WELCOME BACK, RECRUITS!

It's been a LONG time since RocketWerkz originally released Out of Ammo in 2016 and it's sequel, Death Drive in 2017. And a long time since we've updated them.

But all of that is about to change. Get ready for...

How big is this update? REAL BIG. Strap in. We've got a lot of ground to cover.

General Improvements to BOTH games:

• Valve Index support
  
• Oculus Rift support
  
• HTC Vive Pro / Cosmos support
  
• An Unreal Engine 4.24 Update
  
• An overhaul of teleport, snap-turn, and control bindings, up to date with more modern VR practices
  
• Laser pointers for manipulating menus, instead of having to click buttons with your (chunky) fingertips.
  
• Lots of general bug fixing
  
• Lots of general quality of life improvements
  
• Various frame rate optimizations
  
• Adding new achievements and fixes to existing achievements
  
• And more more! (Patch Notes TBA)

Out of Ammo Changes / Improvements

• Out of Ammo is has received a large overhaul to quality of life features, such as manipulating units and structures in Commander Mode, and the ease of handling your weapons in First Person Mode. With these changes, we’re hoping to bring Out of Ammo up to a more modern VR standard, while correcting many issues that have been present, including feedback from the community forums and Steam reviews.
  
• Added briefing text for every mission, to give you a better understanding of the goals of a given scenario.
  
• Additional quality of life and polish to all missions, and ensuring all missions are fun while still being challenging. We've also taken lots of feedback from the forums and reviews regarding some of the missions being too difficult or unclear.
  
• Improvements to the Escape (Pause) Menu, including adding volume settings and floor height settings to the Pause Menu.
  
• Better tutorialization and more informative tooltips
  
• Large UI updates all over the game, for a more unified look that's up to date with more modern VR practices
  
• Improvements to the main menu to help orient the player.
  
• Various tweaks to controller rumble, using it in more appropriate places and up to date with more modern VR practices
  
• Various sound updates to many aspects of the game, including (but not limited to) new sounds and "Commander" lines for certain gameplay events and better feedback on Units when they move, take damage, and die.
  
• Some tweaks to game balance, all across the board.
  
• A price drop! Out of Ammo is now only $9.99 USD

Out of Ammo 2: Death Drive Changes / Improvements

• We consider Death Drive to be in a more polished state, already featuring quite a few of the quality-of-life touches that we’re giving to Out of Ammo. Our main priority will be giving the game improved controls and accessibility, with a laser-sharp focus on what already makes it fun and exciting.
  
• Adding a required completion order to the campaign, locking out subsequent levels until you beat the current one.
  
• Additional quality of life and polish to all missions, and ensuring all missions are fun while still being challenging.
  
• Improvements to the Escape (Pause) Menu, including better volume controls, particularly for music.
  
• Improved tutorialization and more informative tooltips in a few places.
  
• Added Snap Turning
  
• Added interaction lasers in Commander Mode for easier unit and structure selection and manipulation.
  
• Updated VOs and new friendly unit VOs added
  
• Gameplay tweaks and rebalancing
  
• And much more! (Patch Notes TBA)

Commander Mode Improvements

• In Out of Ammo, you start most missions in Commander Mode, where you can place defensive positions and order units to locations around your base.
  
• (OOA) All of your friendly units will have an indicator over their head. (Visible in First Person Mode as well.)
  
• (OOA) All defenses will have an icon showing which soldier class is manning the structure.
  
• (OOA) Improvements to Commander Radio Abilities, both in ease of use and effectiveness.
  
• (OOA) Unit stats will show when hovering your hand over a unit.
  
• (OOA) Addition of a 3-star ranking system for individual Units, so that Units who perform well during a round (when not under player control) will receive bonuses, such as better accuracy. This will add a reason to keep specific individual units alive.
  
• (BOTH) Laser pointers added to hands when in Commander mode for better ease-of-use and accuracy.
  
• (BOTH) Improvements to the radial menu when ordering units to a defensive position.
  
