Scorporation damage has been reduced by 50%, and other balancing tweaks
Removed "Simple Reflections" mode. Reflections are now on or off.
Buildings drop bitcreds instead of items sometimes now :)
Added a big floating $ hologram above shops
F7 is now Quick Save
Fixes:
Too many to count, but the game is going to run a lot smoother, faster, and better, especially on lower-end machines.
Controller GUI:
New Loot Cubes:
New Bouncy Ball Projectiles:
Dark Servers
Black Ice Major Version 0.5 - Patch Notes
Major Features:
PVP - Shoot your friends!
LAN Mode - Play offline with reduced latency! Great for LAN parties!
Nemesystem - Dying has consequences, but revenge has its reward!
Two New Enemies - The Ghost in the Shellfish and the Scorporation
Minions - Summon your own combat AI!
Reflections - Oooh, Shiny!
Would you like to know more? Keep scrolling! I've got more details on the major features below.
Minor Features:
Cloaking Enemies affix - The Predator comes to mind
Rebalanced Server Difficulty - Now just look at your player level to figure out what level server to hack!
Retooled Level Generation - Easier to find servers of your level!
New Unique Item - The Porta Device - A Unique Mod which has a chance to teleport your attackers away
H or Q to hack - No matter which slot your Icebreaker is equipped in!
Halloween Surprise 2014 - Find your own #HackOLantern, or make one IRL and win a Black Ice T-Shirt!. Don't like the Black & Orange servers? Select "I Hate Halloween" in the top left of the main menu.
Not to mention Bug Fixes and System Enhancements all over the place!
PVP:
Just select PVP from the Advanced Options when creating a multiplayer match to jump into PVP. You'll be automatically assigned to the Red or Blue team, although you can switch teams at any time by holding Tab and pressing the Switch Team button. Note that all servers and enemies are still active - and not friendly to you - so it's a race for each team to try to outlevel each other via hacking. Damage numbers are enabled for all players, which makes it much harder to hide from your enemies if you're hacking.
LAN Mode:
This takes a little extra work (instructions here!) but the benefit is that you can play multiplayer with no internet connection and with drastically reduced latency. And if you also own Disco Dodgeball, it's the same LAN setup :)
Nemesystem:
Dying to a server near or below your level will cause it to level up, but also will increase the odds of getting good loot from that server. And of course, the server will taunt you by displaying a large red skull hologram on the roof.
New Enemies:
The megacorps have been busy upgrading their security. First, the Ghost in the Shellfish is a big beefy crab-like enemy who can really knock your socks off (or your ass out of the hacking radius). The other new enemy is called the Scorporation. This high-tech scorpion AI packs a highly-damaging lasgun and can be very accurate, so keep moving!
Minions:
Ever wanted your own pet AI? Now you can have one! Or eight! Minions are great for distracting enemies and can put out some damage to boot. Grabbing a health powerup will also heal your minions.
Reflections:
The world of Black Ice just got a bit brighter with the addition of high-fidelity raytracing reflections. This does affect performance, but you can turn it down to Simple Reflections mode in the options, or turn reflections completely off. One side effect of the Fancy Reflections mode: enemy death particles look super cool now.
PVP has been released and the word is that it's fun, although I'm waiting to hear back from you all for how I should balance it. Right now, I think the most fun way to play is for everyone to start new characters, then go hunting for each other while trying to get some hacking in. One thing we should talk about is how EMPs should act in PVP - I don't think being stunned would be fun at all, so I was thinking we could turn it into a 90% slow. Also, I think we might need Slowing debuffs to affect the jetpack, so that you can't just jet away. Right now, loot still drops for everyone in PVP - even the opposing team - and I'm not sure if I like that or not.
A quick update on the weapon models - they're still being worked on. My artist has been busy with other work.
One of the things I did over the weekend, which I can hopefully push to the Indev patch tonight, was tweak Hack Difficulty. The way it works now is that a server with Hack Difficulty 5 will spawn enemies appropriate for a level 5 player and drop items requiring player level 5. Item levels on items is no longer listed, since it's now always the same as required level. I did everything I could to preserve exponential enemy HP and mostly linear enemy damage.
Finality is now level 150 instead of 500. Shops are around 100-120, and they sell loot up around the player's level, capping out at the shop's level. I'm going to have to redo the achievements - I don't think anyone's going to get up to level 5000. One thing that might cause trouble here is that players that are exceptionally strong might be able to hack servers above their level, which of course they won't be able to use until they level up a bit. I'm not sure what the best way around this is, but one thing I could do is have servers drop gear a couple levels *below* their level - but that's confusing. I'd love to hear your suggestions.
