Tom

This week I’ve been working on player pvp armor. We really want to limit any extra pvp power that comes from progression to allow new players to stand a chance against more experienced ones which is why we’ve done things like separating pve and pvp damage.

In order to limit the power of pvp armor we’re changing it to more of a consumable item, currently we have three armor slots setup (head, chest, legs), the armor will only apply if you are damaged on a hitbox related to that slot. If the armor reduces damage in this way then the item will lose a large amount of durability. After running out of durability the armor will unequip itself and will no longer provide any protection or other stats just like other items.

I’ve also started playing around with our spawn mutators to change up creature spawns.

To see what kind of things would be possible I’ve been working on this fire spitting tokar that shoots explosive projectiles. The tokar has had it’s colors, size, attack projectile and projectile launching settings altered (I slowed it down and added some extra inaccuracy due to its lethality).

This guy will be a very rare spawn (with rare loot to match!) and most creatures will have subtler alterations.

TEHSPLATT

Trees!!! After working out a whole lot of kinks in the work flow and then fixing some really weird problems with transparency causing the leaves to appear grey while in direct sunlight due to the texture maps utilizing different RGB channels for different maps, which can be rather annoying. They look a lot better in our games lighting than they did in Unity’s standard lighting which is a huge bonus. The hardest challenge with these trees was getting the foliage to fill out the trees shape with the small poly budget and not have it look naked, I found that turning the alpha cut-off up fixed this and then later found out that we have fixes for the standard tree shaders and turning the alpha cut-off up the further away you are is one of the fixes, so that was handy. We randomly placed 100,000 trees in the scene and it still ran decently which is a great sign. Since these are my first trees I’m 100% sure there’s a whole lot of stuff I could have done to make them look better and while it’s a steep learning curve it’s one that I am very interested in. Here’s some pictures.

Mils

So I tackled the AWM receiver this week. The receiver on the weapons takes more time than the other components. There was a lot of fiddling with the UV maps and getting the arrangements right. I had to juggle the very long side panels around until I got them to a good spot, which took longer than I’d like. I plan to have the receiver part finished hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday this week. This depends on the baking going well. There are some highly suspect areas around the slide bolt that I think may cause some hassles when baking. Fingers crossed.

Here’s a sneak peak into the working of how I plan my UV maps (image below). I built this test texture myself, which has angled lines, circles and the little pink and white checkers. The angled & circle lines show how non-straight lines will show up when the texture is applied. This gives me a good feel for the texel density I need to use to make the gun look good and what size map to use for it. The little pink and white checkers are 5 pixels across each. I build everything on a 4096 map now and then scale it down to 2048, 1024 etc etc. At 4096, 20 pixels (or 4 checkers) is enough padding to not get mip mapping errors when I scale all the way down to 256 from 4096. I make everything 4096 now because I find you get better retention of quality when painting at a high res and then downsampling than painting at the size it will end up at in game. Also if we ever wanted to go higher quality for 4K, at least I could use the larger maps later.

Below is the UV map and the receiver only.

Cow_Trix

Hey folks! I’m back from a nice, relaxing two week break and getting back into map tools. More on that next week.

Spencer

This week I’ve been fleshing out the upgraded impact effect system and its coming together really nicely. This involved porting all our old particle effects from the core project to an extensible structure in our mod framework as well as porting over legacy sound groups into the new configurable sound group structure. Pretty boring stuff but makes an enormous impact on how PVP feels. I don’t have a great medium for showing off sound stuff so you’ll just have to check it out in this Fridays patch.

For the rest of the week I’ll be restructuring how blueprints drop throughout the progression to not drop weak end game gear in the first biomes that really doesn’t help, you as well as figuring out where the PVP armor stuff Tom has been working on fits into the progression.

If I have time I will also be making the item Rarity / Item Level stuff more clear, so that you can get a rare item at low item level (eg starting biome) that actually helps in that biome as well as allowing you to craft entry level fabricators from the workbench for common level items. You will likely want to hold off for a better rare blueprint but this will give you the option not to be gated by RNG.