EA29 is finally here! While a lot of my time since the last update has been spent working on campaign assets (which are not quite ready to be shown yet), I have been polishing up the base game with quality-of-life fixes and improving Ravenscript and the Trigger System. This should get the two scripting systems ready for the planned addition of custom game modes which I hope to get working very soon.
IMPORTANT: If you're running into any weird main menu or ingame bugs that prevents you from playing the game after updating to EA29, make sure you remove any mods that modify the original game files such as RavenM.
One of the new features in EA29 is an enhanced instant action preview screen, where the background will change based on the metadata tags of the map that is currently selected. Map metadata could previously only be changed via the RF modding tools for Unity, but is now also available through the ingame map editor (via Level Details -> Metadata). In addition to tagging levels, metadata also allows map makers to control other map information such as display name and recommended bot count.
The dynamic instant action preview screen may seem like a superfluous feature at first, but the data that drives the preview screen will be exposed to Ravenscript in a future update. This will allow modders to find maps with specific tags (City, Desert, Airport, Coastline, etc) and load them - essentially allowing modders to create custom campaigns spanning all maps that are currently subscribed (moddable conquest mode on custom maps, anyone?). For this reason, I highly recommend that you tag your custom maps using the new metadata features.
I would also like to highlight one of the new Ravenscript/Trigger features, the addition of named trigger signals. Named signals are sent from a sender component to a receiver component just like regular Trigger System signals, but the modder does not need to directly connect the sender to the receiver inside the map tools. Instead, the modder assigns a name to the sent signal, and any receivers that are listening to signals of the same name will receive the signal. Named signals can be sent between maps/game modes/vehicles/weapons loaded from different files, including different mods, allowing for easy inter-mod logic. Before this addition, this type of communication was difficult to do inside Ravenfield.
Finally, you can check out a few improvements to the citadel story mission such as a more detailed destroyed hangar area. This in an example of the power of the trigger system, where you can dynamically change areas of a map based on story events. Unfortunately I have not been able to implement the remaining cutscenes for the citadel mission yet, which is something I was planning on doing for EA29. Expect these to come in the next one or two updates, finishing up the first story mission in the official campaign.
-- Full change log --
Game improvements:
- Added camera smoothing to player movement while on foot. This should prevent jittering when running close to bots or when playing the game at high refresh rate displays
- Various updates to level geometry in the citadel mission.
- Data container component preprocessing, will now only run once per data container asset at load time instead of once for every instance in Awake().
- Non-actor-collision layer will now produce impact decals correctly
- Objective indicator now fades in/out based on what you're currently aiming at.
- Target seeking missiles now have a grace period of one second after thruster ignition, during this time period the missile can never lose tracking of the target. This allows target seeking missiles to track targets that are behind them on some custom vehicles.
- Vehicles can now be assigned a driver halt strategy, which allows the driver to stop when a passenger is engaging a target according to the passenger weapon's halt strategy configuration.
- Squad leaders can now halt when engaging preferred targets.
- Razorback MG will now halt when engaging preferred targets with the turret
- Prowler quadbike will now halt when the passenger is engaging a preferred target
- Some slight terrain updates to dustbowl near Raven controlled airport to make it easier to get up onto the tarmac for bots.
- Updated occlusion culling data on dustbowl to fix some props turning invisible when standing inside certain areas
- In spec ops mode, the bot count will set the number of teammates directly when the balance slider is set fully to the player team.
- When leaning to the right while standing, the camera will now move slightly less to better align the camera to the third person animation.
- Sped up third person stance changing animations slightly
- Added spawn point offset values to vehicles. This value can be used for large vehicle to offset the spawn position to prevent the vehicle from clipping into the ground.
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a bug where changing a missile target via RS would not cause the targeted vehicle to register the new missile (and thus not warning the pilot)
- Fixed bug with custom skins selected from the instant action menu would sometimes not be applied to the first person arms
- Fixed a bug where TriggerVolumes would sometimes not initialize correctly, and not be able to detect actors.
- Fixed game mode "no flag config" value not having any effect.
- Fixed a bug where bots would sometimes get stuck when following scripted path groups. This bug typically happened on the citadel mission where teammates would sometimes get stuck near the gate.
- Fixed a bug where spec ops mode would not end when the exfiltration helicopter could not fit all teammates as passengers.
- It is no longer possible to lean while dead
- Fixed a bug where bots would get stuck when trying to go to a ScriptedPathGroup. This would sometimes make the bots get stuck outside the citadel gate in the citadel story mission.
- Various misc AI improvements and fixes
Map metadata updates:
- Added biome/terrain/decorator values to map metadata. These values are used to display a custom configuration background in instant action mode. Additionally, these values will be available for modders to query inside custom campaigns in the future.
