Cave Environment
A new tile set has been added to the game this week - caves! This is a test of enclosed spaces, dynamic lighting adjustment, and some atmospheric effects which will hopefully lead to some more interesting and unique environment tile sets in the future!
The transition tiles from Snow/Highland environments to the caves were the biggest challenge as lighting information changes on a per-tile basis after teleporting, I think the results look quite promising.
Gate Healthbars
Thanks to some community brainstorming, a new gate healthbar system has been added that strikes a good balance between useful player information, unobtrusive UI, and thematic styling. These healthbars are also extremely lightweight in terms of performance using a sprite shader instead of dynamic UI slider adjustment.
Enemy Death Effects
Ragdoll physics are one of my favorite effects in games. They make each enemy kill a unique and rewarding experience. However not everyone's computer is capable of running the expensive physics simulation on many bodies at once, and not every enemy death needs the same treatment.
Therefore a new system has been put into place that allows enemy deaths to be quick and cheap for the computer. The effects will be used in a few different scenarios.
- If the death occurred without player action (when a gate is closed)
- If ragdolls are turned off in the settings menu
- If there are too many other ragdolls in the scene already (> 10)
This will add a large performance boost for those without beefy CPUs, removes unnecessary overhead when certain actions in the game are taken, and puts a limit on the amount of CPU power the game can allocate just to ragdoll physics.
Other Additions and Fixes
- Added contextual Leave Game button to menu
- Scaled down gate energy requirements in 4-player games
- Scatter Arrow should no longer trigger teleporters
- Warp enemies color changed to match teleporting effect
- Fixed issue with AoE effects not triggering when enemies entered
- Fireballs are now cleared when a gate is closed
- Fixed energy not being rewarded to non-host players in multiplayer
Edit: Graphicstest branch updated to 0.42.0 as well