Oct 11, 2020

Pixel Starships - toma

Hi Captains!

Please find the latest Patch Notes below. This update is scheduled to roll out on Android, iOS and Steam over the next few hours. MacOS version will not be included.

Please contact our Support Team if you experience any problems updating the game.

V0.961.1 Patch Notes

Updated to new Halloween Icon
Improved Crew Level Bar visibility
Dove Store Purchase confirmation now provides Item Information
Cybership Has been added to the Shipyard
Remaining Attempts for Tournament Battle are now be displayed during Matchmaking
Asset download prompt will now only show for Mobile Devices
New Current/Origin Room is EMPed AI Condition

Fixed an error that occurs while opening the Ammo Crafting menus
Fixed a bug with the Recaptcha Quiz not triggering correctly
Fixed a bug with Market filters not being able to display Leg Equipment
Fixed bug with Promotion UI assets not being downloaded
Fixed a bug with Lvl 7 Fleet Starbase grid layout
Fixed an issue that prevented Panning when Scrolling the GM Mission List
Fixed a visual bug when accidentally Tapping a Crew while in Build Mode
Fixed an issue with Keyboard Input Fields on Android 11 Devices

We have some exciting news ahead, but for now - prepare yourselves for a Spooktacular Halloween, Captains!

-SavySoda Team

Oct 11, 2020

Rec Room UPDATE - the "Going Questing" edition

Rec Room - Coach

This update brings some performance improvements, new shapes and colors, and a surprise for our new Rec Roomies on Quest 2!

Here at Rec Room, we're all very excited to be a Day 1 launch title on the new Oculus Quest 2! To celebrate, we're happy to announce that our co-operative "quest" game Isle of Lost Skulls is available for Quest 2 players!

Everyone else will see general performance improvements in Isle of Lost Skulls, Rec Royale, and UGC rooms.

We've updated the Maker Pen color palette with 27 new colors for you to create with!

We're also adding five new shapes to the Maker Pen! They are a Cone, Hemisphere, Donut, Pipe and a Half Pipe. Please note that these shapes do not yet have accurate collision, and will often be most useful in decoration mode. We plan to add correct collisions for these in the future.

https://imgur.com/a/7oRopYh

We've also added Isle of Lost Skulls and Crescendo of the Blood Moon enemies to the spawner gadget for everyone!

Circuits V2 (currently in Beta) now includes some new and exciting gizmos! Be on the lookout for:
Piston V2
Rotator V2
SFX V2
In addition we've added icons to synchronized variables so they look different from other variables even when renamed.

General Improvements

Inventions are now automatically unfrozen when spawned
Fixed issue where the unsaved room warning dialog wouldn't show after making changes
The Maker Pen is now automatically equipped after creating a new room
[Screens] After editing the time value for an animation frame, you will now properly return to the Maker Pen menu
When using the Delete tool inside of a Shape Container, the shapes will now properly have a red outline
You can now report rooms specifically for "misleading purchases" if you feel like something you purchased in the room was misrepresented.
Fixed some of the Ink Space props not getting selected by the maker pen.
iOS players have the option to Login Automatically, which will get you in the dorm faster than having to select your account every time. You can opt-out of this feature if you have multiple accounts / share the device with family. Logging out from the watch menu is supported as always.
Fixed skipping audio in rooms with multiple audio samplers or holotars

As always, thanks for playing Rec Room!

Please see here for convenient links to controls, tutorials, comfort options, etc.: https://recroom.com/community
We love to hear your feedback, so please don't hesitate to let us know what you think...

Oct 11, 2020

Half-Life: Absolute Zero (Beta Access) - Update Released

Half-Life: Absolute Zero - Cobalt-57 Development

We have released an update for Half-Life: Absolute Zero.
Changes in this update are:

