It has been a while... I have been with life and reworking large chunks of the engine, which has kept me from releasing updates. Updates should be more frequent from now on. 0.9.0 has some major usability improvements, including:
- Improved game performance
- Improved networking code
- Added match accept/decline functionalities, and you can change the selected loadout before entering a match.
- Added a match loading screen.
- Added a title screen.
Balance-wise, the game has changed a lot, so expect some balance issues while players find builds I did not expect. The most notable changes affecting balance are:
- A new physics system that allows smaller and faster spells to be built.
- Increased mana capacity and regeneration across the board.
- A bunch of damage values have been changed.
Full changelog:
Added:
- Added a 'found match' popup screen before starting a match. This allows players to change loadout before the match starts and accept/decline matches.
- Added a loading screen before the match starts that ensures both players start the game at the same time. This should improve lag in the first couple of seconds.
- Added a player head with health/mana bar UI.
- Added a title screen with information about the game, changelog, and credits.
- Added an implosion glyph to self-destruct without dealing damage.
Changes:
- Improved HUD UI.
- Improved rendering performance (batched spell shot rendering).
- Implemented a new physics system.
- Increased fire rate for the rapid-fire wand.
- Increased mana for all wands.
- Changed the default splitting direction to be a line formation when no group direction glyph has been set.
- Improved render order in preparation for later updates.
- Changed camera movement to highlight the center of the map to better see the enemy player.
- Made shrink and grow glyphs smoothly change size instead of directly.
- Reworked the collision system to allow for faster and smaller entities to support future weapons and fix 'tunneling' issues.
- Renamed 'editor' to 'Spell editor'.
- Changed spell shot death animation to be a small implosion.
- Changed totem death animation to be an implosion.
- Remade the audio system to fix multiple audio bugs. It should perform better now and fix audio-related crashes.
- Changed how input delay is implemented, which will improve online performance but increase input delay for player movement.
- Added input delay to the home world to have the same input delay offline as online.
- Made multiple changes to the networking code. Improved prediction code and decreased overall lag.
- Added more window sizes to settings.
- Changed electricity spark logic to remove the annoying 'electricity looping' audio issue.
- Made a bunch of small changes.
Removed:
- Removed Orb wand. It was rarely used and not fun. A new update with new weapons will be out soon.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed crash reporter render texture images.
- Fixed UI issue when closing the editor while dragging glyphs.
- Fixed a bug that caused wizard clones to ignore direction offset glyphs.
- Fixed render order of loadout invalidation crosses.
- Fixed UI issue causing dragging glyphs to remain dragged after mouse release.
- Fixed settings window size showing a size larger than the monitor size.
- Fixed a crash when a loadout glyph index is invalid.