Sep 17

SYNTHETIK 2 - Shrike

Hey everyone!

Update 16 has a strong focus on fixes and improving on the menu user experience, but comes with a good amount of gameplay refinements as-well, such as new items, better and more loot and improved upgrade progression, which we personally feel are very noticeable.

We have heard your feedback about the base of operations and have greatly streamlined the experience to be more smooth, easier to understand, faster and more convenient, while keeping all the new content that Grand Operations brought.

Streamlined Menu

🞙 We simplified the Menu UI and changed it to use a simple unified Tab-Bar

🞙 You can now easily switch to any menu while being in the lobby!

🞙 Cinematics also have been speed up and in general the menu is very fast to use

🞙 Blueprint and Data income has been increased for faster unlocks

🞙 Many other fixes and tweaks have been done.

Note: The menu background is mostly the same with a bunch of optimizations but with the changed camera angles we have some untapped potential for improvements left.

Loot Improvements

Our goal was to improve the overall sense and depth of progression. Early game is becoming more diverse, and we wanted to bring item and item upgrades back in focus as the main progression outside of weapons. We experimented a lot with the amount of loot and we think we now found a good balance in terms of depth of choices, both for weapons and for items.

🞙 The First map now spawns 100% an item and a weapon chest

🞙 Coop now properly spawns bonus item chests per player.

🞙 50% chance per player per map for one extra chest

🞙 Item rarities are now more randomized and you get higher rarities earlier

🞙 Item upgrade shops are now arriving earlier and more consistently

Other Loot Improvements

🞙 Medical shop has seen varied changes and improvements

🞙 Varied other shop improvements

🞙 New options have been added, including specific synergies with certain weapon types

🞙 Choices for non tinkerer shop are now 2 instead of 3

🞙 Most Perks which were Epic previously are now common

🞙 Varied Perks have been improved

🞙 Shops in the third map have been moved away from the end towards 2/3rds

🞙 Medical Chest: Now drops randomly either power rations, healing vial or morphine

New Items

We added some new common Items “Simple Straight forward damage items”

🞙 Ignition Core - Large area damage

🞙 Heat Ray - Self targeted sun ray

🞙 M12 Liquid Grenade - Explosive Grenade with scaling

🞙 Psyonic Spikes - Erupts powerful metal spikes from the ground

Item Upgrade Stats display

You can now see in item stats:

🞙 Double Occurance chance

🞙 Triple Occurance chance

🞙 Quad Occurance chance

🞙 Multi-Cast chance

🞙 Free Cast chance

🞙 No Charges Cost chance

Power Scaling Pass

We added power scaling to varied action effects which previously didn’t scale and we added the scaling to the tooltips.

🞙 Ammo gain to magazine now scales

🞙 Shield Gain now scales

🞙 Plating Gain now scales

🞙 Health Gain now scales

🞙 Stacks can potentially scale (will be used more in the near future)

This opens up many possibilities, like upgrading the amount of missiles an item fires or how fast a upgrade stacks or such things.

