Hi everyone! It's Mark here with news about a significant change Glenn and I have made to how shooting works in Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus.
Changes to how shooting works
We have reviewed our approach to weapon shooting and implemented a better, more visceral approach where shooting always occurs regardless of range or target, yet retains the same chances of causing damage.
All weapons will now fire regardless of range or intervening terrain, except where friendly targets are in the way; however, objects in the way will of course block your shots, and if your target is beyond the weapon's range, the shots are almost guaranteed to miss. In effect, a weapon's range is no longer its maximum range, but rather an effective range.
This should make shooting feel more epic, with a greater chance for terrain to be destroyed by errant fire—buildings should collapse more often, and in fact deliberately targeting units just to clear intervening buildings is a valid and often useful tactic.
This should also stop the situation where players felt weapons should have fired but they did not, as this was seemingly the result of unperceived intervening terrain.
There are many changes in this update that might (and probably will) need further change, but for now we are happy this is a good first step. We will be eagerly reading your feedback to see what you think of the direction we have taken.
Power Fist fixes and improvements
Our initial implementation of the Reaver Power Fists had some issues that took us a while to spot, but the net effect of these was that Power Fists were not as potent as they should have been in single-player (they worked properly in multi-player, but have been tweaked there also). This has now been rectified, so you should find Power Fists are now more deadly than ever.
Upgrade to Unity version
We have updated to a later version of Unity in order to improve our overall efficiency. While this unplanned-for exercise derailed development by a couple of weeks, development will be smoother and faster going forward as a result, so the time spent is not lost time and is very worthwhile.
Updating Unity required extensive reworking on pretty much everything in the game to ensure nothing was broken. At this point, it seems nothing is broken, but we'll be keeping a keen eye on it in case we've missing anything. From a player's perspective, everything should look and feel much the same, but frame-rate may have improved for players with lower-spec PCs.
No longer supporting DirectX9
As part of our Unity upgrade, we have been forced to abandon support for DirectX9. Impact to players should be non-existent, however, given less than 1% of Windows users are still running Windows XP and DirectX9, and almost all of these are business users forced to remain on XP for various, non gaming-related reasons.
One immediate benefit of this change is that players with more recent video cards may perceive visual improvement, as Dominus is now able to make greater use of the latest versions of DirectX.
Thank you!
Glenn and I remain extremely grateful to all players in the Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus community for your continuing feedback and support for Dominus as we undertake our Early Access journey. Your Steam reviews and enthusiasm for 40K and Dominus is very much appreciated.
We hope you will continue to add your voices on our Steam Discussions forum, in Discord, on Facebook and on Twitter, sharing your thoughts and opinions with us, and your suggestions as to how we can improve the game and as a team.
— Mark & Glenn