Space Beast Terror Fright cover
Space Beast Terror Fright screenshot
Genre: Shooter, Indie

Space Beast Terror Fright

Early Access Update Trettio (30)

Early Access Update Trettio (30)


build id: 5762EF13

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

I'm Still Here!
As mentioned in the last update my development tempo has been reduced as of late, hence the length of time that has elapsed between updates. However I am still here and still working on the game!

First look at The Library / VCR / Cassettes / Replays
I didn't expect to roll this out so soon, but as it turned out better than expected I am happy to announce the addition of The Library. This is available from the main menu and represents a complete log of all missions played on the local machine, available for your viewing pleasure. The code is called VCR (from Video Cassette Recorder), a nod towards the suitably retro feel of 1980s-era video recording technology.

What is going on here is that the game is now recording all player inputs for every single mission played and storing them as a "Cassette" in the Library. This works for both local and networked games on both LAN and Steam and with 1-4 players, regardless of who hosted the mission. These files are highly optimized and compressed, and so shouldn't take up more than a few hundred kilobytes even for long matches. The can be found along with the other local files written by the game here: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\

All of this is an initial test of the robustness of recording and playing back replays, and paves the way for sharing replay files amongst the community. The jury is still out on the best back-end solution for this; I was considering Steam Workshop but it doesn't seem like the best logical fit. I will get back to you when I have more info on all of that.

I envision players liking / up-voting popular replays and thereby providing some sort of rating system to better sift through what I expect to be a very large amount of files. There process for both recording and / or uploading should probably be opt-in; currently every mission is stored locally but this can easily be changed if it becomes a problem. The Library gui is also not the prettiest thing at the moment, but be aware that it is possible to scroll up and down using the mousewheel.

On caveat with Cassettes / replays in general is that they are not future proof. Since they are only recording the player inputs and not the entire state of the game, they will break when something changes in the game logic. Things shouldn't crash, but when legacy inputs map to new outputs you will possibly see players "doing weird stuff" like walking into walls and such. Somehow this is funny to me considering how badly actual VCR-cassettes degrade over time. This will of course not happen unless the game code is actually updated.

Technically all of this works for the same reasons as networked games work in SBTF, all based on player inputs and determinism. Seeing replays work this painlessly certainly validates me sticking to my guns concerning the networking architecture in general.

Potentially this also MAY enable improved networking capabilities, because if the game can keep all player inputs around for the duration of the match, then there is theoretically sufficient information available to allow "late join" for players. There may be other things that hinder this that I have yet to discover, but at least it looks promising and there may be much to gain by consolidating replays and the storage of player inputs in the networking system. More to follow.

Miscellaneous
Other than replays I have been doing a bunch of little things:

  • I am not aware of any cheating going on in SBTF, but I took the precaution of sanitizing all inputs that arrive over the wire to avoid exploits related to movement speed.
  • The Plan option "Big Rooms" has been changed to just "Rooms", and now has the following settings:

    • Empty - This is the same as the legacy setting "big rooms on".
    • Filled - This is the same as the legacy setting "big rooms off". The alternate tileset is used for filling these spaces.
    • Pillars - This was implicitly suggested by the community, and results in a pattern of pillars in these spaces (also with the alternate tileset).

  • Pathfinder Upgrades are now randomly rolled instead of being in a fixed order.
  • There are now new difficulty settings:

    • Random All - All Breaches will both appear and spawn Beasts in an extreme range, from Easier -> Insane.
    • Random Each - Each Breach will have an individual random difficulty setting based on their position, from Easier -> Random All (which in turn is from Easier -> Insane).

  • There is now a user option to disable the rotation of the map / tracker. This was suggested by the community. The default settings is on (the legacy behaviour), but as this is a new settings bitflag it will be OFF for anyone who has an existing settings file. As usual all of this can be reset to defaults using the corresponding button.
  • I have corrected the help section to accurately reflect current keybindings and to include information about the somewhat complex permutations of screen split modes combined with player tracking.

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugonio (29)

Early Access Update Tjugonio (29)


build id: 57276A74

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Reduced Development Tempo
As some of you know I've been away from Space Beast Terror Fright for a little bit, and I'm still not back up to full speed yet. Regardless I wanted to give you all an update so as to keep the game moving forward at least a little bit.

I still have some "real life stuff" to sort out in the coming weeks, but I will be back up to a more reasonable speed of development as soon as I can.

