While there hasn’t been a bunch of content added to the game in the past couple weeks, we have been hard at work fixing things up, squashing bugs, and laying groundwork for upcoming features. We’ve added more robust graphics settings, allowing you to tweak settings for Detail, Shadows, Anti Aliasing, and Post Processing. Shooters on our Discord have reported these settings enabling them to achieve smoother performance and higher frame rates, so if your setup is struggling a bit, give ‘em a shot.
Another performance improvement should be coming later this week. If we’ve done our job right, you really shouldn’t see any visual difference, but after some experimentation, we’ve decided to handle terrain a bit differently. This new terrain should be indistinguishable from the old terrain, but shooters with older GPUs might notice slightly better framerates.
Now that we’ve added some courses that have ammo and mag limits, we quickly realized dropping a magazine accidentally was pretty much cause to restart the course, so we’ve changed it so magazines and shot shells do not automatically disappear during your run. This also means magazines can be picked up and placed back in their belt slots. Also, the shot shell caddy now has slots.
We love seeing videos of shooters’ runs, sometimes we’re just in awe of the raw speed we see, and sometimes we say “Hey c’mon, man” and see something we feel we need to address. So, we’ve added more recoil when shooting the long guns one handed. Our apologies to those trying to live out their Arnold in Predator fantasies.
We’ve squashed a lot of bugs, check patch notes for the full list, but the big offenders were poppers not resetting properly, a discrepancy in the reporting of times in certain edge cases, and a crash that would happen when reholstering the pistol.
There’s also a number of small tweaks to things such as the game automatically using the Oculus runtime if you’re using an Oculus, picking a color for the red dot, renaming a few things in the loadout UI, an adjustment to to smacking the bolt release on the WBR 15 (formerly called the MSR), adjustments to the orientation of hands across all platforms, and Index controllers can now use the touchpad to toggle the safety.
Vive controls have had a number of tweaks. Movement swipes can now begin anywhere on the touchpad. Buttons can now be clicked anywhere in their quadrant, not just the edge, and you shouldn’t have issues accidentally triggering two button presses, like toggle safety and magazine ejection. Let us know how this stuff feels to you, we’re still listening.
We’re finally revamping the UI. This will be rolled out in stages, first looking at size, scale, and anchoring, then looking towards a cleaner layout. We’ve already revamped the backend of the system so now the art team can hammer out the rest as we move forward. You may notice we’ve sort of been piling on stuff, just getting it in and working as we add features, and we are currently developing some more UI to support the new Event System we are implementing. In the meantime, the pointer in the UI has been updated to be a little more natural to use, and later this week, we’re hoping to have some improvements as well.
Wait… New Event System?! Yup.
We’ve been building out a new backend for leaderboards. It’s a big change and takes some time, but it’s going to support our new update, Tournaments! Tournaments will be limited time events where we pick a few courses, set a timeframe, and give you one chance to log a score for each course. We know that allowing shooters to just hammer run after run on the same course leads to highly optimized times, and we wanted something a little more true to life. As you may have seen on our live streams, results can wind up different when you are limited to one run. More pressure. No retries. Make every shot count.
Along with these new events, we want a change of scenery, so we’re moving from the high desert up into the high country. We have a new environment in the works and we can’t wait to show it off. We have a couple goals with this new environment. Obviously, we want some much needed variety in environments, but additionally, we’re taking everything we’ve learned building our current courses and giving ourselves a little more variety in layout. This doesn’t mean we won’t be designing new courses in our original setting, but the next few courses will definitely happen here.
So, when is this new stuff coming? Well, we don’t exactly know, but we’re targeting the end of April/beginning of May. We certainly don’t want our first tournament to be a disaster, so testing not only the systems, but the user experience as well, will dictate the exact time as we approach the end of the month.
Finally, we’re looking forward to participating in the next Steam Sale. We don’t get notified when these sales are happening until they’re about to happen, but it’s been a while and we’re hoping there’s some sort of sale coming in the next month or so.
So, if you know someone who is holding out for a discount on the game, or maybe a friend who wants a little more variety, tell them to wishlist the game, and let 'em know there's something coming soon.
Thanks,
12 Gauge Savior