The other major feature I've been working on is Minions. A lot of people have asked me for an ability to convert an enemy to their side, but I thought it'd be more fun to summon them directly. I can always add the ability to temporarily convert enemies later. Right now, you summon enemies by targeting a position up to 10 squares away, which spawns a minion as if it was being spawned by a server (with all the same particles). It takes one second for the minion to appear, and they last until they die or 30s. They follow you around if they can't find anything to kill.
Currently you can summon as many minions as your RAM supports, but I was thinking a better solution might be to only allow one (Strong!) minion per item, but it would be permanent and you could unsummon it by pressing the item button again. I could also play around with summoning them in packs of 3.
Minions will have more HP and damage based on the item level and rarity of the item, but I'm also thinking about introducing minion-specific item affixes, so that you could build a character that relies entirely on minions. I don't think I want minions to scale with your weapon damage and health because I want you to have to choose what type of character you make instead of being good at everything.
Have suggestions or comments? Let me know!
Black Ice Devlog - 9/23/14
Hey all, just thought I'd share the results of what I've been working on in the past couple of days.
First off, PVP is pretty much working, but I'm not satisfied with it yet, so I'm not ready to release it. In particular, you can damage and kill other players, kill counts are working, you spawn randomly throughout the city and cannot teleport to other players (even on your same team). There are two teams - Red and Blue - and you can switch between them at any time, but it kills you. You don't lose credits when dying to a human or by switching teams.
What's not working about PVP yet is that you still share XP with nearby players on opposing teams, you can still see damage numbers for all players, and it doesn't feel very satisfying to kill players, on account of there not being a death animation or any sort of confetti. I also still need to do some work to get debuffs working - and I might need to change some, like Frozen and Stunned, which really would be too harsh in PVP. Damage scaling is also not in yet, so you'll die really fast at high level right now. These are all relatively easy to fix, but will take some time, and I'm not sure PVP will be a ton of fun until they're in.
I tried to get Item Trading working, but I kind of ran into a wall on this. The problem is that the way I serialize player data to save the game or to send data over the network is no longer being supported, so while I can save an entire character no problem, I'm having trouble compressing the Item class so that it can be sent to another player. Actually, I got it working for *some* items, but not others, which is almost worse than not working at all.
The end result of this is that I'm probably going to have to start using another serialization solution, which unfortunately is going to break everyone's saves. I know, this sucks, but another advantage of this is that I might be able to find a solution that might be fast enough to enable autosaving, which I think everyone would like.
I also have been talking to my artist (the permanent one that made the GITSfish, not the temporary one that made the Scorporation) and he's going to start working on some weapon models! The current plan is to have one for each of the following: The Disc, Lasguns, Machine Guns, Sniper Rifles, and Shotguns. For the modular weapons, I'm planning on adding some particle effects to differentiate these weapons. I'm going to try to make the weapons only show up when you're firing them, but if the conjuring time is too long and the weapons feel like they take too long to fire, I might need to just have them visible at all times. Maybe that'd be better anyway. One of the challenges to this is that I'm also going to have to make the projectiles come out of your hands instead of your face, which could affect accuracy if I don't do it right.
Another thing I'm planning on doing is showing only weapons in your left and right click - and in fact, restricting players to only being able to place weapons in the left and right click slots (but you could put other items there) - unless the players went into the options and selected the option to allow them to place any item in any slot. It'll be like Diablo 3's Elective Mode, and hopefully the effect will be that new players understand the system better, but experienced players will still have all the freedom they've come to expect.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
Black Ice v0.4.5 is live!
The TL;DR is that I changed a ton of numbers, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added a new item: The Lasbreaker. You should be able to carry over your old saves, but it would be best to start a new character to stay balanced.
