Hello all,
This patch focuses on improving the enemy engagement experience with improved animations as the focal point and saving/loading bugs.
Since the newer enemies have higher quality animations, it left a difference in quality between the Episode 1 enemies and the Ep2/3 enemies. A few bug fixes, and under the hood for me, a better skeleton/rig in Blender to work with, so I can easily add animations to existing enemies.
For example in the upcoming level improvements, enemies will have more idle animations instead of mostly just standing around, like leaning on stuff, interacting with things, puking up stuff etc.
The animation changes to staggers and stuns does leave enemies more open to attacks, so it does make the game a bit easier, I'll tweak the balance of the game once all the content is in, and do remember, you will choose your difficulty path in E1M1.
I also got a little overzealous with CPU asset optimisations which led to save loading bugs, I tested these thoroughly today, they should be resolved while still maintaining the optimisation.
Patch V0.85 changes:
Moved all human enemies to a new Blender rig which makes animating and retargeting motion capture a breeze
About 300+ Human Melee, Human Pistol, SMG, Shotgunner, and Chaos Mutant animations updated
Added additional attacks for some enemies
Added additional awaken animations for some enemies
Enemies have more stun animations, rather than just the 1
Some enemies when stunned will let off their fire arms in a panic
Made sure various states could be interrupted with stuns and staggers
Fixed human enemies not playing their stagger animations properly, being overwritten by the pain animation
Fixed Mi-Go's pain animation slots and state checking so combat teleport plays the animation correctly
Medical Human Pistol enemy has a different texture color to help differentiate it from the melee medical human
Fixed enemies standing around when a save had been loaded due to skeletal mesh being disabled and the movement component disabled on spawn(this does require a new level save to fully resolve as the data only triggers on a new death, not existing death)
Fixed some scripted objects not hiding properly on save load in E1M3
Fixed dead body scripted events not triggering due to disabled skeletal mesh
Some dead bodies scattered throughout the levels were missing their stumps, now they are more stumpy
Minor optimisations for LODs of dead bodies, turning of shadows on materials don't need it from afar
Disabled the collision of the pick up key icon
Enemies sometimes drop their respective items:
Medics can drop mini health packs
Pistol enemies can drop some SMG bullets
SMG enemies can drop SMG bullets or some armor
Shotgun Enemies can drop shells or some armor
Mining Laser enemies can drop batteries
Rocket Launcher enemies can drop some rockets
Main menu level got some minor visual improvements
Added version number on the main menu to help with keeping track of builds across different store fronts
Thanks all for your support.
-Zombie