Space Windows Version 1
There have been suggestions in the community along the lines of trying to make the game feel more like it actually takes place on a starship, and to that end perhaps add windows so you can see outside the ship.

I have managed to use a pretty cool and relatively computationally inexpensive inverted cube-mapping technique that I adapted from a shader by Inigo Quilez. With the right texture I could also get away with just a single 1024x1024 starfield that I think works pretty well.

The windows also cast a little bit of light, and I have adjusted the system so that these lights aren't affected by power failures. All together these things give the illusion of outer space existing outside the ship you are conceptually on.

I was careful not to make the starfield texture be too "cheerful" or "romantic" as can often be the case when nebulae and / or multicolored stars are used to heavily. I don't want the claustrophobic mood to be affected too much.

The windows will also only occur on the extreme edges of the map / ship. This is very much in order to not have to deal with the case of looking out a window and seeing the outer hull of the ship, and even worse being able to see back in through yet another window. All of that would require a ton of extra geometry to be rendered (with lots of overdraw), and also I wouldn't be able to get away with the magic shader that I'm currently using (which achieves zero overdraw).

All in all a good trade-off that doesn't cost too much.

I expect to be iterating on the windows a bit, not least more experiments with what might be cool looks for the outer hull, and maybe even more geometry outside the ship. I'm also thinking it might be good to add some kind of indication to where the actual glass might be. We'll see what happens.

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugoåtta (28)

Early Access Update Tjugoåtta (28)


build id: 5708DFE1

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Maintenance Update
This update is mainly about behind the scenes maintenance, refactoring, and optimizations to the game's code.

  • Default options for Dungeons now have Big Rooms again.

  • Infestation texture styles have been updated.

  • Infestation texture mapping has been changed to axial instead of the previous stretchy method. This unifies texture resolution much more and removes stretching artifacts, but at the expense of more texture seams.

  • New Rules option "Uniform Speed": With this set to off (the default) players will move at 70% top speed when backpedaling. Moving to the side is 85% of max, and everything in between is interpolated. This was a community suggestion. Turning this option on results in the legacy behavior of movement being the same speed in all directions.

  • Fixed crash bug in Deathmatch that occured when downloading an Upgrade.

  • Made some Advanced Party Config layout adjustments to avoid text overlap.

  • Optimized texture sizes for some models that had excessive texture density.

  • The Plan preview now shows Breaches over Breakers in cases where they reside in the same map cell.

  • Generation of custom player textures is now done in-memory and no longer writes temporary files to user appdata.

  • Level style data format has been changed from text to binary and heavily optimized for fast load times.

  • Heavy optimization has been done to the entire mission generation pipeline, and as a result missions should load roughly twice as fast.

  • Network events have been completely refactored in order to avoid multi-triggered events in networked games with high latency. This was especially evident in the mission log. This may result in better networking performance across the board because the game is doing far less redundant processing when performing prediction and re-simulation.

  • Fixed a bug where having no infestation would crash the Infravision shader.

  • Game statistics reporting is now asynchronous and will no longer stall the process immediately after completing a mission.

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugosju (27)

Early Access Update Tjugosju (27)


build id: 56F991AF

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Hives / Infestation
There is now an option for "Infestation" (none, more, less). When enabled, the ship will be partially infested by "some kind of secreted resin" that the Beasts have (conceptually) built in order to make the ship more like home (for them). The option controls how far from the airlock the infestation will begin, and hence how much of the ship will be filled with this stuff. The default setting is "less" Infestation.

This feature is purely aesthetic and has no actual gameplay mechanic, but I have found it to be a very welcome addition in how it breaks up the levels and messes with visibility. As it partially encrusts and encases the walls of the ship, you will often find it much harder to aim at Door and Fence controls as these can be submerged. Sentry control panels, due to their slimness, will also often be submerged and thus harder to find and even read.

Power Start Option
There is now an option Power Start that controls whether power is initially ON or OFF in a mission. This is independent of Power Failures settings.

Updated Power Failures Options
More Power Failures options have been implemented, as follows:

  • none - Power Failures will not occur.
  • 1 / 8 - Power Failures have a 1 in 8 chance of occurring on interaction.
  • 1 / 16 - Power Failures have a 1 in 16 chance of occurring on interaction.
  • 1 / 32 - Power Failures have a 1 in 32 chance of occurring on interaction.
  • 50% @ 30-60 - Power Failures have a 50% chance of occurring at intervals of 30 - 60 seconds.
  • 50% @ 60-120 - Power Failures have a 50% chance of occurring at intervals of 60 - 120 seconds.
  • 50% @ 120-240 - Power Failures have a 50% chance of occurring at intervals of 120 - 240 seconds.