Updated Glock View Model.
Updated Shotgun View Model to introduce an updated pump animation to match a recently found older version of the animation.
Updated RPG View Model.
Updated Gauss Gun View Model.
Human Assault now has properly defined hitboxes relating to what body part can take what type of damage. Was not defined in the base model Valve created.
You can now only hold 150 bullets in reserve for 9mm Ammunition.
You can now only hold 30 bullets in reserve for the Python.
You can now only hold 10 Snarks.
You can now only hold 10 Chumtoad.
Fixed oversight where you would have 6 rockets for the RPG instead of 5.
Certain weapons with no secondary attack will play the fidget animations.
Fixed bug where Zombie had a chance to spit out no gibs.
General improvements to Grenades.
Chumtoads will now play their idle animations correctly.
Gauss Gun now behaves differently.
Map spawned dead security guards will no longer have their mouths open.
Fixed beam animation on Egon’s secondary attack.
Egon now makes scorch marks on walls when you fire it.
Alien Slaves’ attacks will leave scorch marks on the ground.
Human Assaults can now throw grenades.
Added an advanced option for having an accurate to the E3 98 MP5 firing animation, off by default.
Added an advanced option for having the MP5 grenade be the RPG rocket model, off by default.
General changes for the Gargantua.
Pathing improvements for the Panthereye.
Build text should be off by default now, if it is not then set the console command “cl_earlyaccess” to zero.

Things to note:
We are aware of the broken transition from Screams & Whispers to Footfall and it has been addressed in our Chapter Guide since we had launched on Steam.

If you are having any issues in-regards to starting the game, please refer to this pinned thread on discussions. We’ve likely documented the issue you’re having with a workaround attached. If an issue you’re having in-regards to starting the game is not listed please make a thread in the Support section of the discussions, but only make the thread after confirming the issue you are having is not mentioned in this thread.

If you are noticing a lack of a battery indicator on the main HUD, please note that this is not a bug and is just one of the new HUDs. Please go into Advanced Options to change the HUD to a HUD of your liking.

Oct 11, 2020

Update 8 - Transparency

Half-Life: Absolute Zero - Cobalt-57 Development

Haha, you're joking right? Half-Life: Absolute Zero can't be dead, right? ....right?

Nope, no jokes here. It is completely true, Half-Life: Absolute Zero has ceased development, after almost a decade worth of development.

So, why exactly are you guys abandoning Half-Life: Absolute Zero?

It has been nearly 10 years to the day since we started development on Half-Life: Absolute Zero and to be quite frank, we want to move on; passion only lasts for so long. If it didn’t work out for the past 10 years, I doubt it is going to work out for any more amount of time.

We were unable to secure any level designers since our search for one started back in December, 2018. So as a result, we were asking and relying on friends and friends of friends for help on the project, but ultimately most of them would only work on the project from a range of 3 days to 2 weeks until they would give up. As a result, not much really got done post-beta access release.

Realistically, we knew the project had been doomed since December of 2018. We had already missed our intended release date of November 26, 2018 (the 25th anniversary of Sonic Spinball’s European release, which was a week after Half-Life’s 20th anniversary, it is a in-joke among the team) and we had to delay to the 20th anniversary of Half-Life: Uplink’s release. A lot of us had been burnt out for working on the project for such a long time and we had a level designer who had vanished. We had put out a job listing on ModDB in hope we would be able to quickly find a replacement to be able to salvage the project, but that clearly didn’t happen.

What is going to happen to the Steam release of Half-Life: Absolute Zero?

We are currently actively working on getting the page delisted off of Steam around the 12th to prevent people from accidentally wandering into a barely functioning product. Despite being delisted from Steam, you should still be able to download the mod via “steam://install/<appid>.”

Why delist the store page opposed to condensing down the experience? Well, the mod only currently contains 2 chapters that we would consider mostly complete, which isn’t too exciting considering our 2017 demo contained 5 chapters. We had to deal with a surplus of people who didn’t read the store page or any pinned thread on the discussions and just assumed the product was 100% complete. If we had this problem during the public development phase, we’re going to have the problem tenfold when the mod is supposed to be “complete.” There’s also the fact we don’t want another unfinished product to clog up the Steam storefront, we would rather take responsibility and take down our product instead of letting it rot with every other abandoned project.

