Spencer

Hey folks!

I finally broke the back of the upgrades to the equipment system this week, its taking longer than I originally expected but needs to be done so we have the infrastructure to push forward. One of the biggest wins from this week is integrating a tool that is going to save us a heap of time, and paves the way for mod driven equipment. We are now using a visual state machine editor for simulating equipment. If you’ve ever tried to code something that simulates a state machine without building a framework, you would know it usually ends up a massive mess. That’s what our equipment was before.

The simulation now looks like this:

This will heavily reduce the amount of logic we need to hardcode into equipment. All this configuration can be serialized into JSON, then fed from the server to the clients on connection. This means server side mods can mod client side predicted equip behavior.

This framework also exposes a solid implementation of behavior trees which kicks ass for AI. We have a custom implementation of something similar, but it never reached a stable maturity and is a pain in the ass to work with. I have high hopes this will give is a bit of breathing space to create some more interesting AI behaviors for the upcoming creatures.

Part of this integration is the tricky process of refactoring equipment code so that it stays in sync with the server. This system gives us the ability to consistently synchronize state behavior from server to client and to player animations without a heap of glue code massively reducing the overhead of creating new weapons and equipment.

The hope is to get a working prototype of most weapons implemented in the new system this week.

Dazzler

I have been working away on creatures, as well as a few fixes and additional changes for the big character-controller/gun-play Spence has been working on.

Here is some “Rig Pr0n” for those who are into that sort of thing. It is a task that takes quite a bit of time, though not sexy for most ;P.

Here is a quickie of the Skoogler skoogling, to wet your appetite for some hurt-turkey…

Interestingly, Gavku pointed out the Cassowary (upon which we draw inspiration) makes the following noises;

YouTube / ThePhantomThylacine – via Iframely

Pretty awesome/terrifying

Mils

I have been putting together all the City components and have made a pretty good basic fleshing of how a real city would look. The few different textures I previously built along with the ability to vary the shape and heights of the buildings has actually come out quite well. These are just the basic structures. I will later add the extra dressing that we want to add to give some of the buildings a unique look.

We tested this for performance and I gotta say it’s not amazing right now, but not to worry we are now figuring out ways to cut down on some of the polycounts. This is needed to maintain our high Frames Per Second standard. We will probably have to cut down on the amount of floors each building can actually access. Using some clever LODing we should be able to get the polycounts down and maintain a reasonable quality. If it were 5 years from now and we had future Graphics cards we could probably get away with each floor being accessible.

Once we have the main city building block performance under control, I can move onto messing the city up some more. We want to add some standard assets which you might find strewn around an abandoned city. Items that can fill the road space and the interior spaces whilst looking like the place has been long since ransacked. I guess watching The Walking Dead will be on the cards for me. 😉

Gavku

I have still been working on updating all the construction textures. The wood, stone, and metal textures and materials have all been done, focusing on bringing them in line with other textures in the game and making sure that repeating textures aren’t overly obvious.

I have also updated some of the meshes of certain construction prefabs. Pictured is the new ramp and support truss. As well as unifying the art style, I also reduced the tri-counts which should help give us a little bit better performance.

I have now jumped onto creating new construction pieces with Sean, with the hope of giving players a host of new possibilities in regards to personalizing what they build, as well as some additional functionality.

Cow_Trix

This week I’ve been continuing work on the construction system. Some cool stuff is coming out of it, that I’m looking forward to getting into the wild.

One of the biggest things to get done is allowing individual structure pieces to have distinct properties. For instance, now a wall (or any other piece) can have a health value, an armor value, anything we want! We can even put color in…

This also affects something I’ve mentioned before, how explosions will work with building damage. As now we can do much more accurate physics about how something is hitting a building, we can do much more realistic simulations of explosions. The blast can be blocked by structures that are strong enough, bounce off structures, and have it’s damage reduced when it does bounce off of something. This is going to make explosions much more physically realistic and dynamic.

Me and Gavku have also been looking into expanding the flexibility of the prefabs themselves, by adding new ones and changing the way we use the existing ones.

Part of this is giving more fine control over your buildings, so giving some smaller options for construction pieces. Currently some things like support trusses and floors are only 4m2 blocks, but there’s no reason we can’t give players 2m2 blocks instead and let them design much more intricate spaces. We’re also looking at things like diagonal walls, aesthetic trimming, ladders, windows, and more.

I’m really looking forwards to giving players the ability to customise and distinguish their bases and buildings more stylistically. The more customized a base is, the more its not just a functional space. It starts to become a home, and you get attached to it.

The approach we’re taking is we want to see buildings in other games, art, or the world that we think are awesome, and then provide the tools to be able to build that in Hurtworld. What kind of base do you want to be able to build? Let us know!