- Cleaned up main menu initial state on larger than average monitors
- Fixed the text being too big to fit on submit bug summary textbox
- Fixed bug where pausing and unpausing during countdown started the timer
- Pressing pause/unpause rapidly no longer breaks the pause menu
- Fixed FOV not updating in-game when you change the setting when FOV effect is off
- Some improvements to the prop follower logic
Polyball
v0.5.1
v0.5 - Rebuild
It’s finally here. After almost a year we have finished ripping out all of the systems and rebuilding them to deal with the increased scope of this project. It wasn’t easy, and it isn’t fully finished yet, but we are hoping to get back in the regular flow and bring you guys updates on a much more regular schedule.
So what changed in this patch? Well, everything really. We went into some more details on the changes in our October State of The Game post, but below is a summarized list of the changes. We made a deal with ourselves that we would get this patch out by the holidays regardless of the state it is in, and as such the multiplayer options have been disabled for this release. They are in much better shape than before, but still need some work to be enjoyable enough to let people play them.
An important feature that we added was the ‘Submit a bug’ option which can be accessed by pressing F4 or through the pause menu when you are in a level. If you find something weird or something breaks please don’t hesitate to submit a bug! And remember - any details about how to reproduce the bug, what your setup is like (Laptop or PC? Controller or mouse?) or any additional information is very helpful!
Also just a small note, we updated our anti-aliasing and reccommend changing to 'TAA' in the settings for super crisp edges.
- Lots of old bugs gone, probably lots of new bugs though
- UI changes and optimizations
- More continuity between game types
- Higher performance
- Updated effects
- New main menu
- Improved movement model to allow for more control
- Camera movement improvements
- New skin section: Props
- New controller input system for navigating menus, still a bit rough but better than before already
- Timers more accurate on single levels and marathons
- Fixed leaderboards not displaying, or properly updating data that needs to be retrieved
- Redid Volcano sector
- General level tweaks/replacements
- General visual tweaks
- Fixed momentum not inheriting from moving platforms when jumping off
These are the major things that aren't done yet, but will be our focus going forward:
- Local and online multiplayer
- New ghost system
- New save system
- Final effect tweaks
- Keybindings
- Lots of little polish things
- Mac and Linux
- All kinds of translations
Let's Roll!
State of the Game: October 13, 2016
Hello!
It's been a while since we've uploaded a patch, or even an announcement for that matter. So we’re here to give you a quick update on what's been going on these last few months!
For ease of reading I'll separate my post into a few segments. Our core areas of focus have been:
I: OPTIMIZATION
- splitting large terrain meshes to improve framerate
- incorporating occlusion culling (disabling objects you can't see)
II: INTERFACE + MENUS
- finalising mockups for in-game and menu interfaces
- implementing these into a working build
- improving a lot of the UX and reducing visual clutter
III: SINGLE PLAYER
- incorporating player feedback into the current level set (no more pizza lava!)
- working through the final sector level designs and getting them implemented
- various system fixes (including more stable leaderboards)
IV: MULTIPLAYER
- overall, making it work better
- finalising vfx and layouts for current levels
- complete reworking of the core multiplayer systems
V: VFX (CAMERA + ENVIRONMENT)
- depth of field, motion blur, bloom, camera movement, completely new anti-aliasing (temporal anti-aliasing [TAA]); changes everywhere
- went over a lot of the lighting and fog in existing levels to improve efficiency and visual palettes
- tweaking colours and integrating new shaders (brand-new custom water shader)
PREFACE
Being an independent studio with other commitments (gotta put food on the table, and have a table in the first place!) we've had to take on some web contracts on the side. These have taken up more time than we initially thought they might. Thankfully these are just about done so we will be back to full-staff on the developer front, and can devote all of our time to Polyball!
Now, back to the updates.
I: OPTIMIZATION
The optimization front is pretty straightforward: our terrain meshes were all gigantic as a result of being sculpted as a seamless entity, so we went back and figured out a way to chop them up into small pieces. Now, we can have those chunks turn on and off based on whether or not you'll be able to see them or not (this is called Occlusion Culling). This helps a lot with levels that have a lot of trees, rocks, or large terrain pieces.
