Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Updated Infravision We have updated the Infravision mode to be both more aesthetically pleasing and also have more tradeoffs for gameplay. Basically the idea is to map heat to a color gradient. There are three styles to choose from in Visual Options:
Predator - Inspired by the classic film, this style is purple / orange / yellow.
Night Vision - Inspired by military night vision equipment, this style is black / green / white.
Grayscale - This is a simple grayscale.
Aside from the colors, these styles are completely equivalent.
We wanted to update the effect to have noise / artifacts in it to make it slightly less readable than a perfectly clean image, and also for these effect to become more exaggerated as the battery drains. The color mapping also degrades in quality as the battery drains.
We chose to not have the infravision become completely unusable when the battery is completely drained, as we feel this give the player more options than completely removing the usefulness of Infravision with zero battery charge.
Infravision now drains battery 3x normal instead of the previous 4x.
Infravision is now also a dedicated electronics system, and when this is damaged the noise / artifacts become so bad that the Infravision should be almost unusable, but again, not completely.
Text on Datacores / Sentries / Armories / Coolants is no longer visible when Infravision is enabled.
Just for fun, we now cause the weapon to heat as a function of energy fired. Higher level ammo cause the weapon to heat up more. The weapon will cool off again when not fired. All of this can be seen when using Infravision, and has no affect on gameplay.
Updated Bullet Hit Effects on Players As suggested by the community, we have consolidated the effects of bullets hits on players.
With this update, player bullets will no longer IMMEDIATELY kill allies, but cause electronics damage in the same way that Sentry bullets have done previously. The twist is that now ALL bullets, including those from Sentries, will kill a player that has maximal electronics damage. Sentry bullets still have a chance to ricochet, while player bullets will not.
While highly experimental, our goal with this change is to slightly increase player fear of Sentries, while smoothing out the hard consequence of accidental player vs player friendly fire.
While we have yet to clearly denote all the electronics systems in the HUD (which we intend to do in the future), here is the current list:
SYS_INFRAVISION - This is a completely new system for this update, and will disable the Infravision (cause massive interference) if damaged.
SYS_FLASHLIGHT - If damaged, the flashlight will not function.
SYS_TEXT - If damaged, no text is displayed in the HUD.
SYS_VISOR_ICONS - If damaged, the visor edge graphics as well as all HUD icons are disabled.
SYS_WEAPON_DISPLAY - If damaged, ammo counts will not show on the weapon, and no low ammo audio warnings will be heard.
SYS_TRACKER_MAP - If damaged, the entire tracker / map is disabled. This will also disabled player adrenaline spikes based on motion tracker warnings, and as a result has a detrimental affect on player movement speed.
As a result of all fire now being potentially lethal, we have also added an audio warning that is heard when a player has maximal electronics systems damage. When you hear this, you are in immediate danger of being killed by friendly fire.
Currently damage on hit is caused to a random system, but systems are always repaired in the order listed above. This will probably change.
As a result of all of this, a player effectively has 7 hit points in regards to bullets. We will evaluate if this is a good change, and if so will do further effects and audio passes on it to improve the feedback for all players, as currently only the player that is hit by a bullet gets any real feedback to speak of.
HUD updates Several players have expressed concern over the amount of text in the HUD.
Due to the intense nature of the game we stand firm in our opinion that the "in your face" objective prompts, interaction / upgrade announcements, and interaction prompts are a critical feature for new players learning the game.
We have however added an option to completely clean up all of these things (under Visual Options, enable Minimized HUD Text), intended for use by players who know their way around the game. With this option enabled, all objective prompts, interaction / upgrade announcements, and interaction prompts will always remain at the top of the HUD.
We have also decreased the font size of the mission log from .5 to .35 (this is the same size as the text associated with the upgrade icons).
The interaction icon animation introduced in Early Access Update 10 has also been reduced in size and moved closer to the tracker / map.
Miscellaneous
Repairs are now only single use, as we feel that there are plenty of them.
New level style - Dharkan; an industrial looking silver metal style with orange trims.
Line of sight between Beasts and players is take into account when mixing the music. This is a big improvement, and now it should be much more clear from the intensity of the music how near a threat is to the player.
Q/E strafing is now a user option.
We have added the "interaction denied" sound for the reactor shield controls as well as for broken door controls.
We have fixed the bug where random breaches could occur inside the reactor shield.
