New toys for speedrunning and various improvements in the new update for HA/CK!
Hello there, after some unexpected delays in the development process I am finally ready to release the new update for HA/CK. This update brings an ability to slow down time for those people who are persistent in their will to break the game and find new shortcuts. Many people will also appreciate a separate timer for individual levels. Consequently, a new Timewarp scoreboard has been introduced which can be viewed in the Steam Community. Additionally, various improvements and bug-fixes have been done.
The main motivation for the features introduced in this update is providing an option for freedom of play without reliance on third party software, which could be considered cheating. To provide a fair competition in the global level scoreboards, level playthroughs where Timewarp is used are not submitted and an option is provided to disable uploading of your scores alltogether (and I am naively hoping that people modifying the game to perform unintended actions will make use of it).
Regarding cheating - it is an universal issue concerning any game with online features ever created. As HA/CK is a single-player game without any real versus aspects, it would be foolish and even unfair towards customers to implement any anti-cheating measures, as they are known to occasionally cause issues for select people. Additionally, it does not align with my own philosophy to deliberately obfuscate game data. It is a product customers pay for and they have a right to use it as they please.
Added:
• Timewarp feature
○ Must be enabled manually in Settings -> Gameplay
○ Key can be set in game launcher
○ When activated, slows down time to a configurable multiplier from 0.01x to 0.99x
○ Can be set to toggle or hold mode
• Ability to disable score uploading
• Timer for individual levels (must be enabled)
Changed:
• Updated Unity to version 2018.3.8f
○ Nested prefabs - at last!!! (not relevant to players, I'm just happy)
○ This change forced me to update the post-processing component. As this made me lose the old configuration, everything will look slightly differently now. I think it looks nice, though!
○ Updated Json.NET library
• Disabled streaming of lightmaps
○ I don't know if this will change anything, but load times might become slightly longer, and stuttering on slow hard-drives might be reduced.
• Improved lightmap fidelity
• Removed Steam Audio spatialization engine
○ Overall surround sound quality will be reduced
○ People with weak CPUs can expect better performance
○ Fixes issues with audio cutting out or obnoxiously clipping
• Speedrun timer is fully paused while paused now (previous behavior WAS intentional, if not a bit awkward)
• First steps toward a more complete code refactor have been done.
• Implemented beautiful time formatting throughout the UI
○ No more junk like 3:6.22 - instead 03:06.22
○ Timed scoreboards are also displayed in formatted time instead of ms
• Removed collisions from hologram emitters in spawn rooms
• Adjusted layout of 09 - Kernel Panic
○ A jump towards the exit door platform should be easier to do now
Fixed:
• Local speedrun time now saves the longest instead of shortest time.
○ Even though this time never shows up anywhere right now, I might use it later.
• In the death and victory screens pressing "Retry" will now only restart the level instead of the entire speedrun
• Fixed softlock when a currently possessed turret gets destroyed
• Various crashes should be fixed now
• And sound errors should be fixed too
• Scoreboard reliability should be improved
• Level timer triggers were incorrectly set for most levels, expect slightly increased scores
Known issues:
• Log file contains many messages about materials not having a meta pass - this is an issue with Unity and is harmless.
○ This only happens in the main menu
○ The message is not spammed constantly, therefore does not fill storage with garbage
• Due to an unforeseen event of my testing Mac not wanting to co-operate, the OSX build for this patch is not tested on OSX. If issues arise, especially with Steam features such as achievements or leaderboards not working, please report them!