For those who played last time:
- New level with water, including boats!
- Two new weapons!
- Three new types of enemies!
- You now have grenades that arc over objects to strike targets from afar, just press X.
- Buff to minigun weapon, now dual fire and much more fun
- Dynamic shellcasings and other updated particle effects
- Second mission enemies are now easier to spot and also optimized
- Enemies now have directional armor - sneaking up and shooting them from behind does double damage
- UI now fades itself upon mouseover as it can obscure enemies around the edges. Additionally, you can lock the camera in place now by pressing the Tab key.
- Aim reticule is now dynamic and easier to keep track of.
Miscellaneous:
- Weapons have better accuracy relative to the cursor
- Player mech and enemies now skew in relation to screen position, making things slightly more 3D
- Bullet code has been rewritten entirely for both optimization and slight differences in weapons
- Master volume slider in settings (entire menu will hopefully be redone in the next build with full settings for everything)
- Mech enemies are smarter now and become alerted to explosions as well as stop before driving into fire. They also subtly show brake lights when they're slowing down
- Bullets from enemies move slower now so it's more fair to dodge
- Lock-on indicator for missiles has been revised to be more visible
- Player mech now has subtle firing animation and weapon kickback
- Game should now launch in fullscreen or at least automatically double in size if you have a 1920 or larger display
Bug fixes:
- Particles no longer linger in levels motionlessly upon redeployment
- Enemy mechs no longer get stuck inside buildings upon being out of view. Additionally fixed an issue where upon getting hit outside of the camera they would remain motionless, leading to enemies not entering the level. Their pathfinding could still use some work though...
- On rare occasions the player could get fixed to buildings at weird angles, but this should be sorted now.
- Ambient audio no longer stops if too many noises go off at the same time, now has a proper controller
- Fixed enemy knockback with weapons and explosions, previously would not always trigger.
Other:
Major optimization to the game's code and systems.
I was surprised looking at the previous two DDs that only one or two people mentioned poor FPS. The first two public builds of the game — to put it as harshly as possible — were badly programmed. Not that the code didn't work or was broken, but it was far from what should be an optimally programmed game. The cause of this was mostly the fact that this project began as a quick and dirty proof of concept, and I had little care for optimizing things as much as they should've been and went with a "We'll fix it in post!" attitude. For this new build I've spent a lot of time getting things to run smoother. Core systems like collisions, the player's radar, object to object position checking, texture page flushing, particles, and so on have been rewritten to perform much faster, and the game should in general play smoother than before.
*Crash upon starting a mission / Note for Linux users:
Previously, a few Linux users had this issue - upon starting a mission, they get an error saying the D3D outline shader failed to compile. If this error occurs, please use Winetricks to install DirectX and then try again. This should fix any shader compile errors if you are having them.
- If you are having the same issue on a Windows PC, please see if your DirectX driver is up to date or installed, this will also fix the issue.
- A dedicated Linux build will also come eventually, but currently I do not have the ability to compile one.
---------------
