Late again, but late’s better than never. It’s been 11 days since our last update, so we’d like to fill you in on what has happened since the last update, as well as give you an accurate depiction of what work needs to be completed before we release 0.6.
Q: Why haven’t you released yet? What is preventing you from releasing right now?
A: During our last large-scale testing session, a couple rather important issues showed up that we didn’t see in our previous test sessions due to those usually being smaller-scale tests. I’ll highlight the remaining things that need to be finished before we release.
1. We’re working on a new updater. While it’s very close to being finished, it’s not 100% finished/tested.
2. When lots of players are in the game (13-16), the UI elements rendered with CEF (Scoreboard, medals, chat) can become very laggy, and cause some pretty bad fps drops on anything other than high-end rigs. For example, when you die and the scoreboard pops up, sometimes it would stay on the screen for an additional 2-4 seconds after you spawned, preventing you from seeing where you’re going. Obviously this is not good. Note: The videos posted below are from a higher end rig where the issue is not as prevalent.
We’ve narrowed down the culprit, which is the method and frequency at which we’re sending information to the scoreboard layer that’s eating up a huge amount of CPU, and are working (with promising results) on a fix which will resolve this.
3. Crashes. We’ve gotten most of the crashes fixed, but there are a couple remaining that we’re finishing tracking down.
4. We’re putting some final touches on UI elements, including the forge UI (which a video of is posted below).
Q: How long will these things take to finish?
A. Honestly, not long. I know we sound like a broken record at this point, but we are very close. The end is in sight!
Q: Do you have any new features or gameplay to show us?
A: Yup.
The almighty unk_1 has been hard at work doing more badass stuff with forge. The forge UI got a pretty hefty (and awesome) overhaul. Here’s some of the changes:
- All lists now supports LT/RT, PAGE UP/DOWN page scrolling
- Loading/saving prefabs from within the UI
- Tool Settings
- Material thumbnails
- Quick search now allows spaces in the query
- Recently used items
- Recently used materials now supports colors
- Object properties color pickers
- Engine flags/gametype options allows you to select which gametypes an object will be spawned in. Useful to reducing the number of spawn points needed to facilitate multi-gametype maps.
Here’s a video highlighting some of these features:
Some other things that have been done/fixed since the last post:
- Hitmarkers can be enabled/disabled on a per-server basis. You can also choose to disable hitmarkers if the server has them enabled.
- Active Camo movement penalty is fixed.
- Overshield decay is fixed.
- Added controller support for right-click mute/unmute options in scoreboard
- H3 landing responses - removed camera shake when landing.
- Multiple crashes have been tracked down and fixed. Also, you know the infamous bug many AMD users have where the game doesn’t crash but the screen completely freezes, and you can still hear sounds? It’s a very complicated issue, but we think we’ve found the culprit and are confident we’ll be able to fix it.
Gameplay:
Here’s a video (courtesy of tester RabidEskimo) of a match on a variant of The Pit that I made that has a bunch of forge lights and map modifiers placed.
We also experimented with some new gametypes. Here’s a Big Team Multi-Team match (4x4x4x4) on Standoff Heavy. It was kind of a Cluster-Fuck.
Here’s a match of 2 Flag Heavy on Valhalla:
Here is a video of an assortment of gameplay on forge maps (courtesy of Clutchism):