Note: For those looking to try out the beta, you can do so by right clicking the game in Steam, going to "Properties", clicking the "Betas" tab, and choosing the "beta" option from the dropdown.
Hello!
There's a new update going out to the beta branch today. I had planned on sending this to the main branch as well, but I'm going to be away for a week, and I didn't quite have the time to add all the polish I wanted. I also didn't want to push to the live branch and then not be around to fix any problems that might pop up. I'm going to temporarily push the old 15.8 update to its own beta branch in case there's a major issue with the new update that surfaces while I'm gone. Switch over to that if you have problems with the new update.
The update isn't as flashy as the last few have been, but there are some important changes included. Most importantly, I've improved the reliability of player blocking. In addition to the player's arm hitboxes being just a little too small, there was also a bug that would prevent a whole arm from being able to block sometimes. I've also fixed the bug preventing knockouts from occurring, and another that was causing opponents to hit less hard than they should have been.
I've gone ahead and added in TKOs if a boxer gets knocked down three times in one round. I may be removing it temporarily when I start focusing heavily on balance, but for now not having it seems to be causing frustration for some players.
In an effort to improve game performance in the arena, I've updated to the latest version of Unity. This gave me some tools to make the game run better, but unfortunately baseline performance was worse. With the new optimizations in place, we're pretty much back in the same spot performance-wise, but the game also looks a little worse visually. The new third-person camera was causing most of the tangible performance problems, though, and I've added an option to the settings menu to turn it off. I'll be optimizing everything more in the future, and hopefully should be able to get the missing graphical quality back. Please let me know if you seem to have any stuttering or frame rate issues in the new version.
Bruising has been temporarily removed. It will be back, but in the new version of Unity it was causing the game to freeze every time you landed a hit on an opponent.
Update log:
- Temporarily removed bruising while I work out some performance issues.
- Player blocking has been improved.
- Enemies are slightly faster and don't exaggerate the follow-through on their swings as much.
- Fixed a bug causing opponents to hit less hard than they should have been.
- Fixed a bug preventing knockouts.
- Updated the way force is shown and difficulties are suggested at the heavy bag. The force you see will now change with the difficulty you select, so if sharing your numbers, please also share the difficulty you've selected. Blue numbers are light hits and red numbers are heavy hits (I hope to dress these up more in the future).
- Changed the wording used to describe the heavy bag and what the difficulties mean.
- Made UI elements appear on third person camera.
- Added a toggle to turn third person camera on or off. Shut this off if the game is stuttering for you.
- Updated opponent's stance during winner announcement.
- The ref will now call a TKO if a boxer is knocked down three times in one round.
- Updated the camera effect when the player is hit.
- Halved ramp-up and fall-off speed of crowd cheers.
- Upgraded to latest Nullspace VR Hardlight SDK
- Updated to Unity 5.6.
As mentioned before, I'm going to be away for a week, so there might be a longer than usual delay before the next patch. To keep you entertained in the meantime, I want to give you a sneak peak of what's coming soon.
Let me introduce you to two new friends and reintroduce you to two old ones: