Hello Ghoul Hunters!
While chugging away at DLC development, I have decided to add a couple of variants for the notorious Scythe mutants in the BASE GAME to make them more interesting! First is a variant that throws blades at you, which are very deadly due to high bleeding. You'll first see them in Station 11. Then, I added armor to Scythes in higher-level map areas such as Lake Cheko (occasionally) and Ashinaka Forest. Make sure to load up some armor piercing rounds when you see them!
I also received reports that the ghouls will sometimes have difficulty with pathfinding, and just stays in one place for a few seconds while playing the running animation. I was able to reproduce this, but it seems to be an issue with Unity's navmesh pathfinding - sometimes it just can't find a path to reach you in areas with a lot of obstacles. While troubleshooting this issue, I first added some code to detect "pathfinding difficulty" moments, and when that happens I just tell the agent to go to a random spot within one meter and then proceed with pathfinding to reach player. This helped a bit, and then I increased the frequency of updating each agent's pathfinding when there are a lot of them around. While this is also helpful, it revealed an optimization issue - there are too many and too often calls to find certain game objects in the map, which is a slow process.
After optimizing the code, I was able to achieve some noticeable increase in performance. I have also hidden gameobjects that are in the same map but on a different level, to further reduce draw calls. I hope this change brings some improvement in performance for folks with older PCs.
One last thing - I received feedback (well, have been for a long time lol) that throwing grenade was difficult because the trajectory was unpredictable. To address this, I have added trajectory - just pull out the grenade (press 3), hold the Right Mouse Button and you'll see the yellow line showing you where the grenade will land. If you are careful enough, you can even line up the yellow line with a window to toss the nade into the building from outside. The grenade will follow the exact path and land at the exact place where the yellow line hits the ground. Hope you have fun with it :) Also, don't forget to use the Left Mouse Button to roll grenade. There's no trajectory for this because it's all about rolling the grenade on the ground. This is most useful when dealing with doorways.