Additions:
Added the Lasbreaker, a new icebreaker type that damages all enemies touching the hack link
Added a bunch of new achievements, including Humble Beginnings
You can teleport to another player in multiplayer by holding tab and clicking their name
XP is now shared evenly among all players within 50 meters in multiplayer
Added Sprint Toggle option so you don't have to hold the button down
All text in the game has a new font, which should help Linux players who don't have Arial. It also looks really cool
:D added to multiplayer (you'll know it when you see it)
Changes:
The SHARK now scales with difficulty... strongly
Damage Returned now scales much more with ilevel
Changed item rarity colors
The color red should now only be used in text for bad things. Magenta is used for Weapon stats now
Set Items have been renamed to Epic items, to properly correspond to their function, since sets aren't implemented
Weapon Range talent nerfed to 5
RAM Regen talent changed to 5%
RAM talent changed to 5%
Health talent changed to 5%
Movement speed talent removed (but items now have more)
Weapon recoil is lower
Machineguns have been tweaked to be more competitive with snipers and shotguns
Reason (the Unique machinegun) has been buffed
Railguns fire faster and cost less RAM, but do less damage
Most modular weapons fire faster
Icebreakers hack faster and scale better with ilevel, but cost more RAM
Item level to Required Level scaling has changed
Item affixes overall are more variable
The homing affix now has a maximum amount that can drop on an item
You now only lose 10% of your credits on death, but the maximum amount you can lose is now 250k (from 50k)
Enemy HP scaling has changed (more at high level)
Enemy Damage scaling has changed (less at high level)
You now get most of your XP from hacking instead of killing enemies
XP required to level has been lowered, since enemies give less XP now
Lasgun damage has been lowered a bit, RAM cost has increased a bit. Still pretty OP
Mines no longer shake your screen as much
Only 30 enemies can spawn from a server at one time (60 from all servers), but servers will spawn the same total number of enemies before being hacked
Jetpack is now quieter
The store near the spawn zone has lower level loot now
Knockback to players shouldn't ever be
too* ridiculous
Player HP and RAM Regen per level has been buffed
Only unique items have a minimum level requirement of 5 now
Items now cost more from stores compared to how much they sell for, encouraging players to hack for items instead of shop
Players can no longer spawn more than 6 mines per mine item - spawning more causes the oldest one to explode
Jetpacks now use a percentage of your RAM that increases as they heat up. This is so that players can no longer fly forever, so they actually have to give the enemies a fighting chance.
The hack timer is now a progress bar counting up (It's at 80%! I need more time!)
When you create a character, the default is a blank bar, which should lead to some more interesting names in multiplayer. Random names are still available
Players can no longer choose to not spawn buildings (which people thought was a bug)
Enemies fall to the ground faster
All player projectiles fly faster, so you don't need to put as much of a lead on enemies
Players can select the closest multiplayer webserver to them manually. All games are visible from all servers. I'm talking about the real, physical, out-of-the-game cloud server that hosts multiplayer games, not in-game servers.
Servers drop 3 loot less often (1-3 is still what you get)
Damage taken redness is now a LOT more noticeable, especially after taking multiple hits
Healing items (Instant and Over Time) heal for a lot more
The SHARK's death explosion is a lot more spectacular now
Sprinting now looks cool as it changes your view a bit
Mines do less damage and use more RAM, but are still super strong
You can no longer unequip an icebreaker or mine while they're in use, or a jetpack while it's heated up
Maximum movement speed is now +150% (down from +200%)
Additional hack range on items is a little lower
Missiles don't knock enemies back as far
Other servers spawn further away from Finality
Finality spawns further away from the spawn zone
Bug Fixes:
Dying now causes the game to save, so going back to the main menu won't make you lose progress
Updated the achievement system to work even if you exit the game prematurely
Mines and Health Powerups now can fall through enemy shields
Achievement: Pay, Pal now works even if you drag and drop the item
Enemies can no longer fly at you when you're jetpacking about. They can still jump
Piercing weapons no longer go through the floor
Firing two lasguns at once no longer causes crit problems
Crit and Crit Multiplier are no longer global affixes
Shops now drop the appropriate item level loot when hacked
Swarm Server info terminals now display text appropriately
Enemies no longer seem to stick to you when they're close
Jumping off mines to effectively walk on air has been disabled
Pressing enter after you die no longer causes issues
Skipping the intro video should be faster and not cause issues
Enemy Shields and Mines should no longer cause lag
More enemies can be on screen at once now
Player mines shouldn't blow up on other players in multiplayer
The modding menu buttons for payloads and unique payloads have been fixed
Zombie Derezzed enemies should no longer appear
Joining games with passwords now works properly
Swarm buildings now change colors properly in multiplayer
Jump buildings no longer drop the item on top of them when they're hacked
XP can no longer overflow into negative numbers
Aimbots and the SHARK are now much better at chasing you down
You can no longer hear icebreakers from across the map in multiplayer
Camera shake can be turned down properly now
The Flatline talent now properly checks for you to be below 5% HP
Enemies no longer keep being knocked back after teleporting to respawn
Frostbiter, one of the unique lasguns, spawns less particles and therefore causes less lag
Music doesn't change way too often anymore
Really high RAM regen no longer causes items to not reserve RAM
You can now see damage numbers in multiplayer (crits don't show as red, though)
You can no longer see the original pre-bloom/1990/CRT textures on items in close range peripheral vision
Jump puzzle buildings now always have the correct level displayed in multiplayer
Thanks for reading all this! I hope you like the patch <3
- Super Duper Garrett Cooper