Beast footstep (clawstep?) audio can now be heard purely based on distance; previously there was a bug where Beasts that were not in the view did not make step sounds.
We have added 2 new Astro-Creep styles and polished all textures.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
UPDATE: The missing texture issue has been fixed in build 55C268FC.
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Enemy Type: Astro-Creep We have added a new enemy type, the Astro-Creep, borrowed from our game UfoPilot : Astro-Creeps Elite. Our intention with this new enemy was to introduce a very different mechanic to the game; the Astro-Creeps are completely harmless by themselves, but combined with the Space Beasts things can get dangerous, and the total level of chaos in missions has increased markedly.
Astro-Creeps do not attempt to interact with the player unless you get too close, at which point they will literally "get in your face", blocking visibility and creating extremely dangerous distractions to the true threats. An Astro-Creep can be killed with a single shot.
We were happy to discover a large number of emergent behaviours when Astro-Creeps were added to the mix. For one thing they become a drain on ammunition. Sentries also become even more dangerous to the player, as they will attempt to fire upon Astro-Creeps who have a completely different movement pattern as compared to Space Beasts. As a result we are experiencing even more friendly fire incidents than before. Both these issues tie into the changes we have made to core types.
Astro-Creeps also add significant "noise" to the motion tracker display, and while they are smaller than Space Beasts player definitely need to use both the tracker and the actual 3d display to properly sort out threats. This is of course intentional. Astro-Creeps are also targeted by the Auto-Targeting upgrade.
We speculate that some people will not like this addition / change to gameplay (and the resultant chaos). We have added the option to completely disable Astro-Creeps (under Rules / Breaches options in the advanced party screen) which are enabled by default.
Redesigned Cores / Interactive Objects As the addition of the Astro-Creep changed gameplay, we realized that we needed to address all the emergent issues.
The need for more ammunition was one thing, and that naturally tied into the illogic of "downloading ammunition" that some people really dislike. We went back and forth on that for a while before figuring out the balance, and the result is that we are happy to announce the addition of Armory cores which allow you to manually reload your weapons. You interact in a similar manner to Datacores or Sentries, but ammo reload happens at a fixed rate regardless of your upgrades, and is always aborted if you begin firing your weapon while interacting with the Armory. Each Armory has 500 rounds, and ammo types are randomized per Armory instance.
In response to the increase in friendly fire indicents due to Astro-Creep activity, we have also added a dedicated Repair station. Datacores will no longer repair electronics systems damage, but Repair cores allow you to repair as many systems as you like without limit (they will never deactivate). Each damaged system must be repaired separately, but the speed of repair is currently tied to your data rate / download time upgrade.
Sentries have been also modified to have a slimmer profile, but functionally work the same as before except for the fact that Sentry ammo has been reduced from 500 to 400 rounds.
The addition of two new core types has forced us to re-evaluate our color palettes for the 3d objects as well as clarify the map icons and pathfinders:
Datacore - light blue / cyan
Sentry - green
Armory - orange / yellow
Repair - red / coral
Coolant - dark blue / purple (this also affects the reactor shields)
White - Airlock (updated shape and now also spins)
Doors / floors / disabled cores are now all gray, with broken doors in red.
Heads Up Display Improvements We have consolidated all of the mission event logs so that all team members now receive the same messages; we envision the log to be a global information channel. We have also added many more messages related to things that happen in the mission.
The (rather arbitrary) text that was displayed when the user interacted with a core has been removed, and has been replaced by icons and progress meters intended to clarify that the user is indeed interacting with something. We hope that this will improve the legibility of the user interface as a whole.
HUD icons now use procedural text as opposed to having text baked into the art.
Practical Leaderboard Reset Due to the way that unique leaderboard ids need be generated (since there are billions of maps that have lots of options) in the game the leaderboards have again been reset. The old scores are technically still there, but the output for a given seed and algorithm has changed, so in very many cases the maps are again completely new and combined with the options they have new identities. This is also affected by our addition of new interactive core types; these also affect the output of the map generation process.
We are at this point a little unsure of whether or not leaderboards have very much traction in their current state. It is our observation that so long as players manage to complete a level they will have very similar scores. We either need to change the calculation (there is lots of theory to this effect in the forums, thanks for that) or simply use these kinds of statistics to keep track of which maps are popular and use that to drive user interfaces that help people find good maps. Suggestions along these lines are welcome.
