State of the Game #30 : New MAV Editor and Game Mode

Hello everyone, time for another fantastic State of the Game!

Get Version 0.3.3!

So this week, I focused exclusivly on issues that had been reported / suggested by a number of different users.

The two biggests complaints have been the editor not being that easy to use and the missing single player option with the Alpha build. This week, I have addressed both of those issuses.

And I made a nice video to show you 🙂

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New Editor UI:

I had received quite a few comments on ways to improve the ui and after watching a few people try it out for the first time it was obvious something needed to be done.

Instead of explaining the new ui, I want to list off the common complaints that it sets out to solve.

+ Part selection is slow
+ Hard to compare parts
+ I couldn’t find the filter options
+ Part selection didn’t remember my last part
+ I can’t read the stats
+ The stats are too confusing
+ I can’t get weapon groups to work
+ Removing parts from weapon groups doesn’t work right
+ I forgot to set the weapon groups
+ The editor is ugly

So as you can see, there was quite a list of issues and I hope I have addressed them all. There is also room for the UI to expand for new features (you can see what I have blocked in currently) and I am very happy with the result. It will still get work over time, but I feel it is a much better starting point now.

Single Player:

There had been quite a few complaints of people not being able to enjoy the single player game because it was laggy. This was caused by single player being a locally run multiplayer game. I had previously stated that there are numerous technical reasons behind this (there still are) but not having a playable game is completely unacceptable. So, Arena Mode was born!

Arena mode is a simpler, faster paced, game mode for single player only right now. It is a PURE single player mode, so no lag, and it removes a lot of the siege mode restrictions. You are given a large amount of money so you have all the parts available to you. It is designed to allow you to quickly build and experiment and jump right into battle.

I also fixed a slew of bugs (like the chat window bug). I didn’t do any part tuning this week, though I feel I will be reducing the recoil on sniper rifles in the near future.

One last thing, I got a bunch of backend work done to support Heavy weapons. I didn’t have time to create any yet, but they will be coming soon. I did get a generator done, but I didn’t see the point of adding in a single generator, since MAV is all about choices.

Until next week!

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