II: INTERFACE + MENUS
Our previous menus were a rough draft of what we wanted to accomplish, and we've improved user flow across the board. We've been working on new pre- and post-game screens, customize pages, and multiplayer screens. We're in the midst of swapping out old placeholder assets for new ones, so this will hopefully make everything uniform and easy to use!
III: SINGLE PLAYER
The new sector is on its way, and its development was slowed due to some scope creep. We became a lot more proficient with our tools which allowed for a larger scale to these levels. After making the Limbo sector it was tough to break out of the black and white, totally cube mindset and get into what I sort of think of as a flip-side to the forest sector. It's on its way, and we hope you do your best to beat our records!
IV: MULTIPLAYER
On the multiplayer front, we’ve been focusing on backend systems and UI. You now have the ability to have one player using the keyboard and mouse in local games, with up to three others using controllers. We’ve streamlined the stats, making it easier to get the important info (who won, kills, deaths, etc.), and redesigned the post-game menus. This will make it easier to navigate to new levels after you finish a match, and display the wins, losses, and other stats for your entire play session.
For online, we’ve reworked the network code resulting in lower bandwidth usage and higher network accuracy. We also took a look at the lobby system and it’s working well in internal testing. Multiplayer is high on our priority list right now, and we’re working to make it as accessible and smooth as possible.
V: VFX (CAMERA + ENVIRONMENT)
This is one of the areas that we've been working really hard to perfect. When you're working with low-poly it's really important to make sure that your effects are well-tuned in such a way to complement the geometry and flow of your environments. We've been ironing out depth of field parameters, playing with the tiniest amount of motion blur, and have gone through numerous other lighting and camera effects that didn't end up making the cut. Not to worry of course, these are all togglable!
On the environment front we've spent some time going over your feedback regarding lighting, geometry, and environmental choices. We've integrated the ones we felt were most conducive to our vision, and want to thank you for all of your support on that end! RIP Pizza Lava, you won't be missed For the most part this includes eliminating one or more light sources in environments that had multiple. In some cases this washed out shadows, and ended up having some unforseen impacts on the readability of (especially platforming) levels. A lot of the fog has been updated, alongside materials and basically the entire superstructure of the volcano sector. We basically went from anthill to Mount Doom with this one, and hopefully it's more volcano-y!
IN CONCLUSION
This is all from us for now, and we'll do our best to keep everyone updated on our progress leading up to our next patch. We've seen some comments from players who have speculated that Polyball is dead, and we want to assure you that this most definitely is not the case. We had to do a major overhaul to get the game where we wanted it to be, and we've learned a lot of valuable lessons from the way we went about it.
Also, if you've read this far you might be interested in following us on twitter for more consistent updates.
Best,
The Studio Monolith Team
v0.4.6
This update is mostly focused on camera + level fixes. We have a another patch coming with a bunch of system changes and UI optimization which was going to be in this but required more testing.
Also, we are getting very close to 0.5.0 which is the main menu redo so look forward to that!
Levels
- Updated volcano entry
- Tweaked volcano sector lighting - we are working on improving the path readability of this sector
- Disabled asteroids in space because they were causing lag
- Fixed falling through water
- Shards now count in Meteor Storm
- Lowered trident score par from 6500 to 650 (see what happened there?)
- Tutorial level now leads into the first level rather than Styx
UI
- Updated loading screens
- Made in game settings box larger
- Added Camera tab in settings
Camera
- First person cam works again, even better than before!
- Camera tilt is back in - and of course you can turn it off in the options menu
- Fixed inversion being opposite to what it should be
- Unified Aim invert/sensitivity settings and normal camera settings
- Fixed aim mode
- Added Camera Pro Mode which removes all smoothing
- If you try to move the camera left/right when follow cam is on, it will do it and then wait one second to resume follow cam
Skins
- Fixed Gouge ball interior not glowing
OSX Release
We haven't been able to test it on that many hardware configurations, so if you run into any issues please let us know your hardware/OS version and we will do our best to get it running!
Rollback Branch
Doing this rollback will corrupt your save data!
