Hey all - Brenn here with your monthly-ish post, this time.
Now, the last post teased a few big changes - the rewrite from HDRP to URP for performance gains; new wheels; map updates. As Pan also alluded to there, changing the Unity Graphics backend we're using entirely is a large endeavor, and while we were hoping to get one big update with everything, we've realized that wasn't reasonable and we've kept some QoL and part improvements pending for too long. Turns out reimplementing every material, every light, every particle effect in the project takes a lot of work. Who'd have thought? Therefore: QoL and some fixes/rebalances now, and many of the other improvements will come as 1.6.4 (or 1.7) in the hopefully not distant future. (I don't want to promise anything, but the URP branch mainly just needs testing at this point ;) )
A lot of the improvements in this patch can be credited to Daylee, who's joined the dev team this cycle. Daylee's been part of the Procelio community for a long time, and everything finally aligned this time to bring him on board to really focus on coding and UX for game feel and part mechanics.
In particular, Daylee joining the team compensates for one of my own shortcomings -- while I've been the lead programmer for Procelio for, well, pretty much ever, my interests and talents lie much more towards the "classical" software engineering problems of networking and overall infrastructure, and I've more of a blind eye for the smaller gameplay features. That was fine while we were still building out all of the core game systems, but as we've hit our Steam era it's become quite obvious that the added help to focus on gameplay was needed.
And, without further ado...
New: Secondary Reload Sound Effect
Plays a sound when a secondary’s magazine is completely reloaded.
If your secondary is unequipped, the icon will also flash when reloaded.
New: “Bonking” Sound Effects
When your bot impacts a surface at high speed there will be various collision sound effects depending on your speed.
New: Mirrored Block Placement Sound Effect
Successfully placing two blocks via mirror mode will now play a new double-place sound.
New: Build Mode Autosaving
Added build mode autosave interval to game options (0-30 minutes, 0 = no autosaving).
Improved train warnings
Train warning signs will now flash on and off like a real train crossing sign, to better grab the attention of a player.
New: Part Darkening
Damaged non-chassis parts will now progressively darken the closer they are to being destroyed, to give better feedback as to what is damaged on a bot.
At low health, the lights\\emissives on the part will also flicker.
New: Wheel Visuals
New model with actual suspension and updated textures.
Adjusted wheel animations and offsets.
Viewing the scoreboard will now disable the crosshair so it isn’t overlaid on top of it.
Rivet Rifle projectile VFX is now much easier to see and lingers for longer.
Cerberus UMRL tooltip: Added projectile count stat
Makes it more obvious that UMRL shoots two rockets per launcher.
The opacity of the outer ring on the Autocannon reticle has been made more opaque and easier to see.
The central dot shared by crosshairs has been made higher contrast and easier to see:
A larger 3d heading indicator has been added to the aim-down-sights view above the crosshair to make it easier to discern where your bot is pointed.
With the URP update in the near future, it will be made translucent and toggleable.
Health bar display changes
The appearance of health bars on enemies and allies has been made a bit easier to see. The obstructive diamond has been removed and the percentage number is larger.
We plan on adding an Ammo indicator, especially for Flux players.
Health bars now all display true Health% instead of AMP%.
Bot health now updates with partially damaged parts
Because they used AMP%, partially destroying a part did not update the bar, even if you did a lot of damage that half destroyed a lot of high health components (you saw this with Nova a lot). Health bars will now more consistently update when dealing partial damage.
Shield damage is now displayed in damage numbers, in a blue color. If both shield and health damage is dealt, shield damage is prioritized.
Rewrote weapon falloff ranges to be more transparent
Max range (falloff end point) stat should no longer be inaccurate to the actual weapon range.
Default Undo Log length increased to 750 (was 100).
Default of 100 meant you could easily irreversibly delete parts of a bot, if removing lots of cubes to test something.
Improved climbing capability
Force previously was vastly reduced when ascending a slope, making many map areas inaccessible (that one Feldspar capture point comes to mind). This force reduction has been toned down by 85%. This should allow hovers to ascend most slopes on their own.
Buffed hover height changing speed
Height change rate: 5 🠊 10
Increased hover movement force
Translation force: 3000 🠊 3500
Will make base movement without thrusters less sluggish.
Autoleveling for hovers (not tilting over immediately when slightly unbalanced with COM) is also something we want to add. Movement parts are one of the most fiddly pieces of the codebase to tune given the complete freedom you all have in building your bots.
For future updates, we intend to also make the other ground movements more enjoyable to use. For now, fixing one of the issues hovers have (climbing) is pretty simple so we’re tossing it in.
Currently Gauss is forced into a cowardly/risk-averse playstyle because of the obscene range and heavy punishment for getting close to other players. The objective of these changes is to reward people using the weapon at close to middle ranges more often with more damage. There should be less interactions where you’re getting poked across the map and can’t do anything back, while Gauss still should have an edge in ranged fights.
To do that, we’re experimenting with removing bloom so it isn’t so clunky to get off an accurate shot. To compensate for players being able to unload at full speed much more often, the base fire rate is reduced by a bit. Since air bots are no longer being held back by the bloom/fire rate reduction from movement, falloff will be added to counterbalance.
For the issue of Gauss on air bots that are able to naturally negate cover, we’re first trying adding damage falloff to reduce the power of being so far away the other player cannot interact with the Gauss user. Gauss should still be a better ranged weapon than the other guns, but the gap will now be less utterly massive when the Gauss user is super far away. We’ll see how this change works out first in isolation; other stuff like changing map sightlines, reducing flight ceilings, re-adding bloom etc. are still options of course.