Miscellaneous
There is now only a single 4:3 aspect obituaries display that shows rank, name, upgrades, experience, missions, and total mission time. This is because we have added more statistics and they will no longer all fit even in wide screen layouts.
We have fixed the bug where you could start interacting with a core, move to an adjacent core and have the interaction switch to the second core. Now you will properly disconnect if you move out of range of the core you began interacting with.
In an effort to fix the problem of some mission layouts having excessive distances from reactor to airlock, the reactor overload sequence now also affects your adrenaline level. The closer the reactor is to overload, the faster you will run. Also, we think this just feels pretty cool. We were worried that this would make escape too easy, but now instead of worrying about beasts chasing you, you now have to worry about running around a corner and smacking into them instead.
We have double mapped both TAB and MOUSE WHEEL to toggle Infravision.
Q/A/Left Arrow now strafe left, while E/D/Right Arrow now strafe right.
We have added an option for preferred music. When enabled only the theme you have selected will play as opposed to depending on the seed of the mission.
We have added rank insignias to the backs of the marine 3d models, as well as the last name of the character.
The map preview (advanced party screen) now has a color coded corresponding legend. The colors match what you will see in-mission / on the tracker / map.
The Infravision shader now only affects things "outside" your helmet.
The post-mission stats screen now also properly shows the seed and leaderboards for random seeds as well as explicit seeds (you still do not see the random seed / map you will play pre-mission).
We have added a couple new random ambient sounds to the game.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Build Id Format As noted in the last update we have made a change to the build id. The new format is simply the 32 bit unsigned unix time of the build filesystem (.nwf file) in hexadecimal. This has always been the case, but we have earlier used local time functions to format that timestamp to something legible, but the problem with that was that it was time zone dependent. The whole point of the id is to let you make sure you are running the latest version of the software, and this way it is simple and unambigous.
New Mission Generation Options / Improved User Interface As a result of recent work on consolidating the local and network experiences, a lot of refactoring and discovery has been done on the concept of a Party. This has led to a lot of user interface work, and most recently this has led to some work on new and existing mission generators and related options.
The user interface has been improved, with the clickable / interactable parts actually looking like buttons, spinners, and combo boxes. This stuff is very much a result of the need to add more and more options to the advanced party settings screen.
We have now exposed options to the existing Crawlers mission generator (now renamed to Corridors), including the options to turn off Doors and Sentries, as well as an option for bigger rooms. Turning off Doors has a huge affect on the feel of a mission, both due to the fact that you have fewer strategic options but also because Doors are a significant light source. Bigger rooms make for more intense encounters, as in general it is harder to deal with multiple beasts in an open space than in a cramped corridor.
We have also added new generators called Dungeons and Mazes. These result in more cohesive collections of rooms and classic mazes, respectively, each with a set of options. Although we don't feel that these offer gameplay of the same quality as Corridors, we are including them regardless in order to let the community experiment. We recommend trying Dungeons and Mazes with the Breach option of Random Positions turned ON.
What we suspect at this point is that maps need a lot of intersections and alternate routes in order to work well with the current Beast A.I., and we will be experimenting with more generator algorithms based on this observation.
With the addition of these new algorithms in conjunction with the available options, the number of available maps to play has increased by tens of billions. Procedural stuff is awesome.
As a result of all of these combinatorics we needed to change leaderboard ids, so effectively all leaderboards have been reset. We apologize for this necessity.
Bullet Ricochets / Electronics Damage Repair We did some extensive testing with having bullets ricochet. Initially all bullets would have a chance to ricochet, but that was completely insane and extremely dangerous. Also, the more powerful ammo types, having more energy, had a higher chance of bouncing around, so green ammo shotguns were almost guaranteed to result in you killing yourself.
The next test was to have player bullets not kill you but rather cause electronics damage like the Sentry bullets, but that only resulted in severe electronics damage being highly likely. As a result we implemented the fix of having Datacore downloads automatically repair a single electronics system upon completion.
What we finally settled on was to only have the Sentry bullets ricochet. We feel this adds some spice and danger to the experience. Note that the electronics damage repair feature is still enabled; we expect to iterate on this, adding more user interface feedback and probably moving this mechanic to something other than the Datacores.
Motion Tracker Update The motion tracker will now show ALL motion in range. Beyond Beasts this now also includes all bullets and all gibs. The goal with this chance was to muddy up the Motion Tracker a bit and make it a little harder to see if you have cleared out nearby threats. At long range this change also has the effect of highlighting all the action that is going on in the mission.
