Spencer

Hi Hurtworldians!

We’ve been a bit slack on the dev blogs the last couple weeks, rest assured we’re hard at work on the content patch dropping this Thursday. Main features include an overhaul of how we handle water including adding swimming mechanics, new town events, a big upgrade of our Unity engine version (about 2 years of updates), the new Mac10 SMG weapon and a ton of bug fixes.

Water

Water has turned out really nice, while this patch mainly focuses on the interaction of water, players, vehicles, animals etc and introduces some basic water features throughout the map, it paves the way for the upcoming islands patch which will drastically change the way that end game is played.

Quality of life

We spent a bunch of time this wipe playing and came across some very annoying bugs like name plates disapearing, re-amber protecting your gear being mega glitchy. Name plates should now always show on other players, we’ve also introduced a protect all feature to amber protection to reduce the friction between respawning and getting back into the fight. By right clicking on a stack of amber, you will see the option to protect all in the current storage.

Thursdays patch will be going out at 5pm Melbourne time and will force a wipe for all severs.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since last devblog I’ve been mostly working on our upgrade to the latest version of Unity (2018.3). This upgrade brings some significant performance improvements, most importantly being the physics engine being upgraded to PhysX 3.4.2 and the terrain rendering system moving most of its processing off the cpu and onto the gpu. This upgrade should also help with stability in the long term because we’ll be back on a properly supported version that is receiving patches and fixes but in the short term there will probably be a bunch of teething issues to sort out when the upgrade goes live, I’m expecting some hotfixes early into the 0.7.2.x cycle.

Most of the upgrade work so far has been updating our tools, dealing with changes to build pipeline and then either upgrading to the latest version or finding replacements for 3rd party tools and middleware that were broken in the upgrade process. Thankfully this has gone well and everything seems mostly stable now, just a few of our replacement screen effects need some extra polish and we have a few shader bugs left to stomp out in the Mac and Linux builds. Workshop mods will need to republished from the upgraded SDK to be 100% compatible with 0.7.2.x and I’ll be pushing out a preview SDK to a steam beta branch ahead of release to help sort out any issues ahead of time and make sure mods are ready to go. If you wish to get involved in this please email me at tom@bankrollstudios.com

As well as the 2018 upgrade I’ve also been working on 0.7.1.x hotfixes mostly dealing with issues in the tether system. Most of the tether issues were due to the joint constraints getting into an impossible to fulfill state which was causing it to create some insane forces and shoot stuff all over the map. Currently to stop this occurring I added in a simple force limit beyond which the tether is broken but in testing I’ve seen promising results from changing the simulation to be 2 bodies connected by one joint instead of 3 bodies connected by 2 joints and also turning off the auto correct impossible configurations system. This more comprehensive fix was put on hold until our Unity upgrade was complete as the physics engine upgrade would mean a bunch of duplicated work to rebalance and retest the system post-upgrade. Unfortunately the Unity upgrade has taken a bit longer than expected so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to implement the true fix for the 0.7.2.0 release but it should make it into a post-release hotfix.

I’ve also been implementing the new Mac10 sub machine gun into the game, which will be a high rate of fire, short to medium range gun introduced at the titranium level of crafting.

Whilst it will be launching with only the base attachments (standard mag and ironsights) and a single flat color pattern we plan to fully stock it out with extra attachments and patterns in future patches.

Mils

So I got the Main part of the MAC10 done this week. The same styling that the other guns have received. This came out nice. I’ll be making a tip, magazine and iron sight at least for the release of this. I’ll get to the other parts after that and the colour masks for everyone to customise their gun. There are some funny inscriptions on this that I’m sure you can just see if you look closely. 😀

I’ll be away taking a holiday for the next 2 weeks, so seeya after that.

Update: So I got back from the holiday and here’s the MAC10 with a few more parts. Coming along nicely.

TEHSPLATT

So this week I’ve been speed building town event levels, got two so far, they are pretty enjoyable, tried to make the way they play match the level of gear players would have in these specific areas. They will both be placed close to the shore line in the jungle areas, which means most players will be coming in with tier 1 bows, spears and hatchets so I’ve made sure the levels have a bunch of tricky routes and decisions to make meaning players with low tier gear can prevail using knowledge of the map. The second map is a pretty weird one, I went with this tree house , multi-level type design, very vertical, which is something I’m interested in exploring more. I would like to get one more event done and then drill down on some modular building assets so I can replace the grey boxes with some actual nice looking assets.

So this is the before and after stage of building the towns, start with a grey box so you can design the actual play-ability of the level without worrying about visuals, then when you feel like you’ve got that sorted, you move on to replacing all the grey boxes with something visually interesting. I also worked on some swimming animations, I’m not an animator but I have bit of a grasp on the basics and understand the general pipeline. I made a breast stroke animation and a wading in water idle animation, I would also like to update the get up from crash animation as well, it’s pretty place holder.

HENRY

What’s really hood?

Been a minute since I’ve been in the blog, but I’m back grinding on this extended trailer. We realised whist the V2 trailer was action packed, fast paced and lots of fun. It didn’t quite communicate some of the best things about Hurtworld, so over the last two weeks we got the squad together and captured some great moments of teamwork, heartache and PVP action.

Aside from this footage I have also captured a large amount of cinematic style shots to assist in showing the games function and features. During the time spent capturing this footage we have worked out there are more things that need to be added to the script, not to mention after hearing my voice overplayed on loop, I am no longer happy with the delivery.

So new words, better internation, longer shots, more gameplay and 5 players worth of footage to go through and edit. I better get back to it.