Hello Warriors!
There's a few different things we want to go over with you today. First is the current state of VBG with the player counts, second is a very quick overview of our immediately planned updates as well as the season two update we have planned. And lastly is the patch itself. If you only want the patch notes scroll down until you see the cat!
Current State of VBG
First off we want to thank you all for your continued support of Virtual Battlegrounds. Our team is still very excited for the future of VBG. We're aware that player counts are low right now but we're confident we can bolster player numbers again. We have a lot of quality of life and game play improvements planned for Virtual Battlegrounds and once they're in place we'll begin our marketing efforts again. Our goal has not changed from making the best VR Battle Royale that we can.
Next Steps
Mid Season Update
We have one more major update planned for Season One. This will be our biggest update for the season and we're calling it our "Mid Season Update". This will feature some major reworks of the lobby system, improved AI and even more stability and performance improvements to the game. Our hope for this patch is to make it more accessible for new players and to make it easier to player without other players.
Spooky Update
Sometime in October we'll release something spooky ;D. No spoilers so more on this later.
Season Two
After this update in October our updates will slow down until our season 2 update in November. This will be by far the single largest update we've introduced into Virtual Battlegrounds. This will also be our biggest marketing effort since release week. If we're really going to reinvigorate our player numbers it will be during this time and possibly the spooky update too.
EA Patch 0.6.9.0 (Cat)
Alright guys on to the patch! Again the goal of this patch as similar to last one was purely stability and performance improvements. We actually made some major headway here this patch. We're finally feeling comfortable enough to begin adding content back into Virtual Battlegrounds again after this patch. Expect some new stuff from us in the next one.
Texture Streaming
One of the big issues we've had with Virtual Battlegrounds is the sheer amount of VRAM and RAM the game required to run. This wasn't much of an issue for those of you with very high end machines but the average VR user was being pretty heavily affected. Long story short we managed to reduce the memory requirements for the game by 50%. This should result in less crashing, better performance and overall a more stable experience.
Visual Updates
While optimizing our game assets we've been taking a look at the visual fidelity of various assets and updating the ones that were especially low quality. Here are a few assets updated this patch. Expect more visual updates over the next few patches.
New Bridge
New Ladders
New Gas Station
Performance Improvements
Again expect more performance improvements this patch thanks to the texture streaming and physics optimizations we built into this patch. Mileage will vary but we've seen numbers from 5-30% gains for players.
More Music
Integrated some music into our JukeBox from one of our players Mekugi! Check it out in the lobby.
Check out his music here: https://soundcloud.com/mekugiofficial
Full Notes
Honestly warriors most of the stuff we've done this patch is going to be in the list below. As our goal was primarily stability and performance for this update this had us going through the many bugs that users have found over the last few months and tackling them one at a time. We've got more to go but the list is shrinking.
New Features
- Added an underwater breathing mechanic (players can now drown)
- Added a new zipline system that replaced the old one. (functionally very similar but less buggy)
Design Changes
- Made apples heal you overtime instead of instantly (limit exploitative healing tactics during combat).
- Increased height of doors on generic houses by another 6 inches. (For you tall folk)
- Made it so you could shoot through fences.
- Made the bell ring when you shoot it.
- Made it so you can see the helicopter trail on the map when in the helicopter.
- Made bots drop in a bit earlier. Should be roughly the same time as the players drop in.
- Changed press space to hold grip on the credits screen to open up the credits.
- Added an option to crouch while standing with a button.
- Added air drop SFX to make it more apparent.
Major Bug Fixes
- Fixed jumping without air control exploit. (Forever Jump)
- Fixed gun angles flipping up when players got kills.
- Fixed not being able to put anything in backpack until you hold it once.
- Fixed zipline not working in the tutorial area.
Minor Bugs
- Fixed loot in some cabinets not being grab able in Sandford.
- Fixed broken terrain geometry near Sandford.
- Fixed clipping through tractor body in Maetland.
- Fixed clipping through boulders on the south side of the island near Motel.
- Fixed first gunshot lagging the game.
- Fixed Alpha skin not popping up in the lobby.
- Fixed ziplines in water area near shoreline not working.
- Fixed roads in Sandford not playing SFX.
- Fixed weapons from other players not pointing the direction they're aiming.
Suspected Fix | Things we think we fixed but we need your help confirming
The dreaded scope bug. (You know the one)
And we're going live now at https://www.twitch.tv/cyberdreamvr to discuss our next steps for Virtual Battlegrounds.
See you on the battlefield warriors!