Mils

Hey there mi amigo’s. So I got into a jam with 3D Coat, where my layers weren’t exporting to Photoshop correctly. Basically my transparency isn’t working and so I had to ask the experts on the forums what is happening. I wanted to finish the skin designs for the Mozzy but got held up there. In the meantime I have started modeling the bed which looks pretty cool so far. The bed had to be big enough to look reasonable but not too big that it filled a whole foundation cube in space. When I double checked the models I could see that the length of 2 metres actually looks fine, and this happens to be the length of the character so full steam ahead on that one. I had a lot of fun simulating the bedspread with Maya’s nCloth functionality. This can be a dark and winding path but it certainly paid off for me this time. 😛 This is not complete yet but it’s looking good, and I’m getting decent poly counts too.

Okay so managed to finish the bed today (Monday) so snuck it in. Came out well there’s some funny scratchings on it too. You can see the 3 LOD’s that I made for it the closest one is the full mesh, then the 2nd and finally 3rd.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, nothing much to show this week as everything’s been technical fixes to bring the map tools up to good usable point. For the next release my game plan is to make the map a lot more interesting over all, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now but due to the tools not being artist friendly I haven’t been able to do much. The hardest part about taking on this task is making sure I stay focused on the bigger picture, it’s very easy to dump a bunch of time into the art side of things instead of carrying on with the general feel of the map. The stamp tool we have is a pretty huge help with this kind of stuff cause you can stamp subtle changes to height or vegetation without disrupting the other things in the land making everything feel disconnected. Currently I’m in the trail and error phase for a lot of things so probably the most interesting thing I have to show visually is this Substance Designer beach grass I was testing out to replace our pretty out dated old grass. I tried to give it a more stylized and kelpy feel.

Tom

Hey Hurworldians, this week I’ve been continuing the work on item upgrading and crafting.

Crafting times have now been removed from all items and you are able to specify how many times you want to craft a recipe so making full stacks of building materials will be much easier now.

Adding crafting count into the crafting window was done as just a quick change, a proper overhaul of the crafting window to reintroduce categories and probably show more information about what items upgrade into is still part of our plans but won’t be making into this experimental update.

On the item upgrading side of things I’ve been going deep into the configuration of our items, assigning compatible upgrade types for most equippable items (for instance a pickaxe can take upgrade types of weapon, melee weapon, tool and pickaxe). I’ve also been creating more ‘upgrade gems’ (may not be gems by patch release) so that there are many options for every item and just about every stat we use can be altered. We’ll be playing around with the exact mix of stat assignments and upgrade point values (items can only take a limited number of upgrades) through the rest of this week and the next to try and find a decent balance for release.

Unfortunately I didn’t get into expanding item customisation just yet but still hopeful of getting there by the end of this week as thats our internal cutoff for features for the March 15 patch and all the work next week should be bug fixes, testing and polish.

Spencer

Hey guys, this week I’ve been on the respawning refactor. My goals are to continue our work on balancing out the punishment for death and try to eliminate any scenario where death isn’t something you are concerned about.

Death Tax

My original plan was to have the ownership stake consume some resource when ever someone spawns at it, which would have likely been amber. This has a heap of issues like the one idiot who dies all the time burning all your amber, your stake de-authing because respawns consumed all the amber etc.

After more thought I realized that there isn’t really a good reason to couple the respawning mechanics with the ownership of cells, so decided to decouple the 2 functions of the stake and introduce a new machine for each player, the Bed.

Bed

The bed serves as a spawn point for one player, and will have much harsher respawn cooldown requirements than the previous systems. Likely something around 3 mins cooldown after respawning once which will be shared across all beds. For scenarios where respawning quickly is vital I introduced a buyback system similar to DOTA where you can put an amber supply into your bed and depending on how long left your bed has to cooldown, you can consume amber to respawn instantly instead of waiting out the timer. Respawning at the noob beach will always be an option regardless of cooldown.