We’ve got some slightly-unusual patch notes for you today.
But first, you can say goodbye to that annoying server filter bug! (The “show full servers” checkbox functionality was inverted. Whoops!)
Additionally, we’re introducing some experimental changes to the “dead dead” mechanic, as well as the way “instadeath” works. Let’s dig in a little.
Pre-Alpha 13
Prior to Alpha 13, the mechanics worked like this:
After dying and being revived, there was a 60-second time frame during which you were extra vulnerable. This meant that if you died again during these 60 seconds, you would become unrevivable (“dead dead”) and be instantly sent to the spawn screen. There was no UI indication of this vulnerability.
Taking a large caliber headshot (such as 50cal) would instantly make you unrevivable (instadeath).
This was a mechanic was originally added to convey some consequence of death, as well as a sense of tension and vulnerability to newly revived players. The goal was (hopefully) to encourage the vulnerable player to stick back with their squadmates.
We had some questions on whether the role of this mechanic was too punishing and negatively impacting the teamwork aspect, especially for new players to an already challenging game. It could be difficult to understand why the “instadeath” black screen occurred and the 60-second timer was not well-exposed.
Alpha 13
With Alpha 13, when dying and being revived, there was no longer a period of extra “vulnerability,” allowing a player to be revived indefinitely. (Or until your medic ran out of bandages, anyway.)
The caliber required to make you unrevivable was increased, meaning you could be revivable after a 50cal headshot, but not after a 30mm headshot.
After 3 months of evaluation with these new changes, including lots of feedback from our community, we’re introducing a new iteration of these mechanics.
As with the previous ones, the effects will be monitored and tweaked. Keep us updated with your feedback!
Alpha 15.4
As of this patch (Alpha 15.4), when you are incapacitated, you have a revive window (5 minutes by default). This revives window will be shortened based on the amount of damage you took as part of your death.
For example, if you got downed by minimal damage from a pistol, your revive timer will be very close to 5 minutes. If you got downed by a rifle headshot, your revive timer will be slightly less than 2 and a half minutes. A 50 caliber headshot will give you a short 30-second revive window. Lastly, anything from a close proximity IED blast to a 30mm headshot and beyond will cause your revive window to be 5 seconds – too short to get revived in, so you’re effectively dead.
On top of this mechanic, the revive window persists through revives until you have been healed by a medic. This means that if you get headshot by a rifle, revived without getting healed, and then headshot again, the remaining revive window will be too short for another revive.
If not getting healed, this “persistent revive window” will automatically slowly increase back to the full 5 minutes as long as you remain alive. If you died, were revived, and managed to stay alive for a few minutes, you would be nearing the five-minute timer again.
Anything that previously sent you instantly sent to spawn screen (“instadeath”) will now instead give you a 5-second revive timer, too short to be revived in. The hope is to give the player more feedback about what happened when he died, instead of instantly disappearing from the map and into the spawn screen.
In the future, we hope to include a 1-2 second ragdoll moment before entering the incapacitated state to provide better feedback about what just occurred in a more intuitive and immersive way.
Please note: there can and will be further tweaks and/or additions to this system. All in all, we hope it is a more flexible way to tune players’ revivability, as well as increase information available to the player.
Our goal is to balance between the game being too forgiving and too unforgiving. In this version, revive trains should be harder to maintain and most catastrophic damage (e.g., headshots, IED explosions) should be more effective as well. However, players will still get a second chance in most cases. We will keep tracking revive statistics as well as your feedback.
Buddy Rally
Finally, we would like to give you some information on our intended gameplay ideas in the future concerning the Buddy Rally system. For the time being, lacking a system to reclaim or reset abandoned vehicles in the field, we will be keeping the buddy rally mechanic.
In the future, we would like to see this replaced with a mechanic that deals with abandoned vehicles in the field, so that respawning at main is a more viable option. The buddy rally mechanic might still become a limited option available to the Commander, giving squads an extra option for situational redeployment. Another option is to make it available only to the Insurgents faction. Please keep your feedback coming on this as well.
The Orville - Interactive Fan Experience - Scragnog
11 days from the first public release, and 9 patches in! We're still working very hard on stability and bug fixing for the Orville Fan Experience here at Messy Desk. We've just pushed version 1.0.9 to Steam, and below is the changelog, for all you folks that like that kinda thing.
New: Added a new feature that you may or may not spot in random multiplayer games. Ribbit. New: There is now a 5% chance of being visited when going into the Bridge. Keep your eyes peeled though, because once you leave the room, the visitor will scamper off. New: Added the Main Stairwell on B Deck. None of the exit doors go anywhere yet, but you can have fun hurling yourself from the top ;) New: Implemented a lot of the background infrastructure needed for the upcoming VR release!
