Information on the Gang Beasts Beta 2

To access and download the beta branch, go to your Steam Library and right click on 'Gang Beasts' to select 'Properties'. From there, navigate to the 'BETAS' tab, then select 'public_testing'. You may need to restart steam before 'public_testing' will show up for you.

The patch notes can be found below.

General:

• Fixed an issue preventing bloom from working.
• Updated the project to be able to build and test on consoles again.
• Updated graphics settings to fix a few issues with the transition from 2017 to 2019.
• Mac now uses Metal as its primary graphics API, there should be performance gains, but there may also be a few graphical glitches we need to fix.
• Fixed some issues involving camera tracking.
• Fixed the costume editor issue preventing legs from rotating with the body.
• Fixed the objects that didn’t interpolate online.

Stages:

• Rebaked the lighting on all stages to fix legacy lighting issues so shadows should no longer be dark and stages should be more visually appealing now.
• Adjusted bloom across all stages.

Billboard:

• Adjusted the physics properties of the billboard panels to be more realistic;
• Adjusted the catwalk of the billboard to be flatter and added assistive colliders to help players stay on for longer.

Blimp:

• Adjusted the physics properties of the balloon section of the blimp to have more grip and assist players’ movement over the surface;
• Adjusted the ribbing on the balloon section of the blimp to no longer collide with the players’ ball collider, which should help with navigating the blimp;
• Adjusted the blimp to be more affected by player movement;
• Added a wind effect to the blimp to help visualize the movement.

Chutes:

• Adjusted the lights to remove light artifacts from falling sausages;
• Adjusted sausage distribution;
• Adjusted the chute doors to be able to hold more weight and slower to move, this should, hopefully, incentivise players to fight on them more due to the reduced danger.

Elevators:

• Replaced the glass to use the new fracture system;
• Elevators now escalate consistently.

Gondola:

• Fixed the grating using the wrong shader, it should look more crisp now.

Grind:

• Adjusted the lights to improve baked quality.

Incinerator:

• Replaced the glass to use the new fracture system;
• Updated the fire particle system;
• Adjusted the lights to make the stage brighter and fix some lighting artifacts;
• Fixed an issue with boxes and barrels passing through the front wall.

Lighthouse:

• Replaced the glass to use the new fracture system;
• Updated the background water shader, which is a temporary solution until we upgrade the project to Unity, Universal Render Pipeline (URP);
• Updated the glass materials to prevent a weird lighting issue;
• Adjusted the joints on the Lighthouse to be stronger, so they should no longer break at the slightest touch.

Ring:

• Adjusted lights and materials to brighten the stage slightly;
• Adjusted the rope height to make it slightly easier to eliminate players.

Roof:

• Adjusted the joints on roof to be stronger, so they should no longer break at the slightest touch.

Wheel:

• Added a delay to the pier escalations to prevent them triggering on stage load;
• Fixed an issue that would usually eliminate an unlucky player on load;
• Adjusted the escalation timings slightly, which will be an ongoing process until we’re happy with the way the stage is playing;
• Reduced the dwell timers on the burgers.

Subway:

• Fixed an issue that made the front train push players away instead of pulling players towards it.

Trucks:

• Slight adjustments to the materials and textures;
• Added a slight tilt to the trucks when they move to make their movement more apparent;
• Fixed an issue where the trucks would occasionally mount the curb and collide with oncoming signs;
• Fixed an issue where signs could pass through players instead of colliding with them.

Towers:

• Added a pink smoke effect rising from the cooling towers.

Vents

• Added security cameras to the stage.

Character Movement & Combat:

• Added a temporary diminishing damage reduction when a player revives from a knockout (100% damage reduction on revival reducing to 0% over 10 seconds) to prevent knockout camping.
• Fixed an issue that would prevent players from controlling their movement when lifting themselves, additionally this should now perform better then it did prior to the bug.
• Added the swimming ability to the character (although this won’t be enabled until we add in the new buoyancy in all stages).
• Adjusted arm direction when cheering to be relative to the character’s up instead of world up.
• Increased reaction forces of all moves, they should feel more satisfying now.
• Adjusted damage of all moves to better balance them.
• Adjusted damage received when in certain situations or attempting certain attacks to help balance combat.
• Adjusted character collision to hopefully improve stability during combat.
• Added code to dynamically adjust characters collision mode based on context to help reduce likelihood of limbs getting embedded in objects.

Known Issues:

• We’ve found that, in the upgrade to Unity 2019, the strength of joints that can break are seemingly weak. We have fixed the main issues with this, such as the bridges in Vents collapsing on stage load, but there will likely be some we missed.
• There was an issue that was causing people to disconnect when a stage became too processor intensive (lots of physics). We should hopefully have fixed this, but we will be keeping an eye on the server logs. Please inform us if you see a pattern to any disconnects, e.g. do they usually happen on the same stage and after the same set of actions?
• The guide wheels on Elevators will often desync and move independently of the elevator cars online.
• Occasionally there seems to be a desync on level load that can have some strange effects, such as grey or invisible players, cameras tracking the wrong player, or some physics objects in the wrong position.
• There may be some occasional visual sync issues especially when hats detach. This is entirely visual and is something we’re working on.
• There’s some unintended side effects to the combat changes that may occasionally manifest itself on waves with larger characters, good luck.
• Joints on Vents are somewhat unstable.
• Nametags are sometimes occluded by geometry.
• There are some occasional issues with players not being updated in parties after a disconnect.
• There’s some odd camera behaviour on waves.
• The wheel’s motor sound doesn’t play correctly on Wheel.
• The ping indicator always shows. This is intentional to help with testing during beta.
• There are some strange effects on Elevators online to do with syncing, this will be fixed in a later beta build.
• We have noticed a few crashes on Mac with the new glass, we hope to have fixed this but it’s something we will be keeping an eye on.
• We have noticed occasionally eliminated beasts are formed into meatball like shapes and appear in strange locations, this is not intended and we would like players to know this has nothing to do with the meat processing factory in Beef City.

Regarding the next update:
Sadly, we weren't able to achieve everything on this list but these are goals we’re still working towards. So for clarity, these changes are things we’re currently working on for the next update.

General:

• Update loading screens and game splash

Stages:

• Standardised all buoyancy in the game to use our new buoyancy system (there was a last minute bug we found with this that made players entering liquids extremely strong).
• Adjust Elevators escalation to trigger more consistently.
• Update Buoy mechanics to escalate.
• Update Chutes mechanics to escalate.
• Add more audio and effects to indicate Wheel escalations.
• Add a better indication to when players will be eliminated on Trains when the carriage detaches.

Character Movement & Combat:

• We plan to explore a potential solution that should reduce the success rate of players who like to walk into hazards while holding you by linking grip strength to stamina, which should make it easier to escape prolonged grabs. If this solution seems effective and doesn’t create any other issues, we will try to include it in the next update.

Online:

• Fix a long standing issue with ropes that makes their movements look strange online.
• Fix an issue on Elevators where the roller starts in the wrong position on level load.
• Fix an issue on Elevators where the background does not move online when the stage escalates.
• Fix an issue that makes some things fail to sync correctly on load.