6:05pm

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days - Harriet_PikPok

Survivor Missions for Steam Scream IV

It's nearly Halloween!

Which means it's just about time for Early Access Update #5. This update (releasing in four days!) will bring you the first of our survivor missions, an all new starting pair, as well as the ability to save multiple runs.

We're a New Zealand based team and we'll be releasing the update for everyone on Steam on Tuesday 28 October NZDT at around 1:00pm. This is:

Monday 27 Oct @ 5:00pm PDT
Monday 27 Oct @ 8:00pm EDT
Tuesday 28 Oct @ 12:00am GMT
Tuesday 28 Oct @ 3:00am MSK
Tuesday 28 Oct @ 8:00am CST
Tuesday 28 Oct @ 11:00am AEDT

You can find your exact local time (and a countdown!) on our Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd8RPnRZjx

We're also excited to announce that we'll be taking part in this year's Steam Scream VI. Hope you nab yourself a spooky deal...

(For all PR and content creator inquiries, get in touch with https://pikpok@deadgoodmedia.com.)

See you soon!

Harriet
& the Into the Dead team

6:05pm

Update 1.01 is LIVE!

Cairn: Mathair's Curse - chrisdefish

I've been very busy the last couple of weeks since release!

Feature updates:

Look out for the great thistles - these plants will provide your party with a free recovery!

The first piece of feedback I've focused on for this update was providing some kind of rest point/relief for players. Particularly in the early chapters where items can be most scarce. With this update you can now find scattered throughout Albaness a mysterious flower which when touched provides a one time full recovery for your party. This means you should chew through your items just a little less quickly.

A combat speed modifier has been added to the main menu

Another request was to add the ability to alter the speed of combat. To which you can now find battle animation speed settings within the options. (1 being default and 4 being the fastest). Currently the speed does not affect some animations, particularly party members who use skills with timed attacks. I'll include these in a following patch :)

Difficulty Changes!

Tweaked the difficulty of enemies in the early game (a little less intimidating)
Tweaked some late game bosses (a little more intimidating)

Some players were finding the early stages of the game a little tough or the later stages of the game (particularly the bosses) a little easy. These have now been tweaked and alongside the Great Thistles in the early game should help the difficulty curve across the game.

(Vile) Video Game Re-Seller!

Did you miss a collectable? Did you miss the chance to find that one time only video game? Never fear, for a nice chap who will sell you them for an extravagant price is here! Ok, maybe he's not sooo nice, but he will help you obtain those video games you missed the first time around. (Be careful though, it'll get expensive if you missed a bunch!)

Now for some smaller but nonetheless important updates and fixes!

Minor Updates:

Renamed for a similarly named character to Jim to not get mixed up
Some XP re-balance
Reworked some cave areas to not get lost! (and more spacious la-di-da)
Some item descriptions are more descriptive

Fixes:

Fixed an issue where enemies caused a softlock when fleeing
Fixed a bug with the VR sprite disappeared for normal Alex
Fixed a bug causing players to get stuck in a crypt in chapter 11
Fixed a SFX error when Hamish gives you an item
Fixed a couple of enemies with missing battle backgrounds
Correct some skill descriptions
Fixed some sprite errors in chapter 11
Fixed an issue with Peddler Pete not letting you leave a shop

6:00pm

SimplePlanes 2 | Wings Part 3

SimplePlanes 2 - SupremeDorian

Welcome to Part 3 of our set of blogs showing off the new wings! This one goes into some more enhancements to visuals and physics, so let's get into it, starting with...

Propeller Blur

Er... propellers are technically wings, right? I know, put away your nerd emojis, I just had nowhere else to put this. So anyway...

When something like a propeller blade spins very fast, it creates a blur effect that is rather plainly called motion blur. Propellers had motion blur in SimplePlanes 1 but it was very basic, merely being a flat rotating texture. Because of that, they had various visual shortcomings, mainly that they were infinitely thin from the side and they didn’t really interact with the lighting in a convincing way.

So for SimplePlanes 2 we “borrowed” a technique Philip had previously developed for version 1.1 of Juno: New Origins for proper 3D motion blur on propellers, giving them actual depth, better lighting, and overall much better visual fidelity. Not only that, but the blur properly adapts to the current properties of your propeller like the shape, RPM, or pitch!

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

This effect looks much better than the old motion blur – so much better in fact that we’ve also applied it to helicopter rotors! Additionally, it holds up much better than before in slow motion or when paused, showing the blades partially blurred but not with the full intensity seen at regular speed.

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of these, click on this text

Propellers and rotors now also have new XML properties that let you customize parts of the motion blur’s behaviour, letting aesthetically-minded technical players get their hands dirty to make things look how they want if the default values aren’t cutting it.

