This build halves the video memory the game's sprites take and cuts loading time with it, by repacking the sprite atlas from ten pages to five with nothing changing on screen. The Huey gets its sliding cabin doors, door guns you build in an open doorway, rotor downwash that tells you when it is low enough to jump, diagonal flight, a higher top speed and a hotter deck. Lighting and layers get a pass too: blood and soot pools raise under the lamps, every stacked hole shades the layer beneath it, a Huey overhead x-rays as the whole lit vehicle, and explosions and effects now show on every layer you can see down through.
Sprite atlas repack
- Every sprite in the game is now stored on the texture atlas cropped to its actual art instead of its full canvas. Most CM13 frames are mostly empty margin (the 32x32 frames average half blank, the 608x608 Huey sheet used 1.5 pages for about 5 percent real pixels, and 1505 frames were entirely blank), and all of that empty space was being kept in video memory.
- The shipped atlas drops from ten 4096x4096 pages to five. GPU memory for sprites halves, from 640 MB to 320 MB, and the normal-map twins that drive sprite relief halve with it. That is the difference between fitting and not fitting on an 8 GB card with the rest of the frame alive, and laptops on shared memory get the most out of it.
- Loading is faster: boot now decodes, edge-dilates and uploads half as many pages. Download size does not change, the compressed files already squeezed the blank space away; this is a video memory and load time win.
- Nothing should look any different. Every sprite still draws at its original size and position; the crop is applied once in the shaders. If you ever see a stray sliver of a neighbouring sprite on the edge of something, that is a missed site, report it with a screenshot.
Huey
- The cabin doors are real now. Each side slides shut on its own door entities, with closed and interior panels that travel from the open position to seated over the door's open and close time. Click a door from inside or outside the hull to toggle that whole side, including from the ground beside any doorway on that side when the hull is landed. The flight console's DOORS section is one PORT DOOR and one STBD DOOR row.
- A closed door seals the hull edge, not the seat tile: a rider standing in the doorway is never frozen by a closing door, and a door no longer bump-opens when walked into.
- The cockpit glass sees out. With both doors shut the crew still has sight through the front windows, while a closed side door stays blind sideways.
- Door guns. A vehicle weapon mount (1000 at the W-Y ATM) builds in six seconds in any open cabin doorway, snaps outward over the hull edge, and takes an M2 (1500) or an MK19 (3000) as an upgrade. The gunner mans it from inside the cabin, fires outside across a 140 degree arc at 12 tiles, and can attach, swap mags and pack it from the ground. A mounted doorway cannot close its door until the mount is packed, and the pilot gets a toast saying so.
- Rotor downwash. A hull within 20 px of the ground kicks up a dust skirt and a pulsing ring (full strength at 10 px), so riders can tell when the Huey is low enough to jump out. It plays for people on the ground under the hull too.
- Diagonal flight. A pilot holding two movement keys flies the diagonal at the same speed as a straight run, and releasing one key of the chord lets that axis drag to rest. Two pilots each holding one key share the hull exactly as one pilot's chord.
- Top speed up a third, from four to five tiles a second; the run to top speed is longer to match, and the airspeed dial now reads to 200 knots with the redline at 165.
- Full throttle under a loaded hull lights the deck in under two minutes (down from about four), two and a half with a full tank, about ten for an empty hull. The console no longer prints the deck countdown, just EGT RED and DECK FIRE as cautions like the rest. MASTER CAUTION only lights for rows the annunciator actually shows, so the dropped EGT HIGH no longer flashes it.
- A Huey flying above you x-rays as the whole lit vehicle: cabin lighting, riders, cabin fire and nav lights, with the roof opaque so the cabin reads through the open doorways. The old flat scanline silhouette is gone.
- Hovering a door outlines its own panels; hovering the hull outlines the hull alone, and the outline lights for a door hovered from outside the hull.
- An unconscious, hooded or short-sighted rider of an airborne Huey no longer sees the whole map; the sight range applies in the air as it does on the ground.
Rendering
- Blood and soot pools raise under the lamps: every decal bakes a height map and the lighting shades its rim, so a pool under a light reads as a wet surface with an edge. Tunable in the Relief Tuning window.
- Every stacked opening shades the layer beneath it. Looking down two or more holes, each layer casts its own dark rim on the one below; previously only the first hole did. The rim is a true shadow now and never glows blue on a night floor.
- Explosions, bullet impacts and particle effects draw on every layer you can see down through, including from a flying Huey; a grenade going off on the ground below used to be invisible from the air or down a hole.
- Ground effects like the downwash dust draw under a landed hull's cabin instead of over it.
Fixes
- Closed cabin doors and directional windows block fire through their edge only, so a round through an open doorway or a glass edge behaves as the sim says it does.
- Pilot training appears to be lost after leaving the seat for some players; it is not reproduced yet, so both sides now log the refusal. If the seat tells you it needs pilot training after you held it, say so, the logs will name the side.