Improvement: Our internal tools can now define custom corridor light sequences. Improvement: More blueprints are now nativized, improving performance slightly. Improvement: The Orville will now decelerate more rapidy when using Flight Assist. Improvement: The Orville should fly a bit better now. Let us know how it feels. Improvement: Removed the large door next to E-Sim 3 because it was breaking the laws of physics. Improvement: You can no longer close the door at the bottom of the bridge staircase. It was locking people out. Improvement: The Bridge now has better visual ambience during Red Alert and Emergency Lighting Improvement: Ship Movement should be a little smoother in multiplayer now. Still not perfect, it's a work in progress. Improvement: Player can no longer go into Kayon Head Mode when ragdolled, to prevent strange ghost mode issues. Improvement: Lowered overall polycount in mess hall. Shouldn't be noticable, but GPUs everywhere will be pleased Improvement: Split B Deck Corridors into Fore and Midship to help with loading hitches. Improvement: Made some quality changes to the Voice Chat feature. Needs more testing. Improvement: Player name tags should display more reliably now. Improvement: Increased texture streaming pool due to lightmap issues
Fix: Voice chat should no longer auto-enable when joining a server. Fix: Removed a few unwanted door panels around the ship. Fix: Resolved an issue where the ship going to Quantum Speed in the menu would leave the bridge behind. Oopsie! Fix: Chairs on Mac builds sometimes had no collision and you couldn't interact with them. Additional fixes may still be needed. Fix: You should now be able to leave the global voice chat. Fix: Added a collision plane under the Bar in the Mess Hall top stop players falling through the floor. Fix: Extended the music area in the Mess Hall to cover the Bar area. Fix: Earth now rotates correctly west to east. Fix: The default character before customistion is an Ensign in Security, with correct badge and rank indicators. Fix: Main Menu looping sequence no longer stops at the end, it loops smoothly. Fix: The external hull no longer intrudes upon the ship after using the external ship camera. Fix: The weapons in Multiplayer now fire slightly more accurately. Still working on this. Fix: The helm control music is now playing correctly when you sit at the helm. Fix: Newtonian mode on the helm console should now work correctly. Only the thrust and rotation applied over time will be retained, no further acceleration will apply until further inputs are entered. Fix: Player can now use zoom when setting at the helm in first person. Fix: A few tiny bugs here and there. Fix: Hopefully found a workaround for Chat Command crashes on Mac builds. Fix: Hull shadowing outside of the Bridge is now correct. Fix: The ESim door is no longer black on the inside and shouldn't sometimes disappear Fix: Reversed screens in Science Lab 1 and Mess Hall now correct. Fix: Lift music should now not bleed through to adjucent rooms Fix: Three tiny little holes at the front of the Bridge floor have been plugged, all the air was leaking out into space Fix: You now can't reload your gun when piloting the ship. I don't know why people would want to, but now you can't, so... Fix: Sunlight was sneaking into the mess hall and lighting up the doors from the inside. we used an anti sunlight ray to make it go away. Fix: Forced the E-Sim Arch to use a different UV map so it lights properly. Fix: Fixed issue where certain rooms were loading very slowly due to a get reference bug
* YOU NOW GIVE UP A RUN IN LANDER MISSIONS WITH F10 AND NOT ESCAPE, THIS WAS ANNOYING FOR SOME WHO DIDN'T REALISE AND TRIED TO USE ESCAPE FOR EXITING THE HELP SCREEN. F10 SHOULD BE A GOOD SUBSTITUTE AS MOST PEOPLE NEVER USE IT :-)
* RESOLUTION-THE GAME NOW DEFAULTS TO FULL SCREEN SCALED MODE THIS IS GOOD FOR THOSE WHO DONT USE 1080P RESOLUTION, YOU CAN USE F4 AT MOST POINTS IN THE GAME TO SEE WHICH SCREEN MODE WORKS BEST FOR YOU THE FULL SCREEN WINDOWED SEEMS BETTER BUT REQUIRES 1080P. THE GAME ALSO SAVES YOUR CHOICE.
* THE CONTINUE BUTTON NOW ONLY SHOWS UP WHEN YOU CAN ACTUALLY CONTINUE.
