This week I have been busy working on some back end items, along with a secret project ;), but I did get a chance to take care of some annoying bugs and add a large line of new cockpits to the game!
This new line of cockpits covers all the cockpit types, from light, medium, and heavy, and even adds a new type called Attacker.
The attacker type cockpit focuses on having decent armor, but maintaining a large amount of weapon groups and attach points. The Dragon class cockpit boasts an impressive 5 full weapon groups, along with 7! ideal weapon attach points (not including the rear facing attach point). This makes it a great choice for boating machine guns or assault rifles, or any other weapons you prefer.
As for the bug fixes, these were the primary ‘gameplay’ offenders and they have been squashed.
No Man’s Pass V2 : The map would not contain all the data. This was hard to track down, as it seemed to have happened randomly after making some geometry changes. After many attempts and trials, I tracked the issue down to the Occlusion Culling system in that level. They system was preventing some geometry from being displayed to the map camera. This is now fixed.
Spectating a dying player in multiplayer can cause the screen to freeze: This one was easier to track down but harder to fix. It only happens in multiplayer and was due to a race condition [things not happening in the right order]. The camera would be attached to the player your were watching, and it should have been removed and attached to a new player on death. However, what was actually happening was the player was removed [along with your camera!] and then the camera would try to move and error out, because there was no camera. I rewrote the system with better checks in place, but also in a way that your camera is never attached. This means that even in a failure case, you will be spectating in the spot the player died, but will still be able to switch to a new player.
That is it for this week! Swing back next week for more updates!