You have asked, we have provided. Rookies are like cats now. Small, squishy and a bit lost in time and space, but determined to survive stuff ordinary single lived marine would not. Players with less than 10 000 XP) will now be granted an opportunity to respawn with a drop pod 180 seconds from the moment they die.
Second piece of good news is that we’ve finally managed to tweak new movement netcode enough to be declared a decent successor to the old system. As you may already know, or last two weeks we have been trying to rework the movement netcode in order to deal with issues such as teleporting, position desynchronization, and general unresponsiveness, that are caused by a time delay between machines on the network.
First thing game now does upon establishing connection is clock synchronization. In this phase machines create and synchronize nanosecond precision clocks for each connection. When that is done, each sender machine can put a timestamp on it’s packet, and each receiver machine can subtract that timestamp from it’s own present clock value and thus calculate with satisfactory precision how many milliseconds ago was that package sent. Using that data, receiving machine can calculate a position where sending player should be positioned at the present moment. If that predicted position is significantly different from the displayed position (position where that player’s marine is drawn), displayed position will be gradually adjusted over 1500 milliseconds to match the calculated value. That way we can keep position data more or less in sync while keeping the responsiveness and avoiding teleporting.
Another trick we are employing is forced command delay. Each client machine now tracks the average latency of it’s connection to host. Once player on a client machine orders his/her marine to move, his machine will send the movement packet to host, but will delay the actual movement for a number of milliseconds it usually takes for a packet to arrive at it’s destination (or maximum number of milliseconds a movement can be delayed before game starts feeling unresponsive). That way over a stable network we’ll get marines starting to move at approximately the same time, keeping the location in sync even without the position prediction.
As you can probably guess, the new system is fairly complex and since it’s brand new, it might not work perfectly in all situations. If you encounter problems, please let us know so we can tweak stuff further.
A bug was found that in certain situations caused weapons to have only 10% chance of dealing critical damage although 15% was stated in the description. That bug has been fixed, and all primary weapons (except vindicator) have been given a default 1% critical chance.
Players will also now be immune to ailments if their armor is above 80%
Monsters will now have a bigger selection circle, so certain bosses will be much easier to target.
We have isolated a problem with light objects creation that was causing a crash when certain objects were created on the map (for example turrets). We believe that was causing the instability in the previous version and thus we hope this one will perform noticeably better. A deeper lights object corruption has also been identified. It causes problems more rarely but is also much more unpredictable and much more difficult to fix. We are working on it also and should have it fixed in the upcoming weeks.
And last, but not the least, it's my pleasure to announce a big content update patch named Horrors of Mars, coming up 17. October 2014. More info about it will be released in the following days.
To summarize:
GAMEPLAY
- added 2 seconds more time before shiva goes off with Nyx
- fixed bug where critical chance was 10% instead of 15% as stated in description
- every weapon that is not secondary or vindicator has inbuilt 1% critical chance now
- if player has more then 80% armor he cannot receive ailment
- added info if player dies that he can revive later with reinforcements mission
- player total lives changed (can be revived 2 times before going KIA)
- rookies(players under 10 000 XP) will revive via drop pod every 2 minutes up to wave 10 on easy and normal difficulty if they're NOT KIA
- equalizer range increased form 3 to 5 meters
- returned small bloppers in science sector per each wave
GUI
- added helmet for heavy support(targeting systems)
- added cooldown info for skills on mouseover
- quality of life change - increased monster selection radiuses
NETWORK:
- Reworked movement related netcode