Fairly slow progress lately, but I think I'm getting back on track now. Since it's been a while since the last update, there's still a fair amount of stuff here though, including visual improvements, bugfixes, balance changes and stability improvements.
2017 is going alarmingly quickly, so shortly I'll have to be thinking seriously about release dates and what features are most important for the final game. For now though, my immediate priority is still to finish the art overhaul, make some updated promotional material and start promoting the game more, which should hopefully help maintain a more active playerbase until launch. I could continue to work on the art indefinitely, but I'm currently working to a soft deadline of 2 weeks from now.
COMMUNITY MADE MAPS:
- Ex3mx (Max Graw) has made some pretty substantial changes to his latest map, Space_Station. In particular, it's now looking much more visually complete.
ADDITIONS:
- Changes to the character model:
- Helmet is now more detailed, and, in my opinion looking much better. I may do some more work on it or I may decide it's more or less finished. Let me know what you think on this.
- There's a new model for the grapple "gun", which is much more prominent than the old one. I'm not too sure about the design yet, but it's fairly rough still, so do let me know what you think of the general shape.
- Belt magnets. A few updates back, I made the magnetic force affect the avatar's centre of mass as well as the feet, so it makes sense to add magnet models to the belt. These are pretty rough still, but you can see the general effect I'm going for. I wanted to create a kind of "gunslinger" silhouette, which I think has worked, but do let me know what you think.
- New grapple gun model. The one on the old character model was almost unnoticeable, so I've made this one larger and more eye-catching. The actual design is a little bit random, so I'll be interested to hear what people make of it. In any case, I'd probably do at least a little more work on this model if I stick with this design.
The character model is approaching completion now, but I still intend to do more work on it. I'm also intending to work more on customisation options once it's otherwise finished.
- The shotgun has a new model, which isn't finished yet, but I'm fairly happy with the overall silhouette. It also now has projectile trails, which I think will make it more satisfying to use, by illustrating how much you missed by better.
- These are the things I've added to or changed in Factory this week:
- The floor panels now have bevelled edges. This is not something I've bothered with much before, but having done so on the character model in some places, I've decided it's worth it. This doesn't really affect the profile of the object in any noticeable way, but what it does do is produce the lighting highlights on the edges of objects which you'll be able to see in real life on any smooth object with a fairly sharp edge. This just makes the floor panels look that bit more 3D. This may come at a performance cost, so let me know if you get an fps drop and I can probably fix that for the next update. I suspect it won't be noticeable though.
- I've also changed the blue LEDS on the floors, so that they make more of a crosshair pattern in the corners, rather than the rows of lights as it was before. I'm not decided on whether this is an improvement or not, so opinions are welcome. I think possibly the sea of blue lights before was a bit much though.
- You may also notice some strange reflections in factory. I'm experimenting with UE4's "reflection capture actors".
CHANGES:
- After quite a lot of testing, I've nerfed the grapple weaponizer in a different way. Basically, I found that the most effective use for it previously was by shooting right next to your opponent, where it would quite likely hit them almost instantly, if the beam was close enough. In this respect it was acting basically as an extra gun, that didn't interrupt your firing in any way, or require any different behaviour other than just spamming both mouse buttons rather than one. The kind of behaviour it was supposed to encourage was large swinging motions on the part of the user, and big expansive dodging on the part of the target. To shift the effective use towards this, and make it less OP, I've made the following change:
- There is now a delay of 0.6 seconds after shooting the weaponized grapple before it becomes damaging. This is reflected by the aesthetics. The user should now have to activate the grapple in advance of trying to hit the target, which should necessitate a swinging motion in order to make contact with the target, who would otherwise probably have moved out of the way. No doubt this will need more balancing after it's tested at more length. Let me know if you have any observations on this front.
- If you remember, I changed the run acceleration a while back from 4000 to 3000 cms^-2. I've actually just gone and changed it back.
- Changed ERC 479 max rate of fire from 7 to 5 rounds per second. I've been testing this weapon for balance at some length with Ex3mx, since we both got the impression it was a bit OP under some circumstances. I'm still not completely sure on this, since it's high damage is balanced in most cases by the difficulty of hitting a moving target, but it seemed like the issue arises from the fact that it can kill jarringly fast against an easy target (for example, someone coming though a narrow door, or hanging in the air for a second) compared to it's normal effectiveness, since you can just launch 3 shots off before the target has a chance to react. I'm hoping this slight rate of fire reduction will make these easy kills less easy without making the weapon much less effective under normal circumstances. As usual, it'll no doubt need more playtesting. Do let me know any observations you have on the ERC with regards to balance.
- Also reduced ERC 479 recoil to 2/3 of the original value, since it was a bit much for it's rate of fire.
- The grapple beam should behave more consistently in the force it applies now, particularly when swinging. This is because the grapple beam tension is now calculated based on the distance between the grapple point and the character's centre of mass, rather than the visual origin of the grapple beam on the character's arm, as it was before. This produced some slightly random behaviour previously, but much more now that the avatar's left arm is animated when using the grapple, which is what prompted me to make this change.
- Changed grapple colour to green-blue for now, although I'm considering making it customisable in future. Weaponized grapple now adds red beam to this.
- The single player menu message has changed to a less optimistic one on the subject of AI, due to an increasing time shortage, although the original message didn't make any promises.
AI is still something I'd very much like to add to ZGA (perhaps more than any other feature), but it's likely to be very time consuming, so depending on the launch date, I may have to choose between features, or it might take a prohibitive amount of time. I may start a discussion shortly on how important the playerbase feels this is.
BUGFIXES:
- Body of new character model excluding secondary colour sections did not cast shadow. Does now.
- Shotgun had a bug where ammo was not deducted on the server for a shot by a client. This sounds like it ought to grant infinite ammo, but in practice it just meant the client could not pickup shotgun ammo more than once, since after the first time, the shotgun ammo is maxed out on the server, so the server won't let the client pick up more ammo, but the client's local ammo stat still depletes and the game won't let the client shoot when their local ammo stat runs out. Funnily enough, there was an identical bug for the railgun that was found by some testers before the early access launch, so I don't know if this has been present for the shotgun since then or not. Perhaps no one's used the shotgun enough to notice. In any case, it's fixed now.
- Hopefully reduced the frequency of crashes significantly. Certainly removed a few possible causes of crashing anyway, I don't know how commonly they would have occurred though.