Hello everyone! We've just released Teardown version 0.7.4 on the main branch. This is a minor release with some small additions that we wanted to get out to you before we leave for summer vacation.

New in this release:

• More options to the photo mode. You can now move, rotate, tilt, and zoom the camera in photo mode.
  
• A new "game" tab on the options menu where you can adjust the difficulty through toggles for alarm time, ammo, and health. You can also enable/disable the option to skip missions and unlock all tools and levels in sandbox mode.
  
• Some minor bug fixes

During July we will be off on summer vacation, so communications will be very sporadic. We'll be back working on Teardown on August 2.

Have a great July!
The Teardown team

Hello Sherry,

I won’t write too much on the above subject, as frankly, this video will do a much better job of it. In short, we need to get to know the island and its people. It’ll help us blend in with the crowd better, which in turn will let us gain their trust and reveal vital information to the case.

Observe it all in action below Sherlock.


We’ll be arriving at Cordona soon, Sherry. I cannot wait to see what mischief we will get up to on that island.


Speak soon,

Jon


Add Sherlock Holmes Chapter One to your Wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1137300/Sherlock_Holmes_Chapter_One/

- Difficulty settings have been balanced
- Added a new "normal" difficulty setting as well as a "hard" difficulty setting.
- Settings mostly affect combat and amount of recharges available

It is John again, and time for another delve into the art side of the game.

As you may have noticed from our updates and posts, our focus for the art has shifted between various things (e.g., particle effects, mountain rocks, etc) over the past few weeks and months. This is largely due to the feedback we received from you regarding what it felt like to play the game, as well as us spending our (far too limited) time wherever we felt it was most needed.

With the mountain rocks largely finished, I have now been able to return to one of my bigger, longer term goals: To get the new Villager models in place. I am saying models, instead of singular model, as I have been also working on a female villager to go along with the preview you had of the male villager from a few blogs back.

As you can see from the screenshot below, a first draft of her has been modelled and partially textured at this point and I have been focusing on skinning the characters and rigging them.

Skinning is when you make an armature (set of bones) and then connect the mesh for the model to those bones so when you move the bone, the mesh moves too. As you can imagine, this does not always work as expected on the first try, and I have been working through many issues with stretching and clipping and trying to get them to work seamlessly. It can be a barrel of laughs, I assure you.



Rigging is when you take those bones, and set constraints to them, so they move more naturally. Technically, you do not need to rig the bones, and I didn’t for the iteration of the villager in the game currently. I took each bone individually and animated rotation and movement for them to simulate the walking or the shooting that we have. Frankly, I am still impressed with how well they came out considering – and with the rigged armatures, I am hopeful that the new animations will both look more natural, and that we will be able to implement them more smoothly in the game.

In addition to the rigging, I have also set up inverse kinematics, as well as extra bones for more flexible movement. For instance, I have rigged the feet so that the toes initially remain on the ground while the heel tilts, simulating the Villager pushing off with their foot for forward movement. Another good example is the spine curving with different strengths so we better simulate the bend in the back while the hips and shoulders can move independently.



It is a lot more work at this stage - but with the upcoming animation of the characters, it is going to be a great deal easier and quicker to get more natural movements. Additionally, we can plug the inverse kinematics into Unity too - so the characters can react to the different levels of the terrain, so their feet can stick to inclines etc. At the moment, we are not planning to use all of the bones (we are not using the “bones” for the eyes, for example), but as we are continuing development, I hope that we will be able to implement more and more animations to use the full range of options we are giving ourselves with the new system.

Until next week!

Dear Blackthorn Arena Players:
Hello, first of all, we would like to thank you for your support to our game. We will continue to try our best to add new content and optimize the game, unfortunately, due to the special reasons , the "Roar from the North" and the annual update will be delayed for one month (the end of July)
We apologize for any inconvenience caused to the players. This annual update will be the biggest update of Blackthorn so far, and we will have further breakthroughs in solving optimization problems.
Many bugs for players' criticism will also be fixed with this update. Kindly please give us more time and patience. Thank you!














There would be many new contents and optimization improvements in Anniversary update, so stay tuned ....

From Mortal Empires to the Beastmaster Rakarth, there have been tons of free updates to WARHAMMER II over the years.

Take a look at the video to see everything we’ve done so far, and a hint at what we’re doing next: https://youtu.be/Sjsz__7FD08

Bug Fix.

There was an issue where Chatiators would stand around in Pacifist mode where they were just spectating their target rather than attacking, seemed most common with the majestic chests.

There was another issue where if something took damage from a damage pool and hadn't targeted anything else, they'd get aggressive and attack the pool.

These SHOULD be fixed. But, it was hard to forcefully reproduce so the fix is speculative, I did some forceful testing and was able to fix it and change some settings to make it work in-game. I've simulated a ton of matches and force attacked chests and wasn't able to reproduce it again after the fix.

Hello Sherry,

I won’t write too much on the above subject, as frankly, this video will do a much better job of it. In short, we need to get to know the island and its people. It’ll help us blend in with the crowd better, which in turn will let us gain their trust and reveal vital information to the case.

Observe it all in action below Sherlock.


We’ll be arriving at Cordona soon, Sherry. I cannot wait to see what mischief we will get up to on that island.


Speak soon,

Jon


Add Sherlock Holmes Chapter One to your Wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1137300/Sherlock_Holmes_Chapter_One/

• AAs to Romania, as well as a new 47mm AT gun.