Spanwise Flow

In the Wings Part 2 dev blog, we went over some of the physics for the new wings in SP2. This section will elaborate a bit on one aspect of those: “spanwise flow”

In real life, wings produce different amounts of lift across different parts of the wingspan, with lift gradually being reduced towards the tip of the wing. This wasn’t modeled in SP1, meaning the whole wing produced the same amount of lift, which left a lot to be desired.

SP2 on the other hand has a whole spanwise flow model developed by Nicky through blood sweat and tears, simulating it and many of the resulting characteristics it gives to your wings but in a simplified enough manner that you don’t need a supercomputer to run it.

One of the biggest differences you’ll notice here is with stalling behaviour. For the uninitiated, stalling is essentially when the angle of attack of your wing (the angle of the front edge relative to the airflow) is so high that it can no longer effectively produce lift, making the aircraft drastically less controllable. In SP1 the whole wing would abruptly stall at once, but now in SP2 wings will gradually stall from the tip to the root, resulting in generally much more gentle and realistic stalls.

“Induced drag” is also modeled now, essentially being extra drag that comes as a direct result of the lift your wings are producing. More efficient wing shapes such as those with a large wingspan will have less induced drag than less efficient shapes, creating more of a need to balance your designs than SP1 had.

As a result of these new effects, delta wings (previously a notable victim of SP1’s wing physics) are back with a vengeance, now capable of reaching the high angles of attack they were always destined to; perhaps with a bit more proficiency than they realistically should unless we make the physics even more advanced later down the line, but for now their excessive performance makes for extra fun for the player.

As this is inherently an abstract force that is hard to observe, we’ve added a nifty visualizer to see the lift and drag forces coming from your wings. This was originally a developer-only visualizer used for debugging, but our playtesters saw usefulness in it so now you too can see a flurry of benevolent green lines coming out of your wings if you so choose.

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

Wingtip Vortices

You know those little trails you often see coming from the wings of all sorts of planes? Those have a name, they’re called wingtip vortices. They’ve been a fairly commonly requested visual effect for both SP1 and Juno for a long time, and at long last they’re made their way into SP2.

We could have simply hardcoded some basic logic that just makes a trail come from the tip of your wing and called it a day, but we didn’t do that. Using the spanwise flow model Nicky developed, we can have wingtip vortices that actually take the physical characteristics of your wing into account like the lift it’s generating, the distribution of that lift, the shape of the wing, and more.

For a slightly more complicated explanation, wingtip vortices are, as the name might suggest, a result of a fast-rotating vortex formed behind a wing. The precise reasoning for the formation of said vortex is… complicated aerodynamics stuff that’s beyond the scope of this post, but basically there’s a lot of weird airflow happening on the wing, with sideways airflow and pressure differences causing the air near the wingtip to rotate, which becomes the vortex. Normally these vortices are invisible as they’re just air, but certain conditions such as your altitude can contribute to making water droplets in the atmosphere condense or even freeze inside the vortex due to the low pressure, which creates a visible trail in a rather similar manner to the distinct funnel cloud seen on a tornado but on a much smaller scale.

For a much more complicated explanation, Nicky recommends NASA TM X-2516, a paper published by NASA in 1972 that proved vital in his research on how to get this stuff into the game. He also wanted me to tell you he’s jealous of their huge wind tunnel.

GIF is a very limiting file format to work with; if you'd like to download a higher quality MP4 version of this, click on this text

If you like what you're seeing, please consider wishlisting SimplePlanes 2 on Steam. If you'd like to see bits of these blogs early, consider joining our Discord Server!

5:51pm

Patch 1.1.0

Dirty Aim Trainer VR Playtest - DirtyBong

Hey trainers, this patch is aimed to fix gameplay issues and bugs, and to properly setup NPC Targets.

If you want to report anything, have issues or want to send your suggestions, please visit the official Discord server or use the [url]Discussion [/url]Board.

Achievements

Implemented the “Sharp Shooter” achievement, which should now function correctly.
Fixed a bug that allowed players to earn achievements that did not belong to them. (Oops)

UI & Controls

Added a Return Home button to the wrist/hand menu.

Tasks & Gameplay

Added a missing Menu Target to the Gridshot Long task.
Changed task start confirmation from a 2-shot requirement to 1-shot.
Added a custom time slider for playtest duration and fixed related save issues.

Performance & Stability

Added a potential fix for consistent crashing issues.

NPC Target Fixes

Fixed NPC targets not dying when shot.
Fixed NPC targets failing to respond to players properly.
Fixed NPC targets not moving or only moving in place.
Fixed NPC target damage location detection.
Added ragdoll behavior to NPC targets for improved visual feedback.