Item Balance

🞙 Pulsar repeater stacks 10 > 20

🞙 Shield dome now stuns enemies within at first

🞙 Roundhouse boots cooldown doubled, now deals way more damage

🞙 Roundhouse boots now gives 10% movement speed

🞙 Power array now shoots a cone burst

🞙 Crowd control gear now shoots a volley of grenades

🞙 Sidewinder fires 3 missiles with less damage

🞙 Shove is now Hypershovel, cooldown 7s > 0.75 seconds

🞙 Hypershovel now reduces ability cooldowns by 1s

🞙 Now deals 10% bonus max hp damage

🞙 Guardian moved to lost & found due too many summons

🞙 Slug Boots damage 8.5 > 10x

🞙 Fire Prism reworked - now actually acts like a prism and splits lasers on the

target

🞙 Heavenly Embrace minimum range 1>1.5m, max hp damage increased

🞙 Bloodrite reworked, now gains stronger with every usage until you will have

to throw it

🞙 Bloodbane now causes curse explosions too

🞙 Grappling hook stat buff 2s > 2.5s, enemy damage range 3m > 4m, dmg stacks 7

> 8 times

🞙 Grappling hook projectile speed 200% > 250%

🞙 SAT masterkey deals more damage

🞙 Flare gun gives a small speed bonus on activation as Qol

🞙 Flare gun base stats 70% > 80%, scaling 0.35 > 0.2

🞙 Sticky Bomb cooldown 10 > 5s due to misses from enemies being dead

🞙 Sticky bomb and healing drone have a “no friendly in range” popup

🞙 Magic mag now reloads up to 30 * scaling, now creates ammo for free, now

shows a buff

🞙 Stun mines renamed to P7 Concussion Mines - Cooldown increased, now has a

fixed 4 constellation, improved VFX. No longer uses charges

🞙 Cryo turret now has 2 charges

🞙 Disc of justicia damage doubled

Global / Coop Balance

🞙 Enemy damage per player bonus 5% > 3%

🞙 Enemy aiming speed per player 5% >0%

🞙 Enemy Health scaling per player from 55% to 40%

🞙 Enemy Health scaling per 100% Difficulty from 25% to 50%

🞙 Enemy Base Projectile speed multiplier from 55% to 50%

Tldr: Enemy health is higher in singleplayer and a little bit higher in 2 player high

difficulty, up to 16% lower in 4P on low difficulty. Enemy damage is reduced

overall and enemy projectiles / reactions are a bit slower.

Weapons

🞙 Seeker carbine damage 3 > 2.5x

🞙 Increased amount of visible weapon perk slots from 7 to 12

🞙 H200 Commando damage 1.9x > 1.75

🞙 Evo XS damage 1.15x > 1.05

🞙 C900 Pioneer upgear now increases weapon perk power as it was causing

technical issues

🞙 Divine ammo conversion now works on special and spewer type weapons

🞙 Sickle Variant now properly uses its cooldown to drop the pickups

🞙 Stun missile burst stun duration 2s > 3s

Other

🞙 Reduced loop effect in silo floor

🞙 Varied map fixes

🞙 Heavy Gunner ramping up changed from

-50%, +10% fire-rate per stack

to -35% +7% fire-rate per stack

🞙 Snappy movement speed 3 > 3.35

🞙 Metal Storm now places one on the left and one on the right

Data & Blueprint Chest

🞙 We added a new chest which can grant 2 Blueprints or 50 Data or 80 Data

🞙 Data per map completed 10 > 25

🞙 Data from Boss kill removed 20 > 0 (still gains per map change, so -5 total)

🞙 Increased data gain cap overall

Kill FX / Feedback

Enemy kill effects have been improved and are more satisfying now

🞙 Added kill oil sparks

🞙 Added kill metal fragments

🞙 Timed oil splats better

🞙 Rag Doll chance from 40% to 100%, now only explodes above 2000 damage

🞙 Rag Doll velocity tweaked

🞙 Damage Numbers ported to new MSDF Text, made more snappy

🞙 Kill X Effect Improved

🞙 In coop, the item bar is now always shown for other players

Audio

🞙 Fixed playlists playing over each other

🞙 Out of combat now plays in a faded style

🞙 Fixed doubled music track playing in training

🞙 Removed some less good tracks in training, added S1 Training tracks

Enemy Compositions

🞙 Enemy spawner high now spawns 3 different archetype of units not 4 per map

🞙 Medium Spawner now only spawns 2 different archetype types not 3 per map

🞙 Low spawners now only spawn 1 enemy archetype

🞙 Low spawners no longer spawn special units such as tasers, wheels etc, these

are on medium or big spawners only

Overall this gives a much stronger identity to the compositions where groups previously felt random. We also gain a better contrast of types, so we have normal enemies, being mixed up with more special enemies instead of a permanent wild mix. This makes gameplay, visually and enemy attack patterns a lot clearer and more diverse.

Easier Early Game

🞙 Added new super low spawner for first 2 enemy groups per game

🞙 Reduced enemy count in first map noticeably, to make the game start easier

and faster

Other

🞙 Summons now hold you half as long in combat after enemies are already gone

🞙 Alarm wheels now are stunned for 1 second per spawn, max spawns 8 > 6

Bosses

🞙 Jet boss armor 30 > 0

🞙 Sawblade now spawns mini-sawblades when one of the 2 is destroyed

🞙 Last Defender now has laser beams,

🞙 Last Defender charge attack fixed / improved

🞙 Last Defender missile attack reworked

🞙 Last Defender no longer spawns secure bots and lightning wheels

🞙 Last Defender now spawns area denial drones and pacifiers

🞙 Added safeties for last defender loot and no longer shows the reward twice

Mod.io Update

We seemingly updated the U15 mod browser just when a much newer one came out, making the new U15 one instantly very outdated. We added now the latest Mod.io browser, there might be some issues with it left as this is quite a big task to integrate. The new ui is easier to customize and we have commited to sticking and further customize this UI as required and deal with API changes in the future by just fixing the modding backend as needed going forward.