The default is now 50% @ 120-240.

Battery Changes
Bulk battery charges (on download completion) have been increased:

  • The player will receive 30 extra seconds of charge when a download awards an Upgrade.
  • The player will receive 60 extra seconds of charge when a download does not award an Upgrade.

Battery charge rates have been increased:

  • No Upgrade - 2.5 seconds / second (previously 1.0 seconds / second)
  • Level 1 - 5.0 seconds / second (previously 2.5 seconds / second)
  • Level 2 - 7.5 seconds / second (previously 5.0 seconds / second)
  • Level 3 - 10.0 seconds / second (previously 7.5 seconds / second)
  • Level 4 - 12.5 seconds / second (previously 10.0 seconds / second)

New Planner: MiniMazes
This is simply a quarter-size version of Mazes, with all the same options.

Mission Config Persistence
As the mission config options are ever expanding, I have implemented saving of the local party MissionConfig (all Seed, Plan, and Rules settings) in order to let players keep their favorite settings more easily. This works for both Random and Explicit Seed settings. This is currently only supported for local play and not in networked multiplayer, and will store at the same time as changes to your characters are stored (upon mission failure or success).

This also means that the concept of "defaults settings" for how to play the game become quite blurred. It is possible to restore default settings for each Plan or Rule setting by reselecting it from the drop-down list. This data is stored in the same file as your local team characters, so deleting this file will also restore defaults (along with removing all your live characters in the local team):
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\localteam.txt

Appdata file format changes
All data stored by the game in the local user folder have updated file formats. This means that all previous settings and characters will be wiped by this update. Data stored is a follows:

  • C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\dead.txt - The list of dead characters shown in the main menu obituary scroll.
  • C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\localteam.txt - The current local team, which may include both live and dead characters in each slot. Your last MissionConfig is also stored in this file.
  • C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\settings.txt - All settings from the Options screen.

Note that this file format change has made these files much more human readable and eminently more manually hackable using a text editor. Note however that manually editing these files is not supported and is always done at your own risk.

Miscellaneous

  • All mission configuration options (advanced config) now have tooltips.
  • Gui spinners (for example weapon selection) go both ways, and arrows light up appropriately depending on cursor position.
  • Interaction notifications are now the same for both mid-screen notifications and the mission log.
  • Finally fixed the ghostly muzzle flare issue sometimes seen in multi-player (both local and networked).
  • There is a new option to turn off the aiming reticle. Note that disabling the aiming reticle also completely disables all icon and text information relating to the Aim-Assist upgrade, but the Aim-Assist itself will still function.
  • The Beta Armories option has been removed.
  • The computer voice that announces the reactor overload warnings / countdown has been updated to be robust to alt-tab as well as pausing the game.
  • Infravision has been updated to no longer show emissive light that has been turned off by Power Failures.
  • Distance to airlock display (shown during reactor overload) has been fixed to properly do hot/cold distance display (like all other objectives).
  • Intermediate difficulty levels have been implemented (easier + and harder +). Tooltips now exist to explain exactly what all difficulty settings entail.

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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johno / nornware interviewed by That Cooper Fellow

Early Access Update Tjugosex (26)

Early Access Update Tjugosex (26)


build id: 56E2F7F5 56E337D3

EDIT: Bugfixes:

  • Fixed position of the Reactor Overload text.
  • Fixed spawn positions of Random Breaches to not occur in Door / Fence frames.

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Power Failures
Power Failures will now randomly happen when the player does something that could reasonably (in game logic?) change the amount of amperage used by the whole spacecraft. This includes things like interacting with a Core / Sentry / Armory / Coolant / Door / Fence. There are Rules options that control how big this chance is (none, more, less...)

If a Power Failure occurs ALL lights are off and ALL ship functionality is down. The only way to get the power back on is to find a Breaker and manually reset the fuses. The HUD will now replace the distance to the nearest Datacore with the distance to the nearest Breaker; this in order to relieve some of the pressure on the player who may well be battling Beasts and Creeps with only a depleted flashlight. Of course, if your flashlight is damaged you will have no lightsource at all except for muzzle flashes...