New Music Theme We have also added a new procedural music theme to the game, more in the vein of progressive heavy metal. Also, we have invited a number of composers to create their own music themes, in the hope of having as large a musical variation as we are aiming to have in the graphics styles.
Miscellaneous
We have added 2 new level styles for a current total of 9.
Emissive / light textures in the spacecrafts are now slightly glitchy, similar to what we had before on all text in the world. We feel that this kind of subtle animation adds immersion.
The text scanning effect is now separated out per player, so you will no longer get text scanning resets when another player downloads a datacore or activates a sentry. This makes it less likely that you will confuse someone elses interaction completion with your own.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
First of all, a note about the build id that shows up at the upper right in the menus. We just figured out that the time stamp is in your local time zone, so basically it won't be correct for anyone except people in UTC+1 (our timezone). Epic fail. I will change this in the future to something unambiguous.
Party Changes In general we have been working hard on consolidating the local co-op experience with the networked co-op experience. The main goal is a unified experience where your Party stays together across a number of missions, with character progression and statistics intact. Whenever a party is pre-mission, it is logically a "lobby", and is basically the same for local and networked play.
We have split up all the information into Basic and Advanced, with Basic being the first screen you see. We added Basic to highlight the characters that are in the Party, and is focused on showing statistics on the characters that are in each logical slot (red, green, blue, gold). The Advanced screen is more akin to the previous incarnations of the lobby, and here you can set all the options related to mission seeds, difficulty, etc.
In both screens you can now also choose the "class" of your character, which currently only affects the weapon that character will play with in the coming mission. This can be reselected prior to each mission. In Local mode you can also choose the number of players / what input devices to run with, while in Networked mode you see the players that are connected to the lobby.
We have also removed the per-player ready toggles, as this was causing a lot of technical issues with our Steam Implementation. Currently the owner of the lobby is the machine that is allowed to launch the mission (you will see a button) as well as the one that is allowed to change seed and difficulty settings (now in the Advanced screen).
Our hope with the Party / Lobby changes is to limit the amount of information that a player is forced to deal with in order to "just play the game", and also prepare for the addition of even more user options in the future.
Technically the lobby now stays alive for the duration of the Party. This means that players who are looking for games will always see any given party that is live in the LAN, Steam Friends, or Steam Public lists. The state of the Party will be displayed as "accepting members", "ready for mission", and "in-mission". It is currently only possible to join a Party that is accepting members (in the pre-mission state).
Character Changes Sadly with this update we had to wipe all local character information, as that format changed a whole lot. For Local Play the logic is still the same, with a party of four characters that is always persistent. With the Basic / Advanced Party changes you can now also see the current rank and stats of your characters prior to the mission. As before, whenever a character dies it is moved to the obituaries list and a new character is spawned in the party to fill the empty slot.
The Network Play parties are created once a network game is started, are stored in the lobby, and persists for the duration of that lobby (remember that lobbies now stay alive between missions).
In LAN mode the lobby is a small server that runs on the machine that started the Party, so in that case the owner of the lobby never changes and the Party itself requires that the creator stays in the Party for the character information / stats to carry over.
In Steam Friends / Public the lobby lives in the Steam backend, and the ownership is able to migrate between players independently of who initially created the Party. This means that the character progression will live as long as ANYONE is left in the lobby / Party.
Both Local and Network play characters, upon death, will be logged in the local obituaries list. This includes ALL characters, so if you played in a network game and someone elses character dies, it will be logged to your local "list of the dead".
In-Mission Networking Changes / Issues The main in-mission networking scheme has not changed in principle for this update, but we have added the ability to run the networking while the game is minimized / in the background without stalling the game for all other players. Note that this means that a network game is always running in the background, and your player is obviously at risk in this state. The game will still pause for everyone when any player is in the escape menu; currently this still looks like a red SYNC / stall situation for other players.
Note that we do not currently have a completely robust solution for players aborting out of the mission. If any player does this, that player is kicked out of the party altogether, all the way back to the networking menu, and the network subsystem will be shut down for that machine. This is to avoid the case where some players in the party are in the mission while others are in the lobby.
The effects of this are kind of broken at the moment and also vary between LAN and Steam; we have seen the game sometimes stall and sometimes even transparently switch to local co-op mode when the network goes down (which is kind of cool but also very disorienting). This is both a logical design issue (what to do with the party in this case?) and a technical one, and we will push a fix for this as soon as possible.
