Grease your motor for this month's two-part content update! For Part 1, we have a wide variety of game-wide improvements and changes, along with a taste of this month's new biome coming in full for Part 2! Here's the full details:
Features
Improved AI! - Friendly NPCs and Civilizations alike are all getting an intelligence boost! Here are some of their newfound capabilities:
- Door-busters: All Civilizations now have the ability to break down your vessel's doors during their attack when you try to steal from them. Thieves beware!
- NPCs don't swing in Civilization hubs unless you're being attacked or if you've upset the Civilization.
- NPCs are more responsive to commands.
- NPCs can attack enemies while reviving.
Damage Overhaul! - Introducing variable sized breaks and a new shielding system for our big Damage Overhaul!
- Variable Sized Leaks: Leaks now scale with damage dealt, meaning big biters can chomp big, fast-flooding holes into your ship, and a little bump may only cause smaller breaches.
- Shield Damage Absorbtion: Shields now absorb variable damage rather than an all-or-nothing solution, meaning you can tank damage more effectivly, with only the difference in damage affecting your ship when it does cut through!
New Relics! - Three new mysterious but telling relics have appeared in the Prehistoric Waters - they seem to be from a different timeline, however, from a yet unseen biome...
New Enemy: Trash Compactor! - Another taste of the new upcoming biome. Brought by The Time Traveler, this strange machine cares little about your presence, but get in its way and you'll be sorry.
Optimizations and Improvements! - Last but not least, this update is packed to the brim with a host of new fixes, optimizations, and improvements in just about every area! Every machine needs to be well-oiled, after all!
- Greatly optimized bandwidth usage across the board.
- Flooding/Water system optimized to be less processor-intensive.
- Lairs now receive item drops.
- Fixed hosting and lobby issues for Mac OSX users.
- Caught and fixed many, many, game-slowing null reference bugs.
- Ceiling walkers' orientation is now networked.
- Revolver fixed to deal the correct amount of damage when shooting rapidly.
- Bots no longer shoot at barnacle mines or puffers.
- Fixed the lock cursor toggle when pressing caps lock.
- Aggroed Tiki Civ stops spawning boulders when dead.
Specific balance changes and fixes
Balance:
-Bots will continue to swing at enemies even when reviving a dead player
-Bots spend more time repairing if it is a directly commanded task
-Water flooding rate is now proportional to the size of the hull breach
-All enemies increase their health and damage upon looping the game.
-Batteries now provide 5 minutes of charge rather than their previous 3.
-The Tiki civilization no longer spawns boulders after all the Tikis are dead.
-Submarine shields now charge linearly rather than step-wise, and change color/scale to signify charge.
-Reduced wall flower projectile hull damage ~25%
-Increased lion-mane jellyfish hull damage ~250%
-Reduced hull damage from individual maggots 60%
-Decreased hull damage from lamprey invaders 60%
-Decreased hull damage from Aurelian worm 40%
-Increased angler fish hull damage 20%
-Reduced angler fish and sick angler fish biting rate
-Increased angler fish swim speed 5%
-Time devourer children do less damage based on their size
-Per-breach damage from ghost pirate invaders reduced 40%
-Per-breach damage from barnacle grabbers decreased 20%
-Increased hull damage from Dunkleosteus bites 300%
-Reduced Dunkleosteus health 25% and reduced bite rate 50%
-Reduced damage from cursed oyster clusters 20-66% depending on size
-Increased volcanic turtle and shark damage 25%
-Reduced volcanic vent eruption rate 50%
-Zoomed in lair guardian fight camera slightly.
-Doubled the XP value of killing exterior enemies.
-Hull damage due to crashinig the submarine increased
Fixes:
-All enemies, pickups, cave decorations, projectiles, ragdolls, hazards, and treasure now use a distance-based method to dynamically spawn and unspawn over the network only when in near-sight radius. This drastically reduces the amount of information sent to mid-game joining players and reduced moment-to-moment traffic on the client side 50-75%.
