While we're pushing forward on bringing Tournament Events to the game, we're also working on a couple other things. You may have noticed a change in the UI, reorganizing some things to hopefully make it less overwhelming. We're looking for feedback from shooters as to how this feels. We know we're not done with it yet.
We also implemented our optimizations to terrain. This really shouldn't be a noticeable change, but it needed to be done because we're working on a new environment, which means we needed to adjust our art pipeline first. I'm happy to say the new environment looks amazing and is a welcome change of scenery. The first course developed in this new environment is a blast, and we feel like it's a culmination of everything we've learned building courses so far. Can't wait to see what you think.
While we're spinning up our new leaderboard system we're also cooking up a couple other things for our competitive shooters. We've started modelling out a few Practical Shooting classifier courses. We won't really have a Practical Shooting mode right away, but we figured it'd still be useful for shooters to be able to practice on them. We'll be adding more classifiers in the coming weeks, so please be patient, but feel free to sound off in the Discord about which courses are most useful to you.
So, without an actual mode, how helpful can Practical Shooting classifiers really be? Well, a lot more helpful with the other new feature coming this week. We're adding a shot timer to these courses. No, it's not gonna be some little blue box on your belt, it's going to use some of the tech we've already got to accomplish this. Each classifier course should have a shot timer UI panel near the start that will show times and splits. You'll have to inspect your targets to call your own Alphas and Mikes, but we think it'll still be a useful practice tool.
There's a lot of game rules that need to be implemented to support the real world versions of these types of courses: strong and weak hand shots, ammo limits and classes, and things like mandatory magazine changes to name a few. It's a bit much to bite off in a single week of development, but we figured adding this shot timer would allow shooters to practice the way they would IRL, and give us a bit of room for the art team to keep developing these courses while the programmers navigate the gigantic rule book.
As we continue building out these features, we can't stress how valuable feedback is. Our shooters have guided most of our decisions and we will be leaning heavily on our Discord community, so get in there and let us know what you think.
Thanks,
12 Gauge Savior