Spencer

Hi Guys, we’ve been making awesome progress on this weeks build. I’m confident that the direction we are heading is the right one. Having items be valuable again has really opened our design options up for utilizing all the amazing tech we’ve built over the last year to do with item customization. I mean who wants to upgrade, paint, name, pimp an item if its only gonna die on you in a few hours of use. Tomorrows build will be our foundation, with some really exciting stuff to come.

The new map is also coming together amazingly. Cow_trix has done a great job bringing everything together on that front and it should really bolster the playability of this build.

This week I’ve been working on automating the amber protection cost calculation to be based on source materials as well as boring content configuration stuff. Currently this tool is only usable for us, so modded items will have to explicitly specify their amber protection cost in the data provider. Eventually I plan to do this calculation on the fly at runtime.

Performance

Perf is currently pretty ratshit, the new map has very high creature and tree density which feels really good if you can pull 60fps. Once we lock down our new content targets we will do a heavy optimization pass on foliage and creatures, fear not.

Mils

So I spent a lot of time messing with the chopper’s proportions last week. I am making sure that the scale suits the Huey proportions which is weirdly a hard hard thing to do. All the blueprints for the Huey seem to be wrong, so I have been back and forthing between blueprints and photo’s and measurements from chopper enthusiast’s websites. Helicopters are not mainstream consumer vehicles, so the information available on them is limited to people with businesses that run/fix them, enthusiasts and rich peeps. I’m getting close to being happy to start the high poly modeling.

We did some play testing on Friday of the new map and it was pretty good. Still a ways from the final product but will be great to see a good map back in V2.

I also got stuck into selecting some colours for the vehicles. These will be used until we build the UI customisation section. They are hand picked by me to look good, and not like, er… cancer. I checked these on the Kanga and Roach as they have fairly different shapes/surface area. The other vehicles should look fine with these also.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians! This week I’ve been helping to sync up our base content with legacy hurtworld as well as chasing down some elusive bugs.

I fixed the problem of tree leaves and bushes appearing ‘see-through’ when using deferred rendering combined with the SSAO effect on. This was occuring because the leaves translucency required them to be drawn after the deferred pass so they had data about the background color to apply the translucent lighting. A consequence of this was that the leaves and bushes weren’t being written into the normal buffer which is what SSAO uses to apply its shadowing effect, instead the effect was applied to the objects behind giving them effectively outlining these objects through the leaves. To solve this I changed our SSAO method over to a different implementation that doesn’t depend on the normal buffer.

I also fixed a few other issues like resource nodes spawning pre-damaged, stat events not being fired properly after loading from a save (things like toxin not clearing off your character after loading in with toxin applied or smelting machines not updating their temperature until being relit), the construction ui not removing itself properly after using a construction item and fixing issues with vehicle inventory ui not updating after adding or removing storage slots.

I also setup a vehicle crafting machine that is crafted out of the first workbench and allows crafting of vehicle airdrop beacons, vehicle repair wrenches and also vehicle engine upgrades.

We’re now at a point where we are pretty much back to legacy balance with everything but vehicles plus we’ve got our new item insurance system + item recycling. We’re hopeful this can serve as a stable base that we can gradually add to based on the lessons we’ve learned with our experimental releases so far.

Cow_Trix

Heya folks! This week I’ve been getting together a new version of Mangatang for the new patch. It’s been going well, and I’m pretty happy with where the pipeline is at. I’ve passed off the hand-polishing to Splatt, so soon we’ll see some awesome, interesting areas in the map. Building a new map from scratch is always a bit of a mammoth task, but the brief of trying to somewhat emulate the layout of diemensland helped a lot in that. It was nice to return to it’s familiar structure, while being able to apply the many new lessons we’ve learnt since then. In many ways we’ve tried to combine the best of old Mangatang with the best of Diemensland. There will be some familiar but different landscapes – including the sand dunes! Instead of a beached aircraft carrier, you’ll have the skeletons of a deserted city to explore for some good loot. Check out some screenshots below!

There’s still a few things that need tweaking – for a few of the biomes, I don’t think the base ground ripple is right, and there are some spots that just don’t work in terms of ground scattering and line of sight. However, with the new workflow we can split this work up nice and easily, thank god! So map iteration will now be a lot more parallelizable.

On the code side of things, I was working on the usability of the map tools, trying to fix up some of the more confusing parts of the UI and putting in some warnings and restrictions to prevent setting up stamps and layers in a nonsensical way.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, this week I’ve spent a lot of time gathering and making assets for polishing/dressing our biomes. I’ve figured out a good way to sculpt rocks that’s extremely quick and easy to get the noise frequency looking correct over the different sizes of rocks. Due to how fast rock sculpting is at the moment I whipped up some replacement rocks for our main rocks that are everywhere. I started to implement them into the red desert biome with a new colour pallet and over all look that feels more like the Australian out back. This involved trials with a lot of vegetation and different foliage which doesn’t work great due to the grass getting culled and not providing the colour difference from far away. I played with putting the green colour into a second red desert terrain splat to get a consistent colour change even after the grass has culled but it still needs some work. I’ve also started to work with the actual map tools and am definitely planning on playing with re-doing the biomes in my spare time.