• (BOTH) A bunch more!

First Person Mode Improvements

• In Out of Ammo, you can possess any friendly unit on the battlefield. We’re improving how this feels and providing better feedback to the player while in this mode.
  
• (DD) Improved audio tells for certain things, such as getting low on ammunition.
  
• (OOA) Improved Wristwatch interface (Commander mode also)
  
• (OOA) Better gun smoothing, especially on scoped weaponry, making it easier to stabilize a long-distance shot
  
• (BOTH) Allow snap-turning in defences while possessing a unit
  
• (BOTH) Improvements that allow you to more easily pick up items, especially off of the ground.
  
• (BOTH) Most weapons now have faster projectiles when shooting them in First Person Mode.
  
• (BOTH) Better signalling when something occurs, such as the unit running Out of Ammo™ or dying from enemy fire.
  
• (BOTH) Better (slightly smaller) proportions to weapons for easier weapon handling and up to date with more modern VR practices
  
• (BOTH) Improved throwing
  
• (BOTH) Improved weapon handling

https://store.steampowered.com/app/451840/Out_of_Ammo/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/569630/Out_of_Ammo_2_Death_Drive/

Here's a small but significant patch focused on stability with a few quality of life changes and several more bug fixes.

You can now create custom bindings for some actions by editing the input config file. If you're interested there's a guide with a few example configs at the end.

The attachment selection menu can be opened by pressing and holding the grip button of a controller holding a gun, same as before 1.0.9. To activate or deactivate an attachment you still need to place your other hand over it and press the grip button. Another small quality of life change is that attachments spawn already active by default.

Interaction has been updated slightly to work better with both hands at the same time. It also tracks the closest hover target better which should help when there are overlapping deployables or units. There are also a few more checks so that it can recover better from accidentally invalid interaction states. And finally the overlap test tick rate has been increased. Overall it should be a lot more reliable and responsive, but there is still a limitation in that you can only deploy one defence at a time as the deployment system is still legacy code.

• Players rotate around their head rather than the centre of the play space when using snap turn.
  
• Players return to their previous location when returning to commander mode.
  
• Added SnapTurnYawDegrees as an option in Game.ini to set snap turn angle. Default is 90. See the forum post on resetting game settings for a little more information on how game settings work.
  
• Began to add VOIP support back in. Currently by default it is unbound as I couldn't figure out a good button for it. Bind "PushToTalk" to an action to use it. There is an example in the control rebinding guide linked above.
  
• Made audio fade in on spawn so that all the objects spawning and settling won't blow out people's headphones.

• Fix deploying and moving in Port. The map is playable again!
  
• Stop weapons from colliding with teleportation mesh.
  
• Prevent many pause interactions that shouldn't be allowed, and force other elements that should never freeze to ignore pause state.
  
• Fix Game Over screens being positioned incorrectly.
  
• Fix various race conditions and network replication issues with equipping items.
  
• Fix various teleportation bugs - including a particularly nasty one that could randomly set your location to world origin.
  
• Replicate floor height and HMD type to server so that multiplayer clients are set to the right height.
  
• Fix quit menu being hard to reach when possessing a unit.
  
• Fix units falling through the floor when defences are dismantled.
  
• Fix ammo belts being left behind when MG defences are dismantled.
  
• Improve deployment restrictions to make it harder to place defences in invalid areas.
  
• Improve defence colliders so that it's easier to select defences and units in defences.
  
• Fix medic and engineer field tent possession so it functions as it did before.
  
• Fix throwing knives not being dropped when sticking to something.
  
• Fix M4 being impossible to reload in Overwatch mission.
  
• Fix equipment slot bugs in missions.
  
• Fix RPG bouncing instead of exploding on clients.
  
• Fix full cartridges disappearing instead of being ejected when opening the sniper rifle's bolt.
  
• Improve ammo belt motion on MG.
  
• Fix entry/exit point marker not being visible when deploying defences.
  
• Fix units not resetting correctly after their possession cooldown time has run out.
  
