Mils

The guns are now getting some iron sight designs as a starting point for the grey-box testing. we need to get a feel for the type of sights we want. Spencer said he wants something that feels fairly fine, so you can really feel your victim being lined up. I couldn’t agree more. This is difficult until we get it in game and actually look at it. I just made a greybox version of an SMG as well. This was based on an old style world war gun. I’ll be designing a component based pickaxe next, using the same construction system as the new guns.

I also made a box for the new sleeper system, which I think you’ll agree is quite hilarious. It had to be low poly and the size of the players collider capsule, so a box was the best option for this one.

Gavku

This week I finalized the two basic shoes, and knocked out a set of Timberland style boots with three skins being classic, dark, and worn.

We are also looking to do some extra character skins of varying nationalities/skin tone. The changes need to be enough to sell a different look, however a lot of the facial landmarks need to stay intact to accommodate hair/hats/facial hair etc.

Cow_Trix

Hey folks. Not a lot of pretty pictures from me this week. I started off this week by sorting and trying to make a dent on the Bankroll support email. Still about eight hundred emails still needing a read, but hopefully we will get through all of them eventually. Thanks for all of your bug reports and suggestions!

For the Friday patch, I fixed an exploit where people were able to push themselves through solid objects by building into the space they were occupying. We think this was exacerbated due to recent changes to player collision. The solution was to just create a conservative collision check on all the construction attachments that only checked against players. This might mean that your friends can block your building a bit more easily, but it’s a small price to pay for guaranteeing that when a construction piece is placed, it isn’t going to push a player through a wall. I would strongly advise anyone who has made a custom construction pack to go back and add a new ConstructionVolume to all of your attachments. There’s a handy “Snap To Bounds” button now that will set the ConstructionVolume to encompass the attachment. Set the “Don’t Bake” and “Override Collision Mask” flags to true. You’ll want to set the Collision Mask field to Players, PlayersRoot and PlayerSelf. See below (and the updated attachments in the SDK) for examples.

I’ve gone and optimised the map generation a bit, and ran Spence through the map generation workflow for the first time. This was good as Spence was able to pick it up and make sense of it pretty fast! I was worried that after all this time being in my map-generation-programming hermit cave, the pipeline might have been far too convoluted, but it seems like it has turned out to be a pretty cool toolset. Spence requested some QoL upgrades which I implemented, as well as giving me some direction on what needs some tweaking in the generation. More on this next week.

I also took a bit of a look at how Biomes are structured, and it looks like I’ll rework them to be a bit more flexible in what they can do. For instance, we are probably going to implement things like NoBuild zones within the Biome system for ItemV2, instead of with colliders as they currently are. We’ve run into some performance issues with big colliders, so it’s something we need to move away from. How this would work is that biomes now can choose how they are blended with all other biomes. The logical structure of this is very similar to how we blend ambient audio sources – a biome can be Normalized, Greedy, or Overlayed. Currently the behaviour of all biomes in Hurtworld is normalised, which means that the total weight of all biomes adds up to 1. Adding these two other modes means we can have additive biomes – like a biome that only adds a binary effect like NoBuild. The Greedy blend mode also opens up a different way of doing weather which might be a lot better. I’ll go into more detail with this when it’s more complete.

Tom

This last week I’ve been working on getting the 0.3.8.0 sleeper update finished.

The reason we added sleepers so suddenly rather than waiting until after ItemV2 was to deal with an exploit where people were logging off and then having their friends build over their position causing them to be pushed away when logging back in, with the right setup and a bit of luck people were using this to push themselves inside rocks and other terrain.

Sleepers stop this by adding a no build area around the sleeper, if the server you’re playing on has sleepers disabled then a different invisible sleeper is created that is just a no build area that can’t be interacted with.

These invisible sleepers have a timeout so they don’t stick around forever creating permanent no build zones but the timeout is long enough that someone would have to be seriously committed to be able to exploit them.

I also made a change to the way vehicle stats are updated that hopefully will stop a bug where the physics world became desynced from the main simulation after sending many redundant updates over a long period time (20+ hours), this was causing vehicles to move in strange ways after resting for a long time, sometimes penetrating through walls and other terrain. If you notice this still happening in 0.3.8.0 please let us know!

I’ve also had some time to work on ItemV2 fixing some bugs in the mesh baking system, extending our model viewer to work with the first person view and getting vehicles working.

This morning I’ve been working on a quick patch for the sleeper update to fix spawns after your sleeper is killed so you’ll properly respawn back at your totem if you have one. In this patch I’m also going to tweak the spear right click numbers a bit to make it easier to flip goats back up as it’s gotten a bit tricky after the last spear balance change.

This week I’ll be adapting the mesh baking system for vehicles and working on reimplementing all our current items under the new system.

Spencer

This week I’ve been mostly playing studio head, getting upto speed with what everyone else is doing and making sure we are moving in the right direction. I had a bit of a play with Cow_Trix’s terrain generation toolkit and have to say its pretty amazing. It really takes all the repetitive work out of map creation, meaning we should be able to pump out some sort of new map per month or so once we get rolling. I spent a bit of time refining the basic formula to the terrain, to ensure things don’t feel too empty or too small. I’ve now passed it back to Cow_Trix for further iteration.

I spent the rest of the week looking at upgrading our ItemV2 branch to the Unity 5.5 beta, there are a few features that we have been waiting on a while. This failed miserably, so I’ve settled for 5.4. One awesome benefit this brings is allowing us to re-use the same asset bundle builds between platforms. Meaning all workshop items will be 1/3 the size and build in 1/3 the time.

Lastly I ported our tooltip system to ItemV2. This week I’ll be back on bullet feedback in preparation for the ItemV2 deathmatch release.