V1.1!
A little while back, Mothership Forever was in the Steam Shmup sale. I received a number of reviews, almost all of which focus very heavily on the physics explosions. Now, I'll be honest, I saw these during testing, but they were so rare and so hard to reproduce that I simply failed to fix them.
However, so many of the reviews focused on this, that I finally decided to buckle down and fix it. Which is why I'm writing this. I'm *pretty sure* it's fixed now, or at least so massively rare as no-one will see it. I've certainly not seen it in the last 8 hours of testing! I also spent those 8 hours digging really deep into the performance, as I really would love to release this on consoles. If it DOES happen, then the game should give you a free kill on the Mothership, as opposed to your failing. Try not to abuse that too much ;)
There were a few other minor issues, but mostly I've focussed on performance!
One other note before those glorious patch notes; the design of the game is *entirely* based around you either being much more skilled or sneaky than the Mothership. Flick asteroids at it. Hide. Dig holes through the armour to the core. Stack up a hundred mines and sneak the ship into it. Don't play fair. Cheese it. Cut off its engines and wait until 2 seconds before killing it.
The story mode *should* be relatively simple and easy if you take your time on each round. The other two game modes (Endless and Rogue) are designed around you killing the Mothership as quickly as possible and THAT'S where it gets hard. But consider the Story mode little more than a Tutorial on what weapons do what, and how the evolutions react to your behaviours.
Gameplay changes
- Using Dash now immediately switches you to Cruise mode
Fixes
- Fixed an issue where broken joints could cause enormous physics forces for a brief period of time
- Motherships that *do* warp into the middle of nowhere will now explode. But this will never happen as I 100% fixed the bug.
- Fixed an issue where destroyed objects could be left in a bad state for 1 frame, causing knock-on effects
- Health and Shields will now show at all points during Endless and Rogue modes
- Fixed issue where Radial Weapon select UI appeared after finishing hotkeying
Performance
- Enabled multi-threaded Physics (250%-400% speedup!)
- Cached Weapon speeds, as opposed to querying them tens of thousands a second
- Improved targetting choices to be much more CPU efficient
- Optimised shadow rendering of weapons to be faster
- Ripple camera is now smart and will not render blindly - large CPU and GPU speedup!
- Various render layer optimisations
- Optimisations to Radar rendering.
- Massively optimised rewrite of Radar simulation
- Reduced worst-case scenario of blindfire weapons by spreading the work over multiple frames