• Rebalance recoil slightly to make weapons with a faster fire rate less accurate when fired very quickly and/or in large bursts.

And several other miscellaneous fixes.

• Gripped objects are still buggy when the game is paused.

Hi, I'm the developer currently working on the latest patches. Here's a quick hotfix for several very important bugs. Lesson learned - release massive reworks on the experimental branch first, then on stable!

• Fixed weapons despawning after a certain amount of time had passed from last possession.
  
• Rebuilt navmesh in D-Day that was preventing unit movement and structure deploying.
  
• Fixed mounted machine gun ammo despawning when it shouldn't.
  
• Fixed menu polaroids colliding with other polaroids unnecessarily and making it hard to select levels.
  
• Fixed radial menu for engineering tent and medic tent not tracking correctly when summoned with left hand.
  
• Fixed stat tracking in Icarus mission.
  
• Fixed weapon collisions so they always enable themselves when not colliding with a defence.
  
• Reflected equipment slots for left-handed players (weapon is equipped on the left, commander radio is equipped on the right).
  
• Restored physics to grenades. If knocked away by accident they will respawn quicker.

And a bunch of other minor bugs have been fixed.

• Deploying defences on Port is broken.

Apart from Port (which I'm still working on) this should be enough to make the game playable on all other maps. I'll be checking the forums regularly, if you find any more bugs please post them there and I'll get to them as soon as possible.

A few months ago we assigned more resource to do some substantial updates to the game. This started a long journey of refactoring. Think of it like taking a panel off the wall to replace it, realizing the frame needs replacing, so you replace that... essentially this Malcolm in the Middle episode.

This represents a pretty major change in how Out of Ammo is built. So if you like it, please do get the word out there! We've pumped a lot of development time in this, as always let us know your thoughts below.


Hi, I'm the guy who's been holed up making an update for Out of Ammo. I haven't seen the sun from my blacked-out room for months! What was supposed to take a matter of weeks has expanded to take over all my waking hours, so let me start this changelog with a cautionary tale…

Since the last update I've been working on a refactor of the main player character, a.k.a the Pawn. Out of Ammo was built for an immature platform with rapid iteration of new features being tacked on wherever they would fit. The Pawn was the key component of the entire game; over time anything that happened became somehow integrated with the Pawn. This made the game pretty difficult to work on since the Pawn was so massive that it took several minutes to open, save, compile or do anything. It had become what's known as a God-Object. So, in order to facilitate further development, I volunteered to clean up the Pawn. Just a bit.

When I first started writing this changelog I believed I was about halfway done - in fact at the time I was only a sixth of the way through. At least 7 GB of data changed over almost a thousand files, 5 engine updates, a near-endless amount of bugs and 5 months later I've reworked almost the whole core of the game! I had massively underestimated the task. Because the player pawn was involved with everything, reworking the Pawn meant that I was reworking almost everything else as well. But the end result has made the game much more maintainable.

... I'm sure there's a moral in this somewhere. Don't bite off more than you can chew? Don't volunteer for anything? Hindsight is 20/20? I don't know, but hopefully it's helped you gain some insight into what has been a very difficult update!


Engine update

Out of Ammo has gone from using Unreal version 4.16 to version 4.21 and has gained many benefits from doing so.

• Screen Percentage has been removed in favour of Pixel Density. Instead of having to figure out an appropriate screen percentage for each headset, and often being slightly off, we can use a normalized number to get the perfect amount. If you have pixel density set to the default you can be certain it will be perfect for your device. You can still down-sample to 0.5x or up-sample to 1.5x normal resolution if you want, but if you just need a few extra frames here and there...
  
• Dynamic Resolution is now available. We haven't tested it fully so we're not enabling this by default but if you feel like you need it it can be accessed by setting Pixel Density to "Dynamic".
  
• Spectator Screens have been added as an alternative view option. It's off by default though (the "Default View" option just copies what the player can see with almost no overhead) as it effectively involves rendering the whole world another time. The spectator screen refresh rate is limited to ~30 FPS to reduce the burden on your GPU.
  