Once a Breaker has been reset there is a lockout period so that Power Failures can't happen again for a certain amount of time.

As suggested by the community I also turn off the music while power is out, except for the very top end / highest intensity part of each theme so you still get the noise / scream / chaos of Beasts being very near. Most of the time however everything is pretty silent and spooky.

In order to deal with closed Doors when power is out, players can now push them open slowly by simply trying to walk through them. After they are opened (by game physics) enough to let the player through they cannot be closed again while power is out. I have added some suitable grinding audio for Doors sliding open.

This kind of close interaction required solving the issue of the player flashlight being inside level geometry and "hiding" the light altogether (something that has always been an issue), because pushing right up against a Door is required to get it open and through it. This turned out to increase the utility of the flashlight across the board, a welcome change.

Note that Beasts can also push open Doors when power is out, which has big implications...

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugofem (25)

Early Access Update Tjugofem (25)


build id: 56D365A0

Hello all! I am happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Additional Plan Options (Doors / Fences)
I have updated the Plan options to include 3 distinct settings for both Doors and Fences. These settings are More, Less, and None, where More is the legacy setting of "on" and None is the legacy setting of "off". Note that the previous functionality of selecting Invert Barriers is still supported, swapping the first and last passes of Barriers. The setting of the option for the first pass of barriers (Doors if Invert Barriers is on, Fences if Invert Barriers is off) may radically affect the state of the random number generator, and it is very possible to see different map layouts as a result of changing these settings.

The main goal here was to allow for more permutations of maps in regards to how many barriers there are. Some users expressed concern that there were too many Fences after the last update, so the Less setting might be a good choice for them. Additionally the inclusion of a Less option for Doors creates some interesting situations; a sort of in-between situation between the legacy binary option of Doors on or off.

Updated Door / Fence / Airlock Control Boxes
One of the oldest parts of the SBTF renderer has now been officially retired, namely the way the control boxes for Doors / Fences / Airlock worked. They have now been updated to use the more modern rendering path, with a texture resolution to match the rest of the world as well as using the standard OCR-A font for information display.

All of this took some iteration to get to the point where they felt close enough to the previous control boxes, but I am pretty happy with where they ended up. A big plus now is that Door control boxes show the integrity percentage of the corresponding Door at all times. I have also added pulsing to the Fences as well as blinking to broken (ERROR) Doors to further distiguish them from each other.

All rendering of control box and frame text has also been update to use the Potentially Visible Set, so performance should be increased for all "world text" across the board.

Beta Armories
There has been some discussion in the forums about the ability for players to shoot off unwanted ammo to make room for more powerful ammo, this being viewed as an unwanted result of the implementation. One suggestion to avoid this behaviour was to allow players to always load better ammo than they currently have by having the system automatically "dump" lower tier ammo in favor of higher.

I have implemented a variant of this idea with the additional functionality of all "dumped" ammo being placed back in the Armory that you are currently reloading from. This results in Armories (while initially only having a single type of ammo as before) now having the capacity to store all types of ammo, as a result of player interaction. This functionality is disabled by default, but can be accessed by enabling the Beta Armories option under Rules settings.

Note that with Beta Armories enabled, Armories will start with the following amounts:

  • Orange - 400 rounds
  • Pink - 300 rounds
  • Blue - 200 rounds
  • Green - 100 rounds

Also note that I don't feel that the Beta Armories solution will stick for a number of reasons, and will most likely be modified or even removed altogether in the future. Problems include:

  • This implementation results in the player having far too much high-tier ammo at all times.
  • The current ammo capacities feel like they are too large, as the player for example always has the capacity to fill the entire capacity with green (highest tier) ammo.
  • In general there is a reduction to the feeling of "luck" in coming across a high-tier armory.
  • I have no idea how to calculate a reasonable "download progress" percentage given this new ammo swapping functionality!

As I spent quite a while on the complicated transaction logic behind this feature, as well as in the spirit of Early Access, I decided to keep the Beta Armories option in the game for the time being in order to get player feedback and suggestions towards improvement. Again I am not personally convinced that this (rather radical) change is a good one, as balancing it will require numerous passes over related systems. My high level goal is still to remove the tendency for players to dump ammo by shooting it off, and I would rather see solution that has less jarring impact on the balance of the game.

