This is a bit of an intermediate patch with 2 unfinished maps we’d like to get some early testing on: The new practice environment and a new multiplayer map “Dome (WIP)”. The occasion being preparation for another public play event, this time at RetroLudix at Enghien. Apart from that we have some improvements for physics and core mechanics which are still ongoing.
Dome
New map atm is still mostly gray block-out version but should be functional enough for some basic playtesting, we’re mainly concerned with travel times, layout and sight-lines for functional gameplay
Practice integration
The main starting scene and the regular offline practice scene are now merged into one, this means you can go from building to controlling your bot and back much faster.
The practice environment is also being overhauled to facilitate a better tutorial and to make basic testing functions more easily reach-able by basic builds
Minor changes
Made adjustments to desert and grass arena to make pitfalls less punishing
Added distinct crosshairs for each weapon and additional indication to make it more obvious if you’re in zoomed in (snipe) mode
Added some randomization to spawn point selection, the main consequence being that the first player won’t always spawn in the same place
Added rich presence info for Discord and Steam (this is still being tested, may not work correctly)
Changed the tech tree view so that you can scroll around further and more smoothly, tech info will also be hidden when you click away from a given tech to give you a full-screen view on the tech tree
Added a special render feature to display your build as a hologram in the battle menu
Further refinements for gamepad input
Physics friction with the ground has been decreased a lot to help crippled builds traverse terrain more easily
Aerodynamic drag has been increased overall and will now also somewhat scale with overal volume (0.1 drag points/block) this is to give super fast builds a more reasonable upper speed-limit, especially extremely drag-optimized builds which were absurdly fast in previous patches
Made several adjustments to wheels and car physics since a lot of these were out of calibration after the physics changes of the previous update. Wheels should among other things have a lot more traction with the ground and be more pro-active against flipping over
Flamethrowers will now have a natural pitch-up to account for dropoff with gravity, similar to mortars
Module buttons will now display detailed tooltips
Added a super recovery mechanic: by holding right-click in recovery mode you can teleport to the last known safe location at the cost of 3 recovery charges
Bugfixes
Fixed issue with bloom-blur effect being flipped along y-axis on Windows builds
Fixed some issues with rendering of the pilot character and his gamepad on the battle page
Made some improvements to help avoid aim point landing on a bubble shield when it shouldn’t which was causing issues with snipe-aim. We didn’t manage to reproduce this error, so it may not be fixed
The code that handles staying aimed on target while switching between regular view and sniping mode will now revert if the angle change is bigger than 30 degrees, this should avoid extreme failure cases such as when aim point is behind the sniping camera point, where the camera would turn 180 degrees
Smoke screens now have an unlimited render distance
Fixed layering issue with smoke screens causing them to not block AI vision and also to block projectiles
Fixed bug where AIs would end up using the settings of other AIs because of the way their controller objects are recycled
Several improvements to handling part transactions and recovering from issues that can cause negative part counts
Fixed issues with the nav mesh causing lots of errors on the snow pass map
Fixed bug where creating a custom match with a fixed map would always choose the next map in build settings
Fixed weapon accuracy gain over time which was meant for plasmaguns and railguns getting applied to all weapons
Linux builds will now use Vulcan when possible in stead of OpenGL which fixes a lot of graphics bugs we were dealing with