• Various performance and stability enhancements too numerous to list.

Grip rework

The whole grip system has been rebuilt around the VR Expansion Plugin. This means far more accurate and comprehensive grip manipulating in single player and multiplayer. In general things will remain the same for you, it simply allows us to add, alter and maintain things more easily. Maintaining the old grip system was a massive chore and the complexities of it effectively kept us version locked under 4.18. This was where the bulk of the work went.
Here's a few other changes to grippable items.

• Items will trigger haptic feedback when they bump into things while held.
  
• Some items, like the commander radio, can be dropped with the grip button on the corresponding controller. Others can be dropped by releasing the trigger as before.

Weapons update

All weapons in the game have been updated to take advantage of the new grips system. The gunplay has been improved to be more rewarding, consistent and intuitive.

• Weapons are now physical objects with collisions and can be gripped and dropped in the world. Press the grip button on the corresponding controller to drop a weapon.
  
• Large weapons can be gripped with both hands. Just grab the weapon where you'd expect to hold it with your off hand to dual grip.
  
• You can dual wield weapons!
  
• You can switch a weapon to your other hand by placing your other hand over the weapon's handle and pressing the grip button.
  
• Bolts and slides can be accurately moved rather than snapping to positions and weapons internally have a chamber that stores a single round. Some weapons have more steps to reloading to take advantage of this.
  
• Weapons have physical recoil and kick.
  
• Ammunition is stored per magazine rather than per weapon, so if you remove a half-empty magazine it doesn't magically become empty.
  
• The M2 mounted machine gun has been completely reworked from the ground up. It is much more reliable to reload, and you no longer need to hold the grip buttons to fire it.
  
• Weapon attachments can now be accessed by holding your hand over the attachment area and holding the grip button. Use the primary trigger to select an option or press the grip button over the attachment to get rid of the menu.

Equipment and loadouts

A new concept to Out of Ammo coming over from Death Drive; almost any grippable item can be equipped to slots on the players body. It's especially useful in the 'Icarus' mission!

• There are 4 small slots and 2 weapon slots on the player when they have possessed a unit. Small slots cannot take weapons.
  
• The commander radio always reserves a slot and any loadout weapons reserve slots as well. When a slot is reserved the slot can only be used by that one item.
  
• If you drop a loadout item out of reach it will teleport back you and attach to the slot it reserved.

Quality of life

• The tutorial has been updated with the relevant changes.
  
• You can now teleport in commander mode and teleport using both hands, just like in Death Drive.
  
• You can now use the commander radio while possessing a unit.
  
• All game settings (the ones at the back of the commander tent in the starting level) are now located in either Game.ini or GameUserSettings.ini found in %LocalAppData%\OutOfAmmo\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor. If you're having real problems related to game settings clearing those might help.

Bug fixes

There are far too many of these to count. I'll list a few here that come to mind.

• Pausing now actually pauses the game, instead of just making it really slow. This should prevent many bizarre physics and desync bugs, although it's currently messing with grips a bit.
  
• Fixed several bugs relating to Oculus rotation caused by code using the unrotated head direction or position.
  
• Fixed menu tooltips not showing or having incorrect text.
  
• Fixed many physics bugs caused by weird physics constraints.

However, with massive changes such as this there is a possibility for many new and interesting bugs to be introduced. If you find any, please let us know! It should be a lot easier for us to fix them now...

Been a long time since we released Out of Ammo. We had some new programmers at the studio and we decided to put them through their paces on this project. While VR has been a money pit for us, we love the game and we loved out time with Out of Ammo - so it had been a dream for us for some time to tidy up some of the bugs we had with it.

We decided to dust off the old code base and tidy up some of the pesky bugs that remained. While we were there, we also decided to tackle some of the bigger opportunities that changes with Unreal (the engine we use) and VR provided. This means we now have the forward renderer working, giving pretty dramatically better framerate.

