Early Access Update Nitton (19)
build id: 567169EA
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Weapon(s) - Hammer(s)
Prior to adding the Razor weapon we set out to do experiments with some kind of typical "minigun" type weapon with a high rate of fire and the penalty of a spin-up time. We quickly realized that there were at least two weapons in there; just the high rate of fire without any kind of spin-up penalty made for a very fun weapon, and that is how the Razor emerged. As you know it fires 25% faster than the Rifle and does 25% less damage.
The "other weapon" was intended to be the aforementioned "minigun", but the more we played with it the more we realized the necessity of being able to fire as fast as you can react in a game like SBTF. The Shotgun already has the caveat of having a low rate of fire, but as long as you aren't currently firing continuously you can basically react to anything and fire immediately.
This caused us to drop the idea of the spin-up, which in itself felt cool and sounded cool, but it wasn't something that you would necessarily want to play with. The rate of fire was initially 200% of the Rifle, and while this was awesome and crazy, the sum of everything didn't make for a very useful weapon. We speculated that it might be good in a team situation, but we also reasoned that every weapon should be a viable option for solo play as well.
All of this led us to a new iteration on what we wanted to be our "heavy" weapon, and we finally nailed the name; Hammer. We reasoned that if higher rates of fire required a caveat other than a spin-up or reduced damage (which we felt was wrong for something that was "heavy"), then we would have to go the other direction. We figured we could do something halfway between the Rifle and the Shotgun, and then we realized we could do EXACTLY that; the Hammer (4x) fires 4 rounds per shot, and has 1/4th the rate of fire of the Rifle (and 2x the rate of fire of the shotgun).
This proved workable and mathematically solid in terms of damage output over time, but after a while we started messing with the concept some more and tried a Hammer (2x) that fires 2 rounds per shot and has 1/2 the rate of fire of the Rifle. This ALSO felt awesome, but in a different way, so in the end we simply decided to throw both versions into the game and differentiate between them simply by paint job. Hammer (2x) is red, and Hammer (4x) is green.
A significant difference also is that the Hammer fires tightly grouped shots that do not spread like the Shotgun. This has proven to allow the Hammer to be used as a high-powered sniping weapon, especially in the case of the Hammer (4x), as for example 4 rounds of green ammo striking a single target does an enormous amount of damage and has the potential to penetrate / pass through quite far. We never intended to implement a "rail gun" per se, but the Hammer (4x) comes close.
We are thinking that the community should have the opportunity of speaking there mind on this. Should we have the Hammer (2x), the Hammer (4x), or both? If we indeed do keep both it is probable that we will differentiate the visuals and audio further in order to reinforce the different feels of the two. Hammers now, as well as the Razor, have custom target reticles.
New Music Themes
- "Agren" by johno.
- "Desperation" by Billy Swartzel.
We have also (in most cases) switched back to the original logic for music mixing, which is based on the distance between the player and the nearest Beast. We have been running with code that also takes line-of-sight into account for a while now, but we felt that this resulted in the music being pushed down to much. This also had the effect of removing some important audio queues that the player originally got, and we think that the game became more difficult as a direct result of this.
The original reason for adding the line-of-sight check was because we felt that the music mix in Mazes was too aggressive. Since then I have decided to be pragmatic over dogmatic, so the line-of-sight check is now only used when Mazes is the current Plan, and the original distance based code is used for everything else.
Miscellaneous
- Fixed chat linebreaking for extremely long words (without spaces).
- The layout of party screens has been adjusted to minimize overlap with the chat feed.
- Auto-targeting indicator is now rendered using gui text instead of being baked into the reticle icon.
- Razor and Hammer weapons now have custom reticles.
- Frustum culling has been fixed to take field of view into account, there should be fewer instances of cores disappearing at the edges of the screen when adrenaline (and hence field of view) is high.
- We are currently also using an experimental pre-calculated Potentially Visible Set to aid in culling. This has been seen to have some bad edge cases where you might see a stray core or door pop in and out erroneously, but we are working on making that more solid. The PVS helps greatly to improve performance, as it allows us to cull out things that are behind walls very efficiently.
Pending Research
Much time has been put into research of deferred rendering / light pre-pass. The goal was to switch to a more modern renderer approach that allows for more flexibility when it comes to dynamic lights, thereby enabling one flashlight per player as well as more dynamic lights for things like bullets flying around.
We have chosen to defer (haha) the use of that research for the time being, because the performance tradeoffs aren't completely clear at this time, and we think it's important to not significantly increase the system requirements of the game. Some kind of hybrid approach between what we are currently doing (textured / baked lighting) and a deferred / light pre-pass solution may well emerge in the future, so that we can reach our goal of more dynamic lights without requiring too much more of the CPU / GPU than is the current case.
Planning for exiting Early Access
Much more can be said on this matter than will be mentioned here, but we are currently doing final cuts and planning for the longer term, with the ultimate goal of getting out of Early Access and to an official release.
Once the plan is more or less established we want to make some kind of road-map publicly visible but have yet to figure out what the best (and most honest / up to date) way to do it might be. More on that as it emerges.
With that in mind however, now is the time to post suggestions on things you are missing in the game and that haven't really been discussed yet. It has indeed happened before that we have implemented community ideas verbatim, and may well happen again if someone comes up with some good stuff that is in sync with our goals.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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