If you are reading this, 0.36 has finally hit... and it's easily our biggest release to date.
For players, the biggest additions will be the full weapon set and industrial assets -- all in our new style. It's been incredibly rewarding to see all of this come together over the last month and we're excited about some cool, (secret) thing that we're going to be able to do with this style. This is the start of Reflex getting a whole lot prettier.
If you're a mapper, you've now got a fully customizable, Lua-based UI for the editor (including an in-game content browser at last). Since there's no textures for it to cause problems with now, you can also scale meshes and override materials on every object, making assets a whole lot more flexible. We've also unified our lighting system, allowing for faster build times, less lightmap stomping, no more nolight textures and a consistent look across brushes and meshes.
For the tech geeks, we've made a lot of changes under the hood to support a vertex count that has jumped from 300 thousand to 30 million in the space of a month. Besides countless small tweaks, we've also added a batching system, multiple reflection probes, NVIDIA ShadowWorks HBAO+, Level-of-detail meshes and probably more I've forgotten. With so much changed, detailed bug reports (submitted on our forums) are going to be invaluable.
We're really happy with how this update has come together and ready to start working on the next.
Editor:
- Content browser for effects/meshes/materials
- Entirely Lua powered now, so get customizing.
- All meshes & brushes can now have their material type and colour overridden
- Meshes can now be uniformly scaled up and down.
- Prefab system (EntityPrefab, me_createprefab, me_breakprefab, me_updateprefab, me_destroyprefab -- full docs soon)
Minor improvements:
- Increased UI mouse scroll speed
- me_snapangle is now a float
- Pickup positions now always exposed in replay
- Changed respawn & teleporter sounds -- many more will be coming with our updated sound engine.
- Added industrial ambient sounds
- Removed a heap of profiling sections so cl_show_profiler 1 is no-longer useless
- Added r_profiler 2
- CPU & Memory optimisations for servers
- Added weapon land impulse
- Added weapon bob (see cl_weapon_bob)
- Added ultra quality settings
Tech:
- Added static batching
- Removed lightmapping (we're now 100% probe-lit)
- .probe files are now redundant -- all baked lighting is saved into .light
- Can now load un-matching .light files (no more lightmap stomping the second you change anything)
- Added support for multiple reflection probes (requires DX10.1+)
- Added SMAA x1
- Added quality levels for FXAA
- Implemented NVIDIA ShadowWorks HBAO+
- Implemented LOD system
Bug fixes:
- Restored UV rotation commands
- me_getmaterial now works again when no faces are selected.
- Weapons no-longer rotate around crazy when building lights, much to newborns dissapointment.
- Fixed rotation on meshes when doing group rotations
- Editors can no longer select/delete/created player, grenade, rocket, cell, burst, stake, temp, cameraPath, vote or damage entities. We kept that bug secret for ages!
- Quad & resist effects no-longer seen on weapons on 3rd person players
- Several server bugs fixed
- Disabled stake launcher (for now)
Lua/console
- Lua functions: nvgFillImagePattern(), nvgLineCap(), nvgLineJoin(), nvgMiterLimit(), nvgGlobalAlpha(), nvgTextLetterSpacing()
- Lua vars: providing selected entity properties, providing selected brush properties
- me_activematerial and me_createtype are now vars not commands (they'll be saved to config / are query-able from lua)
- Added me_setentityproperty
- Added me_activealbedo and hooked it up to UI
Art:
- Added industrial theme. It's only a single bullet point, but it includes about a hundred assets and will include more over time.
- Added first-pass weapon art -- still some polishing to do.
- Revised carnage effect
- Updated hostile to match the new art style.
- Optimised some effects
- Fully themed BDM3