Patch Notes - Season 14 - (2.0.2.0)

- New Maps: Mountain Pass 2, Tundra Tumble 2, On Thin Ice 2, Frozen 2, Slippery Slopes 2
- New Season Skins and Modifiers have been added
- New: You can now select community maps for a Grand Prix
- New Season Challenges have been added
- Streamer Season XP Changes:

• - 1 Bonus race is awarded per hour (120 cap)
  
• - Earn 2x XP for bonus races
  
• - Earn Bonus XP when viewers complete energy tiers

- Viewer Energy Changes:

• - Energy is reset to 50 at 3a.m. EST each day
  
• - Earn energy back from completing bonus tiers in unique streams
  
• - You cannot earn energy back or earn points if you have reached 0 energy for the day
  
• - Tier progress can be seen at the end of race screen in the Bonus column
  
• - Energy earned can be seen at the end of race screen to the right

- Shop Revamp:

• - Items in the shop are rotated daily and hourly
  
• - An inspection panel has been added to give more detailed information about each item and item type
  
• - You can now get a more detailed view of skins and modifiers using the marble preview inside the inspection panel. Click and drag the previewmarble to rotate the model
  
• - Streamer Skins now have their own section and have an input field for searching

- Merchandise button added to the main menu
- Added home button now visible in the main menu
- The podium level at the end of a grand prix has been updated
- Added animations for notifying a claimable challenge reward, shop rotations, and when items are added for customization
- Added challenge progress UI/animations that display at the end of a race if season xp was earned
- Top Streamers has been added to the home screen
- The Main Menu world has been updated
- Updated the Energy column at the end race screen
- Season leaderboard ranks are now updated as they were in previous seasons (every 5-10 minutes)

Track Builder:
- Test Marbles now load with Equipped Everyone Skins
- Map Boundaries no longer interfere with testing
- UI Cleanup
- New Straight Piece Variant
- Bingo Ball Geometry Updates
- Many minor geometry updates
- Removed old end buckets
- Added 3 new end buckets without center protrusion
- Added Cannon functionaltiy to Rock Blaster
- Fixed bug with track piece count not updating on load
- New ending drop track piece
- 4 New Map Textures
- Fixed a bug where snap spheres would not update on flipped piece
- Fixed a bug where you could select destructible objects and delete them
- New starting pieces have been added
- Slow motion can now be used in test marble mode
- Physics objects now work during test marble mode
- Hover and click logic for components that light up has been updated
- Updated my maps (open) menu to be more visually friendly
- Added new names to choose from when uploading maps

Bugs Fixes:
- Marble data for ghost marbles should no longer be recorded when playing custom maps (was causing the game to hang on very long tracks for some users)
- Fixed an issue where streamer bonus xp was not showing in the profile widget on login
- Fixed an issue in Tilted where toggling the settings button at the end of a run showed the incorrect screen
- Fixed an issue where the tilted leaderboard was populating twice
- Fixed an issue with tips not showing in certain areas of the main menu

MOS Mobile patch notes: (Update on Android only, iOS should be updated soon)
- New Spawn Effects: Snowman, Snowflake Swirl, Santa Sled
- New Trail Effects: Top Hat, Santa Hat, Deer Antlers
- New Finish Effects: Snowflake Finish, Ice Finish

Hey guys,
first of all sorry for not updating the VR experience for such a long time. The game is a side project we only have occasional time to work on. But the last few weeks we focused on it. We added more details to the room to give it a more complete look. And we refactored the behavior of the RC car on the tracks. The RC car now follows the tracks as you know it from stock car race tracks such as Carrera. We know its still not perfect but we will continue working on it to make it as much fun as possible.

We hope you like the update and please let us know what else you would like to see improved.

Oh and last but not least we have added a little Christmas atmosphere.

Merry Christmas!

