Since the last playtest, we’ve been taking a fairly aggressive look at performance, movement, combat, building, inventory, onboarding, audio, animation and anti-cheat.
The result is a build with a lot to test and, almost certainly, several exciting new ways for you to break things.
Let’s get into it.
Performance and Optimization
This build includes a substantial round of performance improvements, with more work still underway.
Since Steam Next Fest, our art and engineering teams have been taking a close look at Enginefall’s performance across the entire train. This has included reducing texture memory usage, optimizing environments and characters, improving visual effects, cleaning up collision and foliage, and making improvements to lighting and level streaming.
The goal is simple: improve performance, particularly on lower-spec machines, without compromising visual quality.
The Tutorial and Drifter have been optimized to use fewer skeletal meshes.
Third-person animation logic is being optimized.
Mirrored assets across carriages, airlocks, tunnels, the lobby and tutorial have been addressed as part of our performance improvements.
Texture sizes, compression and packing have been optimized across characters, environments and water to reduce memory usage.
Props including machinery, train wheels, furniture, luggage and pickups have received a wider optimization and cleanup pass.
Character assets, including heads, hairstyles, outfits and dead bodies, have been optimized to reduce their performance and memory costs.
Smoke, wind and torn-plastic effects have been reworked to reduce their performance impact.
Collision and unnecessary rendering features have been cleaned up across mud and foliage.
Black and incorrectly displayed textures have been addressed, alongside new material-quality controls for further performance tuning.
Lighting management has been improved, including support for lights responding to time-of-day changes.
Level streaming and rendering have been further optimized to reduce the cost of loading and displaying the environment.
Character animation processing has been improved to reduce unnecessary server and client performance costs.
Equipment and inventory networking has been optimized to reduce unnecessary replication.
The game can now report aggregated frame-performance statistics, giving us much better data on where performance problems are actually occurring.
And, of course, a lot of crashes have been fixed.
This isn’t the end of our performance work. Optimization will continue as we add, change and inevitably find exciting new ways to make the game work harder than intended.
Hit Registration and Validation
We’ve introduced a new hit-validation system that more accurately checks on the server whether your shots hit their intended target.
Bullets are no longer blocked by foliage.
Shots are now predicted on your client to make combat feel more responsive. Because of this prediction, you may occasionally see blood appear even if the server ultimately decides that the shot did not connect.
A confirmed server-validated hit will appear as an X on your crosshair.
In other words: blood means your client thought you hit them. The X means the server agrees.
Anti-Cheat
We’ve implemented new systems targeting some of the combat-related cheating observed during previous tests.
We will not explain exactly what those systems do. That would rather defeat the point and turn the release notes into a helpful guide for the people we’re trying to stop.
Combat and Movement
We received a lot of feedback from players, as well as from our own developers, that movement felt too floaty.
We’ve reduced some movement freedoms, lowered overall speeds and tried to keep players’ feet somewhat more closely acquainted with the ground.
We’re not finished, so please let us know how the new direction feels.
New Feature: Climbing
You can now mantle, vault and use whichever other synonym you prefer for climbing over wall-like surfaces.
Hold the Jump key while facing and moving towards a climbable surface to climb it.
You can climb onto surfaces with enough space to stand or crouch.
You can also catch yourself while falling.
You cannot shoot while climbing.
The current maximum climb height is roughly the height of a player-built wall. This maximum height is temporary and will be reduced.
Climbing animations are not fully implemented yet. We promise it will eventually look less like your character is negotiating with the wall.
Movement
Player movement has been retuned to feel slightly more realistic and grounded.
You can now only sprint at full speed while moving forwards or diagonally forwards.
Weapons and armor no longer reduce your movement speed.
You can no longer sprint while crouching.
Reloading any weapon now interrupts sprinting.
Sprint stamina has been significantly increased.
Maximum running and sprinting speeds have been reduced.
Most actions that interrupt sprinting will now pause it rather than cancelling it completely. Once the action finishes, you’ll continue sprinting.
Maximum jump height has been slightly reduced. You no longer have the jumping ability of a plumber, but you remain comfortably above average.
Landing now applies a small deceleration penalty. This should be barely noticeable during normal movement, but makes bunny-hopping significantly slower than simply running with your feet on the ground like nature intended.
Fall damage has been heavily reduced for now. A warning from the future: fall damage will probably become more punishing again once the wider movement changes have settled.
Weapon Changes
Every weapon has been looked at as part of this pass, alongside broader changes to recoil, spread, ADS and weapon handling.
SMG damage has been increased.
Every gun has received a recoil pass.
Weapon spread has been adjusted based on weapon category.
Sight and scope attachments now reduce recoil.
The Train Tech shotgun’s fire rate has been restored to its intended value.
Equipping a ranged weapon now takes 0.5 seconds across the board.
Swapping weapons no longer transitions through an unarmed state.
ADS can now interrupt more animations earlier, including weapon-equipping animations.
