Hi all.
End of October, start of November?
The year is rapidly dwindling and so it must be time for another TU2 update.
At this point all content is in, so the focus is very much on balancing and bug fixing.
This update won't fix all the bugs but there's been good progress on killing many of the more bothersome issues.
First up is a rebalancing of upgrade costs and the amount of upgrade points awarded during play. Essential upgrades such as reload time, armor levels and shield regen have been made cheaper - other items such as rockets have been made more expensive. The nuke ability is now very expensive to both buy and use - as might be expected. Finding secret depots/tombs/villages after clearing a level can help greatly in scraping together more points.
Users were seeing a crash after a number of hours playing.
Seems a bunch of textures weren't being cleared from memory between levels and were actually compounding. This would inevitably lead to a crash after 5-6 hours of continual play - which is unacceptable. This update should resolve that issue with textures being properly flushed.
Player medium tank shells bounce chance reduced from 5% to 3%. Less aggravating.
Blastwalls should now properly fade-out when done and be removed from radar immediately.
Fortress wall repair time decreased by a third. This makes it more viable to repair a fortress while defending.
Harvesters now have panels along their bodies that light up as they collect glyphs. Looks cool.
If game does exit without saving for whatever reason (powercut, cat on keyboard or god forbid, a crash), restarting and choosing continue will restart on the level played before exit.
Various cutscene wording tweaks.
Behemoth shield level reduced by a third. Mines are still the best way to take them down.
Behemoths only appear once now during a fortress defend level. They don't respawn continually.
Graphics tweak to the statue + worms in Gorgon's sector.
Sappers now take correct amount of time to drill through walls.
Lots of other tweaks and fixes.
I can say now that as a developer, there's nothing better than dozens of playthroughs to make you thoroughly sick of your game. But it has to happen to pick up bugs. Hopefully the next update should see the game in a release ready state. It's been a long road but the end's in sight (although having said that, there'll be more patches needed after release I'm sure.)
Speaking of the end of the road/year - merch!
There's TU2 stuff in the link below of course, but if that doesn't appeal there's also New Zealand themed t-shirts which have been very popular, along with Elite Dangerous stickers. In fact a guy who works at Frontier bought a couple of the 'Thargoid Pest Control' stickers for the office! All good for Christmas.
https://www.redbubble.com/people/Madjack66/shop?asc=u
Many thanks for your support!
Known issues:
As mentioned, hardpoints in hub levels need another pass. They're not working correctly but are still playable.
When carrying the player out of a finished level, the lifter sometimes dips below the landscape.
In-game cutscenes such as when logic gate opens or boss is spawned may have cam placement issues.
Hack progress bar GUI elements sometimes showing/not showing correctly.