We only made a Steam release as our mod is not fully compatible with the 2013 updates to the GoldSource engine. Shadows cause the game to crash and various game behaviors would act sporadic. A Steam release allowed us to ship with a branch of the engine that we knew was fully compatible with Half-Life: Absolute Zero, but it still provided its own host of problems. Such as us changing the executable name which resulted in Windows 10’s internal compatibility hack for GoldSource games to not take effect, which resulted in the game’s window being extremely zoomed in. Luckily that was a fix as easy as just renaming the executable back to HL.exe, but there were still issues with the engine itself that were either fixed in the modern engine, were just things from Source that people expected to be in GoldSource, or were issues that affect most versions of the engine. Ultimately, there’s not a version of GoldSource out there that is perfect, they all have severe issues that hinder the experience some way or another and we had to pay the price for it. We did not and still do not have access to the engine code, so being able to fix anything with-in the engine would be impossible for us to do and if the engine was open source we could have at least attempted to but as it currently stands, GoldSource is closed source.

We will push out a final update for the mod on Steam, we held back on an update since August 14th in hope to be able to ship out a Milestone update in September, clearly that Milestone update did not work out.

What will happen with Half-Life: Absolute Zero after the 12th?

Well, the Steam build will be posted to ModDB for those to download there (minus the engine, of course.) But more importantly, the entire development drive of Half-Life: Absolute Zero will be uploaded to the internet and will be licensed under Creative Commons. This will allow any developer or modder to be able to reuse our work and all you need to do is credit us for the work you’ve borrowed! This had been our plan for several years now, regardless of completion, releasing the full source tree on the 10th anniversary of the mod’s development beginnings. This allows us to be able to have the community learn from our work and for our work to live on beyond a beta mod.

We are currently actively sorting through our unsorted backups making sure as much of our content is backed up and available. This will release on the 12th, alongside the mod release on ModDB.

What will happen to Cobalt-57 after the 12th?

This does NOT mark the end of Cobalt-57 as a team, we have no plans to dissolve or disband! Little do many people know, Cobalt-57 was never created as a throwaway team to have a pseudonym for all of us as a team for our modding projects. We will be shifting our focus to game development after the 12th, in fact, we actually have some games and projects in the pipeline. Some relating to pre-existing IPs (some of which will likely never see the light of day) and some being completely original IPs. As you may expect, yes, we are still in fact looking for level designers and even more than that! We can’t promise that we’ll hire or even speak to everyone, but we will read every message.

In-closing.

While it is sad to see Half-Life: Absolute Zero go, we’re glad it is over. It is bittersweet, sure we didn’t get to complete the project that united us to begin with; but we will forever get to keep those memories and get to work together on things that don’t limit our creative direction.

Finally, we would like to thank you for supporting us til the very end. While we don’t know when the next time you’ll hear from us will be, we will still be creating things and when we stop creating we’ll let the world know. If you want to keep in-touch, please follow us on Twitter, as that’s currently our only social media presence where we can provide quick updates.

Until next time,
- Cobalt-57

Oct 11, 2020

New Props and Editable Props in publicbeta (v98)

Survivalist: Invisible Strain - Bob the P.R. Bot

There's a new patch in publicbeta! Over the last month I've been refactoring how the game defines props, so now they're editable by mod authors similar to how you can edit equipment. And I've made it possible to add new models for your props using Unity Asset Bundles - I'll be writing a guide for that shortly (EDIT - here it is).

I should mention that you still can't add your own equipment models, which I think is the thing most mod authors actually want to do - so, sorry no new gun models yet! I will make that possible in a future update :)

In order to test out my new prop editor I've added a bunch of new props to the game myself! The idea behind most of these was to try and add some more points of interest to the bare countryside areas between the towns, and maybe provide you with somewhere interesting to hide or loot, or build a base around. (In future I'll be adding more variation to the towns themselves as well.)

Besides that we've got some new music tracks from Alexandre, and the Italian translation is almost done, thanks to Team Lagorn. Here's the full changelist:

Made it possible to import new models for props using Asset Bundles, refactored props to be data driven and set up via the Editor
Added a bunch of new props including trailer park, crashed aircraft, windfarm, fire lookout tower and tank
Added some new music tracks for exploring, and game over and game complete screens
Added Italian, mostly
Fix for being able to switch control to dead characters via the Equipment Totals section of the Community menu
Crash fixes

It is quite a big overhaul so there might be some bugs, let me know if you notice something I broke. EDIT: released a couple of quick patches to fix crashes.

What's this publicbeta thing?

v98 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".