A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.29.1.0) The main additions in this update are 4 new enemy spawn patterns for Survival and Blitz modes. These include curved or angled waves of fast enemies, or large groups of seeking enemies.. There have also been a few balance changes for general enemy spawn patterns for Survival/Blitz modes and increased kill counts per wave. The goal of these changes is to increase progression of complexity to keep gameplay interesting.
This update also includes lighting improvements and optimizations for Player/Enemy ships and cave background. All Player/Enemy ships now better display normal mapped specular highlights and enemy and boss ships now use emission maps to improve visual fidelity. The cave background lighting now has corrected normal values for each vertex, which better calculates how lighting should look based on the position and orientation from the camera and light source. Specular highlights have been added to the cave background as well.
This release also includes updated 3rd party libraries for things like texture loading, fonts, music, and leaderboard communication. Since the last set of library updates were integrated, there have been a number of new releases to fix security issues, improve performance, and fix bugs.
In preparation for AVideoGameCon, improvements have been made to the Kiosk mode of BlastZone 2 to make it more accessible on the show floor. The main improvement allows for a second player to join midgame without waiting for the current player to be done first. Also, the game trailer now automatically plays when the game is idle for a while. For more information about this convention, check out the website here:
http://www.avideogamecon.com
Here are the full list of changes for v1.29.1.0:
- Added 4 new "enemy wave" spawn patterns for Survival/Blitz modes -New pattern #1 simultaneously spawns several quick enemies in a symmetrical angle shape -New pattern #2 spawns many quick moving enemies sequentially in a curving wave -New pattern #3 spawns many regular heatseeking enemies -New pattern #4 spawns many vertical tracking enemies
- Made several balance changes to the Survival/Blitz game modes: -Adjusted the proportional frequency of each enemy spawn pattern to be more evenly distributed -Adjusted the times when each new enemy spawn pattern is introduced -Increased the overall frequency of enemy spawn patterns by 67% -Increased the kills count per wave -Survival Singleplayer: 40->50 -Survival Multiplayer: 60->70 -Blitz Singleplayer: 80->100 -Blitz Multiplayer: 120->150
- Made numerous realtime lighting improvements -Added Emissive lighting to all enemies and bosses -Improved interaction between diffuse and ambient lighting for all objects -Improved specular highlights for player ship rendering -Corrected cave background vertex normal values, fixes how lighting should behave relative to the light source and camera -Added specular highlights to the cave background
- Added scripted fly in animation when starting new waves in Classic/Survival/Blitz modes
- The ViewDistance and ParticleDetail settings now default to "VeryHigh" to take advantage of recent optimizations
- Terrain positioning is no longer affected by the ViewDistance setting
- Optimized ship and cave background shaders -Eliminated a few redundant per-pixel calculations that can be calculated per-object instead -Eliminated multiple light calculations when only a single light is active for the cave background (ships already have this optimization)
- Reorganized and updated the credits screen
- Cleaned up a few areas of code to prevent potential bugs and memory leaks
- Combined separate color and alpha textures for all wave intro splash animation textures -Reduces startup load time -Reduces memory usage on some systems -Slightly reduces CPU overhead for rendering the wave intro splash animation
- Updated Kiosk mode to allow for the second player to join midgame -The second player gamepad needs to press the 'A' button to join -Added text to the HUD to reflect this -The joining player will start with the same number of lives the first player currently has -The joining player will be given the A3 ship as there is no opportunity for ship selection -This update does not apply to the standard game to prevent highscore exploits
- Updated Kiosk mode to play a trailer video after idling for a while
- Migrated to newer versions of a few 3rd party libraries -libPng v1.5.30; Used for loading textures -FreeType v2.9.1; Used for generating fonts -LibOgg v1.3.3; Used for music playback -LibVorbis v1.3.6; Used for music playback -cURL v7.61.0; Used for leaderboard uploading/downloading
As usual, to make sure you have the latest version, launch the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.29.1.0” or higher. Enjoy!