Hey everyone, apologies for the silence, we’ve been hard at work on our backend making sure NervBox is stable and scalable to best support our future plans. You should expect to see more regular updates going forward.
Here’s what’s been changed and added:
Networking:
- The entire networking backend has been overhauled. We switched from using “Netcode for GameObjects” to “Fish Networking”. Alongside this we are now using Epic Online Services as our relay service. Most of the following netcode improvements are a result of this change.
- Reduced bandwidth usage globally. Players should notice reduced latency.
- Reduced CPU usage. This allows for more objects to be synchronized, and will allow for larger lobby sizes down the road.
- Improved Death and Respawning, player bodies should not explode as often.
- Reworked and greatly improved Holster Sync.
- Improved Weld Gun Sync.
- Fixed an issue where players could not rejoin/rehost after leaving a game.
- Fixed an issue where players would join a lobby and face a black screen.
- Added ownership transfer when bullets hit objects.
- Fixed various other networking issues.
Levels:
- Added an empty flat map for maximum performance.
- Main menu tweaks.
Items/Interaction:
- Added Spear.
- Added Shopping Cart.
- Added Baseball Bat.
- Added ladder.
- Added physics materials to all items.
- Improved magazine loading.
- Improved grabbing from magazine pouch.
- Reduced floppiness when grabbing a gun slide.
UI:
- Brand new UI with new styling, animations, and sound.
- Added 80hz refresh rate option (Quest).
- Improved Lobby Creation, it is now faster and easier to get in game.
- Improved error handling and feedback.
- Improved UI pointer visuals.
Player:
- Made hand colliders adjust based on whether the player is making a fist or not.
- Improved force grab targeting.
- Reduced movement of legs on a moving object.
- Improved climbing sensors to reduce accidental climbing mode activations.
- Adjusted auto-player calibration, this should create a good balance between too-tall and too-short legs.
NPCs:
- Reduced the likelihood of NPCs falling down upon being spawned.
- Potential fix for NPCs reviving themselves after dying.
Audio:
- Vastly improved collision sounds across the board. Objects now have a hardness that affects how they sound when colliding.
- Object to object collisions now produce sound.
- Improved performance of collision sounds.
- UI elements now have sound effects.
Known Issues:
- Players can sometimes get stuck in the shopping cart.
- There are performance drops in the CTF gamemode.
- There are a couple of spots with occlusion culling problems on Warehouse.
- Toggling the spectator camera in-game with multiple players may result in the camera following other players.
Alongside this we have also created a roadmap, so you can follow along with that to see what we’re currently working on and what we plan on doing next: Roadmap
If you have any questions, feedback, bug reports, or suggestions, or just want to chat and hang out, join our discord!
Thank you for your patience, and we hope you enjoy this update!
-The Quantum Lion Labs Team