This is, by far, our biggest update since releasing to Early Access! As you may have already read, our primary goal was to improve performance. Happily, we were able to improve AI companion intelligence as well. We also, of course, fixed quite a few bugs and made some other minor improvements.
Changes include but are not limited to:
- Performance: Changed the way every moving thing figures out pathing and such in order to improve performance.
- Performance: Removed some footstep sounds that you couldn’t hear anyway.
- Performance: Made changes to a ton of art assets to improve perf.
- Performance: Made med kits, stim shots, turrets, and fence kits slightly more performant. (There should be no difference in game-play unless noted below.)
- Performance: Tuned wood, dirt, and grass particle FX to improve performance when you shoot them.
- Performance: Fixed issues with rain and splash FX.
- Performance: We now default the video settings to High instead of Epic. (Other performance updates are scattered throughout the list.)
- We now truncate long Steam names so that you can read the rest of the information such as whether they’re in a lobby or in a level.
- Tweaked font sizes in the friends list in order to increase the amount of information shown.
- Your Friends List in the Join Menu is now sorted first by whether they are joinable and then alphabetically.
- Added a popup to show an error message if you fail to join a game through the friends list.
- Sometimes, when you toggled the Ready switch, it would immediately set itself back, undoing your change. Fixed.
- The reminder that T is what you use to Chat in the lobby now returns to the screen when focus isn’t in chat, in case you forget.
- Added a Setting to enable you to turn off Subtitles.
- Fixed a bug that caused client players to have extra latency when channeling to interact with something.
- Added tooltips to Badges so you can tell how you got them.
- Changed the way we post leaderboard information in order to prevent a potential hang when trying to start a new round.
- AI companions:
- No longer speak when unconscious.
- No longer excitedly exclaim that they “found” the weapon you just dropped.
- No longer excitedly alert you to a weapon that they’re just going to take for themselves. (There's a delay between the time they alert and the time they grab.)
- No longer alert you to found weapons while grabbed by a whiplash. In theory, they’ve got more important things to worry about.
- Tweaked the way they think and act in order to make them easier for us to control and to improve perf just a touch.
- Revamped their goals for staying close to their human companions during combat in order to enable them to spread out and to prevent them making unnecessary moves.
- Will now sprint after the player they are following if they get too far away. Also, adjusted their follow distance.
- Would keep walking when you were trying to heal them. Now they stop.
- Fixed a bug where an AI companion who got pinned while reviving someone couldn’t seem to function well after being released.
- Will try to heal you from behind when you’re on a turret so they don’t block you from firing.
- Will now try a variety of heights when trying to pick up weapons (in order to address a problem where they sometimes couldn’t reach weapons they should be able to grab).
- Are no longer allowed to pick up Vendettas or SW22s (i.e. they can no longer dual-wield).
- Are now allowed to use Glintecs and AK-47s.
- Now reload more proactively.
- Are more likely to heal/revive you if you are on a raised platform (like a generator). They used to think you were out of reach when they were standing right next to you.
- Would sometimes try to use a med kit they didn’t have. Fixed.
- Used to prefer in-hand med kits over nearby health stations. They’re less stupid now.
- Would pick up stim shots and then not use them. Fixed.
- Were only allowed to use the health station if their health was less than 70%. They now have permission to use it if their health is less than 90%.
- Tweaked the preference AI companions have for med kits over stim shots. Also fixed a bug that caused them to try to pick up stim shots when they already had one.
- Now grab items off the printer. To help prevent conflicts with human players, they will wait a bit after your print job is complete before grabbing that weapon to give you a chance to grab it first. They also wait a bit after a printer comes online before printing something for themselves.
- The printer now closes after 5 seconds if you don’t choose something to print.
- Now have a delay between the time a weapon is spotted and the time they pick it up in order to give human players a better chance of grabbing the good stuff.
- Will no longer try to heal or revive pinned targets or targets in a Sapper cloud. They’re also smarter about not reviving you if you or they are just going to get immediately knocked out by a nearby special. They should deal with the attacker first.
- Will now prioritize their attack targets better.
- May now switch to their secondary weapon if their primary needs reloading but there are a lot of enemies around and they don’t feel they have time to reload.
- Were sometimes oblivious to enemies standing behind them, touching them. They will now react to such immediate threats.
- Would sometimes fail to attack enemies when they should, including failing to fire during last stand. Fixed.
- Repeat themselves less frequently.
- Decreased the number of times AIs stand exactly where you’re standing such that you would see the insides of their heads. (Editor’s note: God, I hated that!)
- Added physics to Danny and Maya’s clothing to make them look better.
- Enemies:
- Decreased detail on drones at a distance and the textures on all aliens to increase performance.
- Improved efficiency of drone footstep effects to slightly improve performance.
- Improved efficiency of drone drool to improve performance.
- Tweaked the way aliens decide who they can attack so they’ll be slightly smarter about going through doors.
- Improved efficiency of drone animations to improve performance. Also improved the look of some animations.
- Improved the efficiency with which we calculate collision during shotgun fire.
- Increased blood when limbs are knocked off drones.
- Rarely, killing drones with an axe would result in floating drone skulls. Drone skulls no longer float.
- Drone “eyes” no longer pop out except with the killing blow.
- Drone headshots now play a sound.
- Fixed some bugs with the way Drones die from the flamethrower.