Note also that when Beta Armories are disabled (is they are by default), Armories will now always show the color of the contained rounds. While this is not a perfect solution to the player "ammo dumping" behaviour, it at least offers more information to the Player at a glance without having to interact with the Armory only to find out that the contained ammo wasn't of interest. This is in my view a rather small concession, and will probably stick.

Miscellaneous

  • You can now no longer disable a Fence by interacting with the control box on the other side of the barrier.
  • Fence and broken Door icons in the map / tracker have been updated to be distinct from each other.
  • I have added some creaking metal audio that is mixed into Breach events and Door damage events. This audio pitches higher and higher with increasing Door damage, intended to further reinforce the current state of the Door.
  • I have optimized program startup performance.
  • Aim Assist icons now include an exclamation mark.
  • I have identified and fixed a bug in the low-quality lighting shader path. This could very well have caused crashes on startup (when the shader is compiled) that would have been fixed by removing the following file: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\settings.txt. This also caused a crash when switching to low-quality lighting while in a mission for the same reason (shader failed to compile). This issue is now fixed. I should probably switch to pre-compiled shaders...

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugofyra (24)

Early Access Update Tjugofyra (24)


build id: 56C5FAD0 56C6331A

EDIT: A problem was discovered in the map / tracker with elements appearing outside of discovered areas. A new build has been deployed to fix this.

Hello all! I am happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Security Fences
A pretty significant feature which I think was originally suggested by the community has been implemented, namely Security Fences.

These Fences are semi-transparent laser grids that will kill all Beasts and Creeps that come into contact with them, and as such act as indestructible barriers behind which the player is perfectly safe. EVERYTHING except players is completely stopped by Fences, including bullets and Beast gibs. As a result of this Sentries can no longer see potential targets beyond fences, in order to avoid them wasting ammo on things that they cannot hit.

The downside to Fences is that the player will suffer Electronics damage when in contact with the laser grid of a Fence. If this happens, the player is always kicked out the other side of the Fence at a safe distance after suffering a single point of Electronics damage. This is to ensure that you don't get caught in the Fence and die very quickly as a result, and to allow the player to pass through the Fence. Damage can as usual be repaired using a Repair station.

Fences have the same kind of frames and control boxes that Doors do, and are interacted with in the same way. However Fences, unlike Doors, are toggled instantly. The text in the Fence frame will display SAFE to indicate that the Fence is off (of course you will not see the fence in this state) and !CAUTION! to indicate that you should be careful around the live laser barrier.

All of this leads to interesting trade-offs. For example it is possible to be too close to a Fence when activating it, causing immediate damage and a kick to the player. It takes some practice when fleeing through Fences to get the timing of activation just right. Another interesting strategy is to activate all Fences behind you, and if you are forced to flee through an active Fence you can simply choose to take the Electronics damage hit. The same rules as for Sentry damage and Creep damage apply, so as long as all your systems haven't been knocked out you will survive passing through the Fence.

The map generation algorithms have been updated to do two passes of "barriers". With default options Doors will be placed first according to special rules that make sure they are at the ends of all straight corridor segments (as before). Next all other elements will be placed, and finally Fences will be placed last after all all Cores and Sentries are laid down by the generation algorithm. This second barrier pass is always an addition and cannot replace anything else except for empty floor cells, so if a potential Fence location is occupied by something else the Fence will not be placed.

The algorithm for the second barrier pass is different from the first in that it tries to put in as many Fences as possible in a diagonal raster with a spacing of a single tile, but as the map can be pretty filled up with other things this doesn't result in too many Fences being placed. Fences are similar to Doors and as such can only be placed in single-width corridors, so you won't see them in big rooms. The number of Fences depends highly on the specific map geometry that you happen to roll, with some corridors having several in a row while others have none at all.

With the above rules for Doors and Fences in mind, it is now possible to select "Invert Barriers" to have the Fences in place of Doors and vice versa. You can also explicitly disable both Doors and Fences individually. This leads to many interesting permutations of map styles, especially since disabling the first barrier pass (Doors by default, but Fences if Invert Barriers is selected) will skew the output of the random number generator and often result in completely different placements of other map elements.

The game definitely feels deeper now that I have had the chance to play a while with Fences, and also a little bit easier / less stressful as it is now possible to create safe havens for the player at multiple points in the level. It is of course best when making for such a safe zone between two fences to switch them off before passing through, but being able to choose to just run through the Fence and suffer the one point of Electronics damage adds a nice last resort fallback / retreat strategy for those times when Beasts are hot on your heels.