Optimizations

MSDF High end, High performance custom Text rendering System

Up until U15, we’ve used the Unity Engine TMP Text system. While the glyphs rendered by this text engine look quite nice, the performance is pretty bad. This is especially noticeable in text heavy UIs in the main menu but also for example when new weapons are dropped and various text elements pop up in the same frame.

Unfortunately the Unity version is not fit for change so we took the time to write our own text rendering engine that is now included in the game.

The performance for creating text elements is roughly 2-3x faster than Unity’s TMP and renders glyphs with a higher quality algorithm called MSDF.

Asset loading

Synthetik 2 uses Unity’s Addressable system for dynamically loading content pieces meaning all the 3D models, Audio clips, Icons etc. This is great since this is the only real way in Unity to not preload all potentially referenced content when loading new levels, which would completely blow up RAM usage with the amount of content Synthetik 2 features.

Unfortunately the system is not very optimized for fast paced accessing of content.

Any instantiation of new content, for example throwing a grenade made the actual instantiation of the new content delayed by 1-5 frames, immediate instantiation of already RAM loaded content is not featured and the CPU overhead of actually using the RAM loaded content is also noticeable.

We’ve forked the Unity code and implemented our own Asset Manager that sits on top of the Unity code and can preload and recycle content much better and in most cases immediately instantiate accessed content with practically no overhead.

Raycast Targets

🞙 We cut raycasting targets in the UI by 90% which might improve frame

times when clicking

Muzzle Lights

🞙 Low quality setting no longer produces muzzle lights

🞙 Medium quality now has 60% shadowed muzzle lights

🞙 High quality retains full muzzle lights and shadows

🞙 Muzzle lights on medium and high quality now fade out over distance

🞙 Muzzle lights now have maximum ranges to avoid rendering to many objects

Arctic

🞙 Fixed a large snow particle effect which causes heavy overdraw in 2 maps

Controller Enhancements

We did significant work on controller support, with better aim-assist, a rework of the menu handling and a overhaul of the controller aiming system. More controller improvements are coming up.

Fixes

Many many fixes …

🞙 Refactor of weapons into a state machine for better handling of states

🞙 Fixed that summon upgrades don't work in co-op

🞙 Fixed varied other pick-up and weapon related co-op issues

🞙 Fixed a issue where certain effects stacked each map change, like no

cooldown chance on unstable current or critical chance on volley system,

causing people to reach 100% no cool-down chance and such things.

🞙 Fixed varied quest issues causing problems

🞙 Fixed pioneer breaking stats

🞙 Fixed a issue where items dissapear when picking up with full inventory

🞙 Fixed issues regarding minimap

🞙 Fixed Sniper Laser sometimes staying on

🞙 Fixed a issue with invisible enemies due to unreliable packages

🞙 Fixed a issue with bleeding effects causing enemies to break and bosses to

die instantly

🞙 Fixed a issue where things break when people drop weapons while attachment

shops are active

🞙 Fixed a issue where weapon switching did not properly re-parent actions,

leading to many bugs when trading weapons

🞙 Fixed depots not being switchable in the mod menu

🞙 Fixed doubled difficulty modifiers

🞙 Fixed many issues with U15 menu

🞙 Fixed Methadone coop issue / general action ownership issue leading to

potentially more bugs

🞙 Fixed many minor action issues

🞙 Fixed that WASD controlled menu buttons

🞙 Hopefully fixed last defender reward not appearing

🞙 Fixed Dialogs playing per player

🞙 Added fallback for last defender reward in next map

Known and investigating for next week:

🞙 Boss sometimes not dropping rewards in coop

🞙 Ability shop not usable in coop

🞙 Many more

We are now trying to follow up with an even shorter update cycle.
Up next are boss improvements, more improvements on items and more controller improvements as well.

Let us know what you think! We hope you enjoy!

Team Flow Fire Games

Known issue: Certain people report having a very bright daytime lighting instead of the intended night light in the menu - we looking into a fix

Edit2: It appears that there is an issue with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and maybe more font sets missing, we'll fix this ASAP.