerful and make each fragment feel like more of a decision because reaching the upgrade limit is no longer far off into the future.

Unique upgrades
Some fragments will only be able to be applied once per item. This allows us to create more powerful fragments ensuring that they have enough stats on them to have a noticeable effect without having to be worried about a player having a few of that fragment in their weapon making it completely OP.

Hope to see you on the 30th!