- Map metadata now contains information about the precense of ground/naval/air vehicles in maps, this will be made available to custom campaign modding in the future.
- It is now recommended to always generate map metadata and set up map type and theme so the exported map can be categorized correctly. Therefore, the mod tool will warn you if you export a map that doesn't have metadata and instruct you how to create metadata for your map.
- Map biome/terrain/decorator metadata values can be automatically fetched from steam workshop tags for maps that do not have them assigned.
- Added metadata editor to ingame map editor.
Ravenscript:
- Exposed LandHelicopterAtPosition(), CancelLanding(), TakeOff() and related landing status bools to the Squad class. This makes bot helicopter landing controllable from RS
- Exposed Player.allowAutoWaveRespawn, set to false to stop player from being able to spawn in the automatic wave respawn system used by most game modes.
- Exposed GameManager.sceneName and GameManager.mapDisplayName that can be used to get names of the current scene/map.
- Exposed Time.systemTime fields
- Exposed ConfigurableJoint
- Exposed ReflectionProbe
- Exposed Rigidbody interpolation/collision detection values
- Exposed MountedStabilizedTurretClamp to RS
- Exposed new Actor values to RS: hasHeroArmor, isInvulnerable, canBeTargeted and attackersIgnoreRulesOfEngagement
- Added Random.RangeInteger() to RS to randomize integer values (previously only floats were available)
- Added OnDestroy RS callback to ScriptedComponent
- Exposed global named signal sending from using TriggerScriptedSignal.SendGlobalNamedSignal("my cool signal")
- Cleaned up API for MountedWeapons and MountedStabilizedTurret which previously contained lots of unneccesary functions and properties
- Updated the online Ravenfield documentation categories, the API reference is now split up into Ravenfield and Unity type categories, which should make it easier to navigate
- Updated the online Ravenfield documentation's auto-generated links to the Unity documentation for Unity types so they are no longer 404
Trigger system:
- Added TriggerDamageVehicle component
- Added TriggerShowInputPrompt component
- Added TriggerOnVehicleDestroyed component
- Added TriggerNamedSignalSender and TriggerNamedSignalReceiver components. These allow sending named signals to all child receivers of a gameobject, without having to explicitly set a destination trigger component. Named signals can optionally be sent/received globally.
- Added TriggerDebugMessage component that can be used to display a console message from the trigger system along with an activation counter and the signal context.
- Added CancelLanding to TriggerLandHelicopter component
- Added "pick random squad from team" and team filtering to squad references
- Added optional actor credit to TriggerKillActor
- Added total actor count greater/equal condition to TriggerCondition
- TriggerSpawnVehicle can now use TurretSpawners.
- TurretSpawners can now be set to Scripted spawn mode, which allows them to be controlled from Ravenscript/The trigger system instead of their default behaviour
- TriggerSpawnPrefab signal propagation to the prefab instance can now optionally use a named signal in the same way as TriggerNamedSignalSender.
- Renamed TriggerScriptedSignalSender and TriggerScriptedFunction to TriggerRavenscriptSignalSender and TriggerRavenscriptFunctionCall in order to differentiate them from the named signals. This is just a visual change in the mod tools inspector. The Ravenscript class name is kept the same as before, so no need to update any existing code!
- Added per-signal context documentation to trigger components. This can be used to see what parts of the signal context a trigger component sets.
- Fixed default paramters values for TriggerSpawnSquad/TriggerSpawnPlayer components
- Fixed a bug where the player would sometimes not get the correct weapon arm skin when spawning from triggers.
- Fixed OnActorEnterSeat LeaveSeat signal not being sent
- Fixed an issue where OnActorDeath trigger squad filtering did not work as intended
- Fixed an issue where squad conditions would sometimes return fale positives.
Dialog system improvements:
- Added rich text support for the ingame dialog system. Rich text supports Unity's built in rich text tags such as <b>, <i>, <color=red> and the following custom tags:
<player> - Prints the player's steam username
<map> - Prints the map's display name
<pose=posename> - Changes the icon actor pose to something else
<grain=grainamount> - Changes the grain amount on the dialog portrait
<pause=duration> - Pauses for duration seconds
<speed=multiplier></speed> - Changes the print speed of the dialog text, default is 1.0
<silent></silent> - Stops the actor mouth animation and prevents blip sounds from playing
<color=team0></color> - colors text using the team color
<team=team0> - Prints the team name
Valid team parameters are:
team0 - Team 0, default Eagle
team1 - Team 1, default Raven
teamf - Friendly Team (same as player)
teame - Enemy Team
I hope you'll enjoy this update!
/Johan (SteelRaven7)