Mils

We decided against using patterns on the clothes at least for now as we didn’t want the clothes looking too noisy and ‘el cheapo’ We are going to run with large block colours that will be hand picked by myself or TehSplatt. This should guarantee a colour set that doesn’t look like a clown spewed all over your outfit. I started sorting through the textures for the player making sure that all the clothes/gear that are currently in ItemV2 have a colour mask which we will use to vary the colours of the characters in the game. I also scaled down some of the textures that were a bit big. This will shrink our ever-expanding content data a little and boost performance. After confirming that all the items have at least 1 mask, I laid out the array you can see in the pic below. I’ve picked colours that aren’t too saturated as I think they look better in the game. I’ll be handing the scene over to Tom so he can extract the colour info and correctly author the items in the game. The rarity of these colour schemes will be chosen by us based on our preference.

Tom

This week I’ve been continuing work on the upcoming 0.4.7.0 patch which we’ll be releasing this Friday, the 6th of October.

I’ve been focused on implementing the design I spoke about last week where items can randomly roll their appearance. I’ve been doing this using ItemObjectMutatorStacks which are assets that can be attached to our item generators to alter the item based on context. This context can be rarity, biome (of where the item was spawned) or random. We use the random context to pick the items look based on probability weighting.

Currently I’ve got a few test items setup with some placeholder looks to test the system out and after working through a few tricky bugs related to nested item serialization it appears to be working well.

Tomorrow I’ll be setting up the items following this pattern with the appearances that Mils has been picking out and also tweaking the town loot so attachments can be found there.

Once that’s all done I’ll be able to get an internal build done so we can start the testing and refining cycle.

0.3.8.9 OSX Issues

I also spent some time last week removing the bakenavmesh console command in legacy Hurtworld (not ItemV2) that some players were using to crash the construction system leaving bases invisible on the client.

Unfortunately it looks like the 0.3.8.9 build has some problems on OSX where the input manager doesn’t resolve correctly. We’ll try and push out a fix for this with Friday’s patch, our build process has gotten pretty complex running both branches simultaneously on the one install so it’s a big time saver for us to wait and roll it all into the one update.

TEHSPLATT

Well Hi there, this week I spent a good while cleaning up all the mess I’d made during the creation of the new build biome, lots of files all over the place and things named weirdly and just bad organization, not to mention important files mixed with junk spread across two desk tops. So after the cleansing I started wrapping up some lose ends here and there, mesh and texture fixes, sizing issues, that sort of stuff just tying everything up before taking on another big chunk of work. I made some new world items, more building resources, might need to iterate on them a bit more due to similarities to other icons, but there’s some easy fixes to that sort of stuff like stacking the objects to make them look more like building materials. Metal has it’s challenges when using PBR in a stylized world, if you make the metal look too much like metal it becomes realistic and weird looking among the other items but if you hand paint it, it can look too cartoon-ish, so it’s always interesting finding that middle ground.

We also found an interesting problem with specular values coming in far too shiny, so now I correct the values in Photoshop after exporting from Substance Painter and it seems to work pretty well. As you can see here the one of the left has a very wet look too where as the one on the right feels more like a scratched up helmet would. I’ve had to run through a few old assets fixing this little problem. Once I get the last of this stuff wrapped up I’ll be moving onto some Air Drop assets which should be interesting.

Spencer

This week I’ve been doing some house cleaning in ItemV2 and working through some long standing + critical bugs. I’ve also been talking to members of the community on the best ways to solve balance around divided issues like loot balance and bunnyhopping.

In this weeks patch there will be a new console variable bhopfriction <1/0>. When turned on, bunnyhopping will not be possible. This will hopefully give people options while we come up with a solution that everyone is happy with.

I’ve also added some new loot modes to playerlootmode:

Backpack Only

Backpack +1

Backpack +2

Backpack +3

These will be reminiscent of infamy, like everybody has the same amount of infamy already. You will always drop resource items (even in hotbar) and any gear in your backpack. Modes with +1,2 or 3 will drop the corresponding amount of secured items from your hotbar and equipped gear.

PVP Iteration

I am now moving on to the PVP iteration. I will be looking at making PVP great again, incorporating the new more powerful weapons into the gameplay so they are balanced and useful. I’ve only been in a a gunfight a few times in Hurtworld, mainly because the cost of weapons don’t make sense to not take a bow. I want this to not be the case. Part of this iteration will be fixing up some stuff that needs polish like recoil, gun sounds, silencer functionality, raiding balance, weapon damage, PVP armor etc.

First on my list of functional changes is solving the issues around third person camera shooting projectiles from a magical point over your shoulder, making it possible to hit people that can’t see you



SDK Update

Today I pushed out a big ItemV2 SDK update. This can be downloaded by switching the SDK branch to ItemV2 in steam tools. In the update you will find the complete configuration source to our basecontent project to be used as a reference of how we build vanilla Hurtworld. Tutorials on how to use each part of the SDK are coming soon, for now if you want to jump in and have a poke around now is the time.

Cow_trix

Away this week