The network protocol has now also been compressed further in order to lower bandwidth requirements.
Player Classes / The Shotgun We have added a very basic "class" concept for players, which allows you to chose what weapon you want to use prior to each mission. The legacy Rifle is still there, and we have added a Shotgun.
The Shotgun evolved from a test of just firing 8 bullets of the usual ammo at once, in a slight spread. We reasoned that if the Shotgun fires the same ammo, it should be reasonably balanced to the Rifle if we simply reduce the rate of fire to 1/8th. The rate of fire for the Rifle has always been associated to the type of ammo that you are currently firing, which is weird but functional. This means that the Shotgun also has varying rates of fire depending on the ammo you currently have.
We think this works just fine. With the addition of some meaty audio, a new HUD model, an adjusted flashlight attachment, a new muzzle flare, and a new targeting reticle, we feel pretty happy with the Shotgun for the moment.
One might argue that the Shotgun is a bad choice in the situations that happen in SBTF due the the slower fire rate versus the constant stream of Space Beasts, but we are kind of reckless at nornware and in any case just had so much fun with the shotgun that it stuck. It adds tension to the game, an axiom that is pretty central in our design, and also it adds player choice and team dynamics that are fun to explore.
We fully intend to continue experimenting with other distinct weapon types in the future.
Music We have been messing around with using the theme from our last video in the menus, and hence there is some of that in the pre-mission and Mission Success screens. This needs some more work, but in general we want to add some more hype to the menus.
Misc
On request, we have mapped the arrow keys to have the same function as WASD.
Leaderboards now display the player class / weapon used to attain the score.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Networked Multiplayer Part 4 : Yet Another Peer-to-Peer Networking Implementation The short version:
Networked play should be smoother with fewer stalls.
The techy version:
We have been doing even more research into various technical options when it comes to the networking code. It turns out that there are MANY permutations of techniques to try. We ran some statistical analysis on them and came up with a non-intuitive approach that looks like it should be a good tradeoff. In theory.
What we are doing is basically trading some input latency for overall smoothness for all players, and prioritizing the reduction of game stalls (which are what happens when the SYNC text turns red). The game is intended to run at the exact same speed as in single player or local co-op, and that is what we are trying to achieve.
In this implementation all players buffer 4 ticks of input, which comes down to a hair under 67 millisconds (4 ticks at 60 hz). Experienced FPS players will probably feel this (as opposed to how local play feels), but we speculate that this is a reasonable tradeoff if it gains us a smoother experience (with fewer stalls) overall for all players.
The previous implementation also buffered a maximum of 4 ticks, but this could vary, with some players having only a single tick buffered while others had more. This, in conjunction with how we were running the simulation, resulted in some severe stalls in certain cases.
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new (very quick) update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Networked Multiplayer Part 3 : Alternate Steam Peer-to-Peer Networking Implementation Today we looked into trying to alleviate some of the slowdown / sync issues that some people are having when playing over the internet. As usual it is hard for us to test this stuff, but our initial cross-Sweden tests look like things may be better with this change to the code.
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Single Player Explicit Seed Leaderboards We have added support for Steam Leaderboards when playing with 1 player and Explicit Mission Seeds. There are as many leaderboards as there are permutations of mission seeds X Rules (Easy, Hard, Random Breaches, etc), and you can view each when browsing explicit mission seeds.
The system stores a single score per user and leaderboard as well as the outcome of the mission (success or failure). A score will be recorded as long as it is higher than your previous attempt, regardless of whether or not you survived the mission.
We have also added support for keyboard input when selecting an Explicit Mission Seed.
Networked Multiplayer Part 2 : Steam Friends / Steam Public We have extended our earlier LAN network implementation to support Steam Lobbies and Peer-to-Peer Networking. The main gain of this system is to allow players to find each other via Steam ID from behind most NATs / routers.
You can now create Steam Friends Teams, which are lobbies that are initially only visible to your Steam Friends. When browsing for Steam Friends Teams you will see any lobby that includes one or more of your friends.
You can also create Steam Public Teams, which are visible to anyone playing the game. Steam Public Teams that include one or more of your Steam Friends will also show up when browing for Steam Friends Teams.
After the game has been launched from the lobby it switches to Steam Peer-to-Peer Networking, which negotiates direct connections between all players in the team and allows them to play the mission together.
