Work on the new version of the game continues steadily. With the new Lobby finished we are now focusing on the player, player interactions and the randomly generated ships.
Player Interactions:
The old system we had where the player has to click on physical buttons has been removed. It was too clunky and would have made navigating more complex things such as the Store a chore.
We also felt the Mission Control menu and navigation could be spruced up a bit so we set out to design a new way for players to interact and navigate menus. This new system will also allow us to make other elements of the game more interesting i.e. an hacking mini-game for the Computer Core data dump and other ideas we're currently experimenting with.
When interacting with things like the mission Control or the Store your character now looks at the screen when you click the keyboard. You can now navigate the interface with your mouse. You can leave the interface at any time without resetting the screen.
The Mission Control menus have been given an upgrade and we added a new section to it so we can give players more information on what they need to do for that mission, before starting the mission.
The new mission select interface, selecting a mission:
The new mission information menu, this will display more details on your various (special) tasks:
The Level Generator:
The level generator is fully working now. Nothing much has changed as the level generator already worked very well in the old version of Disinfection.
The various components for the level generator (hallways, stairs, rooms, etc) are almost fully ported over. We do need to update the textures of the decoration, like we did with the Lobby, and we need to make some new textures for the walls, ceilings and floors as the components needed to be arranged a little differently now. This will take quite a bit of time and effort, so this will probably be one of the last things we finish for the new version of the game.
All the textures for the components are getting optimized too, some were too big whilst not needing the extra detail thus wasting GPU and VRAM resources.
Here's some screenshots of what we have so far:
Getting Rid of the Loading Screen:
Our original idea for starting and ending missions in Disinfection was to ensure a single, continuous, experience for the players. This meant we didn't want any loading screens.
Unfortunately this wasn't possible in the old engine as the static Global Illumination needed to be re-baked every time and the navigation data for the AI also needed to be re-calculated every time.
However in the new engine we now have dynamic Global Illumination, which is calculated in realtime. This doesn't need any baking at all. It also seems that navigation data can be pre-calculated and saved in the engine's editor and thus it doesn't need any calculation during gameplay.
The new engine also allows us to preload the necessary components for the level generator, which makes generating new missions extremely fast, at the cost of a little more RAM usage. Even large missions didn't even dip the framerate below 60 during testing, which the level generator doing everything in a single frame. Of course it doesn't need to do everything in a single frame per se, but it's very nice that it actually does work that well.
So, instead of a loading screen, we now have a short transport and docking sequence that plays whilst the mission is being loaded and prepared. This makes starting and ending missions a lot more immersive as it actually feels like you travel from location to location with your ship.
Traveling to your next mission:
Planning:
If all keeps going well we should have a playable testing beta by the end of this month, so players can freely opt into this beta, try out the new version and help find bugs. This testing beta may be solo play only initially as we need to rewrite a lot of the networking code, so that may not be finished in time.
In December we will add the missing content & features and fix bugs. If it all goes well we should have the new version of the game ready for public release by the end of December.