I thought I'd get this update out before I head off to bed. (at 1am again).
FINALLY! Steam friend invites!
You need to be in an online lobby obviously for this to work, but you can simply hit the Y button and it will bring up the steam friends list in the Steam overlay, then invite your friends from there.
I intend to eventually make this into a proper in-game user interface, so you won't even need to open the Steam overlay which will be great!
Online menu makes more sense
While this is really just super place-holder stuff (I will eliminate all 2D UI!), there's some changes I made based on what I saw from a Twitch stream where the players were confused at how to use a toggle/tick/check box. So NOW when you check or uncheck the "Online/LAN" box, it will show either Online, or LAN.
The same goes for the Public/private box.
I also replaced the text at the top middle of the online menu, so when you are creating a server, it says "CREATE" and when you are browsing, it says "BROWSE", because "ONLINE" wasn't really useful, you already know you're in the online menu, you don't need reminding haha.
I intend to replace these with 3D animated assets and make it way more obvious as to what is going on.
Also, I added the ability to hit the B button to go back out of the online menu rather than having to click the back button in the lower left corner.
Dodgy physics aren't as dodgy
I limited the velocity that the energy balls can move around at, this will prevent impossibly fast balls that are as a result of physics glitching.
I also made the ball physics independent of frame-rate, so no matter how high or low your FPS is, the balls will remain consistent in speed.
This should also help with reducing latency issues online where the server might be running at 165fps, but the client is running at 30fps, and they would see balls in 2 very different locations, resulting in death from invisible balls.
There's still going to be lag issues, but this is a good step forward.
Tap Out clients no longer fly into another dimension
Something that I found was common in online games is players would be tapping away while the counter counts down, then there's a bit of lag, then the clients get yeeted upward.
This should no longer happen. This was due to a build up in force applied when the round started, and thus sent players too fast upward.
Using the same velocity limiting technique as Dodgy, the Tap Out movement can no longer surprise a certain threshold, and feels much better to play.
Tap Out is too easy eh?
Ok....Tap Out was NEVER easy, but for those who get the hang of it, and DO find it too easy, I added "Powermode" to Tap Out.
At the tutorial screen, as the host, hit the Y button/Triangle and you can enable POWER MODE.
Powermode speeds up the acceleration rate of the camera, and also increases the tap difficulty by 60%, so you guys are all gonna get one muscly finger....or you'll get RSI....either way, this mode is for those who like a real hard challenge.
REMOTE PLAY DOES NOT WORK AND IS NOT SUPPORTED
I have contacted steam in regards to this, and they are trying to remedy the problem.
Due to how Metal Heads handles Input (so 8 players is easily done without messing around with XInput), Remote Play just does not work at all sadly.
I did untick the box in Steam to say that the game does NOT support remote play, but when people play the game, they get a pop-up saying to invite friends to a remote-play session, which is very misleading, and has caused some people to get real annoyed because they can't get it to work.
While it's not my fault, I still want to apologize for this inconvenience, I should have noticed it sooner and contacted Steam support sooner, but I didn't... :(
--------------------------------------
That's all folks!
Thank you all so much!