Beyond the use of Steam Lobbies and Peer-to-Peer networking, everything else is technically the same as the LAN case. We have done as much testing as possible on our end, but as we have very good internet infrastructure in Sweden we need help from the community to test this functionality "in the wild" in order to determine if it is a solid enough architecture for general internet play.
As networking is still very much a work in progress, there is currently no support for any mission-to-mission carry over. You will have to create lobbies anew for each mission, and all characters are reset for each mission. This will be extended when we have a solid technical base for networking in place.
There is also no explicit support for chat in neither the lobby nor the mission, but the built in Steam Overlay can be used for chatting as usual. We anticipate a smaller need for chat when in mission do to the hectic nature of the game... :)
Misc / Bugfixes
Optimized particle systems to remove particles below the floor plane.
Fixed bug where FOV-intensity slider was not restored upon game restart.
Fixed bug where character progression would break when player is killed by reactor meltdown.
Fixed 3d-scene screen UVs; this should result in an overall higher quality image for the main 3d-scene with less tearing.
Added option to normalize normal maps, resulting in higher quality bump mapping and lighting. This is now enabled by default.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Weapon Model Interpolation The weapon model now interpolates orientation slightly. You can see this effect when you spin around quickly in that your model and flashlight will take tiny amount of time to catch up to your viewing angles. This is simply aesthetic and makes the weapon feel slightly less rigid when turning.
Updated Sentry Visuals The Sentries have been updated to turn off all lights and audio when they are depleted. In addition the text display will change to red to indicate a depleted sentry. Infravision is also updated so that depleted sentries are "cold".
New Player Models / Gender Preferences We are happy to announce the integration of our own design in player / hero models. The new model is significantly more hi-def than the original placeholder and more in line with the graphical style of the game at large.
In a fun / experimental twist we decided to implement texture compositing to allow us to composite custom face textures on top of the base textures for the hero. We have initially added 4 males and 4 females as an experiment, but are anticipating supporting "user faces" in the future. This whole system has been kept as simple as possible and is by design supposed to look a bit goofy; the faces are simply front-projected onto very simple geometry in the player model. Careful observation will reveal that the player model does not have a nose, for example. You can preview all the current player models and textures in the About S.B.T.F. menu.
We use the same face textures to composite player gibs, so players who die will no longer spawn beast gibs. If you look carefully you may well find a dead player face staring back at you from the floor.
This whole compositing idea ties in to our new support for gender preference (available in the options menu). We have tagged all the first names in the system as either male or female, and based on that the system will automatically swap both names and player textures if you express a gender preference. The default is no preference, and will work as before. Currently player textures are generated at mission load time, so changing gender preference in-mission will currently only affect names, not player textures. The next mission loaded will however display the correct textures.
https://youtu.be/bvdRmwYekFk
Work In Progress : Steam Lobbies and Peer-to-Peer Networking In tandem with our work on the new player models we have continued implementation of Steam Lobbies and Peer-to-Peer Networking. The lobby system has been tested and works fine with our architecture, and the next step is to get the actual in-mission networking running. Please note that the current release does not include any new networking functionality, but LAN should work as per the previous update. Again we ask as many players as possible to test LAN functionality if at all possible.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Updated Mission Logs We have added more information to the mission logs (lower left of the HUD) to include Datacore ids in download messages, Sentry ids in activation messages, and Coolant ids in disabled messages. Sentries will now also send messages when they are low on ammo (1/4th of starting ammo) as well as when they are out of ammo.
Sentries now start with more ammo We have changed the starting ammo of Sentries from 250 to 500.
Infravision Toggle Prompt When you have Infravision installed the HUD will now display the key used to toggle that powerup (TAB for keyboard / mouse input, and Y for gamepad input). Datacore emit textures are now fixed in Infravision mode, so you can more easily see that a Datacore has been downloaded without switching out of Infravision.
New Dual Input detection algorithm We found a subtle bug that would cause Dual Input mode (switching between keyboard / mouse and gamepad if there are extra gamepads connected) to not work correctly. Hopefully this will work on all systems; as before the idea is to press any key / button on the device you want to use to activate it.
Improved bullet graphics A real artist (not a programmer) has now worked on the graphics for all bullet types, resulting in a better aesthetic and a better transition between the leading energy ball and the tail effect.
Electronics Systems moved to simulation All the Electronics Systems added in the last update are now part of the simulation as opposed to just being visualization effects. This is partly so they will be replicated correctly in multiplayer, but also has the benefit of allowing actual gameplay effects.
