It's been a while since the last SOTG. Partly due to a string of smaller updates to the game, and partly due to a (personal) bout with Covid. But all is well, and if you've been keeping up with the game on your own, we think you'll agree we've been busy!
New Firearms
Last week we launched the DaviDae S320 pistol. It looks great and comes with the full suite of optics available in the loadout screen. We haven't seen any negative feedback so far on it, but if you've got something to say about it, hop over to the Discord and let us know how to improve.
This week, we've got another one for you. We're not sure how many shooters will choose to run it in our current courses, but hey, how many different shotguns can you really make? We also wanted to set a challenge for ourselves to tackle the mechanics of a pump action. Look for the Fossberg 500 in this weeks update, then as always, head over to the Discord to let us know what you think of it.
If you've been following our Friday Night Dev Streams (Twitch, Youtube, Discord, Facebook, Steam), you've probably seen much of the recent updates, as well as the discovery of the issues that lead to these updates. If not, subscribe, follow, or just hop in the chat Friday nights at 8:30pm MST to get the very latest.
Fixes/Changes
- Updated Red Dot for visibility
- Adjusted audio fall off range for steel targets
- Changed failure to engage penalty to just be 5 seconds per infraction
- Swingers stop swinging upon course completion
- Adjustments to table colision to prevent wacky gun bouncing
- New Target Variations with no-shoot occlusion
- Added option to disable visual activators on the Trap/Skeet range
- Added reminders to Classifiers 09-02 & 13-01 for facing uprange
New Courses
WBPSA Classifiers:
- 19-03
- 19-01
- 20-01
- 20-02
- 09-02
- 13-01
3Gun Courses:
- Fast Act 01
- Fast Act 02
- Fast Act 03
- Fast Act 04
- Fast Act 05
Course Editor
We thought we'd gather a bunch of the assets together to give you an idea of what we're playing with for the editor. None of these assets are guaranteed to make it to the final editor, but heres a bunch of stuff we're trying to get working.
Obviously, you'll need these to make a functioning course...
And here's some mesh barriers we want to make available...
Some barriers that obstruct line of sight...
Some props to dress things up...
Some walls for those indoor courses...
And of course, targets...
...lots of targets
This is what we're working with so far. If you think we're missing something, or have ideas you'd like to see added, the only way we'll know about it is if you head over to (you guessed it) our Discord and bring it up. The whole dev team is there, as well as a great community of gamers and real world shooters. Together, we think we'll be able to make something really powerful.
As far as rolling all of this out, we're thinking about doing this in phases, the first of which would actually be a range editor. Some time ago, we added an internal feature to add shooting ranges to the game that aren't bound by the rule sets of the various competitions, and we think this should be our first vertical slice we tackle.
After rolling out Ranges, we'll want to tackle the problem of sharing and browsing these courses. This might be rough in our first implementation. There's a number of things to try here. We've made progress on converting our courses to be data driven, and at the early stages of sharing we may just be sending eachother big ol' walls of text, or maybe we'll do some sort of workshop integration.
After implementing sharing, we'll move on to rolling out the different rule sets. There's a number of challenges to take on to get this stuff working. How do we let shooters lay out shooting lanes? How do make the ropes work? How do we make sure scoring is automatically handled? What kinds of things need to be restricted so the editor doesn't become some sort of nightmare experience where shooters need a 4 year degree to understand it? How do we tutorialize this thing so it doesn't annoy shooters who "get it" but doesn't frustrate shooters who don't?
One feature we're designing around is making sure you can easily swap between editing and playing the course you're working on as seen in Halo's Forge and Mario Maker. This ability to build, test, build, test, etc... without saving and loading at every turn makes all the difference in usability and is really something we want. And of course we want all of these tools to be in-game. You won't need to learn Blender or Unity to make courses, and of course, you'll be making courses in VR.
Do you know of any games with built in level editors we should be looking at for inspiration? Do you have ideas that may answer some of our toughest questions? Is there a glaring hole in our plans? Again, head on over to the Discord and let us know!
Thanks,
12 Gauge Savior