Alright pilots, listen up.
This week was about ripping out the guts of our singleton managers and replacing them with actual Engine Subsystems, because we're tired of race conditions and "spaghetti code" being a valid architectural pattern. We paid down a massive amount of technical debt, but we didn't leave you empty-handed. We’ve finished the Tobii Eye Tracking integration, so you can finally aim where you look.
We’ve added full Tobii integration. It’s not just a wrapper; we did the math to make it feel right.
Head & Gaze Tracking: Full support for both.
Gaze Boost: Your look direction now subtly influences camera rotation, helping you track targets faster. It feels like telepathy, but it's just math.
Smoothing: We dampened the jitter, but it still needs some work. It shouldn't feel like you're having a seizure anymore riding the raw Tobii data-stream.
Auto-Disable: Tracking optionally automatically cuts out when you zoom, keeping your precision rock solid. Settings for eye and head tracking are in the view settings menu.
Fixes: We've been working hard on getting the game ready for EA, and all the systems overhauls we've done to squash the bugs we have and prevent more from coming back in the future.
Camera Fader: The old camera fading subsystem has been deprecated and removed. UI transitions are now handled more directly by the UI framework itself, resulting in faster and cleaner menu navigation.
Player Manager is now a Subsystem: We finally killed the UObject singleton pattern for Player Manager. It is now a proper Game Instance Subsystem. This means better lifecycle management and fewer "accessed none" errors when the world tears itself apart.
Contract Info is King: Refactored our Game Instance to stop hoarding contract state. Contract Info is now the Single Source of Truth for active contracts. It caches match registration and post-match results, so the UI stops guessing what happened.
Content & DLC Framework: The "Modular Content Availability System" (MCAS) was created to replace all our Demo, Base Game, DLC and unlockable content custom code. This makes managing different content states a breeze to work with, meaning we can get content out sooner in smaller time windows.
Input Persistence: We hardened the some parts of the input system pipeline. Custom joystick mappings will now persist correctly even if you load the profile while the device is disconnected. Tobii and TrackIR are now hot-swappable, so no need to restart the game if you forgot to plug something in or launch a supporting app.
CIWS Optimization: Significant optimizations to the projectile managers have drastically reduced CPU overhead. Large battles won't melt your frame rate anymore.
Lag PIP: You can now switch between Lead and Lag Pip Aiming modes in Settings -> Misc.
Weapon Reliability: Squashed a nasty bug where projectiles were registering multiple hits erroneously. Damage multipliers were adjusted to compensate. This sounds huge but we only had to swap two lines of code, hehe.
AI Upgrades: Bots figured out how to use Railguns again. Good luck.
Input Flexibility: You can now fire weapons using joystick triggers/gamepad buttons even while in "Interact Mode" (e.g., holding Left Ctrl).
Matchmaking Fail-safes: The HandleMatchmakingTimeout logic in SessionManager was... optimistic. It now actually verifies that the random fallback contract has a valid Map Name and ID before trying to launch a session.
Session Metadata: Rewired the backend. Changed session setting key SessionType to Mode to align with the backend and stop modes from mixing.