Tunguska: The Visitation
New Ghoul Variants and Performance Optimization
While chugging away at DLC development, I have decided to add a couple of variants for the notorious Scythe mutants in the BASE GAME to make them more interesting! First is a variant that throws blades at you, which are very deadly due to high bleeding. You'll first see them in Station 11. Then, I added armor to Scythes in higher-level map areas such as Lake Cheko (occasionally) and Ashinaka Forest. Make sure to load up some armor piercing rounds when you see them!
I also received reports that the ghouls will sometimes have difficulty with pathfinding, and just stays in one place for a few seconds while playing the running animation. I was able to reproduce this, but it seems to be an issue with Unity's navmesh pathfinding - sometimes it just can't find a path to reach you in areas with a lot of obstacles. While troubleshooting this issue, I first added some code to detect "pathfinding difficulty" moments, and when that happens I just tell the agent to go to a random spot within one meter and then proceed with pathfinding to reach player. This helped a bit, and then I increased the frequency of updating each agent's pathfinding when there are a lot of them around. While this is also helpful, it revealed an optimization issue - there are too many and too often calls to find certain game objects in the map, which is a slow process.
After optimizing the code, I was able to achieve some noticeable increase in performance. I have also hidden gameobjects that are in the same map but on a different level, to further reduce draw calls. I hope this change brings some improvement in performance for folks with older PCs.
One last thing - I received feedback (well, have been for a long time lol) that throwing grenade was difficult because the trajectory was unpredictable. To address this, I have added trajectory - just pull out the grenade (press 3), hold the Right Mouse Button and you'll see the yellow line showing you where the grenade will land. If you are careful enough, you can even line up the yellow line with a window to toss the nade into the building from outside. The grenade will follow the exact path and land at the exact place where the yellow line hits the ground. Hope you have fun with it :) Also, don't forget to use the Left Mouse Button to roll grenade. There's no trajectory for this because it's all about rolling the grenade on the ground. This is most useful when dealing with doorways.
1.43-1 Patch Notes
- To address future save game corruption, now whenever you save a game, a copy of the savegame.dat (with timestamp in the filename) will be saved in the /backup/ folder of your save game directory. These save files will be removed whenever you start a new game.
- Fixed various small errors around maps.
- Slightly adjusted camera angle so you can see a little bit further.
- Made sure dead NPCs will occasionally drop batteries.
New Gear Slot, Battery System, Character Movement, Stealth Enhancement!
Before I begin, I just wanted to give a shoutout to all the Ghoul Hunters who have been supporting me :) Your feedback is what drives me to continue improving this game, and keeps me motivated and dedicated day after day :) I get many of these improvement ideas from Steam reviews - so if you haven't yet reviewed the game, please feel free to drop a few lines and tell folks about your experience with the game, and tell me how you would like the game to change or improve. This will be a great help for me :)
One major change I added in this 1.43 update is to accommodate folks with motion sickness. By default, the camera will pan (move) around with your cursor. This camera movement was necessary because you often engage in long range firefights with NPC, so you would need to see further away. Many top-down games don't feature this because either they have mostly melee enemies, or the firefights are limited to short ranges (such as in-doors), so I can imagine many people aren't used to this kind of camera movement. After hearing about these challenges in the reviews, I decided to add a "fixed camera" mode where you get a very broad field of view and there would be no need for camera panning. The downside is that the characters and objects appear much smaller. To help with this, I added the ability to zoom in and out by holding (by default) Left-CTRL while scrolling with mouse wheel. You can also simply press Z to quickly switch to a close-up view.
I hope this change can make the game more accessible!
Here are some other changes introduced in this update:
- Added another slot for the protagonist's inventory: Head Gear. Now you have two slots for the head: helmet (including gas mask) and head gear including flashlights, NVG (from DLC), and other technologies worn on the head.
- Added a "mining headlamp" item which will be your default flashlight, so you'll have to wear it in order to turn on flashlight.
- Added battery item. Batteries will now be required for all electronic devices including headlamps and detectors. Battery level on the headlamps will affect their brightness. To insert battery to a device, first equip it on the body, and then drop a battery onto them. You can also remove battery by right-clicking a device. Batteries are pretty rare in the Zone, so you should conserve them as much as possible. You can find batteries sold by traders and NPCs.
- Improved protagonist's movement. There have been some issues with the protagonist movement animations such as continue to run while not moving, and this update should fix them.
- Now you can break doors with crowbar and wood axe! The best way to do that is to hold the weapon, stand near the door, and right-click to hit the door.
- When you equip and pull out the Ambient Detector, now in addition to the gauge that tells you how far away you can be seen by enemies, you will also see a faint blue hexagon around your character that keeps rotating. The idea is simple: if any enemy is within the blue region, he can see you. This should help with stealth and make the Ambient Detector more useful.
- Fixed a bug where the Groza's muzzle smoke is misplaced.
- Fixed a bug where when a NPC walks through an open door, he tries to go back and forth towards the door endlessly.
- Rebalanced weapon damages.
- Added a few changes to Russian translation.
As usual, if you notice any problems caused by this update, please let me know in the Steam Community forum :)
Thank you!
P.S. DLC Update: I'm hoping to have it done by March 21. It's still a tight stretch because I spend a lot of time fixing/improving the base game. But I have almost all of the new features for DLC coded, just need to work on farming system, add a couple more characters, and then fill out the map with objects. Stay tuned :)
AI Bug Fixes
- When crouching very close to a hostile NPC he doesn't see you
- When you attack an NPC, his teammates don't come rush to his help
- NPCs lose interest in their enemies too quickly
- NPC investigates disturbance too quickly, not giving you enough time to sneak by
Also made it so that when a NPC is on high alert (like when he knows your presence and walking around looking for you), if you are very close (< 2m) to him he will see you even when you are behind him. This is to eliminate the situations where you can just camp behind a door and cheese everyone coming through. This only applies to high alert NPCs. If he's just chilling or on guard duty, he won't see you when you are behind him.
1.42-5 Bug Fixes
- Added a journal entry for Boris to avoid confusion with tasks
- Fixed a bug where the character stats from old save games get overwritten by new saves