• You can now resupply units in landing crafts around allied harbours. No need to get out. Basically you can resupply them like ships.
  
• AI will now send back units in landing craft without ammo to an ally harbour for rearmament instead of staying without ammo and not doing nothing in front of the coast.
  
• AI will now deploy its generals far from the frontline.
  
• AI will not use a single harbour to perform its landing anymore, but will take into account how many units there are around this harbour to check if it’s worth getting there or not. Meaning, it is going to use another harbour to perform a landing if there’s no room at the closest harbour. Which means, landings will now be performed from many places, not a single one.

• : AI never buying heavy artillery.
  
• AI could buy twice the same general.
  
• Tanks in landing craft ignored armour of defender on the ground.
  
• Yugoslavian navy being smaller compared to other graphics.
  
• Very, very, very, very big issue with AI having Allies as a faction when historical focus was ON.

Hello everyone!

The game was just updated with version 0.32a

In this update I've implemented a number of pretty huge changes, in an effort to make the combat better, fluid and more responsive overall. It's still not final, ofcourse, and will require some testing, I am really interested in your opinions.


The biggest change with melee is reworking of the stamina system. Originally, I intended stamina to throttle combat, preventing player to infinitely stunlocking enemies wiht melee attacks, but there was a number of problems with that approach, the biggest one is stamina starving preventing you to effectively use of your combat abilities.
Now you won't use stamina for simple attacks, you will only use it for melee abilities like powerful strike or whirlwind. Consequently, the enemies stagger reactions were reworked, now you will knockback them at the end of the combo, giving them a chance to attack back. Enemies are now also more aggressive, they are quicker to attack after stagger, and also a lot of them have improved effects before attacking. Stamina will restore slower, you will have lesser stamina overall, running will consume less stamina, and your basic melee damage was reduced by about 30%.

Some of the abilities can now be performing in the middle of the attack, and the input queue was smoothed out to make the combat more responsive. For example you can use warscream when you are attacking, and it will not break your attack sequence, it will just apply an effect.

There were also a number of additional impact effects added in melee to improve audio-visual feedback.


I've added a bunch of changes to the abilities, mainly streamlining and focusing a lot of them into certain playstyles. All the talents are now divided into categories, to make it easier to choose what you want to focus on.


Most of the main abilities in ferocity tree were improved in damage, and got cooldowns removed, so you can use them freely while you have stamina. Biggest change for this tree is execute, which was reworked into passive, which would allow you to perform cool executions on enemies. The implementation of this still could be somewhat clunky, and I will polish it more in the future, also would glad to hear your feedback.

Combat mastery was changed the most out of all ability trees. Since the beginning the tree was a little confusing in regards of its purpose. I tried to streamline it, and focus it into 3 small groups: Improving your basic combo attacks, a couple of defesive and control abilities, and magic-melee abilities. There is a lot of cool stuff there, and I'm really interested in your opinions.

Elemental magic was changed a lot. Previously, you could cast spells while on the run, and you had a lot of abilities that can only be casted at close distance. To balance this, none of the magic had any knockdown impact. While this made mage a very dynamic playstyle, it also made magic feel floaty and non-impactful and it was also very dangerous to run around in close range with enemies, seeing how mages couldn't really take huge hits.
Now all of the elemental spells will root you in place with animation, they were redesigned to be casted at huge distance and they will apply a huge stagger effects on enemies. Also a lot of cool casting effects were added. So elemental magic is now about engaging enemies at long long distance and keeping them there.
Also most of the spells with other elements were streamlined into raw damage, so you could viably make build like raw dark magic caster, or raw holy damage caster. So, now, if you want to go nature magic for example, you can learn more of the nature tree abilities and get summons/buffs/heals, or you can learn more elemental tree abilities and use it with nature element to get raw nature caster. Same goes for dark and light.

Nature magic was changed a lot too, mainly focusing it into two playstyles - werewolf one and plant summons. Now you will be able to use most of the nature spells in werewolf form, things like drain water or bark and thorns. Absorb element spell was replaced with cool beast style attack spell instead, and fill the earth spell was reworked.

The biggest change with dark magic was to make summons dynamically scale their damage/health with your current dark magic and overall magic power, so you can't just summon minions with dark magic armor and then change it to melee armor for example, your minions will become weaker. This also makes minions scale with your magic power buffs nly when they are active. And also... I've replaced useless dark scream spell with summoning HUGE AWESOME BONE DRAGON instead (Seriously, this thing is really cool)

Holy magic was buffed a lot with a bunch of damage increases, cool new abilities and passives. Mainly paladin seal was improved a lot.

Archery was a little bit nerfed in terms of raw damage, and slo-mo in the air now requires stamina to do. I've also streamlined enchant arrow into one type of arrow - frozen one, and it is more effective now.


I've also finally added a change I wanted to add a long time ago - improved grass shading. This should make grass look better and moore performant, add cool new effects like reactions of player walking around, better wind wavering and weather reactions.

• Basic attributes are now more infuential on your damage
  
• An option to disable screen shake was added
  
• Changes to keybinds change process
  
• You can now rename your companions (And your dog, yes)
  
• Traning dummy was added to the house building, which will show your DPS when you attack it
  
• New effects of player damage and voicelines when you have no mana/stamina
  
• Added new guardian armor to warrior faction merchant
  
• A bunch of new interface improvements
  
• A lot of small bug fixes

Check out my youtube channel (I might post previews of new updates there, or might not):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMfMlahJzjpMeLrrfRvL05A

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