Main Features:
- Overhauled A.I.
- New physics-based enemy death animations.
- Active ragdolls.
- New enemy behaviors.
- Improved gameplay.
- Further graphical & audio improvements.
- Fixes & Optimizations.
The full change notes are below:
Enemies
- New complex enemy death animations.
- New advanced enemy ragdolls that combine animation with active physics for more realistic death animations possible.
- Some enemies will now run and slide into cover.
- Some enemies will now choose to stay in cover, with new cover finding improvements and can now fire from cover, instead of only using cover to hide
- Enemies will now sometimes attempt to deploy strafing as a technique while firing and moving from one spot to another.
- Enemies will now also sometimes attempt to move backwards while shooting, moving towards potential cover.
- Enemies are delegated, so some will be denoted as tactical and others will be in "panic" mode where they engage without thought, based on game scenario.
- A.I. now has variable crouch heights powered by inverse kinematics.
- A.I. can now decide to stay crouched while shooting if they feel you too threatened by you blowing their cover, or the cover is low enough to fire from without standing, instead of only being able to stand up to shoot as in previous builds.
- Improved various other small enemy animations.
- Enemies can crouch lower now, and even run lower if needed.
- Fixed enemy aiming interpolation issues.
- Crouched enemies no longer shoot up in the air when killed.
- Further enemy crouch animation improvements.
- Each sniper shot now exponentially increases enemy awareness instead of a true/false comparison.
- Further general cover finding improvements.
- Improved enemy idle animation.
- Enemies are generally now more lively, even the non-tactical types.
Graphics:
- Made vehicle lights for driving at night brighter.
- Amount of blood made slightly more realistic.
- Improved blood shaders and fixed new issues with occasional blue blood caused by linear color space.
- Large permanent blood stain decal pools now fade in instead of appearing instantly.
- "Sharp" is now the default anti-aliasing setting. Feel free to change back to "Soft" or "Overkill" if things are jagged on your screen, but for most purposed sharp should work perfectly. (I also wouldn't recommend using overkill unless you really need it as it uses a double antialiasing pass which might be unnecessary.)
- Improved vehicle "on fire" particles.
- Removed some ridiculously out of proportion grass meshes.
- Improved some more materials to go with the new V0.8.8+ Linear Color-Space
- Removed some more unrealistic tree placements on slopes.
Gameplay:
- All characters now have double the sprint stamina than before, and the hiking boots powerup will still increase this even more.
- Audio mix and level improvements.
- Improved physics calculations.
- Game balancing.
- Chapter 2 is now a lot more chilled.
- Poachers attempting to rescue will now do so with more gusto.
- Increased leader (Mission 4) defeat/hands up radius for more realism.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a rare bug that would sometimes cause random objects such as rocks and trees to bleed when shot.
- Fixed some visual issues with buffalo dust clouds.
- Fixed an issue that could leave you stuck in the garage.
- Fixed issue with downward physics applied to ragdolls from the player sometimes causing ragdolls to shoot into the air.
Optimizations:
- Optimized blood delivery system
- Third person avatars now only stream into memory when they are needed, and only relevant to the character the player has chosen.
- Decreased the amount of simulation processing taken by birds flying in the sky when they are not visible by the player.
- Improved animation culling for groups of flies that sometimes appear near fallen enemies.
- Please Note : There has been a lot of complicated systems introduced in this update, so there might be some slight performance optimization regressions on lower devices, but if that's the case let me know and I'll be looking into it.