Early Access Update Femton (15)
build id: 5630C7FA
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Multiplayer Community Features
The community has noted that the process of finding other players is a bit "blind", and as a result we have done a big overhaul on how all of that stuff works.
The main visible change is that once a network is selected, all players are automatically placed in a single big "public chat room". You can see all the players that are currently in the chat, get messages when they join and leave, and other typical stuff. When you type a message in the public chat, all players will see it. Currently you are limited to basic ASCII characters (English alphabet, numerals, some punctuation).
The networks available are:
Local Area Network (LAN) - All players on the local D-network.
Steam Public - All players using Steam.
In both cases everyone in the network can see and join any party.
The Steam Friends option (parties only visible to Steam Friends) has been removed. We can / may in future add further controls to manage who is allowed in your party as required / discovered, but initially we simply want to make the process of finding players much easier.
Parties are conceptually the same as before, in that you can create and join them freely, with up to 4 players per party / mission. Once in a party you can toggle between public and party chat using the TAB key. One important change is that the player who creates the party is the one and only party owner, and if this player leaves the party all other players will be pushed out. There are uninteresting technical reasons for this.
A significant benefit of the underlying solution is that your multiplayer character is bound to your Steam ID, not to your slot in a party. This means that as long as you stay in the network, regardless of party, your character will stick to you. For example you can take your character with you even if you change parties. In future we hope to improve this even more by saving your multiplayer character to disk, so you can keep it indefinitely (unless of course your character is killed).
The in-mission system has not changed other than ANY aborts, disconnects or crashes from the mission by ANY party member will drop everyone back to the pre-mission screens. This is the same as a single player mission abort, and characters will revert to the state they were prior to the mission, as if the mission never took place. There are again uninteresting technical reasons to why we cannot support player drops from a mission in progress, but hopefully we will be able to handle this case in the future.
Also note that there is no chat available in-mission yet, but we have grand plans for such, with much better screen splitting, player tracking, and other options for use with networked multiplayer missions. Coming soon.
Miscellaneous
- We have adjusted the download time upgrades to the following: 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 seconds. We felt that the maximum upgrade of 1 second was a bit too fast.
- Repair Stations are now enabled even when Sentries are disabled (Plan option). Repair Stations were originally disabled along with Sentries since player fire was initially always fatal to other players. Since we changed all projectiles to damage electronics before finally being fatal, we felt it was a good idea to have Repair Stations available in case of friendly fire incidents between players.
- Pre-mission music is now shut off just prior to mission load, to avoid hitches / stuttering.
- The help screen has been updated.
- Right Mouse Button / R are now double mapped to "Interact with Cores".
- Gamepads are polled on game startup, so the gamepads that are connected initially should be available on player selection.
- Infravision is now disabled by default, so you must enable it manually after upgrade or on mission start.
- Fixed some holes in level geometry.
- Removed some lights in the "Ristretto" level style to make it generally darker.
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