-Bots have improved response to commands when in an expedition segment
-Baby crabs are back! Where did they even go?
-Interior enemies now correctly respond to multiple sources of damage simultaneously or in short succession by using per-damage-source invincibility times, rather than per-damage invincibility times. This means that a full crew can attack cave/civ enemies and have each hit registered successfully. Very handy!
-Exterior enemies send 50% less traffic when mildly distant from the sub, and send no traffic to clients at all when far out of range (as part of the distance-based networking overhaul)
-Fixed bot loadout items sometimes appearing incorrectly for players joining mid-game
-Exterior hazards are now generated only once per level chunk, fixing the problems where waiting a while could cause the next level chunk to be packed full of barnacle mines or volcanic vents. Also fixes hazards popping into view.
-Quadrupled the size of the acknowledgement packet buffer (reduces packet loss)
-Increased the max sent message queue size from 128 to 150, allowing slightly more messages to be buffered and thus reducing packet loss due to network backup.
-Increased the max reliable message fragment size and max small reliable message count per-packet to help condense traffic and reduce bandwidth usage due to repeated packet headers.
-Decreased the ping timeout for disconnection from 8 seconds to 5 seconds, thus reducing ~35% of the packet backup caused by trying to resend reliable messages to an unresponsive client
-Fixed a bug in the broken container behavior causing networking backup.
-Wrote a failsafe to help prevent players from getting duplicate XP from a run quickly leaving and re-joining a game.
-Fixed a problem where the revolver could not deal damage for each shot if used at its max shooting speed - now each shot registers and deals damage
-Bots operating weapons will actively try to avoid barnacle mines and gaseous fish
-Nearly all objects related to the water flooding system no longer perform per-frame physics overlap casting, and instead do a single raycast at their start or highly stagged physics overlap casting. This dramatically improves flood performance.
-Fixed a bug in the cursor locking logic when pressing caps lock
-Built a series of workarounds for hosting online games on OSX when Unity fails to get any information about network adapters on the local machine
-Fixed the stage II barnacle crab not being properly hooked up to the network manager, causing networking backups
-Interior enemies now correctly sync their scale, miniboss status, and ceiling walker status for mid-game joining players
-Fixed pirate ship debris particles not properly being destroyed, causing slowdowns over time
-Fixed Discord Rich Presence showing incorrect biome names for players in-game
-Fixed an issue in the position syncing configuration of barnacle mines and gaseous fish, causing position information to come in out of order.
-Fixed a few typos in Atlantean, Egyptian, and Lamprey dialogue.
-Added a sound effect for grounded dodge rolls.
-Fixed a null reference in the appearance setting code for bots and civilization recruits.
-Fixed an animator rigging problem in the time devourer/children
-Ghost clams and eldritch spawnlings are now properly cleaned up after exiting a cave
-Fixed the lair guardian sounds ignoring SFX volume settings
-Fixed a bug where weapons power always displayed as zero in the tactical view
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Community
::: Player of the Month :::
The Player of the Month for September is..... GiantButtFace!
GiantButtFace, despite their name, has been a giant HELPFUL face in helping us find some important Mac OSX Networking bugs that we were able to solve in this very update! Through some good old fashioned back and forth emailing, questioning, and prompt info gathering. Thanks GiantButtFace!
::: Community Highlights :::
Person Personmans just sent us our first fan-made music piece this month, and we had to listen to it right away, and share it with y'all as well! Evoking the feeling when you are filled to the brim with leaks, this is "Breach" -
https://onlinesequencer.net/918623
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let us know what you think of Part 1, and we'll see you soon when Part 2 comes around!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patch 1 notes:
-Fixed a null reference causing caves to be non-exitable if preceded by certain cave types.
-Fixed a networking error in broken doors.
-Fixed ranged weapons being able to damage submarine doors