A gameplay improvement update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.28.2.0) This update puts more emphasis on bullet patterns by making improvements to long range enemy types for Survival and Blitz modes. Now, long range enemy types move around the right side of the screen for a while and fires rapidly at the player. This brings more variation to gameplay by giving the player a broader scope of enemy behaviors to account for to survive.
An update has been made to enemy bullets to make them easier to track in 3D space. When enemy bullets are outside the gameplay plane, they use a more washed out color, then change to the standard color as they pass through the gameplay plane and can hit the player.
There are also a few performance improvements for the new OpenGL 3.0 renderer. Shaders are now dynamically swapped out for objects based on the current lighting situation to improve graphics performance. Dynamic batching of shader properties has also been implemented to reduce shader management CPU overhead. The new 3d matrix calculation system created a few updates back has been improved as well to better balance multithreading workloads between the rendering and main update threads, improving overall CPU performance. A rare multithreading crash bug was also fixed in this update.
Here are the full release notes for v1.28.2.0:
- The long range enemy type now moves around the right side of the screen for a while, firing at the player -This only applies to the Survival and Blitz game modes -Increases the emphasis on bullet dodging in these modes, as there was previously too much emphasis on dodging enemy ships -These enemies eventually move toward the player to prevent too many from piling up on the right side of the screen
- Clearing a wave in Survival or Blitz mode now clears all bullets from the screen to prevent dying between levels
- Enemy bullets that are outside the gameplay plane are now colored differently to make it easier to track bullets in 3D space
- All player ships are now always in memory, slightly reducing load times between scenes
- Updated the custom enemy scripting system to allow for using any player ship model -Previously only allowed for using the current Player 1 ship
- Updated Class #1 enemy scripting to add the following parameters -Stop X position -Stop Time -Enable AutoFire
- Updated the Stress Test level packs to make it easier to test performance -Removed AutoFire from enemies -Starting stats are now maxed out -Increased starting lives for all difficulties to 5
- Improved performance when the player is not using Hyper Mode or beam weapons in the OpenGL 3.0 renderer -Eliminates extra lighting calculations when only a single light is active
- General shader management optimizations for the OpenGL 3.0 renderer
- Improved render matrix management performance and parallelism in a few areas -Includes enemy ships, enemy bullets, player bullets, and player booster -These improvements affect both the OpenGL 1.5 and 3.0 renderers
- Fixed a rare multithreading crash bug at the end of the final player death animation
- Tweaked screen wipe transitions
As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.28.2.0” or higher. I hope everyone enjoys this gameplay update!