Gavku

So before jumping on to back packs, I went about taking a couple of Marvelous Designer shorts through the clean up process. I ended up with a pair of basic shorter shorts, which could have a thin-ish feeling type material applied to then, and a pair of longer shorts that could have a slightly thicker feel of denim, or like cargo shorts cotton etc. I will bake and texture these up upon approval.

The first backpack I have built is a smaller nylon type pack, next up is a bigger almost army type pack.

Larger backpack sculpt

Mils

After almost two weeks away, we are back in full swing. Dev Days was a really good experience, I learned a lot of interesting stuff, which hopefully we can use to further our game design. The part I really liked was a talk given by a Valve employee Mike Ambinder about the Psychology of Games.

So I have 3 new concepts for the Creature Weapons to show you all. After looking at our game and thinking how these guns would look compared to the rest of the game and also how they would feel when used, we decided to tone back the designs to things grounded in a modern-ish reality. Also a reality that relies partly on scavenging and repair.

The original designs were a little too sci-fi and also we wanted them to have tactile feedback that you can relate to and feel like you are really firing them (lasers are hard to give these attributes to). This is always appreciated by the player, as it gives that feeling of a huge force being unleashed as you shoot each weapon.

So I have 3 body types shown below that will have different component sets. The 3 bodykits you see for example could be classified as one complete set per gun. We want to use the same animation sets where possible, removing the need to animate a whole new set with each ‘hold’ configuration.

So the Pistol will have the same animation set and so would the other two. We will create the other visual components with the same sized interactive pieces. For example the ammo clip will always be the same size, so that the hand, when reloading will always go to the same spot on the weapon and grab an object the same size and move in the same way. The object itself will look as different as we can make it within these constraints.

Also note, the main Blue/Grey areas on each weapon would most likely be the designated area for ‘designs’ as seen on the vehicles.

Above: The Pistol Body Type

Above: The Mag Rail Body Type

Above: The Pump Action Body Type

Tom

We returned from Seattle this week and I’ve been fighting jetlag and working on the next minor update.

I’ve been working on improving vehicle reversing behaviour, to limit reversing speed currently we are directly reducing the acceleration force.

This works well enough for limiting speed but has introduced a new problem where there is no longer enough force to reverse up hills once they get steep enough.

In the next update rather than limiting the force directly, we sample the acceleration curve using a reverse speed percent that is roughly 1/5th of the standard top speed. This allows the same force output as acceleration at low speeds with a much quicker falloff meaning you can reverse up hills again but top speed will still be limited.

Here’s a visual example where the x-axis is the inverse speed percent (ie. (1-speedPercent) so at a stop the value is 1 and at full speed the value is 0) and the y-axis is the normalized force (ie. percentage of maximum acceleration force delivered).



The other major change for this update is more fixes for rock bases. For the Kanga patch I was too hasty declaring the end of rock bases and I apologize. Whilst we made it harder to plant ownership stakes inside rocks there were some bugs in our technique and it was still possible to get stakes down inside rocks usually in spots around the edges where our raycast checks weren’t working like expected.

I’ve fixed up this bug in our logic and it should be even harder (hopefully impossible) to get those stakes down inside rocks. Please keep making noise about the problems you see, we are reading the forums even when we don’t have time to reply.

Spencer

Back into the swing of things, this week I’ve been ironing out the last bugs in ItemV2 ballistics hit and verification code, added back in the muzzle flash.

I added a new impact feedback flash that ensures you can see where your bullets hit in any range in any light. It doesn’t particularly make sense, but I think the feedback is crucial for the feel of the weapon.

My testbed seems to have turned into a Salvador Dalí painting recently. Can’t say I hate it 😉

I also added a hit/flinch layer to our player animations to give better feedback when a player is hit by stuff

Ranged projectile claiming and verification are back to baseline and applying damage once again. The plan is to have it up internally this week and push out a deathmatch only build to the devtest branch next week for you guys to have a play around with and give us some feedback.