• Made some changes to “In The News This Week” to make it sound more energetic. It has different sounds and mixing, and some new guitar parts.
  
• Minor changes to “Rise And Shine”, including minor changes to the mix, and re-recording of a guitar part that had a mistake in.
  
• New SMG firing sound from Deika. The previous sound was made when the SMG was still styled more as a conventional projectile weapon rather than the sci-fi-laser-plasma-zappy-thing it is now. The new sound is more fitting for it's new aesthetics.
  

• In KOTH modes (at least on the dedicated server), next to the score limit there is now a message saying “occupy the KOTH zone to score”. This is a rather inelegant solution to the problem of people not realizing the current game-mode is KOTH.
  
• Also decreased the dedicated server team KOTH score limit to 100 from 120. This is because Team KOTH tends to take longer than normal KOTH.
  

• Dedicated servers now automatically revert to either Pipe or Factory after being unoccupied for more than 10 minutes. This is because Pipe and Factory are reasonably rounded introductions to the game for new players and also work for a range of player counts.
  
• For the launch, I've changed the map voting pool so that there are now more official maps than community maps. I will most likely change this back a while after the launch. I just wanted to make it more likely that new player's introduction to the game is an official map and that confusion caused by the maps not looking like they do on the store page is reduced.
  
• There's some more cover objects, and some floating rocks in Laboratory. From testing, it felt a bit empty before.
  

• Bots still seemed to somehow end up spawning in unsupported maps. I've spent a long time looking for the cause of this and I am certain that it's impossible. Due to reality's refusal to conform to the possible, I have been forced to just add some extra code that manually checks for and de-spawns bots in unsupported maps.
  

• There's an amazing new map from DarkGuy1001, the creator of the map “Prota”. The new map is called “SelfTendedArchive” and seems to be themed around a kind of archive that's fallen into a considerable state of disrepair. I absolutely love this map, it's super inventive and it looks great too, so I think it's very fitting as what will almost certainly be the last user-made map before the launch.
  

• I've set most of the SMG's particle effects to be hidden when Effects Quality is set to Low. I think the complexity of the particle system might have been the cause of framerate drops on very low-end PCs. This needs testing though.
  

• The tutorial now features a grapple beam weaponizer pickup, along with an explanation of it's function.
  

• The tutorial now has a chilled out (ambient?) music track.
  

• Reworked particle effects for the shotgun.
  

• In the pre-match phase, bots will now change team in order to try and balance the teams. This should also “fix” an issue where the initial bot team allocation seemed to create unbalanced teams.
  
• Stopped bots spawning on dedicated servers in any post-match phase. I think this might fix an issue where bots invariably managed to travel over to unsupported maps or game-modes.
  
• Added collision to Spaceball ceiling-light models, which seemed to be lacking it. Not sure if that's new or if it's always been the case and I never noticed...
  

• The resolution scale text box now permits the entry of values over 100%. The slider still goes from 25 to 100 though, as setting the value over 100 will not be a common use case. This option was suggested to me by the Steam user Cheezitupp as an alternative to the anti-aliasing options which, while quite efficient, do produce some artifacts. Setting the resolution scale above the resolution of your screen will have a similar effect to anti-aliasing, but with none of the artifacts. The downside is that the performance cost will be disproportionate for anyone who hasn't already got a needlessly powerful GPU. If you have got an overpowered GPU and plenty of frames to spare then you will probably find this to be an improvement over the anti-aliasing options available at the moment.
  

• As I will presumably be saying in every update from now on, I hope to have fixed the issue where team colours intermittently persist after map changes to a non-team mode, but it needs to be tested. Last update's fix for this evidently didn't work...
  
• Added a delay in spawning bots after a map change on a dedicated server. I'm not sure, but I'm hoping this might fix the issue with bots spawning in unsupported maps. There have been some very strange issues that occur only after map changes lately so my working theory is that there can be some strange conditions immediately after that could throw some assumptions off.
  
• Changed skybox in “Space”, as I believe it was another cause of memory issues due to it's obscene size.
  

• Since it hardly features in any maps now, and was all-but impossible to get kills with, the homergun achievements are no more. I profoundly regret the inclusion of these achievements in the first place, which have tragically driven many achievement-hunters to insanity. I would also like to recognise the almost-implausible persistence of TheSodaCow in being the only user I'm aware of actually having got all of the homergun achievements (and, indeed, all of the achievements). Let me know in the comments if you also managed to achieve the impossible.
  

• Made the lights in Laboratory less costly on performance.
  
• The fire particle effects in the map Temple are now removed when Effects Quality is set to low.
  
• I don't normally edit user made maps, but while I was at it, I just changed the lighting type in BlueIsTrue's “Orientation” to make it perform better. It will hardly look different and won't play differently at all, but should hopefully run substantially better for people with lower end PCs now, who had previously reported this particular map running a lot slower than others.
  

• There have been various intermittent issues with the player colours lately. This is not confirmed yet, but I'm hoping at least some of these should be fixed after deleting some definitely dodgy code.
  
• It's come to my attention that people who had modified their weapon hotkeys might have found that neither they, nor the default keys worked after the last update, following a change to the controls config format. I've now added a system that will convert your old settings to the new format.
  
• Similarly, people who had modified any controls at all found that the open-in-game-menu control didn't work at all anymore. I've made sure that in this case, ESC is always added as a default menu binding, as it cannot be set to anything else anyway, due to being used to cancel the current keybind recording in the edit controls menu.
  