Damage: 4000 🠊 5000 (+25%)
Fire Rate: 0.65 🠊 0.85s
New: Instant Reload Cancellation
Firing during a reload will now both instantly cancel the reload and fire simultaneously, whereas before the user would have to click once to cancel the reload then once to fire.
Bloom Reductions
Removed acceleration-based bloom
Removed speed-based bloom recovery rate reduction
Removed camera movement/weapon rotation based bloom
Dev note: this wasn't playing out well in-game so we've reverted it.
New: Damage Falloff
Damage will now begin scaling down linearly to a Minimum Damage value. Once a shot exceeds the Falloff Start distance, it will begin this scaling with Minimum Damage being dealt at the Falloff End distance.
Minimum Damage: 1500 (0.30x multiplier)
Falloff Start: 250 meters
Falloff End: 400 meters
For reference, Minimum Damage will be dealt at about the distance between the edge of the testing environment bowl and the middle (400 meters):
Damage: 1250 🠊 1500 (+20%)
Minimum Damage: 450 (0.3x, same multiplier as before)
Falloff Start/End: 200/600 🠊 150/300
As with gauss bloom, reverted for now while we evaluate the impact of adding gauss damage fallback on its own
Same idea as Gauss, make ranged poke less obnoxious so the close/mid-range damage can be not as comically worse than ELC.
Inter-use cooldown: 4 seconds 🠊 6 seconds
No longer possible to spam countermeasures faster than a Nova player can reload.
Cloud duration: 15 seconds 🠊 9 seconds
Since duration is effectively also health on clouds (projectiles hitting it will reduce the remaining duration), this should nerf how many shots it can block to a more sane level.
Lock-on immunity duration: 1 second 🠊 3 seconds
Since the inter-use cooldown was nerfed quite a bit this is just to make it about the same effectiveness vs missiles as before.
Mainly these are just to make Countermeasures not completely cancel players using UMRL/Nova as often, especially when multiple are stacked together. Rework is probably on the horizon for them to make them not as one-dimensional and unintuitive.
Rudders (and Wings): Yaw authority (turning a bot left and right) increased to match pitch authority
The maximum amount rudders could yaw a bot was drastically lower than the roll and pitch axes, which made planes very easy to destabilize on the yaw axis. This change should make planes less punishing with slight misbalances that cause you to yaw off course.
Base Healing Zone: Secondary ammo restock rate has been increased 10x.
Vent cubes now have 6 connections instead of 5.
Improved contact registration of wheels and tank tracks that are tipped on their sides.
Made adjustments and improvements to wheel and tank track ground contact detection, especially with regards to bots that have angled wheelbases.
Decreased the vertical force bias applied by Force Concussors, reducing their ability to force opponents far off the ground at flatter angles.
MVP-02 Anguishire - ELC/Minelayer | Cruiser
The new starter bot, should one want to reacquire it. Fully maxed AMP with much higher gun counts and armor, so new players have a decently capable bot from the start.
TRH-91 Kapitan - ELC/Autocannon | Hover-Sled-Plane (H for hybrid)
Wedge-shaped hover with Turbofuel Injectors. Can fly around (temporarily) and more freely aim the autocannons at enemies. Hover as low as possible to make use of the A-GRV Pads.
TA-22 Beento - ELC/Missile | Blimp/Drone
The first drone/blimp type of bot now offered in the Osprey Catalog. Also, it is yellow. On the slower, more floaty side but with Turbofuel Injectors for fleeting acceleration.
TR-10 Foreman - ELC / Minelayer | Cruiser
An incredibly sturdy brawler often seen in Frontiersmen formations, the Foreman deals with simple core design traits: tonnage, and the redundancies needed to keep that tonnage mobile and combat-effective under fire.
TR-11 Limestone - Gauss/Missile | Half-track
An industrial platform field-refitted with combat equipment and plate defenses, the Limestone is one of the more common conversions employed by the Aegian Frontiersmen. Despite its ramshackle origins, the platform is able to hit hard at long ranges and harass aircraft, while being durable enough to absorb considerable counter-fire.
TA-12 Framer - Flux/Missile | Blimp/Drone
A veteran design, the Framer is a lightweight airship with an unusual four-way symmetry profile and full six-degrees-of-freedom movement, equipped with a supportive loadout.
Fixed module reordering in bot configuration not saving correctly.
Fixed a bug where exiting settings in Test Mode would soft-lock the game.
Fixed Serverside Physics indicator having the wrong translation string.
Fixed the Quit to Garage button being cut off in the pause menu on scaled-up UI or certain resolutions.
Brennan back to talk in the first person, again: I've been pushing out a number of serverside changes along the way to improve the experience and make things more stable. I've done a shoddy job of keeping a precise changelog of these, but the user-facing highlights are:
Matchmaker has received a whole bunch of love and attention, and should do a much better job of assigning players to the largest ongoing match instead of splitting players evenly and being more prone to erroneously create new matches rather than assigning players as backfill. It's not perfect yet, but it's better and I'll keep poking away at it as we go.
Max squad size has been reduced to 2. With the limited playerbase, allowing big groups of players to be assigned to a match as one unit was too difficult to balance. You can still queue up at the same time with your friends not in a squad, you just may get assigned to different sides of the same match
Doors on Icarus North work again - some of the devs attempted to do some optimizations that accidentally blocked door opening from occurring on the server.