Rust
Last week was a slow one. I decided that vehicle rust in screenshots looked poor, so I set out some time to remap the rust distribution on the truck and vehicle components. This took way longer than I anticipated and I'm still not entirely happy with the result. Regardless, I can't keep losing time on such minor issues, so I'm calling it and moving back onto more productive tasks that get us closer to a demo of the game and eventually a trailer.
Scheduled Calls
Another hit to productivity was losing time to scheduled calls. We've been spending a lot of time chatting to various people who's time I'm extremely grateful for. These calls need some preparation but also follow-ups though. Ultimately, these short-term hits to productivity should hopefully bear fruit in the future.
Rust Remapping
Most of my dev time was spent on remapping rust as mentioned above. Which essentially involves me re-doing the UV's for the rust maps on the vehicle, and also rejigging the alpha values of the rust texture to allow for gradual rust accumulation.
How does Rust work in Honcho?
Rust functions as a core part of the component condition system in Honcho. Each part of the car has a condition value, shown to the player as a percentage in the UI. Condition lowers from collisions, overheating, running poor fluid mixtures, and a bunch of other stuff specific to each component (e.g. tyres skidding or driving on the wrong terrain). Condition is displayed as scratches and dents on the component. Rust, however, acts as the total condition of these components.
You can think of it as how brittle a component is becoming. A higher level of rust means the component will take damage and wear much faster than a non-rusty component. Rust accumulates on "dirty" vehicles, accelerated based on the weather and region the player is in. Rust is easy to prevent, through cleaning the car - we'll discuss this in another post - but very hard to fix.
Rust is a huge part of real world car conservation. The Japanese have a word for cars so old and rusted that they've been left to the weeds, kusahiro (草ひろ). Don't neglect your truck, don't become kusahiro!
How does it look?
Well, let's take a look at a couple examples.
A truck with a little rust.
A truck with a little more rust. The effected components are more brittle and will wear quicker.
What about non-metal components?
Good point, plastics become warped, fabrics matted, and rubber gathers moss. These can all be fixed the same way you fix a rusty component, which I'll discuss at a later date.
Anyway, that's enough rambling about rust. I'll have to redo the damage mapping and dirt mapping at a future date, but for now I really want to get back to pushing forward on content and functionality.
Wishlists : 5,102
Be sure to let us know what you think, and thank you all for supporting development. You are all fab.
Comments (6)
i eatid a lemon
Hey, how's the game doing? Long time no updates and I'm getting worried! :(
Hey, we've been away visiting family in Denmark. I've been back to work this week and am aware of the delay this has caused. I'm working on getting functionality in for repair and parts shops. Don't worry, the game just needs time.
In your post you state that rust is very hard to fix. I imagine that it'll be very annoying if you're trying to 100% repair your vehicle but your door has 98% because of rust. Will there be a way to repair that last 2% of rust? Maybe something cheaper for the player to more easily deal with very small amounts of rust. Like an iron scourer or something similar.
That's a good point. Looking at how condition repair works in a previous post, components need repairing once they hit a certain threshold, but can be easily "maintained" using lubrication spray (topped up from ~80% to 100%). I think we'll probably adopt a similar solution, having lubrication keep condition and rust topped up, but if either falls below a certain threshold, then they'd need rare parts the repair. For Rust, this would require getting increasingly rare components depending on what threshold it has fallen below (e.g. body filler, grinding discs). This all needs careful balancing, but I think it opens up some interesting dilemmas for players embarking on long journeys.
Sick