• On another similar note, some people have reported that following the addition of the disable-HUD setting, their HUDs were disabled by default. I couldn't think of an ideal solution to this, so I've just automatically set the HUD to enabled whenever you open the main menu. This might be annoying if you really want it to be saved to off, but that seems like much less of a risk to me than, for example, a lot of early access players picking up the game again at the full launch and taking the missing HUD to be a bug.
  
• A few updates ago I listed a change that let the server change maps to Pipe after being unoccupied for too long. Turns out this didn't work due to a stupid typo. It should work now, although I'm considering changing this functionality to use a rotation of the official maps that are more flexible in terms of player numbers.
  

Changes

• A brand new and improved tutorial! This is largely Max's work. It should be a better experience to the old tutorial, although it doesn't go into as much depth. It should provide new players with enough information to quickly grasp enough of the mechanics to join games and start having fun though. I would like to add “Advanced” tutorials in future, but that will most likely not be before launch.
  
• You can now grapple “dead” players.
  
• The open-in-game-menu controls are now rebind-able in the edit controls menu.
  
• Increased the level of the default graphics settings to a medium level of detail. This means that people with lower end PCs will probably have to turn down the graphics settings as soon as they run the game for the first time. The next addition will hopefully encourage them to do so.
  
• There is now a message that displays in the main menu when you haven't set any graphics options yet.
  

• Laboratory is now about half the size as it was before. It also now has basic AI support, although the bots won't be particularly good at making full use of the cylindrical sections yet.
  

• The melee kick now does less damage at lower speeds and more damage at high speeds. In other words, speed now has a bigger impact on it's effectiveness. As another result of this, the kick can now kill in one hit for an extremely high speed difference to the target. I usually avoid one-hit-kill things, but I'm making an exception for particularly epic kicks here.
  

• Temple has a new skybox.
  

• New soundtrack piece “Hypermassive Rotating Object”. I was initially very pleased with this one, but I'm now not sure if it fits into the game very well. I also tried a bit of a musical experiment for the second half of this piece of music. I've got a feeling it's going to come across as some kind of mistake though. Well let me know what you think of this one if it comes up anyway.
  

• If you've changed the weapon hotkeys from the defaults I'm afraid I might have invalidated those particular settings, so you may have to set them again. I'm going to try to avoid these kind of shenanigans after Early Access
  

• Added a brute-force fix for the pre-match timer being occasionally inaccurate for clients.
  
• Added a similarly brutish fix for a highly intermittent issue I've observed whereby you are still on red or blue team after a dedicated server map change to a non-team mode from a team one.
  
• Eliminated the cause of a memory spike that I believe was still occasionally causing a crash on the dedicated server when changing maps to Temple.
  

Changes

• In team modes, automatic victory is now granted if there are no more players on the other team.
  

• There is a new official map, Laboratory, made by Ex3m. The map may not be entirely finished, and does not yet support bots, but should otherwise be in a playable state.
  

• Avatar armour now has glowing sections irrespective of colour options. The 2nd colour on the suit no longer glows for bright colours or during team modes. Also, the new glowing armor turns off when “dead”, as it wasn't that easy to tell before.
  
• Improved grapple beam appearance.
  

• AI now supports King of the Hill and Team King of the Hill! Unfortunately I doubt I'll have time to add support for the ball-based game modes before launch, as that could be a lot more complicated.
  
• Bots are now removed before a map change on a dedicated server. New bots will spawn after the map change, if appropriate. This will result in the bot types changing more often, and also prevents a few possible issues.
  
• Bots now consider finding weapons more desirable if they have less ammo across all their weapons. Previously, they would only consider the desirability of each weapon in isolation.
  

• In the map vote selection, each option now has an indicator as to whether bots are supported.
  
• There are now links in the main menu to the official Zero G Arena Discord server and Twitter account.
  
• A lot of the HUD messages now have grey backgrounds.
  

• Music:
  
  
  
  • New piece: “In The News This Week”
    
  • New piece: “Every Time”, which you might recognise as being a slightly refined version of the piece used in ZGA's very first trailer.
    
  
  
• There are now sound effects that play when you score a hit (for you only). These were made by Deika, as usual.
  

• Wall panels now have thicker collision geometry. Hopefully reducing the chance of the ragdolls getting stuck in them even further.
  

• (Unconfirmed) Last week I observed an issue where my avatar still had team colours after changing from a team mode to a non-team mode on the dedicated server. I might have fixed this, but it's hard to be sure as the issue was clearly very intermittent. Let me know if you see this again.
  

• As a side effect of something else I was working on, your health and defence now no longer go into negatives if the damage dealt exceeded your remaining health.
  

• The stationary kicking-practice-bots have found their way back to the tutorial. Why on Earth would they want to leave?
  
• The server list menu now has a sane layout again. For that matter, this is probably the sanest it's ever been. For some reason it was such an insufferable faff just getting the headings to line up with the info that I considered just claiming the bizarre text discrepancies of the update 41 menu as part of my artistic vision.
  
• I've regenerated the AI navigation data for the map Inception, as I believe it was out-of-date and causing the bots to get stuck in the round room.
  
• I think the problem with global stats not showing that I mentioned in the update 41 patch notes may just have been some temporary hitch with the Steam servers, as it seems to have resolved itself.
  

• There will now be 3 bots on a dedicated server for a lone human player.