When you lose your Tracker / Map System all motion / proximity warnings are now disabled. This has dire implications for your mobility, as a primary source of Adrenaline in the game is currently the Hero characters reaction to these warnings. As a result you will not be able to outrun Beasts with damage to Tracker / Map.
When you lose your Weapon Display System you will no longer receive audio feedback for being low on ammo.
Seeder, Planner, and Ruler We have restructured all the mission options to reside on the same screen. In local play you now choose number of players as well as Seeder, Planner, and Ruler.
A Seeder is an algorithm that generates a mission seed. Previously we always used a random seed for each mission, but now you have the option to specify an explicit seed yourself. These seeds are 32 bit unsigned integers, and the game now allows you input them as 8 digit hexadecimal numbers; for example DEADFACE, BAADF00D, or 1337FEE7 (cosmically we found DEADFACE to be especially hard). This means that you can replay any mission as many times as you like, as well as share your favorite seeds with your friends.
The Explicit Seeder will now display an ASCII-style preview of the map that the seed will generate, using the currently selected Planner. Use the mousewheel to change the individual digits of the seed and the map preview will update in real time. Note that the Random Seeder will NOT display a map preview, as that would be cheating. The post mission screen will now also show the settings you have just run; number of players, seed (if not random), Planner and Ruler settings.
A Planner is an algorithm that generates a mission (a Plan), possibly taking the specified seed into account. The only available implementation right now is called Crawlers, and is the one that you have all seen before, but have several others in development and expect to make them available soon. Crawlers obviously uses the seed created by the Seeder as input to the mission generation process.
One potentially interesting Planner algorithm that we want to create would be one that relies on user created Plans, which we want to implement an editor for in the game. This would probably be tied to Steam Workshop and Achievements.
A Ruler is an algorithm that generates Rules which are used in-mission to control things like Breach spawns, Beast spawns, and control of the Reactor systems. We have added more permutations now, with Easier, Hard, and the new Insane setting, all with fixed or random Breach positions.
We fully expect to expand the Ruler system with more Rules / game scenarios in the future.
Networked Multiplayer Part 1 : LAN Our current implementation as of today is a peer-to-peer architecture. The reasons for this are both simplicity but also because this automatically (on a technical level) gives us support for replays and save games. It will also potentially be possible to support "continue" functionality, so that you could watch someone elses replay and choose at any point to continue playing the game yourself.
We currently only support LAN. This is because we have not yet started using Steam's stuff for lobbies and NAT-punch thru, which will be required to play over the internet as well as to find and play with your Steam friends. We have limited ability to test as there are only 3 of us at the office, so we want to take this opportunity to have the community help us test the core code. Remember that testing software can only ever prove that said software HAS bugs, not that it HAS NO BUGS, so lots of testing (on more machine configurations than we have ourselves) is required.
The next step will be to implement said Steam lobby and friend support and allow you all to play over the internet with the current peer-to-peer implementation. I highly suspect that the current implementation may not work well in a non-LAN environment, but I'd rather test it than speculate. If it indeed proves to be unsuitable for internet play we will implement a client-server architecture which may or may not be used for both LAN and internet play.
You can now toggle between fullscreen and split screen (team view) in a networked multiplayer game at any time (SPACE or gamepad B). The only current difference between this split screen view and the one you have seen in co-op is that the audio is localized to the local player. We expect to iterate on the multiplayer team view to make something that works a little better (for example picture-in-picture), as we find the current transition from full screen to split-screen to be a little jarring in practice. The view will automatically shift to co-op split-screen (with full audio) if the local player is killed.
There is also a small experimental team status indicator in the mid right of the HUD, showing hostname as well as alive / dead / moving / firing / interaction / adrenaline status for all players.
All of the single player mission options are available in LAN networked mode as well. The only thing that we are currently not supporting is any kind of character progression between missions, as there is more design work to be done there, and we did not want to risk messing with people's hard won local characters in networked games without first thinking all of this through. Rest assured however that we will figure out a satisfying approach to networked character progression in the coming updates.
LAN play is HIGHLY experimental at this stage, and we need all the help we can get to test it. We would like to hear your experiences in the forums, specifically if you are experiencing any problems with games diverging on different players machines, as well as any slowdowns or sync issues.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
Hi everyone! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Level Styles We are working on a number of new level styles, all still in progress (as is pretty much everything in the game), but we wanted to share what we have with you. What we realized was that it was possible to "flip" all the existing level styles and thereby create new looks. This led to more polish and fully unique identities slowly emerging from each style.
