Hey everyone!
We've been pretty busy over the last couple of months working on the foundation of the game. Long story short: we wanted to add terrain deformation, but it altered the fundamental way a lot of existing features worked. Due to this, we haven't been in a position to push any hotfixes or updates to the games main branch for quite some time.
BUT, we're in a position now where we're able to show off a pretty stable WIP build of the new game foundation. Of course, we're still in the process of adding in a couple of much needed mechanics and there's a host of exciting new bugs for us to test and iron out! :/
Due to the super unstable nature of a lot of the updates we're making, we've added an optional testing branch with all the fancy new features! You can access this by right-clicking on TrenchesWIP, going to Properties, selecting the BETAS tab and choosting 'testing'
So what's in this fresh new testing branch you might ask?
Terrain Deformation
Well buckle up because we've finally added working terrain deformation! most buildings will alter the terrain in some way, from just flattening to cutting into it! Over the coming months as we update our artillery and ordenance systems, there should be some new fun and exciting ways to turn the environment into a muddy hellscape!
New Map
With the addition of terrain deformation, we needed to create a new map to work with it! so welcome the lush vallies of -*Working Title*- island!
One of the major advantages of all this tinkering to the foundation, is we can now put together maps and alter the playable area super easily, which means we can eventually stretch the playable area of this bad boy to encompass the whole map if we'd like! But what good is a new map if you're fighting against those dang bots? they don't even know how to build!
PvP IS BACK
Heck yeah! you can now blase away your friends in the new version of our PvP mode. The major difference between this mode and the older ones is that we're incorporating a more dynamic territory control system into it. Now the map is split into sectors and players will need to capture a sector by building a spawn flag within it in order to construct defenses and other buildings. We hope this'll lead to more 'frontline' style combat with teams launching attacks on one anothers entrenches positions.
Harvesting resources
We finally had a chance to iron out all the kinks in resource harvesting and decided to simplify the hell out of the economy. At the current time, everything uses a single resource now, Requisition. This can be harvested from any trees within the environment. Currently, there's a limited amount that can be harvested from the map, so we're still sorting out the best approach to providing players with a reliable amount in the long term, but this means players can build some really nice structures super easily now! (you also don't need to convert things at the pesky HQ anymore)
THAT BLOODY SPAWN ISSUE IS FIXED
So we did a huge blunder, when we released our last major update to the main branch, we were aware of an issue with the spawning. Unfortunately in our eagerness to get into terrain deformation, a majority of the base features were broken in the same update that would fix spawning. Due to this, we weren't confident in pushing a hotfix that broke a LOAD of other features until we ironed all of the new content out. BUT REST EASY, FOR THAT DAMN BUG IS NOW PURGED (super sorry to all the people who had a bad time due to this!)
Keep in mind that anything is subject to change as we keep refining the player experience, but we hope you have fun with all our hard work!
As of this post, there are a couple of known bugs and unfinished features that we're in the process of ironing out (and a lot that were brought to our attention thanks to our many testers).
KNOWN BUGS
- Palm trees can't be harvested
- There currently isn't a win condition in the PvP mode
- Vehicles and mountable objects are broken as heck for the time being
- A massive variety of latency issues we still need to fix
- Voxels can occasionally be really funky and do some very weird things
- Occasional perfomance issues on higher settings due to some LoD bugs
- Spawning occasionally doesn't work for clients (currently you sometimes need to press 0 to fix)
- Bots are still dumb as heck, but they shouldn't clip through barbed wire and structures anymore
- Survival mode is preeeeeetty broken in this one, we still need to port the mode over to the new voxel map
- Load times are still a bit long
If you happen to find anymore, we'd love to hear from you over on our Discord. All the devs are super active in talking with the community on how to make the best game possible! https://discord.gg/ns7QZp6
We'd like to thank everyone who's given the game a test and given us their honest feedback, we hope we can deliver a game that we all want to play!
- Big OOF Games