Early Access Update 8
build id: 559E8603
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Build Id Format
As noted in the last update we have made a change to the build id. The new format is simply the 32 bit unsigned unix time of the build filesystem (.nwf file) in hexadecimal. This has always been the case, but we have earlier used local time functions to format that timestamp to something legible, but the problem with that was that it was time zone dependent. The whole point of the id is to let you make sure you are running the latest version of the software, and this way it is simple and unambigous.
New Mission Generation Options / Improved User Interface
As a result of recent work on consolidating the local and network experiences, a lot of refactoring and discovery has been done on the concept of a Party. This has led to a lot of user interface work, and most recently this has led to some work on new and existing mission generators and related options.
The user interface has been improved, with the clickable / interactable parts actually looking like buttons, spinners, and combo boxes. This stuff is very much a result of the need to add more and more options to the advanced party settings screen.
We have now exposed options to the existing Crawlers mission generator (now renamed to Corridors), including the options to turn off Doors and Sentries, as well as an option for bigger rooms. Turning off Doors has a huge affect on the feel of a mission, both due to the fact that you have fewer strategic options but also because Doors are a significant light source. Bigger rooms make for more intense encounters, as in general it is harder to deal with multiple beasts in an open space than in a cramped corridor.
We have also added new generators called Dungeons and Mazes. These result in more cohesive collections of rooms and classic mazes, respectively, each with a set of options. Although we don't feel that these offer gameplay of the same quality as Corridors, we are including them regardless in order to let the community experiment. We recommend trying Dungeons and Mazes with the Breach option of Random Positions turned ON.
What we suspect at this point is that maps need a lot of intersections and alternate routes in order to work well with the current Beast A.I., and we will be experimenting with more generator algorithms based on this observation.
With the addition of these new algorithms in conjunction with the available options, the number of available maps to play has increased by tens of billions. Procedural stuff is awesome.
As a result of all of these combinatorics we needed to change leaderboard ids, so effectively all leaderboards have been reset. We apologize for this necessity.
Bullet Ricochets / Electronics Damage Repair
We did some extensive testing with having bullets ricochet. Initially all bullets would have a chance to ricochet, but that was completely insane and extremely dangerous. Also, the more powerful ammo types, having more energy, had a higher chance of bouncing around, so green ammo shotguns were almost guaranteed to result in you killing yourself.
The next test was to have player bullets not kill you but rather cause electronics damage like the Sentry bullets, but that only resulted in severe electronics damage being highly likely. As a result we implemented the fix of having Datacore downloads automatically repair a single electronics system upon completion.
What we finally settled on was to only have the Sentry bullets ricochet. We feel this adds some spice and danger to the experience. Note that the electronics damage repair feature is still enabled; we expect to iterate on this, adding more user interface feedback and probably moving this mechanic to something other than the Datacores.
Motion Tracker Update
The motion tracker will now show ALL motion in range. Beyond Beasts this now also includes all bullets and all gibs. The goal with this chance was to muddy up the Motion Tracker a bit and make it a little harder to see if you have cleared out nearby threats. At long range this change also has the effect of highlighting all the action that is going on in the mission.
New Music Theme
We have also added a new procedural music theme to the game, more in the vein of progressive heavy metal. Also, we have invited a number of composers to create their own music themes, in the hope of having as large a musical variation as we are aiming to have in the graphics styles.
Miscellaneous
- We have added 2 new level styles for a current total of 9.
- Emissive / light textures in the spacecrafts are now slightly glitchy, similar to what we had before on all text in the world. We feel that this kind of subtle animation adds immersion.
- The text scanning effect is now separated out per player, so you will no longer get text scanning resets when another player downloads a datacore or activates a sentry. This makes it less likely that you will confuse someone elses interaction completion with your own.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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