Welcome back!





This week we want to get a bit more technical, and go into some of the core systems of Hide or Die, and explain some of the stuff we have been working on in greater detail.





Character Art





This week we are working towards finalizing the Krampus character, rigging him, and creating first person arm meshes for this awesome and terrifying Hunter.









Imagine being wrapped up in his chains, and shredded by his razor sharp teeth and claws.





One point of feedback we received last week was the harpoon gun - it felt weak, small, and weightless. Where as we want the gun to feel heavy, powerful and menacing. To better fit these traits we reworked the model, made it significantly wider and tweaked the way the gun is held to better convey weight and scale. This is a quick screenshot of how the weapon is going to look in first person.





We also have been finalizing the color selection system for our base backer items, and are working on converting all our existing clothing assets to this standard.

Backer Item Set - With Color masking for custom color choice





We also created morphs to allow these clothing items to work on the female character. This work continues across all our clothing items to have a shared library of assets for both male and female characters.





WIP - Logo / Backer image placement still WIP

As can be seen in that last image, we have already begun implementation of some of the backer faces, and are working to nail down the pipeline. Big focuses next week are on fixing minor issues like the seam between the head and the neck, and improving the skin shader.









UI





UI Work has wrapped up for the main menu design. Currently the menu is being moved into the final implementation stage where it will be tied into our backend for item tracking, progression tracking, and stat tracking.





















Animations





Work continued on a lot of the bespoke animations for the game - including survivor to killer transitions, and the prototyping of hideable kill animations. If you get found inside a hideable, you are killed instantly.





Survivor to Hunter Transition (WIP)





Dumpster Kill Animation (WIP)





Keep in mind that these animations are WIP, many of the animations across the game are still in blockout form, where the timing and poses are being worked on and finalized prior to the silky smooth and detailed animations that will be completed down the line.

Comic Con





Working with one of our partners we were able to get a section of a booth dedicated to Hide Or Die at Comic Con in San Diego. For this we created some additional key art, and a cut of our kickstarter trailer. These can both be found below. The key art image works great as a phone wallpaper - check it out!













You can download these images as wallpapers here: https://imgur.com/a/Aq04f9i





This is a quick look at the trailer edit we showed at comic con:





Backer Updates





Around 90% of our surveys have been submitted - the remaining surveys need to be submitted by August 1st, 2018 in order for us to have enough time to implement these rewards into the game.









Any surveys submitted after August 1st, may not have their rewards implemented at launch - so please be sure to get them in!





If you need to fill out the survey still, you can access it by visiting our Kickstarter page while logged into your Kickstarter account, a prompt will appear at the top asking for the survey to be completed: kickstarter.com/projects/hideordie/hide-or-die-asymmetrical-horror-royale

Dedicated Server Implementation





Dedicated servers and our procedural level system did not get along as we began making this important transition. The system is based on 189m x 189m unique sections connected with 63m x 189m transition zones which house the light tower area. When we moved away from our p2p network we had to rewrite the way our code handled the spawning in and spawning out of all of these sections.





A big issue was that we were required to store all of those level sections in memory at all times even if they were not loaded in. As you can imagine, this caused major issues with texture streaming, performance, and stuttering. We attempted to switch over to an instance based approach so we didn't have to store those levels in memory, thus greatly improving performance, but we were getting random disconnects of the client to the server.





This was game breaking for us and is the primary reason we shifted the beta timeline. The issue was that the level section instance being loaded on the server was different than the instance being loaded on the clients, causing a mismatch and then a disconnect. We were loading level instances by their name, ie. FarmDocks, Slaughterhouse, etc. The problem was that the name of the exact instance differs between them. We thought a simple fix would be to load on the server first and then the clients, but because of the naming convention it still mismatched.





The fix finally came in when we saved specific instance info, got it loaded on the server first, and then loaded on the clients which resulted in success! We still have some work to do on optimizing when and how long to stream stuff in, but we've cleared the hurdle and it is on to the next one!

Beta Update





If you didn't catch yesterdays beta update, you need to check it out here: https://www.vecfour.digital/news/hide-or-die-beta-updates-roadmap





We announced that beta will start on October 31st so start planning your Halloween!