BREACHPOINT · published · build 26350529
Four patches have gone out since the ALPHA-0.2.1 notes, so this post covers them all as the ALPHA-0.2.5 update, newest first. The headline is online play: your shots at other players are now judged exactly where you saw them, and when you host, the players who join move smoothly on your screen. Endless co-op gets spectating and three fixes, dedicated servers get admin commands, and BREACHPOINT now runs on ARM Linux.
0.2.5 plays together with 0.2.4, but not with 0.2.3 or older. If you run a dedicated server, update it along with the game.
Bots out of ammo switch weapons right away. A bot whose gun ran dry mid-fight kept it in hand for several seconds, still keeping its distance and backing away from anyone with a knife, as if it could shoot. Now it switches the moment the gun is empty: to its next gun if it has one, and to its knife if it doesn't.
Bots with a knife now fight like it. 0.2.1 got them to close in; now they commit. They run straight at you instead of circling, keep up when you back away, and go for a closer enemy in sight instead of chasing one out of reach. Knife standoffs, where two bots faced each other for seconds without landing a hit, are now rare.
Both apply to bots in Breachpoint, Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch. The Endless horde is unchanged.
Your shots at other players are now judged where you saw them. Online, other players reach your screen a little later than bots do, because the server can only move a player once their input has arrived. Shots didn't account for that, so a shot at another player was checked against a spot they reached slightly after the one on your screen: about half a metre away when that player was on a typical connection. Now each player you aim at is judged at the moment your screen showed them, and the difference is down to a few millimetres. Shots at bots were already right.
When you host from the menu, the players who join now move smoothly on your screen. Over the internet they froze and skipped on the host's screen, because their updates never arrive perfectly evenly. The host now sees them as smoothly as everyone else does, in every mode, and the host's own shots are judged against where the host saw each player too.
To do this, the game now tells the server when you saw each player near your crosshair. That changes what's sent, so 0.2.4 can't play with 0.2.3 or older. Players and servers need to update together.
You can now spectate your team while you're down. Going down in a co-op run left your camera frozen on the floor for the rest of the wave. Now it holds for two seconds, then follows a teammate who's still standing, over their shoulder. Press Fire to switch to the next one. If the teammate you're watching goes down, the camera moves to another by itself. Split screen works as before.
On someone else's Endless server, the boss health bar now goes away when the boss is beaten. Over the internet it could stay on screen.
Joining someone else's Endless server with any class other than Rookie, you could see your own body around your camera. Fixed.
Hosting Endless over the internet, the players who join no longer stutter on your screen. 0.2.4 then brought this to every mode.
Admin commands. Set admin_password in server_settings.ini, and a player can type /login followed by the password in the console to be an admin until they leave. Admins get /status, /say, /kick, /ban, /unban, /bans, /next, /map and /rotation, and /help lists what you're allowed to run. The server's own terminal takes the same commands, and if you host from the menu, you're the admin already.
A kicked or banned player is told why. Bans are by IP address, kept in bans.txt beside the server, and a banned address is turned away before it joins.
Every launch setting now fits in server_settings.ini: server name, port, max players, bots, bot difficulty, Endless difficulty and Endless mutators. A command-line flag still wins over the file. The server prints the settings it ended up with when it starts, and a file it can't read is now an error instead of being quietly ignored.
A rotation now sticks to one kind of game. Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch can share a server, but Endless and Breachpoint each need one of their own. The server keeps the rows that match its first row and says which it dropped, and it also warns about any map the mode can't be played on. Before, a mixed rotation could play a map under the wrong mode's rules.
On Windows, start BreachpointServer.console.exe to get a window you can type commands into.
Everything about running a server is in the server guide.
On Windows, the music could play much louder than it should, and the Music volume, In-game music volume and Effects volume settings had no effect. They work again.
BREACHPOINT now runs natively on 64-bit ARM Linux. The game, the dedicated server and BreachBaker all have ARM builds. The Linux download carries both and starts the right one for your machine, and both use the same game files, so the download doesn't double.
The ARM dedicated server has already hosted Breachpoint matches with players and bots on a Raspberry Pi 3B+.
Windows on ARM keeps running the regular Windows build through Windows' own emulation, because Steamworks, the part of Steam a game talks to, has no Windows ARM version yet.
The game window now has the BREACHPOINT icon from the moment it opens, instead of Windows' generic icon until the main menu loaded.
Wishlist BREACHPOINT on Steam to follow along as the alpha grows.