Hello everyone!
It's been quite a while since we did an official update post, so we'd like to use this opportunity to sum up some of the things we did in the past month or so and talk a bit about future plans.
It's been quite a frantic experience working for the deadlines we have set up for the singleplayer, and I must admit I was a bit worried work on further polishing and improving the multiplayer experience might stagnate. To my relief, just the oposite turned out to be true. Creating the singleplayer often forces us to think from a quite a different perspective, and very often the result is a "hey, that could be made to work in multiplayer also" moment.
Thanks to such moments we have the new gunship skill, native skills, and almost compleetly reworked insurgents that now have different classes of their own, each with it's unique set of skills and different strengths and weaknesses player needs to exploit in order to deal with them.
Implementing some singleplayer fearures also made us aware of quite a few user interface elements that can at times either not be visible enough, or clutter the screen too much, so they are at the moment being overhuled. You'll be seing new item interaction icons, new player marine markers, new item icons, monster hit chance and other information being displayed through symbols instead of numbers, new options regarding what information is being displayed and much more.
Some work was done on the netcode for monsters, specially the burrowing monsters, who in part used some of the very old and network resource heavy system, and are now having their own brand new small and elegant packets for each action. The way multiplayer game handles game ending has been greatly overhauled. Game will now keep players connected through the game over menu, allowing host to freely synchronize scores with the clients. As a result, players should no longer see unacurate endgame scores. We'll continue looking for problematic areas in our network system and makng them work propperly.
Players can now see their and community best statistics from the in game menu. Players can also see different community scores as a leaderboard from from the Steam page. It has recently been found that some kill scores have not been propperly calculated, so these have been fixed, but some users might still have those scores saved. For understandable reasons we are unable to test every one of those scores in every situation, so if you ever notice any of them being off, please report it through the forums. Also, please note that some or all of those stats could be reset prior to release.
There have been quite a few complaints about game crashes on end screen, soecially during longer play sessions. We have been trying to figure those out for a while, and have finally found the root cause. Few issues regardin the freing of allocated working memory have been found which led to game no longer being able to allocate new memory after a while. Unfortunately it is not a single issue so we are unable to provide a singular easy fix, but we have managed to seal some major leaks, and users are reporting noticeably improved stability. We will continue working on this issue further.
While digging through the core of our engine, we also managed to stumble on few systems that were unnecesarely draining system resources. Some querries to object lists were greatly optimized, so users, specially those with CPU bottlenecks should feel an emprovement.
Game's graphics engine has been upgraded with two new features, antialiasing and soft particles. Combined with new HDR system implemented some time ago, we are very happy with the visual aspect of the game.
Some updates ago, we introduced a preloading system as an experimental system. We have been collecting user experiences with it and are mostly happy with how it works, but have noticed some issues. Namely, preloading objects, although it can reduce cpu drain at times and increase game fluidity, can also easily overwhelm either computers working memory or GPU memory, leading to reduced performance. At this moment we recomend using this option with care.
Ironward team wishes you all a happy Easter!