Early Access Update Tjugofem (25)
build id: 56D365A0
Hello all! I am happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Additional Plan Options (Doors / Fences)
I have updated the Plan options to include 3 distinct settings for both Doors and Fences. These settings are More, Less, and None, where More is the legacy setting of "on" and None is the legacy setting of "off". Note that the previous functionality of selecting Invert Barriers is still supported, swapping the first and last passes of Barriers. The setting of the option for the first pass of barriers (Doors if Invert Barriers is on, Fences if Invert Barriers is off) may radically affect the state of the random number generator, and it is very possible to see different map layouts as a result of changing these settings.
The main goal here was to allow for more permutations of maps in regards to how many barriers there are. Some users expressed concern that there were too many Fences after the last update, so the Less setting might be a good choice for them. Additionally the inclusion of a Less option for Doors creates some interesting situations; a sort of in-between situation between the legacy binary option of Doors on or off.
Updated Door / Fence / Airlock Control Boxes
One of the oldest parts of the SBTF renderer has now been officially retired, namely the way the control boxes for Doors / Fences / Airlock worked. They have now been updated to use the more modern rendering path, with a texture resolution to match the rest of the world as well as using the standard OCR-A font for information display.
All of this took some iteration to get to the point where they felt close enough to the previous control boxes, but I am pretty happy with where they ended up. A big plus now is that Door control boxes show the integrity percentage of the corresponding Door at all times. I have also added pulsing to the Fences as well as blinking to broken (ERROR) Doors to further distiguish them from each other.
All rendering of control box and frame text has also been update to use the Potentially Visible Set, so performance should be increased for all "world text" across the board.
Beta Armories
There has been some discussion in the forums about the ability for players to shoot off unwanted ammo to make room for more powerful ammo, this being viewed as an unwanted result of the implementation. One suggestion to avoid this behaviour was to allow players to always load better ammo than they currently have by having the system automatically "dump" lower tier ammo in favor of higher.
I have implemented a variant of this idea with the additional functionality of all "dumped" ammo being placed back in the Armory that you are currently reloading from. This results in Armories (while initially only having a single type of ammo as before) now having the capacity to store all types of ammo, as a result of player interaction. This functionality is disabled by default, but can be accessed by enabling the Beta Armories option under Rules settings.
Note that with Beta Armories enabled, Armories will start with the following amounts:
- Orange - 400 rounds
- Pink - 300 rounds
- Blue - 200 rounds
- Green - 100 rounds
Also note that I don't feel that the Beta Armories solution will stick for a number of reasons, and will most likely be modified or even removed altogether in the future. Problems include:
- This implementation results in the player having far too much high-tier ammo at all times.
- The current ammo capacities feel like they are too large, as the player for example always has the capacity to fill the entire capacity with green (highest tier) ammo.
- In general there is a reduction to the feeling of "luck" in coming across a high-tier armory.
- I have no idea how to calculate a reasonable "download progress" percentage given this new ammo swapping functionality!
As I spent quite a while on the complicated transaction logic behind this feature, as well as in the spirit of Early Access, I decided to keep the Beta Armories option in the game for the time being in order to get player feedback and suggestions towards improvement. Again I am not personally convinced that this (rather radical) change is a good one, as balancing it will require numerous passes over related systems. My high level goal is still to remove the tendency for players to dump ammo by shooting it off, and I would rather see solution that has less jarring impact on the balance of the game.
Note also that when Beta Armories are disabled (is they are by default), Armories will now always show the color of the contained rounds. While this is not a perfect solution to the player "ammo dumping" behaviour, it at least offers more information to the Player at a glance without having to interact with the Armory only to find out that the contained ammo wasn't of interest. This is in my view a rather small concession, and will probably stick.
Miscellaneous
- You can now no longer disable a Fence by interacting with the control box on the other side of the barrier.
- Fence and broken Door icons in the map / tracker have been updated to be distinct from each other.
- I have added some creaking metal audio that is mixed into Breach events and Door damage events. This audio pitches higher and higher with increasing Door damage, intended to further reinforce the current state of the Door.
- I have optimized program startup performance.
- Aim Assist icons now include an exclamation mark.
- I have identified and fixed a bug in the low-quality lighting shader path. This could very well have caused crashes on startup (when the shader is compiled) that would have been fixed by removing the following file: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\settings.txt. This also caused a crash when switching to low-quality lighting while in a mission for the same reason (shader failed to compile). This issue is now fixed. I should probably switch to pre-compiled shaders...
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
nornware Dev Feed
nornware on Facebook
nornware on Twitter
nornware on YouTube