Happy holidays to everyone!
It has been another month of development and I’m excited to see playable content beginning to grow for the project. There still is a lot to add for the project to be completed and released, but it’s always good to see progress.
New Maps
In this update, two new maps have been added to the game: Afghanistan Rural Village and Vietnam Outpost. With the relative success seen from the Chaos Destruction test map, both maps contain all destructible assets (aside from trees and foliage). Additional optimizations were added to hopefully maintain decent performance, but in all my testing performance has remained stable (if this is not the case for you, be sure to reach out with a steam discussion or via the community discord server).
With these two maps comes several new scenarios:
- Training Range on Vietnam Outpost
- Troops in Contact on Vietnam Outpost
- Jungle Outpost (Zombie Rush) on Vietnam Outpost
- Taliban Ambush on Afghanistan Rural Village
I intended to have the Training Range and a Zombie Rush map ready to go as well for the Afghanistan Rural Village map this update, but somehow spaced it thinking they were already done. Despite this, you will see those released in the next update that is planned this month (a smaller update before the holidays).
Additionally, I’ve rebuilt the Cannon Air Force Base Desert map – improving landscape textures and foliage assets. Although map building is my least favorite activity (mainly because it is so extremely time consuming), I believe I’m getting better at creating more realistic/believable environments.
With this new map, I’ve reworked the training range and Zombie Rush “In The Open” scenarios for it as well. I really believe the changes to this map made it much more interesting to play on; particularly the Zombie Rush scenario (I probably spent the most “testing” time playing through this one, because I was really enjoying it).
Speaking of Zombie Rush, all scenarios for the game mode are now selectable in the scenario menu. Due to the dual menu system for Zombie Rush (selecting a Zombie Rush map, then selecting a Zombie Rush scenario in the following menu), there has been quite a bit of confusion about how many different scenarios existed in the game. Consolidating these should help clear up this confusion, providing all playable scenarios right up front.
The scenario menu is also finally graduating from the nostalgic text walls of the 1990’s - all scenarios now come with an image to help better differentiate each map/scenario from each other. You can expect to see more improvements here, in terms of scenario customization soon.
I also wanted to point out that I’ve begun working on an audio feedback system, that will help improve immersion when playing. This will include commentary from various crew positions that will respond to what is happening on the battlefield. Now, you can expect to hear comments whenever you score a direct hit on infantry units. Although this is one specific instance, you can expect to see this feedback system expand going forward. I believe audio cues and responses from crew members is a very important aspect of gunship gameplay – not only to help steer the player in the right direction (i.e. attempting to fire a hellfire without an active laser designation, etc.) but provide good commentary on the action.
Finally, I’ve switched up the roadmap menu to be a little more specific and meaningful to you. Now you can find specific primary features you can expect to see in upcoming updates, along with an estimated release date. Obviously, these dates are tentative and depend on a lot of things coming together, but they are personal deadlines that I’ll work to meet.
That concludes the items that I think are worth mentioning here. You can find the rest of the changes down in the change log. As always, I appreciate everyone’s support in helping make Project Gunship a success and I look forward to seeing you in the next update! Thank you!
Change log
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug causing the HUD Speed Variable in the bottom right corner to not have the proper decimal count.
- Potentially fixed a fatal error occurring when using the laser designator.
- Fixed a bug causing the key input window to be created behind the options menu; preventing the player from changing input mappings.
Visual Effect Updates
- Optimized the foliage static meshes to improve performance.
Gunship Updates
- Increased the zoom of all gunship variants.
- Decreased the change value when tweaking guns to allow for finer tuning (from 0.25 to 0.15).
- Changed the sensor on the AC-130H to FLIR, instead of NOD.
- Added the option to disable the sensor shake when firing guns.
- Added radio feedback for direct hits from the air crew.
UI/Menu Updates
- Fixed some information in the scenario details that was inaccurate.
- Added the option to disable the sensor shake when firing guns.
- Added images for each scenario in the scenario menu.
- Made some tweaks to the subtitle system (font and font size, plus dynamic durations).
Map/Scenario Updates
- Added a new map: Vietnam Outpost.
- Added a new scenario for Vietnam Outpost: Training Range Outpost.
- Added a new scenario for Vietnam Outpost: Troops in Contact.
- Added a new Zombie Rush scenario for Vietnam Outpost: Jungle Outpost.
- Added a new map: Afghan Rural Village.
- Added a new scenario for Afghan Rural Village: Taliban Ambush.
- Rebuilt the Cannon Air Force Base Desert map. Improved landscape textures, road textures, and foliage.
- Rebuilt the Training Range scenario for Cannon Air Force Base Desert map: Training Range Desert.
- Added a new Zombie Rush scenario for Cannon Air Force Base Desert map: In the Open.
- Made improvements to the Chaos Destruction Test Map.
- Moved all the Zombie Rush scenarios to the scenario menu to keep everything in the same place.