Miscellaneous

  • Plan preview legend updated to include Fences.
  • Fence control boxes now explicitly say FENCE.
  • Fences are now displayed in the tracker / map
  • The map upgrade for Doors is now called Barriers to take both Doors and Fences into account.
  • Player stats have been somewhat reordered in the Party screens.
  • Cause of death for players is now more explicit; Beasts, Creeps, Fences, Reactor Meltdown, Friendly Fire

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugotre (23)

Early Access Update Tjugotre (23)


build id: 56B6750D

Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Bugfix Update
This update is mainly a stability and bugfix update.

  • Switched to dedicated screen rendertargets for each hero, in order to avoid GPU memory thrashing when using screen splits.
  • Added checks for reachability in all publicly deployed planners.
  • Switched from circular to hexagonal aim assist icon shape.
  • Added credits for third party composers (Billy Swartzel and Isaac Wingrove). Music from Isaac Wingrove is not yet implemented but is coming soon.
  • Plan::Cell.entity and Plan::Cell.tile are now merged to a single byte value with a floor bit. This removes data redundancy in preparation for a future level editor.
  • Airlock "outside door control index" is now implicitly based on flags. This removes data redundancy in preparation for a future level editor.
  • All tracker / map textures are now a single texture atlas, reducing draw calls.
  • Disabled mission menu when any player is dying; this means you can no longer "cheat" to avoid dying once the death animation sequence is active.
  • Fixed broken aim-assist positions in certain screen split permutations.
  • Bolts no longer collide with dead Beasts or Creeps. This fixes inaccurate kill statistics, often seen when using the shotgun.

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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Early Access Update Tjugotvå (22)

Early Access Update Tjugotvå (22)


build id: 569EAED6

Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

Aim-Assist Version 2
In response to feedback from the community we have implemented a new version of Aim-Assist. This version no longer renders threats as outlined meshes on top of the action, but rather uses HUD icons (circles) to indicate threats.

Aim-Assist is now limited to tracking targets that are within 3 grids of your position (about 6 meters), which is the same as the range of the legacy Auto-Targeting upgrade.

In addition to the range limitation, only targets within the Potentially Visible Set (PVS) of grids from your position are tracked, which means that in most cases you won't be able to track threats through walls. The PVS is really just an internal rendering optimization structure and not pixel perfect, so sometimes you will get additional threat information for something that you may not actually see. Also, within range, you will always be able to track threats that are on the other side of a closed door, as technically doors do not block POTENTIAL visibility since they can be opened.

Finally, all threats that meet the above criteria are rendered equally. There is no scaling or otherwise indications of what threats may be nearer than others. Again, 3 grids is about 6 meters and happens to be the same range as that which is used to trigger Beast stinger cues, so you can consider any Aim-Assist icon you see to be an immediate threat.

All of these things combine nicely to create a version of Aim-Assist that in our opinion feels much better. It is erratic and glitchy partly due to PVS coarseness, but still gives you an extra edge when it comes to wading through visual noise to see if you can stop firing.

This change was very much motivated by the feeling that some users expressed of the previous Aim-Assist breaking the mood / aesthetic of the game too much, and removing a lot of the fear aspect. In hindsight we wholeheartedly agree with this, and are very glad for all the candid responses to the previous update. We hope that users will find this version to be a better fit for the game.

Also, the new Aim-Assist does stack / combine with Infravision. The old version did not do this both for technical / performance reasons as well as feeling like a combo that was far too powerful, but in this new case we are interested in seeing what the combo might bring. There may well be color issues related to the various HUD colors in combination with the different Infravision palettes; if that proves to be a problem we can implement an automatic change to the HUD colors when Infravision is active.

Finally, to re-iterate, the switch from Auto-Targeting to Aim-Assist is an attempt to remove some of the "auto-pilot" feeling that could previously be experienced with the combination of Motion Tracker and Auto-Targeting. This caused the game to be played most optimally by only viewing the map / tracker, and both we as developers and some of the community felt that this was a shame.

Aim-Assist is intended to combat this by forcing the player to always aim manually in the main 3d view. It is absolutely true that Aim-Assist requires far more user attention / mindshare than Auto-Targeting, and thereby makes the game somewhat harder, but we still feel that this is the right move.

We will in the coming updates be looking into further enhancements to combat the general upwards-tending trend in difficulty that has been happening in the game lately. We want the game to be very challenging but still not feel impossible.

As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno

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