Possible fix to help Marbles on Stream run smoother

Something Pixel noticed was that moving the installation location for your Steam Games out of the "Program Files" folder. Steam defaults installs to this folder but if you move it to it's own folder it might help things run smoother. This was noticed when Pixel was playing Marbles and other games.

Mainly uninstall all of Steam and your games (be sure to save your game and save files in case!). Reinstall Steam and direct your games folder as stated. This just might help in Marbles and your other games as well!

Bonus: This might also help your other games run better as well!

Follow the steps in the link to change the location of your Steam game installations.
Moving a Steam Installation and Games

Come join us for another Live Dev Stream this Friday, December 20th, 2019 where the team at Elastic Games will reveal an exclusive sneak peak of Last Year: Chapter 2!

Come watch the Last Year Devs play & discuss their latest balance changes this Friday, December 20th on Twitch from 7-9 PM EST. http://Twitch.tv/LastYearGame

Stay until the end of the Stream to see the exclusive sneak peak of Last Year: Chapter 2, and to find out how you can WIN a copy of Last Year: Chapter 1 Afterdark for you & a friend!

Good news, everyone - Winter Sale is on! We gladly participate in it and offer you 50% on our game City Of Jade: Imperial Frontier!

Good news, everyone - Winter Sale is on! We gladly participate in it and offer you 50% on our game Dawn of China: Rise of Qin!

Happy Holidays Everyone!

- added piano, drumkit, xylophone, pookie bear, stockings and giant candy cane

- hide floors and hide stages can be used together now instead of one toggling the other off

- fixed resource count error with a few armor building block types not rounding up cost

- fixed a few bad bugs with electricity in multiplayer

- improved 3rd person jetpack "physics"

- added 3rd person head look at mouse position

- wires hide correctly now when using the "use height" option with hide floors

- even lower part rotation when holding alt while using mouse wheel

- fixed on-wall electric devices being offset slightly into wall on placement

Patched in already:

- button added to infospot panel to move/rotate spot after placing

- fixed bug with loading save while infospot panel is open

Edit: Just added a discount for the Winter Sale

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1100550/FORTIFY_ELECTRIC_UPGRADE/

Good news, everyone - Winter Sale is on! We gladly participate in it and offer you 50% on our game Mervin and the Wicked Station!

Good news, everyone - Winter Sale is on! We gladly participate in it and offer you 50% on our game Pottery Crafts: Hand-Made Simulator!

Good day soldiers,

I hope you're all enjoying the Operation Battleaxe update that released a short while ago. I managed to release it ahead of schedule in the hopes of giving everyone some new content for the holiday season. Given the festivities and traveling around this time of year, I knew development would slow a bit and wanted to be sure to deliver Battleaxe in a timely manner. And while the holiday season has indeed slowed my development just a tad, there are definitely new and exciting things coming to Brass Brigade in the near future.

I was personally a bit skeptical about implementing this, as up to this point in development, I never intended Brass Brigade to be an FPS. However, after a handful of suggestions asking for it, I decided to give it a try, and the results definitely mix-up the Brass Brigade experience - in a good way that is!



Players will now be able to seamlessly switch between the default third-person camera mode and a new first-person camera mode. However, this is not a first person mode akin to most standard FPS games. The camera literally moves into your character's head space and tracks from that position.



It is a very "immersive" experience similar to how games like ArmA and Post Scriptum handle their first person mode. It makes shooting over obstacles and navigating interior spaces easier since the player does not need to combat the third-person camera in enclosed areas. If nothing else, it provides a very different way of experiencing the battles, at eye level.



Please note that this mode was more of an experiment gone reasonably well. As such, I am happy to include in into the game, but how much more it gets developed depends entirely on how much I am willing to treat this game as both a third AND first person game. Either way, I hope you enjoy it - I certainly do!

New Optimization & Performance Options

Some users are still reporting poor performance even for relatively low bot counts. In an attempt to try and further combat this, some adjustments and options have been made for future builds.

