Hi all,
This patch reintroduces Dunes as the first functional scenario.
AI Changes
Bots now gather information more similarly to humans, resulting in fairer gameplay and more human reactions.
Vehicles no longer use set conditions which determine whether they're alive or not, which the bots would base their behaviour around.
Instead, bots estimate whether a vehicle is knocked out based on visual information like movement or flames.
If you survive a penetration and then stay perfectly still, bots will think you've been knocked out and continue on with their lives.
If a bot isn't expecting any enemies in a direction, they'll need to see a larger portion of your vehicle to recognize you as an enemy (more than 50%).
Upon being recognized as an enemy, bots will be more alert towards vehicles in your direction and need to see much less of your vehicle to target you.
This lets ambushes work, as you'll be able to get the first shot off before the enemies know you're there.
Scenario Derandomization
Randomization in scenarios was added to improve their replayability, with the spawn positions and enemies being different each time you play.
As it turns out, this works against the goal of the game. That is, iterating on your design to improve its performance. It became very difficult to notice the effects of your changes when the challenges it faced kept changing.
In 0.2, scenarios will be a constant experience, with the only variation being your design.
From now on, enemies will be designed specifically for each scenario and placed in the exact same spot every time you exit the editor. All of your allies will spawn in the same position each time you hit play.
Changes
- Reworked Dunes scenario reimplemented. It's now more of an ambush, attacking a superior force with a strategic advantage.
- Doubled the amount of spalling from shell penetrations.
- Significantly increased the damage that shells and spalling do to internals.
- Engine and transmission hit points increased by 500%.
- Damaged engines will now output less torque.
- Allies in scenarios no longer have randomized spawn positions.
- The armour overlay is no longer colour coded (The colour coding was very incorrect in 0.2).
- Visual effects are now affected by wind.
- Flameouts now build up their intensity, instead of starting instantly.
- Cannon fires now have a slight random pitch variation on each fire, to reduce repetitiveness.
- Engine fires now inherit the velocity of the vehicle emitting them.
- Exhaust effects no longer play in the vehicle editor.
- Post penetration-spalling cones are now 5x wider.
Fixes
- Fixed vehicle renaming not applying correctly if only one character was edited/changed.
- Bots no longer shoot vehicles which are obviously knocked out.
- Significantly increased the allowed complexity of post-penetration simulations. Stops spaced armour being invulnerable.
- Fixed post-penetration spalling not applying any damage when the simulation hit a certain complexity. Made higher calibre guns do basically no damage unless they had a simple result (e.g. overpenetration).
- Fixed a cause of poor performance in the editor after converting pre-0.2 vehicles.
- Fixed vehicle save preview icons being raised with the vehicle's ground clearance, cutting off the bottom of the vehicle.
- Fixed AI vehicles firing after their gunner has been knocked out.
- Dunes grime is now sandy, rather than dirty.
- Engine fires no longer cause ammo rack detonations.
- Flameouts now go out.
- All effects now correctly disappear when returning to the editor.
- Fixed invisible exhaust in eras before Latewar.
- Vehicle cycling is now limited to vehicles on your team.
- Track trails are now cleared when returning to the editor.
- Track trails are now disabled correctly by the graphics settings.
- Fixed bots shooting before they were even remotely aimed.
- Fixed sprocket wheels clipping their teeth through mark IV track belt segments.
- Fixed cannon mirroring not working.
- Fixed 0.2 design conversion not converting part mirroring correctly. Prevented you from picking up mirrored objects or incorrect parts being mirrored. For designs previously migrated to 0.2, this wont fix incorrect mirror conversions but it will fix the game stability issues caused by them.
- Fixed machinegun port placement not automatically rotating to match surface direction during placement.
Optimizations
- Lowered detail of some vehicle parts when outside of the editor.
- The new damage model now utilizes additional CPU cores in hit detection.
- Disabled texture streaming. Unnecessarily exchanged CPU power for VRAM.
- Significantly optimized CPU side vehicle rendering.
- Fixed crew members not having their detail lowered at distances.
- Halved the VRAM required by track trails.
- Removed physics quality settings. The suspension physics changes in 0.2.15 make the higher settings deliver little quality improvement while using much more CPU power.
Known issues
- Vehicles still don't collide with each other.
- Bots don't check for ally vehicles in their firing paths.
Pausing work on scenarios here, with focus shifting back to the tank editor to fix some major issues and add some important quality of life features to make 0.2 more enjoyable to build in.
Once that's done, the other scenarios should follow a bit quicker than this one due to fewer systems needing an update to work in 0.2.
- Hamish