Tom

This week I’ve been fighting against rock bases again, getting a patch ready that will be released in the next few days and will be followed by a full infini wipe on Friday the 17th of February. We received some reports that rock bases are still around so I did some investigating and it turns out there is a very narrow edge case where the ‘am I inside a rock’ check fails when checking an area overlapped by multiple rocks. To deal with this edge case the check first scans through the raycast generating a list of expected colliders, after the standard raycast is complete it checks to make sure all expected colliders were hit, if not it runs the same raycast explicitly against the missing collider/s (ignoring everything else), adding all hits to the original hit count (the method counts hits going in and out of the rock and compares them to determine if inside).

That will hopefully solve the problem of players placing ownership stakes inside rocks but we also need to stop players getting inside the rocks in the first place. I don’t want to spill the beans about this just yet until the fix goes live but we’ve identified 2 ways players are doing this and developed fixes for both.

On the ItemV2 side of things I’ve been working on improving our model viewer, making it more generic so it can load more than just the player and also working on the ui so you can see what mesh configs are attached, adjust any custom color channels and quickly enable/disable visibility. I’m also adding search windows in for selecting mesh attachments to preview without having to build an item or a mesh config group.

Mils

I tweaked the metal smart materials in 3D-Coat last week, they are looking fii-ine. We may still tweak these, but they are getting really close and so is the workflow needed to reproduce this over all the guns. I did a lot of organising and folder restructuring of the assets in the project and in my personal working files, which was necessary so that I don’t end up in file chaos hell. There are a lot of parts and construction files that go into the guns, so now that I have something I won’t get lost in I can press ahead.

I also worked on the AR15 Receiver (Main Gun Body) Hi poly mesh and got that done on the weekend. I will be UV mapping and then baking in the coming days. Can’t wait to see the new materials on this. 😀

Note; these are renders of the Ironsight out of 3DCoat are at 4096 texture sizes, and while the in game guns look great they won’t be quite this texture density.

The AR15 Upper & Lower Receiver High Poly. Added a few dents and some repair work to add life to the mesh.

Spencer

Good progress on the new progression this week. I implemented durability that can be applied to any item and extended item slot UI functionality to allow any item components to feed data into the progress bar (in this case used as a durability meter), and also for items to request that an icon overlay be displayed in a modular way. This will come in handy when we have items with things like battery power. I’ve also been thinking about moving item transitions into using this system to make things like cooking and going moldy easier to read in the UI.

Here is the system in action (with drastically accelerated rates of wear):

Gavku

This week I have been finishing up some of the hair/beard sets and making sure all the separate eyebrow meshs/mats work as intended. I also wrapped up the Harem Pants.

I have also been going through the project and tying up loose ends, making sure that assets are in a finalized state and without errors. Removing, renaming, or replacing any such items. As well as making sure that work files and some archived older work and in game content share naming conventions.

Cow_Trix

Hey folks. This week I’ve been working on dynamically spawned entities. Before, when we spawned an object we would spawn exactly that object with no changes or randomness. A Shigi is always a Shigi, with the same health, texture, mesh, behaviour and so on and so forth. However, as discussed last week, we want spawns to be a lot more dynamic, different and diverse. Some Shigis should be Legendary Shigis, some should have crazy textures, or some mesh attachment, or anything like that. Diverse dynamic objects make for an interesting world. It also means that we’re dealing with way, way fewer prefabs as we don’t have to make an entirely new one to get some variety in objects.

So how this has ended up working is we give a builder object the difficulty the object was spawned with, a seed for making random decisions, and a rarity (things like Common, Uncommon, Rare, etc) that will all influence which object is spawned, what it looks like and how it will act. This has evolved into a pretty fully-fledged system for making these kinds of decisions. For instance, we can occasionally spawn Rare or even Legendary creatures in areas that are difficult enough, that have higher health and attack but drop way better loot. Check out an example of how we can mutate the Bor over harder and harder difficulties!

I’ve also been moving the creatures over to the new MeshAttachment system that the player uses for gear, that the rest of the team have been using and building for a while. We currently don’t have any art assets that take advantage of the system, and really we only swap out materials at this point, but it’s a step towards creatures having attachments that can distinguish and individualise them.