Hello Fearless Pilots, I have a rare thing to present to you: an update release date: Chapter1B Drops on March 17th!
Video Devlog
If you prefer to digest you devlogs in video format, check out the below!
Let me know what else you would like to see in these, I'm curious to try this new format. I'm new to YouTube but I want to share our dev progress- leave a comment, a like or subscribe if you want to help out.
Chapter1B Features
Performance Improvements
This was our main focus of the last few months.
Steam Deck fps increased 30%, and hits 90 fps in low action areas.
Stuttering is greatly improved. The ones that remain are from spawning units and we will improve this over time.
More settings are exposed now. You can set anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, and render scale. This let's you get the performance / quality experience you want.
This includes adding the new water system! So the game should look better and run faster. The team really cooked on this one.
These updates have allowed us to render some more dense jungle scenes without sacrificing performance, and we are set up really well for the jungle campaign now.
Here's a summary of all the improvements that were made
Native Steam Deck build - unlocked the 90 fps potential
Optimized Destruction System
Updated Unit Navigation - uses ECS for faster calculations, avoided some recalculations.
Bullet decals are being pooled
Unity 6.3 Update
Major vegetation stutters fixed (we pre-load them)
Major improvement from enabling depth priming, removing SMAA
More anti-aliasing options offered (FXAA, SMAA, TAA, None)
Ambient Occlusion is a setting that can be disabled for more performance
Exposed a render scale setting
Improved Unit system- more efficient update loop, and LOD priority system
Arcade Missions
We've added a new section in the home base for arcade missions. Our goal for this was to add replayable content and have a place for experimental missions.
I want this section to be a place where we can experiment with missions that wouldn't fit in the campaign. It should allow us to create more content and to try out more community ideas in a flexible way.
We've only added a handful of missions so far, but this section will evolve a lot. Most of our focus needs to be on Chapter 2, but having this section allows us to add little bits of content over time as we go. This way you're not waiting forever without having something new to play.
AND, now I can make the super duper hard challenge missions that I couldn't put in the main campaign :)
Here's our current list of Arcade missions. These may change before launch.
Survival Mode
Mini Golf (with missiles...)
Skee Ball
Skeet Shooting
Roping Missile Challenge
Radar Turret Challenge
These missions are all pretty short and light, but this is just the start- we want you to help us expand this section over time.
Redirecting Missiles w the Rope
Ok so I know this isn't a top priority, but I've been waiting months to work on this again. Basically, this was possible before but not super rewarding because it didnt't work w all the missiles and when it did work, they didnt do much damage.
Now the missile's can be more reliably redirected back to the turret (or npc...) that fired them, and they will do 3x the normal damage if you pull it off.
New Water System
The new water system has been added to all the chapter 1 missions in the game!
Recently we built a system that detects when any object is entering the water and creates a splash effect. Throwing props into the water is decidedly more fun now.
This prevents us from having to do custom work for the 384593 props in the game.
Roadmap
Edit- I forgot to mention that there are 2 parts of Chapter1B on the roadmap that we have postponed until later: The helicopter customization and a new playable helicopter.
We did this in the interest of getting this update out quickly while starting production on Chapter 2. Our main priority is getting you the main campaign content as fast as we can.
We will release these features as a later date, in parallel with our work on Chapter 2. I am hoping this works better to keep the updates coming more frequently.
Chapter 2 Production Sneak Peak
We've been working on the first mission of Chapter 2 as a way to experiment with our new process and see how the water missions work.
A new hazard has entered the chat
Thank You
Thanks for following along! Mark your calendars for March 17th, and come hop in the discord to celebrate the launch with us: https://discord.com/invite/XmMTqEjpQg
- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team