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State of the Game: January Update coming on Friday the 26th

The January update has been highly focused on performance and it will not disappoint! In most cases, performance has increased by 2X but in many caes you will see more than a 10X improvement!

A lot of work went into tracking down every small performance issue and coming up with a way to solve it.

Even with all this performance, optimization, and bug bashing, I was able to make a few fun changes as well!

Colored Footprints

With all the changes I was making to the footprint system to optimize it, I added a touch of polish as well. Footprints are now properly colored depending on the material they are left on. This ensures they have the proper visibility and while can be used to track a player, they will no longer be the dead giveaway they used to be.

Trackmarks from wheeled vehicles also benefited from this change!

Turret Improvements

Turrets have received a number of improvements, first of which is they now take on the team camo pattern when deployed. In Siege mode this will either be Red or Blue, depending on your team, and in arena mode will match the colored pattern of your AI team mates. In a free for all arena match, they will deploy in a unique pattern to all other turrets and AI and it will be consistent among all your deployed turrets.

In addition to this, the turret AI has been upgraded! They now properly use the AI difficulty settings, tuned to their individual uses. Sniper turrets are insane difficulty. Armored, basic, and heavy, are all normal difficulty. Howitzer turrets are easy difficulty.

Turrets have also been updated to directly contribute to your end round stats. Damage, kills, and parts destroyed by turrets you placed will be added to your end of round stats. Accuracy and turret deaths are NOT added to your stats.

Part Changes

Another Kickstarter backer has redeemed their ‘Name a Part’ reward and has renamed the Z-HWY weapon to PR-UN3. A clever pun that references not only their in-game username, but the howies ability to ‘prune’ parts off of the enemy MAV’s as well!

Grenade launchers have received a bit of an adjustment as well. Looking through the stats and gameplay, it was apparent that while the grenades were very fun to use (a VERY popular weapon) they were not dealing nearly the damage to be expected from their use. Diving into some data, it seems they have a very low chance to hit with the current players (~15% accuracy through the playerbase) which made it when you did connect a shot very under whelming with the damage they do. Given the very small splash range and steep damage falloff in the range, even close hits to the ground were not having the impact players were looking for.

To account for this, all 3 grenade launcher variants were given a damage boost.

GL40MMHE ‘ Thunder’ increased from 78->162
GL40MM MULTI went from total damage of 111->258
GL40MM went from 56->137.

All other stats are the same other than the GL40MM MULTI also increasing in weight from 647->787.

 

Thank you

I wanted to thank everyone for the patience in waiting for this update! This has been the largest, deepest, refactoring of the game since it was launched! All core systems were touched, including movement, projectiles, collision, physics, audio, VFX, AI, and networking. Over 730 bugs were tracked and completed during these past 2 months as well! Overall it’s a great start to the new year and a great new foundation to build more content on top of! I can’t wait to see your new gameplay videos at a silky smooth 60 FPS! Enjoy!

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  1. “All core systems were touched, including movement, projectiles, collision, physics, audio, VFX, AI, and networking. Over 730 bugs were tracked and completed during these past 2 months as well! Overall it’s a great start to the new year and a great new foundation to build more content on top of! I can’t wait to see your new gameplay videos at a silky smooth 60 FPS! Enjoy!”

    Oh don’t mind me, just casually overhauling almost every aspect of my game in only two months by myself.

    Jesus Christ you madman.

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  5. The new update is great – plays like butter, getting consistently high 50’s FPS on a not amazing rig. The new UI is great too – haven’t played since the old UI and this one is much improved. Looks great!

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  6. I love this update, I just did a 1v11 on grassy creek while recording; prior to this patch it was completely undoable due to how bad the frame rate would be at the start, and it didn’t drop below 30fps this time even at the start.

    This performance update was a godsend. Also noticed a couple fixed collision issues and the turret update is a start, it’s nice. 🙂

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      Awesome! I love your 1v11 videos. Try one against 11 support MAVs now that they can aim better!

      1. I gave it a shot, gotta say that you weren’t kidding.

        Their rocket and howie play has definitely improved.
        I did end up winning, but unfortunately the video was ruined when I spent something like five minutes looking for the very last one on crater arena.
        Basically the first one I shot at, which took part in the fight at first, literally abandoned the battle while I wasn’t paying attention to it to go hide next to my base. I’ve never seen that before. XD

        Least now I know that supports aren’t a freebie anymore. 😀

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