Hello friends! We've just returned from our trip all about California. We attended Oculus Connect 3 and Steam Dev Days 2016, trying to learn and share everything we can about VR development from the best and brightest in the industry. We were also fortunate enough to demo at IndieCade, which is always full of interesting games that are inspiring to see.
This week's build just has some minor hotfixes, no more events for the next two weeks so stay tuned!
Today's new feature is the bubble slingshot. The disc weapon is a combat staple, but sometimes you need to have tools to support your combat bots, rather than simply add more damage. The bubble slingshot lets you set up a zone of control with bubbles that will snare the enemy. To recharge bubbles you shake the controller, of course.
It's especially useful for keeping your worker drones safe by dropping a bubble zone around the crystal area. There is still some polish and tweaks on-going for this weapon, so feedback would be very welcome - how/why it was useful to you, what felt good or bad, etc.
The minor bonus feature today is a new wave mode 'Hyper'. This is some tweaked wave mode settings that spawns steadily over time, all over the map. We tested with some night mode lighting to see how that feels - this is also work in progress!
Changelist:
added hyper wave mode
added night scene
optimize tutorial scene
added environmental ruins
cleanup internal pylon code
optimize worker drone scanning
fix rare crash on object kill
fix battery lock in demo mode
fix many particles not destroying after completion
We've added a new transition effect for moving between scenes and starting up the game.
Today's build also has a ton of fixes, polish and internal updates. We upgraded to Unity 5.5, replaced our particle effects plugin and fixed a ton of outstanding bugs. The particle system was taking 3-4ms per frame (out of 10ms~ total), and now it is down to 0.5ms. There should be a good performance improvement for anyone who was CPU bound before.
Steam was not overwriting config files when we updated them if they were locally modified, so we split the Default.json file into two parts: Default.json which is read-only now, and overwritten by updates; and User.json where you can add values to overwrite the defaults. This will not be overwritten when steam updates - there is a version value now so make sure you keep them synced.
tldr: hypercube transition, large cpu optimization, many fixes
This week we added a new experimental HUD display for health / damage, and for notifying nearby enemies. This helps a lot to track down the last few enemies in a wave. It will be useful for tracking sneakier enemies in strategy mode in the future.
We also have some solid performance improvements in this build. After various experimentation we did some custom mesh combining scripts for unity which helped a lot (see below for link to code).
Our internal build last week had a few issues so we took some time aside to get through some of the bugs that have been accumulating. Thanks to everyone reporting bugs on trello, it helps a lot for us to just focus on getting on with fixing when they're all listed up like that.
We thought it might be nice to start sharing some code snippets for any unity developers who are playing the game. Here's a couple of scripts useful helpers:
This week is some minor fixes and tweaks. We're working on some optimizations and a couple of bigger new features in the background. Stay tuned next week for something new and shiny!
Hello friends, we're going to adjust the build timings again this week. After swapping to a one-week offset between dev-build and default branch, we realized that if there are bugs in the dev-build they'll still end up going into the default branch.
So now we'll be doing default branch updates every 2 weeks, and a dev-build update every week. The full patch notes and details will come on the default branch updates.
If you want to follow the dev-build branch progress, and try out some work in progress features, come join us on the discord chat.
So stay tuned for a larger update in next weeks build then!
Behold the Ectoplant! The most effective way to collect ectoplasm in the known universe.
Resource collection for crystals is interesting because you have control over the process in a lot of ways. You can balance resource investment and time into drones or manual mining, and expand multiple bases, and seek out the gold crystals for extra.
However, collecting ectoplasm leaves you at the whim of the random drops from enemy. This weeks patch starts to address that by adding Ectoplants. You can go and find an ectoplant grove and collect them yourself. This gives you some control over dealing with ectoplasm if you're after a specific item or upgrade, and are will to trade time to go and collect it.
The resources also shuffle around a bit on the non-tutorial maps. This means each playthrough the location of crystals is a little different. This should help make things a bit more dynamic. As we add more maps and enlarge the current map, this will get more interesting.
On top of that, we just have a bunch of small fixes and performance tweaks. There's a lot of stuff we're working on in the background which we'll have for you soon too!
Changelist:
<*>added ectoplant
<*>added ectoplant groves to scene
<*>added resource randomizer
<*>balance economy pass to reduce ectoplasm
<*>reduce fighter drone move speed
<*>reduce fighter drone scan range
<*>reduce medic drone move speed
<*>increase macaroon shot rate
<*>fix viveport path issues
<*>fix friend drone spamming alerts
<*>fix friend drone crash
<*>fix friend bot particles issue
<*>fix medic drone particles stuck on
<*>fix assault drone moving into ground
<*>fix teleport sound
<*>disable some logging for performance
<*>disable single pass stereo rendering
<*>tutorial enemies now wait till you attack
<*>tutorial music play timing improved
It lives, it's alive! The Assault Drone. This drone is fast and mobile, and will help keep enemies distracted and away from your worker drones. Mix them in with the defender drones to maximize their effectiveness.
We've also added a new Skybox configuration system. This is work in progress, and we'll move towards more configurable mixing and matching of skybox + scene. For now we've made the Hard Mode map set as the new Dawn style.
Changelist (build 28):
added assault drone
added skybox changing system
added dawn skybox to Hard mode
balance pass on economy settings
updated steamvr plugin to 1.1.1
enable gpu jobs
reduced master volume
improve disc weapon physics
improve ectoplasm to drift closer
tweak worker bot avoidance movement
fix player input enabled when dead
fix quality settings stuck on low
fix crash in controller code
fix particles in main menu
fix crash when mining crystals by hand
fix crash in tutorial
fix drone worker crash catching some items
fix shield tutorial appearing multiple times
fix caught disc weapon vanishing while held
fix drone upgrade settings
fix steamworks initialization across scenes
fix stats display issue when controller disconnects
BONUS - we've just uploaded Cosmic Trip background to SteamVR workshop. So you can enjoy the Cosmic Trip vibes outside of the game.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=745831424
Stay funky!
Dev Blog - Intermission
Hello friends! Thanks to everyone who came by to see us at VRLA. It was a blast!
We have been posting dev blogs as they were live on dev-build branch. This week we're going to skip the dev blog so that we will post when they go live on the actual main Default branch of the game. This will help us make sure the build is stable and we catch any issues before we go live with major changes.
You can change to the dev-build branch if you want to experiment with the new changes before they go public. Or just come say hi in the discord chat!
Stay tuned next week for the patch notes, and a new bot!
Build 27
Happy days, funky friends.
This week we spent some time cleaning up a stack of bugs. Unity 5.4 was released from beta so we took some time to update that and work through a few minor issues it introduced. Hopefully it should enable some optimizations on the VR rendering side of things.
We tweaked a few settings related to the audio popping bugs, let us know if it's improved from before. Still trying to track down exactly what's causing it, but it should be better than before.
We put in a simple music toggle by hitting the friend drone - better controls for this coming later, but in the meantime this should work for those that want to play their own music instead. We also added eye expressions to the friend bot, so we can see what he's feeling a little better.
https://gfycat.com/BlueCraftyIndianpalmsquirrel
This build will be live on dev-build branch until next week, and then Default will be updated. A few hotfixes were also added to default branch since last weeks build (LOD fix, etc).