- If a Drone was on fire when it died, the fire didn’t go out until they disappeared. It should go out sooner than that now.
- Improved the performance of the Sapper explosion.
- Being on a ladder no longer makes you safe from a Sapper explosion.
- Added sound to the Whiplash so you know she’s coming.
- Sometimes, when you got grabbed by the Whiplash, you’d see outside the world briefly. Fixed.
- Improved the look of Whiplash thrash, grab, and idle animations a bit.
- Fixed some funky behavior of Whiplash blood spray.
- Improved the look of the Whiplash being on fire.
- If you were unconscious and your camera was following someone grabbed by a Whiplash, your camera would shake. It shouldn’t.
- You can no longer be healed while grabbed by a Whiplash. (You need to be rescued first.)
- The beast should turn to face you when he spits a fireball at you.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the Beast from actually firing his fireball at you sometimes. It would get stuck, glowing, in his mouth.
- Beast wounds are more gory now. Moar gore! Yum!
- There was a rare bug where the Beast would knock around a downed player and no one could revive them. You’re now more likely to be able to revive them.
- Propane tanks now bounce off enemies.
- Tuned alien sounds in general. (Work in progress)
- Gave ourselves more tools for tuning and tweaking sounds and music and then used those tools to improve audio balance.
- Improved sounds for other people’s weapons.
- Sometimes you’d grunt from being attacked or wheeze from having just sprinted at the same time you calmly delivered your VO line and it sounded silly. We now more gracefully segue from one to the other.
- Removed “Reload!” from the screen while you’re pinned or kidnapped and thus unable to reload. It was just annoying.
- Added some distance to how close you can put fences to each other.
- Removed melee FX trails. They didn’t look good enough to justify their cost.
- Headshots with melee weapons were not doing the damage they should. Fixed.
- Tuned friendly fire when pinned by a thresher or grabbed by a whiplash based on difficulty level. (For example, damage from friendly fire is 0 when difficulty is set to Easy.)
- Tuned FX from metal bullet impacts in order to improve performance.
- You should not be able to fire automatic weapons while pinned.
- You also should not be allowed to fire automatic weapons while using the health station.
- You can now use the health station if you’re injured at all (rather than only when you had less than 90% health).
- If someone used a stimshot and then left the game and you joined and filled their slot, you’d see the stimshot FX even though the character wasn’t still under its effects. Fixed.
- Fixed a bug with the screens on the EF18 and the CVA when you’re on low graphics settings.
- You should be knocked off the turret by explosions (such as grenades or Sapper explosions) instead of staying on the turret and then being thrown back when you jump off.
- You can no longer sprint while carrying the Reaper.
- Fixed a bug with the Reaper’s char effect and another bug with the flame.
- You should catch fire if you’re standing in a fire you caused (such as throwing a napalm grenade and walking through the explosion).
- Fixed a bug where you’d hit a flammable item by firing through a drone or something and the fire would show up on the drone rather than the flammable item.
- Landmines now come in packs of 3, like Frag Grenades do.
- Landmines no longer push dead people around.
- Improved the messages shown during reviving and healing and such to clarify the state of the person being acted on.
- Some drones that died in a fire were not counting towards the Don’t Fear the Reaper badge as they should. Fixed.
- You should be able to get the Gunslinger badge while dual-wielding.
- You should be able to get the Pistolier Achievement while dual-wielding.
- You should not be able to get the Pistolier Achievement if you’ve used a turret.
- Supply Run:
- Tweaked physics on some of the items in the world to make them behave more consistently with other items in the world. (E.g. shooting soccer balls causes them to bounce away.)
- Becoming incapacitated very close to the wall with that fence, AI companions couldn’t revive you. Fixed.
- Fixed a place near that fence where the Whiplash could take you out of the world.
- Fixed some ladders in Zippy’s that AI companions couldn’t climb.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the count at the rally point to be inaccurate if folks left the rally point.
- Made some minor graphical improvements to this level.
- Breakdown:
- There were a number of places in this level that the AIs could end up (via Sapper explosion or Beast swipes, say) that they could not then get away from (e.g. on top of dumpsters). Fixed.
- Fixed some bugs where you could be out of reach of aliens or AI
- Updated the music.
- Data Recovery:
- Fixed a number of places you could put turrets on railings outside the first printer room and inside the generator room. Railings are not a stable platform for turrets.
- If you placed a turret at the locked door on the catwalk in the generator room and jumped on it, you could end up on the other side, unable to get back to your teammates. Fixed that and some other occurrences of the same problem.
- You should no longer be able to place a turret on top of duct tubing.
- Improved the music and sounds.
- Radio Silence:
- Updated the remaining pickups for perf reasons. You shouldn’t be able to tell any difference but let us know if you see any issues.
- Aliens were having difficulty climbing their own shard. Fixed.
- The Beast was having difficulty getting into one of the train cars near the shard. Fixed.
- Tweaked things to enable AI companions to navigate the river better.
- If the barrels on the forklift exploded with you were standing on them, you were left standing in mid-air. Fixed.
Here are a few Known Issues:
- If you fail to find another game via Quick Play, the lobby you end up creating will need to be edited to specify which level and difficulty you desire.
- There is more performance work to be done. We’re not done yet!
- There is more work yet to be done on performance on AMD cards in particular.
- Some folks are experiencing problems with garbled sound. This is an issue we have identified related to our audio middleware and we are currently working with them to address.