Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since the last blog I’ve been working on a temperature mechanics overhaul and implementing the visual override system as well as a few smaller changes and bugfixes.

Temperature Overhaul

Shortly after last blog I worked on rebalancing temperature levels in biomes and thermal protection stats on gear but wasn’t able to arrive at anything I thought was a decent improvement over what we already had, ultimately there were too many moving parts to this system and its complexity was never communicated well to our players.

I decided to make this system simpler allowing us to better communicate game state to players and allow the system to be much more predictable (ie. Make it much easier to work out how much thermal protection you need to survive in a biome and make the derivative timers on the cold and hot ui stat bars reliable).

To achieve this I’ve implemented the following changes:

Players now have a safe temperature range within which their internal temperature will return to or stay at the baseline

When players are in an area outside their safe temperature range their internal temperature will change in proportion to how far outside the safe range they are

When players are in an area outside their safe temperature range their internal temperature will change in proportion to how far outside the safe range they are Safe temperature range starts at 10-30 degrees celsius

Cold/Heat protection no longer dampens internal temperature changes directly but instead now increases the low/high temperature limits respectively

Nutrition no longer affects internal temperature directly, instead a ‘well fed’ buff is given when at 75% nutrition or greater that gives heat and cold protection

Cooked steaks now add a ‘nutritious meal’ buff for 5 mins giving both heat and cold protection (this stacks with well fed buff)

Added a thermometer to the ui showing the current external temperature plus your temperature limits (no preview yet as its still programmer art)

Changed temperatures to be consistent throughout daytime or nighttime with a very short transition between the two (used to be constantly blending between a peak during the day and a trough during the night, because the temperature was constantly changing like this the derivative timers on the cold/heat ui stat bars would never be accurate as they were calculated for the temperature at this instant)

Made cold biomes colder during the day (not as cold as night but protection is still needed to survive) and hot biomes warmer during the night.

Rebalanced Red Desert to match Snow biome. Ultranium has been downgraded to be an equivalent of Mondinium rather than an upgrade, it can be mined with the Titranium pickaxe. Ultranium is used to craft high tier cold protection gear and Mondinium is used in high tier heat protection gear. Ultranium pickaxe is now equivalent to Mondinium.

I’m hoping with these changes players will be able to understand the system a lot better so they can tell where their limits are and what kinds of stats they need to complete the content they are targeting. These are some pretty large changes so I’ll be watching feedback closely and will be trying to fix any glaring issues ASAP post patch release.

Visual Overrides

The other major task I worked on was implementing visual override slots for the player. These can be accessed from the character menu just under the equipment tab and when items are equipped in them they remove the visuals from the normal slot and replace them with its own visuals.

Items in these slots obey the standard drop rules meaning if they are not protected they will be dropped. We made this choice because even though it won’t affect much this week as we are making gear auto-protected (see blog #124) we don’t want these slots to be gamed if we give them special protection rules and revert the gear auto-protection plus we have modders to consider as well (who may not setup their gear items with auto-protection).

It won’t be ready for this weeks patch but we plan on making an item modifier to ‘mute’ an item, removing its stats but making it auto-protected at the same time effectively turning it into a look only item.

Other small changes + bugfixes

Fragment drop rates increased

Adjusted bor hitboxes so it’s easier to land headshots around top of head

Removed no build zone on ownership stake that was previously used to reserve the spawn area

Buffed radiation protection fragments to match toxin protection fragments

Campfires can now be placed in no build zones.

Fixed Ultranium node’s effect zone being placed on the wrong layer (was intercepting projectiles)

Fixed binary effect tooltip timers showing incorrectly

Fixed biome client effects not playing

Fixed Melee Major AttackSpeed Fragment applying the wrong mutator (was applying the minor mutator)

Mils

I’ve made a new Muzzle Brake for the Pistol which is really sexy when added on. Gives the gun a whole new persona. I love these things. They remind me of badass 80’s action films with ridiculous guns and even more ridiculous ‘one liners’ This was quick to make as it is pretty much one piece of metal.

I also got the extended mag done which came out nice, this was pretty easy because most of the modeling was done on the previous mag. I built the extra base bit and then got through the texturing pretty quick. The pace I’m getting through these I may be onto making the designs (skins) by Monday.

I also got the Iron Sights done and they look real nice. We’ll have to figure out how close we want the viewer to get to them and what Field of View we want to use with them also. These have a nice highlighted green mark on each so you can find your aim easily in low light. I made the finish on these the black oxide to contrast with the grey of the gun body to change things up a bit.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week has been a lot of refinement on the Mangatang revamp, the first pass I did was way off, a lot of the ground generation in Map Magic was designed for a smaller map which meant it didn’t scale properly. I also didn’t measure the distance from shore line to the first hills which meant when you actually spawned in you were a million miles away from reaching any thing. One of the main things was lack of grass and trees being too scarce and spaced too far apart which means when you’re running there’s nothing close enough to you to signal how fast you’re moving which can make things feel endless and exhausting. After running around Diemen’s Land some more I noticed you felt a lot more enclosed and then Spencer pointed out that my hills were very short compared to the original ones, this happened due to some stamping issues that caused the hill steepness to increase and meant I had to squash the stamps, leaving the hills pretty small and pathetic. I’ve gone back through and recaptured a lot of the original hills and am currently re-stamping them while also making changes to the layout as it’s pretty noisy at the moment. Here you can see the difference between the first pass I did and latest.

Spencer

Not much of an update from me this week, I’ve working on the tedious task of updating our Localization and filling in the enormous amount of missing translation data with the new V2 items. Hella boring work but needs to be done before V2 can go live. If you run Hurtworld in non English mode expect things to get a lot better soon.