A large number of weapons have received an ADS pass to make sure they behave correctly.
Crosshair materials and visibility have been improved.
Scopes have received an initial improvement pass.
Initial work has started on scope placement and scope widgets.
Rifle iron sights have been improved, alongside several related bug fixes.
Pistol animations have received additional polish.
Mines, grenades and bombs now correctly trigger priority boarding.
Explosives can no longer be placed in the starting carriage.
The grapple gun has been rebalanced and now carries 10 shots in its magazine.
Explosive damage now passes through other players. Your friends can therefore no longer be used as human shields against explosions.
Impact effects now use the correct VFX and sounds depending on whether you hit armor or flesh.
Armor impacts now include a new blue-spark effect.
Bullet tracers should now be easier to see.
Combat Audio
Combat audio has also received a substantial pass.
Gunshot sounds have been improved across the weapon set.
Many weapons now have completely new sounds.
Footsteps can now be heard through walls.
There is now clearer audio feedback when you:
Kill another player.
Land a headshot.
Hit a target’s armor.
Break a target’s armor.
Have your own armor broken.
Base Building
Base Building has received a broad usability pass, alongside several new pieces and changes to Base Core upkeep.
New Building Pieces
Ladders have been added as a buildable item. There were a few situations where the game itself could cause you to fall off the ladders, but those situations have been addressed. This only fixes our reasons for you falling off. Anything that happens after that is between you and gravity.
Half-height stairs have been added.
Building Menu and Placement
The Build Menu now uses a radial wheel.
Item costs are displayed directly on the Build radial wheel.
Build-failure messages have been improved and repositioned so they are easier to notice.
If a placement is valid but you don’t have the required resources, the build ghost will now appear orange.
General Building System UX has been improved.
Base Core Upkeep
Base Core upkeep is now displayed on the HUD.
The Base Core Upkeep panel now shows the remaining upkeep timer.
Base Core upkeep has been disabled on the Dagger.
Inventory Improvements
The inventory has received the sort of pass that looks like a collection of small changes until you realize you use them every thirty seconds.
Items can now be dropped by dragging them out of the inventory grid from all containers.
Item stacks can now be split directly inside loot containers.
Items can be equipped directly from containers.
Attempting to place an invalid item in the shortcut bar now displays a warning.
Feedback has been improved for items that are currently being crafted and cannot yet be interacted with.
Weapons can now be repaired using resources from an open container without requiring those resources to be moved to your backpack first.
Weapons with upgrades no longer lose their icon when moved to the equipment bar.
Dragging an item anywhere onto the paperdoll will automatically equip it into the correct slot.
The same automatic placement behavior now applies to weapon attachments.
When dragging an item towards the paperdoll, the appropriate equipment slot is now highlighted.
Tech Tree, Relics and General Design
Tech Tree nodes have been rearranged to create a cleaner layout.
Resource requirements across several Tech Tree nodes have been adjusted.
Relics have been added to searchable objects inside themed rooms.
Tutorial hints have been updated.
Missions and Onboarding
We’ve continued improving the onboarding flow and the systems supporting missions.
An option to skip the onboarding mission has been added.
The Skip Tutorial feature during character creation has been fixed.
Fixed an issue where mission-complete notifications could fail to appear.
First-Person and Camera Improvements
We’ve introduced a broader camera-animation system as part of the move towards a slightly more simulation-style feel.
Weapons and arms now use First Person Rendering. This allows for better first-person shadows and disconnects the weapon and arm models from your selected Field of View setting.
Camera animation has been added across the game’s movement systems.
Your Field of View now widens slightly while moving at high speed.
Animation Improvements
There have been a lot of animation changes. This list barely scratches the surface, but here are some of the more visible ones:
Animation transitions should now flow more naturally.
Picking up resources while holding a weapon no longer plays the empty-hand pickup animation.
Weapons can now use multiple firing animations, making repeated shots feel less repetitive.
Weapon animations now play in third-person view. This means you can see other characters actually reload and manipulate their weapons.
Several weapon-animation sets have been completely reworked.
Issues that could briefly cause T-poses have been fixed.
Other Fixes
Fixed an issue where the party list could display a red skull and show a living player as dead.
Hair on players and NPCs should no longer disconnect from their heads. The hair and the heads have agreed to remain together for the foreseeable future.
Corpse ragdolls should no longer freeze in unsettled or unsettling positions.
Work Still in Progress
A few parts of this update are intentionally still being worked on:
Climbing animations are not final.
Maximum climbing height is temporary.
Scope placement and scope widgets are in an early state.
Armor-hit VFX are still being improved.
Third-person animation optimization is ongoing.
Movement and combat tuning will continue based on playtest feedback.
This is a substantial change to how Enginefall feels.
Tell us what feels better, what feels worse, and what still needs work. Your feedback during this playtest will help us decide where we go next.
See you on the train!