Early Access Update 5
build id: 2015-06-04_17-24-57
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Single Player Explicit Seed Leaderboards
We have added support for Steam Leaderboards when playing with 1 player and Explicit Mission Seeds. There are as many leaderboards as there are permutations of mission seeds X Rules (Easy, Hard, Random Breaches, etc), and you can view each when browsing explicit mission seeds.
The system stores a single score per user and leaderboard as well as the outcome of the mission (success or failure). A score will be recorded as long as it is higher than your previous attempt, regardless of whether or not you survived the mission.
We have also added support for keyboard input when selecting an Explicit Mission Seed.
Networked Multiplayer Part 2 : Steam Friends / Steam Public
We have extended our earlier LAN network implementation to support Steam Lobbies and Peer-to-Peer Networking. The main gain of this system is to allow players to find each other via Steam ID from behind most NATs / routers.
You can now create Steam Friends Teams, which are lobbies that are initially only visible to your Steam Friends. When browsing for Steam Friends Teams you will see any lobby that includes one or more of your friends.
You can also create Steam Public Teams, which are visible to anyone playing the game. Steam Public Teams that include one or more of your Steam Friends will also show up when browing for Steam Friends Teams.
After the game has been launched from the lobby it switches to Steam Peer-to-Peer Networking, which negotiates direct connections between all players in the team and allows them to play the mission together.
Beyond the use of Steam Lobbies and Peer-to-Peer networking, everything else is technically the same as the LAN case. We have done as much testing as possible on our end, but as we have very good internet infrastructure in Sweden we need help from the community to test this functionality "in the wild" in order to determine if it is a solid enough architecture for general internet play.
As networking is still very much a work in progress, there is currently no support for any mission-to-mission carry over. You will have to create lobbies anew for each mission, and all characters are reset for each mission. This will be extended when we have a solid technical base for networking in place.
There is also no explicit support for chat in neither the lobby nor the mission, but the built in Steam Overlay can be used for chatting as usual. We anticipate a smaller need for chat when in mission do to the hectic nature of the game... :)
Misc / Bugfixes
- Optimized particle systems to remove particles below the floor plane.
- Fixed bug where FOV-intensity slider was not restored upon game restart.
- Fixed bug where character progression would break when player is killed by reactor meltdown.
- Fixed 3d-scene screen UVs; this should result in an overall higher quality image for the main 3d-scene with less tearing.
- Added option to normalize normal maps, resulting in higher quality bump mapping and lighting. This is now enabled by default.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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