SORRY!! v0.4.5 is way more broken than we thought. We've had reports of players not even being able to start levels, so we've put v0.4.4 on the rollback branch.
You can access the rollback branch with the password "polyrollback" (without quotes of course). Here are some more instructions, under Product Betas, if you aren't familiar with the process.
Again, sorry about the brokenness. We'll get a fix-er-up patch out sometime this week.
EDIT: Another sorry!! Your save data will wiped if you do the rollback, and won't be recoverable. Very bad oversight by me. Any new save data will not be lost when updating though.
v0.4.5
Local multiplayer got a little love too. We're gonna come back to it before full release for a final pass, but it's hard for us to test and we want to focus on single player until it's polished enough.
Also, special leaderboards/scores have been added! Cube has moved into one, and there's also Polydoll now (ragdoll skin model). We might do a couple more, still undecided. The switching of the leaderboards/scores is pretty unclear right now, we'll be addressing that in v0.5.
General
- Added button to reset collected trophies
- Fixed loading screens being warped on different resolutions
- Removed Abstract loading screen
- Added jump buffering loading screen
- New community loading screen image
Gameplay
- Fixed ‘slingshot’ exploit
- Tweaked turning/braking math
- More realistic drag
- Rewrote entire camera script
- Smoothed out input when low framerate or frame drop
Levels
- Leaderboard reset (last one for a while hopefully)
- Fixed some platform colliders in Meteor Storm
- Fixed respawn exploit on circuit levels
- Moved some multiplayer spawn points around
Skins
- Changed Real Cube's physics/movement and added separate leaderboards
- Added Polydoll (also has it's own leaderboards)
Local Multiplayer
- Re-added pause screen
- Fixed some UI bugs
- Fixed profiles locking when going back to main menu
- Disabled some levels that weren't working very well
- Free roam levels fixed
Replays (Ghosts)
- Ghosts revamped into the Replay system!
- Added replay mode to levels (very bare, it will be improved)
- Optimized replay recording, including performance and size of files
- Ghosts move much smoother (too smooth, this will be improved too)
v0.4.4
Also, we have a Discord chat channel for Polyball where people have been talking about speedrunning stats, reporting bugs, and giving feedback. If you are interested you can join here.
Levels
- Fixed some level's leaderboards not working
- Fixed UI disappearing after restarting a finished level
Online
- Mousing over weapons displays the right name now
- Fixed charge weapons not working properly for clients
Misc.
- Added flying squirrel follow effect
v0.4.3
Just some fixes to the mess of yesterdays patch. Also a leaderboard reset!
Levels
- Leaderboard reset
- Limbo is really added to the full game playlist now
- Level switch exploit is really fixed now
Online
- Fixed a bunch of camera bugs
- Player look directions are now properly syncing
- Abilities don't double-fire on clients anymore
- Stopped keyboard from affecting your ball when you're chatting
Local Multiplayer
- Fixed weird controller bug
v0.4.2
Gameplay
- Added jump buffering - if you press and hold jump while in the air you will jump automatically when you hit the ground
- Slightly increased air move speed
- Smoothed out vertical movement on moving platforms
- Added a default UI mode setting
- Ghosts now show the player's name beside them
Graphics
- Added a momentum arrow to compliment the input arrow
- Added a toggle for the FOV effect when going fast
- Added a texture to the lava
Levels
- Lowered Limbo Sector medal requirement by 5 to 130
- Added Limbo levels to full game playlist
- Tweaked Hardlight - more paths and better colors now, still not fully done
Fixes
- Rotating objects now reset on respawn
- Cube ball does not glitch now
- Online mode is now actually playable
- Fixed exploit with level leaderboards
- Made UI mode persist between respawns
Optimizations
- Optimized memory usage (if you were getting spikes before, they should be much less impactful)
- Object pooling implemented (even less spikes!)
Also, debug menu now has some new "cheats" that will stick around until full release. This pretty much replaces the old Beta menu we had in options. Feel free to mess around, while you can!
lockforward - forces camera and ball input to forward
greedisalright - 100 shards
imwussy - unlock all levels (and 200 medals)
pimpmyball - unlock all skin parts
omniball - unlock everything