* LOTS OF TYPO FIXES
* EASIER STARTING ENEMIES AND SPAWN RATES ON EARLY 2-3 JUMPS
* MORE SMALL SCRAP DROPS FROM ENEMIES
* IMPROVED DRAW DISTANCE FOR SOME BIG SHIPS
* FIXED BUG WITH FIRST AID IN SHOPS
* FREE STARTING MASS DRIVER TURRET; THIS WILL HELP YOU SWITCH AROUND YOUR TURRETS AND GIVE YOU A BIT OF HELP WITH FAST ENEMIES EARLY ON
* ADDED BUYING QUANTITY FOR SHOPS SO YOU CAN NOW BUY LIKE 20 GRENADES AT A TIME INSTEAD OF 1
**** A SIDE NOTE ****
Hope your all enjoying the game! I completed a run with the miner in the rapier to make sure the game is all working well with the latest changes, it is pretty tough to destroy the mainframe, but very possible :-) .
Hey everyone! This is just a reminder that we'll be holding our main monthly test soon! We'll be fighting in the recently improved arena and testing gameplay and game structure! As usual, we will have the servers up and running and members of staff will be on hand to resolve any issues.
If you're reading this from the in-game menu within a week or two of the update coming out then you can see that Rio is featured above!
In order to reduce load times and keep the installation size reasonable, curated maps have typically been transitioned to the workshop after several months. This was problematic for a variety of reasons however, such as suddenly having to subscribe to the map in order to keep its assets, or for hosts needing to switch the server to the workshop version.
With the recent improvements to the game's workshop integration (e.g. auto-detecting workshop dependencies, installing while in-game), my hope is that taking this featured article approach will improve all aspects of the curated maps system:
Creators have full control over their article and can patch / update the map without waiting for me to release a main game update. This was one of the reasons for adding per-map version numbers.
Maps will not get moved to the workshop after an arbitrary period.
If you're not interested in the map you can click the "Dismiss" button in the top-right to hide it and return to the trending workshop items. Note that the curated articles are shown for a specific number of days before going back to the default.
If you have any feedback on these changes please share!
Update Notes:
Added onEnterVehicleRequested, onExitVehicleRequested and onSwapSeatRequested events.
Added gun attachment change request events.
Added onConsumeRequested and onConsumePerformed events.
NPC Event reward delegate passes instigating player.
Fixed id/name upgrade log spam related to devkit objects.
Fixed landscape tile basemap distance during satellite capture.
Included All_Tool_Items unity package in examples.
Upon completion of our harrowing journey through the brumal, eldritch abyss we have been rewarded with a most gratifying boon. From Beyond: Prologue has been selected by Seattle Indies Expo 2019! This expo runs parallel to PAX Seattle and features curated indie games from the PNW. So, pop over and play some awesome new indie games. The SFG crew will be demoing From Beyond: Prologue all day, please stop by and say hello.
Seattle Indies Expo is Sunday, September 1 from 12pm to 9pm PDT.
Motif Seattle 1415 5th Avenue 3rd Floor Seattle, WA 98101
PS: A new From Beyond: Prologue patch should be ready in a few days.
UPDATE!
New patch pushed early this morning 8-10-2019
The new patch repaired the last couple of minor look related issues. Fixed a Talk button bug. As far as I can tell, the entire game is now Bug Free and is currently running in the most recent version of Unity 2019. One negative note: Unity has deprecated support for 32-bit Linux. I had to update to the latest version of Unity due a series of issues, including a hard drive failure a month ago. The final result is I cannot roll back to Unity 2018 and rebuild the project and must work on it in the most current version of Unity. As a result Linux users must be using a 64-bit CPU. This is a minority of a minority according to the statistical data on Steam, less than 1% of users are on a 32-bit Linux OS, but I felt it necessary to warn people anyway. Just in case. However, the Windows version is still 32-bit compatible.
Due to some good feedback, I'm introducing the patch 1.0.4, "too big to fail":
Two major changes: 1) You can continue after finishing the game. Just go back to the same game from the menu. If you don't want to continue the old game, just pick "no" when it asks you to continue the game and then "yes" when it asks if you want to start the game anew.
2) If you go bankrupt, the bank will bail you out: 2.1) If you have enough money in the bank, those are taken, you owe nothing 2.2) If you don't have enough money in the bank, the bank loans you the money, but you need to pay it back. If you don't pay it back and go bankrupt again - the game is lost permanently.
I think this should solve two major ux issues: sudden loss and expectations to continue the game after clearing the main goal :)
Minor bugfix: - one day will actually pass now (after you trade in Bazaar and return to map)
Version 1.0.0.0 did not unlock achievements at all. New version 1.0.0.1 unlocks all current achievements. All your previous achievements should unlock normally and no progress should be lost in any way.