Another week, another batch of changes straight from the void. We're continuing our push on UI and quality-of-life, and this time our sights were set on the projectile impact points (PIP). The old lead/lag pips were functional, but let's be honest, they were dumb and static. We've overhauled them completely.
Alongside that, we've continued paying down a massive amount of technical debt, ripping out old systems and replacing them with more robust engine subsystems. This work isn't glamorous, but it's essential for stability and squashing entire classes of bugs and preventing future ones before they happen.
Core System Overhauls
Dynamic Pip: The core of this update is the new Dynamic Pip. Instead of just appearing, the pip now has a proper acquisition animation. When you lock a target, the pip will now spawn from the center of the screen, scaling, rotating, and interpolating to the final lead or lag position. This provides a much clearer and more satisfying feedback loop that your weapons are locking on.
Onboarding Refinements: The single-player onboarding experience has seen a number of file restructures and logic updates to make the first flight smoother for new pilots.
Singleton to Subsystem: We finally killed the UObject singleton pattern for Player Manager. It is now a proper Game Instance Subsystem. This means better lifecycle management and fewer "accessed none" errors when the world tears itself apart.
Content & DLC Framework: The "Modular Content Availability System" (MCAS) was created to replace all our Demo, Base Game content custom code. We have expanded on this system to now handle DLC and unlockable content. This makes development and management of different content states easier to work with, meaning we can get new content out sooner.
Camera Fader Fix: The camera fader logic has been tightened up. Fade-complete delegates now fire correctly and unbind themselves, preventing them from firing multiple times. This should resolve issues where players would get stuck in a fade or a transition would not complete as expected.
Combat & Gameplay
Tobii Eye/Head Tracking Options: In a previous update, we threw out the old smoothing system that felt disconnected and jittery. The new system is based on a complex prediction model that will guess where you're looking next. In this update, we've exposed more of the buttons and dials for these smoothing algorithms to the View settings menu. Take a look at velocity, prediction and smoothing for both head and eye tracking.
Turret Controller & Gimbal Logic Refactor: Gimbals are no longer wasting CPU cycles constantly telling their turrets to aim at the same spot. We've added a tolerance check, so the controller only gets new tasking when the target location has meaningfully shifted.
CIWS Optimization: Significant optimizations to the projectile managers have drastically reduced CPU overhead. Large battles won't melt your frame rate anymore.
Bugfixes
Fixed a splash-screen crash on slower CPUs.