The those of you who prefer videos, the 5 minute one below contains all you need to know about this update:
https://youtu.be/mbW7WVN-6_E
There is also a new map competition coming up towards the end of this week, so keep and eye out for that.
New Content From AW2
Those of you who played the previous part Ancient Warfare 2 on itch.io know that there is some content which didnt make it into AW3.
But this update features some remastered content from AW2:
- Camels are similar to horses, but larger and slower. You can now create custom ranged or melee units on camels.
- Armored horses not only look better, they are also more likely to survive a battle
- Catapults are now available in two new variants: fire and poison
- And siege weapons now have shoot sounds
New image effects
There are new scripting image effects that work similar to the Vignette and ColorOverlay scripting nodes, but allow you to heavily modify how the game looks and opens up many possibilities for new effects. All these effects are represented in the update video.
The new effects/nodes are:
- Nightvision can be used to simulate NVGs with a custom color and intensity. The effect features noise and while bright areas become white, darker areas can be seen better.
- The Glitch effect enables screen shaking and distortions
- The CRT/VHS effect makes the game look like it's running on an old tv with bleeding, fringing, scanlines and a fisheye effect
- The Posterize effect reduces the colors per channel to simulate retro rendering like 8-bit colors
- The Noise effect can be used to overlay noise with custom intensity and scale
- The Invert Color effect can invert any color channel
- Grayscale can be used to modify the saturation of the game
- The Pixelation effect makes the game look pixelated and allows you to choose how many pixels to render to make it look more or less pixelated
If you want to try them out in game, I prepared this map with some examples
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2926010928
Custom ranged weapon damage modifications
The damage of ranged weapons in AW3 depends entirely on the projectile/caliber of the weapon. But now you can choose to modify the caliber for your custom weapons to modify stats like Damage, Armor Pen, Armor Dmg, Projectile Amount and Fire Probability to adjust the projectile stats when used with this weapon.
Custom Physics Objects
Custom physics objects are a new type of custom object. They are somewhat experimental and should be used with caution to avoid performance problems, but they also allow a lot of new stuff to be created.
- Physical parameters like mass, drag, angular drag, friction and bounciness can be adjusted, to select how your object reacts to the physics simulation
- Depending on the settings, these objects can be picked up and/or thrown by the player
- There are various settings to select how the object is thrown like throw force modes, strength and whether you want to see a throw preview or not
- Thrown or falling/moving objects can also cause damage to units or buildings
- Resting physics objects can also block units from walking somewhere if set up correctly
- Full scripting support for physics objects allow you to
- Spawn/delete objects
- Modify physical parameters
- Apply force to objects
- Freeze/Unfreeze objects
- Force the player to pick up/drop objects or react to events when the player interacts with these objects
- React to collision events to create custom behaviour
- And more...
Ragdoll improvements
There are various improvements to ragdolls in terms of performance and functionality.
- Ragdolls now react to the force of the kill shot or melee impact to make them more realistic
- Ragdoll simulation quality is dynamically adjusted based on the amount of active ragdolls and units in an area to help with performance in dense melee battles
- Inactive ragdolls are now frozen in place (this is experimental and might be changed or adjusted in the future)
Other improvements
- Increased material limits of most custom object types
- Weapons, shields, grenades, armor, clothing, environment, consumables, modulars, background from 8 to 16
- Attachments from 6 to 12
- Objects are now much easier to interact with by not having to hit it directly. This makes clicking buttons or picking up weapons much less annoying
- Aim sway was reduced when using scopes. The higher the zoom of the scope, the less aim sway can be noticed
- Crouching now reduces aim sway by 50%
- The background grid in the scripting view can now be toggled on and off
- Hovering over node connections now also highlights the connected in- and output to help while editing large scripts with many overlapping connections
- The vehicle spawn nodes now output a reference to the spawned vehicle object
- Added a SetRotation node to quickly set the rotation of a unit without having to calculate delta angles
- Added button input node and BindPress event node
- When dragging into an empty area, the available scripting nodes now show more possible options like custom events and variables
Bug fixes
- Fixed that custom objects with "delete object" destruction mode are indestructible
- Fixed that anti air rockets are blocked by triggers
- Fixed that pausing/unpausing causes ragdolls to fly around
- Fixed that the tank mgs on the WW1 tanks would shoot itself by targeting targets on the opposite side
- Fixed that editing a unit in the embedded unit editor would result in all guard mode poses to be reset
- Fixed that face shields would become invisible on corpses
- Adjusted most L and U stair models to connect to the floors
- Fixed a bug that allowed invalid placement outside of the allowed area
- Fixed that newly infected zombies could not infect other units
- Fixed that hiding scripting objects would result in them not being saved
- Attachment settings on 3rd and 4th weapons now work correctly
- Fixed a bug that allowed invalid battles (with multiple players or other problems) to be uploaded to the workshop
- Fixed that passing no input to a custom event with a value type would output 'null' on the event output
- Fixed that despawned units were still visible on the conquest respawn map overview
- Fixed the environment/equipment bookmark filter