The MH-6J Little Bird is in: a small two seat helicopter with open doorways, its own sounds, a 40 point tank and an ERT beacon to call it. Scopes see further now, and a FOCUS chip hides the HUD while you're scoped. Engineers and sappers can build hedgehogs. PAVN engineers carry a breaching charge that doesn't drop floors, and the EAST AI got a lot smarter about sealed camps, bunkers and roof camps. The client crashing on the first sound is fixed, and LV976's rivers have proper edges. The little bird is an incredible art asset from INFRARED_BARON who has been making fantastic art all the way through. They have been bought on board officially full-time with the studio now to help not only with Gruntz but with some of our other games too. I will be doing a showcase and post to highlight their amazing work soon.
MH-6J Little Bird
- A second helicopter, the MH-6J Little Bird. 2 x 3 cabin, two pilot seats up front and two doorway seats behind, no doors at all so the doorways are open holes you step straight out of. Twice the Huey's forward speed and 1.5 times its sideways and backward speed, so it's the fast one.
- It burns fuel like a small bird. 40 point tank, 1 a minute at idle and 6 a minute at full throttle, so a full tank is about 6.7 minutes of hard flying or 40 minutes of idling. Reserve is a quarter tank.
- Its own sound set from a licensed AH-6 pack: near, mid and far rotor bands, idle, thrust, startup light-off and the lift and touchdown wash. Both helicopters get a tail rotor pair at the boom that winds up with the main rotor and lifts in pitch when you turn. The Huey had this deferred and gets its own tail rotor loops from the UH-1H set now too.
- Blood, soot and oil inside the cabin clip to the painted cabin floor, and anything inside the cabin clips to the cabin outline, so nothing hangs out of the open doorways.
- The pilot ERT beacon is now the UH-1H FLIGHT CREW beacon, and there's an MH-6J FLIGHT CREW beacon beside it with a single pilot.
- Calling a helicopter ERT used to spawn the helicopter over whatever you were standing next to, rock included, and it'd sit there stuck until the pilot flew clear. It now spawns on the nearest clear footprint within 12 tiles of the beacon. Nothing clear within 12 tiles refuses the call with a warning.
- A crashed helicopter now takes every wall beside it with it, every time, and carves its column up through the levels above to the sky.
Scopes
- Scopes used to pan the camera but your sight and the server's view of the world stayed a fixed 16 tiles around you, so facing east or west the far five or six tiles of a scoped view were black or just didn't exist. Sight and the world you receive now lean with the scope all the way to the far corner of the view. Blinded, drunk, visored or short sighted people don't get the lean.
- Every combat scope has a FOCUS ON/OFF chip next to NVG and ZOOM. With it on the HUD drops to the F12 hidden state while the scope is wielded, firing and the chat still work, and it comes back when you unwield or holster.
Gear
- The basic medical optic mounts in the marine helmet pocket like the welding visor and flips up and down from there. The ATM sells the medical optic under MEDICAL and the welding visor under SPECIAL at 250 each.
- Marine helmet pockets take gauze, ointment and the infrared strobe past the Tiny cap, like CM13.
- Getting knocked down can drop the cigarette out of your mouth, lit or not, a coin flip. A lit one keeps burning where it lands and will light oil under it.
- The PMC and CBRN ERT members each carry an emergency autoinjector now.
- The O- blood pack in the ATM showed an empty bag in the roster icon. It shows its fill now.
- Engineers and sappers can build a hedgehog out of ten metal sheets. 800 HP, impassable, no climbing it, and it gives 35 cover so it eats some rounds but never stops them all. A wrench takes 30 seconds to pull it down and gives back five sheets. Xenos bash through it like any barricade, and EAST engineers treat it as a wall to blow.
EAST
- PAVN engineers carry a breaching charge instead of the demolition charge, same satchel art as CM13. It takes out the wall and everything standing near it at full force but spares the floor, so a breach into the bunker doesn't drop the deck. A load-bearing wall going still drops what it was holding up.
- The hidden bunker on LV759 was unbreachable: the inner door is held from inside, the outer door seals the plant side, so the engineers read the inner door as unreachable and cut wire around it forever. A held door they can't reach now chains to the first blocker in front of it, and in a nested camp with pockets inside pockets the job opens on the outermost one so each breach opens the next pocket inward.
- A roof camp whose ladder foot sits in a sealed room below got no job at all, the AI just tried the ladder 144 times. The engineers now walk the ladder chain down to the floor that seals it and breach the room below.
- A sealed camp used to just hand itself to the engineers and no attack group ever came. It now draws a siege group that holds outside the breach at the engineers' stand-off and assaults the camp the moment the charge goes.
- Two demo jobs on LV759 put their stand-off inside the breached bunker, among the marines. A stand-off now keeps at least 6 tiles clear of any living player.
- The engineer supply crate dropped at the first tile of a spawn set 136 tiles away. It now drops hidden near the squad that called it, out of your sight, and only falls back to the authored sets when there's nowhere to hide it.
- Engineer squads were born 200 tiles from their job at a random set. They now come from the nearest set to the job, and a stalled drop re-anchors around the job.
- Engineer airdrops keep 24 tiles from you instead of 10. On LV976 you were killing 18 of 25 engineer squads a median 36 seconds after their drop because they landed in your fire.
- Soldiers digging shrapnel out with their boot knife now wait up to 5 seconds for calm before they start. A knife out when a fight starts gets put away, and a soldier killed with his knife out doesn't leave it lying around for you to pick up.
- Incursion Extraction runs fifteen minutes instead of ten, with the warnings moved to match. The colony's last sparks and fires keep their timing at the end.
Ghosts
- Ghosts get a FLOOR COLLAPSE chip when a floor gives way and an ENEMY SUPPLY DROP chip when the EAST call a crate, both clickable to jump there.
Maps
- LV976's rivers had nonsensical edges after the autoturf pass and the strata floors beside the river were getting a water shore drawn over them. Both cleaned up.
- Wind-swept dunes now sit between the strata mud and the lush grass on LV976, so dunes lap onto mud and the grass laps onto the dunes.
- The jungle wall on LV976 breaks at double a colony wall's health and can be blown with C4 or climbed in 5 seconds like the rock.
- More money hidden on LV759.
Fixes
- The client was shipping without its audio natives, so audio turned itself off at boot and the first gun loop crashed the game. The natives ship again, and a client with no audio plays silent instead of crashing.
- Long settings labels ran under the ON chips in the settings window. The label column is wider.