3 new work in progress styles are included in this update, with more change to come on those styles, and eventually even more styles. We aim to reach a point where even we aren't exactly sure what style the game is currently running.
"Easier" Mission Mode / No Zero-Breach Missions We have added a new "Easier" Mission Mode which is by no means "easy". It features more infrequent Breach and Beast spawns, effectively taking much longer to saturate the map with enemies. Note however that the Beasts themselves are not changed, so individual encounters are as lethal as they ever where.
Is is furthermore no longer possible to roll a mission without any breaches, regardless of the mission mode.
Alternate Sentry Friendly Fire There has been some contention regarding Sentry friendly fire in the game. This feature came for free when we implemented player vs player friendly fire since bullets are all the same in the game. We initially felt that it was very much in the spirit of the game to make Sentry fire dangerous to the players. Of course, they have always and continue to try to avoid firing when a player is in their field of fire.
With the introduction of the highly experimental game mode option to have Breaches appear randomly in the map we however found that instances of Sentry friendly fire increased and in many instances felt quite unfair. It is technically always the case that the player is to blame, as the only way to get shot is to be mobile within the Sentry field of fire. If you are static and obstructing a Sentry, it will never fire and just angrily beep at you.
The edge cases have always been what happens in the short time the bullet is in flight, as well as the cases where the Beast is between the Sentry and the player. This is clear shot as far as the Sentry is concerned, but there will often be more shots fired than are required to kill the Beast (as bullet damage is random to some extent), and as a result the extra bullets will often kill a player who is in a bad position.
This has been a hard problem to solve, as simply removing this feature seems (to us) to be dumbing down a nice hardcore aspect of this game. We have however come up with an alternative that after initial testing feels like it both increases tension and challenge to the game, as follows.
Sentry bullets will now no longer kill Players. What they will do is cause large changes to view angles on impact. This significantly messes up Player aim. The impact is also accompanied by a blinding flash that completely whites out for view for a short time, further increasing the chance of disorientation.
The big change however is the introduction of Electronics Damage. There are now 5 systems that control various aspects of the player Heads Up display: Flashlight, Text, Visor / Icons, Weapon, and Tracker / Map. When a Sentry bullet strikes a player, in addition to the above noted effects, a random system will become damaged, as follows:
Damage to Flashlight will completely remove the player light. Firing the weapon will still cause muzzle flare lights.
Damage to Text will completely remove all text from the heads up display, including objectives, live battery and ammo counts, as well as distance to objective and motion information.
Damage to Visor / Icons will remove all upgrade icons from the heads up display, including the aiming crosshair. Visor can be disabled as a user option, but if enabled it will be removed with damage to this system.
Damage to Weapon will remove all emissive textures as well as ammunition display from the weapon. Ammo warning audio will also be removed.
Damage to Tracker / Map will completely remove the Tracker / Map.
If a player survives a mission with damage to Electronics these will be restored upon starting the next mission. No upgrades are lost under any circumstances.
We have seen cases where a player with ALL HUD systems destroyed manage to find their way out of a mission with no light, no distance readout, and no aiming crosshair. Anyone who achieves this feat should feel proud indeed, and things like this seem like natural candidates for implementation as Steam Achievements.
Misc Changes We have changed the render order of Pathfinders to be: Airlock, Coolant, Sentry, Data. This fixes the problem of the Airlock icon obscuring the Reactor / Coolant icon.
Work In Progress: Networked / Online Multiplayer The big thing that we have been working on lately is networked / online / "real" multiplayer, as this is both a high priority for the community and for us internally at nornware. This is still a work in progress, and there is nothing related included in this update.
Work In Progress: New player character model All the modelling, texturing, and basic animation work is done on our new Hero / Player character. Sadly we haven't had time to integrate this into the game yet, but will as soon as possible.
Thoughts on Update Frequency In general we think that would like to push out updates roughly weekly. This time two weeks have passed, mainly due to the fact that we have been working on networked multiplayer which still isn't finished. Still, we wanted to put an update out that addresses other things that we have deemed as big deals in the forums. For those of you who are eagerly awaiting networked multiplayer, hopefully these changes will tie you over in the meantime.
thanks for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
