Hellfire's all new phase reaper skill
Tactical mode
While being the only one present in a lobby, player can now, by ticking the appropriate game mode, choose to drop solo with up to three AI followers and an option to enter a slow time "tactical mode" where he can issue orders to all members of his squad and plan his actions in relative safety.
AI players can be removed from the lobby by clicking the kick button, and added by double clicking on an empty slot. They will gain experience and ranks, their combat suits can be configured, and they can be renamed from the options menu.
Singleplayer updates
We are happy to announce that this update marks one of the last milestones in the early access stage in the development of The Red Solstice. Yesterday, we have publicly announced the official release date as 9'th of July 2015. We are making a final push to make everything in time, and so far we feel that the puzzle pieces are clicking into place nicely.
Singleplayer, that has been one of our focus points during these last months of early access development, is in the internal testing phase. Some of our most active users have been granted access to first seven missions and will soon be granted access to the rest. There are of course still things that need fixing and improving, but the overall response has been positive, and we are confident that by including additional mechanics such as the slow motion "tactical mode" we have managed to translate the essence of what this game should be to a singleplayer experience. Singleplayer will be enabled to all players with the full release.
You can watch our new game trailer showcasing bits of singleplayer experience here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2i_LM2c550&feature=youtu.be
UI updates
New UI mentioned in our last announcement has been almost fully implemented with just a few kinks left to be polished. We hope it will provide a fresh modern feel and allow new players to understand the game more easily.
New skill
There were complaints about ammo and shooting desynchronizations in multiplayer, so we did a bit of tweaking there. There are still some minor quirks, but judging by the feedback we have gathered so far, it's much better then it was. Manual targeting has also been optimized and will now cause less network traffic with more consistent results. Short range weapons such as arclite can now be fired by clicking outside their effective range.
Performance updates
During the last few weeks a number of performance related issues have been found and fixed. Most notably, a new kind of object storage and search mechanism has been implemented called quadtree. Objects are now stored with their map locations in mind, allowing for much less processor intensive queries. We are seeing a noticeable performance improvement as a result.
Preload feature has been better integrated into the existing resource management system, allowing it to function more smoothly and with much less interference with the normal loading of higher priority resources. Still, running full preload (specially loading objects) will still game performance, so if you want to use all preload options on slower machines you will probably want to wait for it to finish before starting a game.
Extensive beneath the hood work has caused few problems including some minor glitches, but unfortunately also some crashes. Some of them have already been fixed, but few more rare and non deterministic ones are still being hunted for. As always, please send us reports with as much detail as you can provide as it often helps us greatly in pinpointing problems.
Hellfire got a bit of love with this patch. He got his last skill, called phase reaper. It's a melee type skill. We could write a whole essay about how awesome it is, but as they say, picture paints thousand words.
The Red Solstice is participating in the Steam summer sale and thus can be bought at a 10% discount price until .