• In the Settings > Graphics and Audio menu, there is a new option called "Bullet Impact Particles". Disabling this will remove the debris and dust that gets kicked up from small-arms gunfire and significantly increases performance for high bot counts.
  
• The bot vision slider has a much greater effect on performance and how far bots can see as the bot count increases. As the bot count increases, bots now see "less far" than they did before, aiding performance.
  
• The bot CPU Time sliders also have a stronger effect on how frequently bots calculate their AI. Reducing this as the bot count increases is strongly recommended, and will automatically occur as the bot count increases.
  
• Since bots don't collide with one another, their pathfinding was adjusted to ignore finding paths around one another, simplifying pathfinding calculations and mildly increasing performance.

Laptop Performance Tips

I've noticed that of the reports of poor performance, it seems that laptops suffer from poor performance more frequently than desktops. Laptops usually have lower performance than their desktop counter-parts, however slight, but the disparity caused me to do some digging into the Unity Engine on laptops.

• For reasons passing understanding, Unity Engine games struggle to properly detect laptop GPU hardware correctly. A preliminary step to potentially boosting performance on laptops is to make sure that your dedicated graphics card is set as the actual graphics device being used when launching Brass Brigade (or other graphics intensive programs for that matter). Guides for how to do this whether you have an AMD or Nvidia graphics card are easily available online.
  
• Be sure your laptop is plugged into a charger.
  
• Make sure your power-plan is set to "High Performance"

Unity Engine Benchmarking

Please note that the following are my own findings; your results may differ.

I decided to test Brass Brigade's performance on a laptop equipped with an i7 6600HQ processor, GTX1060 6GB, and 16GB of RAM. With 100 bots, default instant action settings, and the lowest graphics settings, I had an average of 30-50FPS, depending on the map. Maps with more foliage tend to run slower than those without. I could squeeze out about 120-130 bots before the average really started to fall below 30FPS for any map. For reference, the current Steam build as of 12/17/2019 would average no more than 25FPS for any map at only 100 bots. More over, another similarly themed, Battlefield-esque bot FPS game built on the Unity Engine runs at around 30FPS average with around 150 bots on the same machine. On a desktop with an i7 7700k, a GTX1080, and 16GB, the results were a lot better for both. It seems to me that laptop hardware is less forgiving and unfriendly to CPU-intensive games in the Unity Engine.

My Unity profiler tells me that the majority of CPU time is being spent calculating physics and rendering the image to screen; the bot AI is no longer the dominant time-sink. This is what led to the introduction of toggling things like the particle effects, terrain details, etc. I am looking for more options I can introduce to the user so they can tweak the game to find a happy balance between visual fidelity and performance. Back to the Unity Documentation and benchmarks I go! It's worth noting that newer versions of Unity claim to offer better performance for certain things that Brass Brigade relies on, so I am also investigating migrating the project to newer engine versions further in the future. This is a risky proposition though as features I use in the older version may be deprecated in newer versions, requiring rewrites or refactoring just to break even.

I'm glad to see so many people are having fun customizing battles to their liking. Some Youtubers such as GrimyGamer have posted videos showcasing what I suspect are 100-150 bot battles, which you can watch below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80rkHNmQyQ

Some other Youtubers such as BaronVonGames and Dragonece Gameplay have made commentary/review videos. I appreciate their kind words and fantastic feedback! Have a listen if you're still on the fence of purchasing Brass Brigade!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40f5WhCZvRg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKarWtFpmxE

I hope you're enjoying the game as much as I've enjoyed making it so far. All of the support and exposure is what helps drive my ability to continue building Brass Brigade. And for that, I offer my sincerest appreciation and gratitude.

Obviously, all of the aforementioned things are next to be released, but there is more in the way of traditional content being developed too. Additional Eastern Front maps have been requested by many players, so I'm beginning to explore that theater of war a bit more. I'm also drafting new special abilities for the player and conjuring up new weapons. Look for more news of this in the coming weeks.

Enjoy the Holiday Season!
-H.