Please let us know here in the comments if you have any issues or what you would like us to add! Should we do a new map? What else needs to be added to the game?

• Updated to Unreal Engine to 4.16.3. This gives us lots of fixes and improvements, too numerous to mention!
  
• Now uses a forward renderer with MSAA and Temporal Anti-Aliasing for much better performance.
  
• Improved ragdoll on characters.
  
• Menu follows view better. Fixes potential issues on oculus when turning.
  
• Increased Tank base speed
  
• Tanks will now be slowed after the tank commander is defeated. (This should make tanks easier to aim with artillery/RPG)
  
• Nearby enemy units will have the chance to pop back into the tank commander seat.
  
• Slightly buffed artillery against tanks
  
• RPG Unit Should no longer kill itself when stationed on sandbags
  
• Machine Gun Nest bugs fixed such as difficulty reloading. Improved geometry model to fix this.
  
• Fix "Get Steam Friend Avatar" being disconnected After the 4.16 update "Get Steam Friend Avatar" nodes had 3 exec out pins instead of just one. In the worst case it prevented PlayerConnected and UpdateUnitStats from being called. Connected the success and failure nodes to following nodes.
  
• Modify and update some networking code
  
• Modify client initialization order Now starts in VRPawn.uasset
  
• Fix tank not moving in D-Day(Increased Nav Area Bounds)

What started as an ironic joke by Dean Hall to add zombies to Out of Ammo has exploded into something much larger. We created a standalone sequel, Out of Ammo: Death Drive.

We've spent the better part of a year experimenting with the dumbest fun we could possibly imagine, while retaining what made the original game fun in the first place.

As owners of Out of Ammo, you'll get a discount if you choose to purchase and play the sequel.

We hope you like our new game, and thanks for playing Out of Ammo.

Your friends,

The Good Boys at RocketWerkz

xox <3

http://store.steampowered.com/app/569630/Out_of_Ammo_Death_Drive/

What started as an ironic joke by Dean Hall to add zombies to Out of Ammo has exploded into something much larger. We created a standalone sequel, Out of Ammo: Death Drive.

We've spent the better part of a year experimenting with the dumbest fun we could possibly imagine, while retaining what made the original game fun in the first place.

As owners of Out of Ammo, you'll get a discount if you choose to purchase and play the sequel.

We hope you like our new game, and thanks for playing Out of Ammo.

Your friends,

The Good Boys at RocketWerkz

xox <3

http://store.steampowered.com/app/569630/Out_of_Ammo_Death_Drive/

Oculus users highlighted in the forums (thanks all!) some bugs that crept in with the recent changes to the Oculus SDK. The team fixed these and released the update on experimental over the weekend, confirmed fixed by these same users.

• FIXED: Floor Height now adjusts "possession" height correctly, and instantaneously.
  
• FIXED: Adjusted base floor height for Oculus users as was incorrect

Please continue to report bugs and issues in the forums. The team is able to pump out updates for this while they continue their work on the standalone expansion.

Oculus users highlighted in the forums (thanks all!) some bugs that crept in with the recent changes to the Oculus SDK. The team fixed these and released the update on experimental over the weekend, confirmed fixed by these same users.

• FIXED: Floor Height now adjusts "possession" height correctly, and instantaneously.
  
• FIXED: Adjusted base floor height for Oculus users as was incorrect

Please continue to report bugs and issues in the forums. The team is able to pump out updates for this while they continue their work on the standalone expansion.

Since we released from Early Access we have continued to fix bugs as well as add support for other Virtual Reality devices. We're pleased to announce we now we have fully support for the Oculus Touch when in 360 degree room-scale configuration!

Note that, while officially unsupported in less than 360 degree room-scale mode, you can still play the game. However, you have to use the controller buttons to "pivot" on the spot to play. We're not comfortable saying the title is supported in less than 360 degree room scale currently, as the game was really designed with this in mind.

Please provide feedback on our new HMD support on the forums, as well as posting bugs.