Welcome to our next update for Hyperblade.
In this update we're improving the AI and the flight mechanics, as well as adding a new small map.
First off, to make our AI a little more challenging we've improved both the way it flies and allowed it to make aggressive use of pickups. The AI will now go after the various pickups on the map and it can be affected by them the same as you. Both good and bad. As well we've improved the way that the AI takes tight turns which means that not only will it navigate tight maps better, it means we can increase the speeds on all maps. Currently we've increased the speed on the space station, but all of our maps and speeds will be balanced going forward.
Player flight mechanics have had some work done under the hood. Not all of the changes are live, but we have put in a system to handle setting up drone stats so that each drone will handle a little differently. These stats will include, Top Speed, Acceleration, Deceleration, Recovery (from wall impacts) and Turn/Rotation Speed. You'll note a new area on the drone configuration menu that indicates these. In a future update when we add more drones, we'll be going through and setting some of these stats to help differentiate them. There is an update for keyboard users, you can now use "shift" and "control" to control your max throttle. This will be indicated by a throttle bar in the lower right. These keys are configurable in the menu if you want to use different keys.
We've added a small Supermarket map. this is just a test map with some small tight quarters, its a little short, so if you race it in multiplayer we recommend at least 3 laps. This is going to be expanded and likely be used as part of a larger map later, or we may use this as the upcoming arena map in our combat update.
Another item we've added with this update is the ability to run the tracks in reverse or mirror mode. We recommend using this only for practice or multiplayer. The AI needs an overhaul to deal with that and that will be part of our next update.