Big one for the network. The weird bug of "everyone hitching at the same moment" in a busy fight turned out to be the server making the gap itself, and the two causes behind most of it are fixed. The server also sends less data for every mob on your screen. The jungle got a lot of work: plants slow you down and rustle, you can cut them with a knife or machete, trees sway and fall over, and tall grass burns to scorched grass. Walls take sunlight on the side facing the sun, dense smoke hides you from AI, and ERT teams without their own vehicle can deploy into a helicopter.
Netcode
- The weird network bug of "everyone hitching at the same moment" is the big one. Dozens of times a round, 25 to 36 of you would ask the server to resend the same patch of map in the same instant, with nothing lost on anyone's connection. In one round we logged six of those in 70 seconds. Each person gets a full snapshot of that area back, 83 to 151KB landing inside one second, and on a weaker link that is the hitch you feel.
- 84 of the 121 we logged in one round came from somebody picking up, stashing, stripping or loading an item across the edge between two map chunks. Anyone watching only the far chunk got told about an item they had never heard of, threw the message away and asked for the whole area again. The server sends a "left here, arrived there" pair for that instead.
- Most of the rest was anything that did something in the same tick it was born. An EAST soldier shouldering his rifle as he spawned was the worst, hitting 30 people at a time, then structures changing as they were built and the elevator arriving. The news was going out ahead of the thing it was about.
- In our 2500 zombie soak test the watching clients went from 35 thrown away messages a run to none, with zero ghost entities left behind.
- A zombie spawning cost 86 bytes and 17 of those were things your client can work out from what kind of zombie it is. Spawn messages are 19.6 percent smaller, a mob walking into your view is 17 percent smaller, and full area snapshots are 18.9 percent smaller before compression, 5.8 percent off what goes down the wire.
- Burning mobs were 11.8 percent of all event traffic in that soak because every count up and down of the fire got sent. The server only sends it when the fire changes level. That traffic went from 507,537 bytes to 193,977, a 62 percent cut. Your own BURNING count is still exact.
- When a resent snapshot arrived behind newer news, your client threw away everything it said about the ground if even one tile had changed since. A blown out wall or a changed floor you missed stayed wrong for the rest of the round. It takes the snapshot tile by tile and keeps only what it has fresher news about.
- Something destroyed inside a locker, crate or morgue tray in the next chunk over stayed in there forever on your screen. The removal goes to the chunk the container sits in.
- On a slow link your client asked for a resend again while the first one was still on its way and got a second whole snapshot behind it. The server drops the repeat.
- For scale, the rounds before this build had the server holding 20 ticks a second with 86 people and 14,000 mobs. Most of you have a clean link. The trouble is about 7 percent of connections, nearly all over 120ms ping, and those are the links a resend burst hurts. The soak numbers are from the test rig, I'll post the live ones once this build has run a few rounds.
Jungle
- Plants slow you down and rustle as you push through them. Each plant has its own speed cut and its own sounds from Chaz, with a bed that plays while you wade through the thick stuff. Coastal grass does nothing. The ENTANGLED chip goes yellow for a plant that only slows you and tells you which blade cuts it. Wire stays red.
- Cut plants with a blade. Harm click with a knife, bayonet or machete in your active hand. A machete takes most plants in one swing where a knife takes three, and knife and machete hits add up on the same plant. Cut plants leave trimmings behind instead of vanishing.
- Palms, pandanus and banana trees fall to a stump from bullets, explosions or fire. Punching and cutting them does nothing. Fly a helicopter into one low and it goes over and your hull takes the knock, same as a lamp post.
- Trees and bushes sway with the wind, harder when the weather picks up. That's the palms, pandanus, banana, the living ashrose and joshua trees, jungle bushes, elephant ears and hibiscus.
- Tall grass burns down to scorched grass instead of bare ground, and the other plants leave ash. Scorched grass gives no cover and won't burn again.
- Tall grass draws thin bands, lone tufts and dead ends as their own shapes instead of the full tuft. LV976's tall grass was swapped over to it.
Lighting
- Walls take sunlight on the faces pointing at the sun. Tops and the sides facing away stay in shadow. It covers every smoothed wall, framed windows, airlocks and pod doors.
- The shockwave ripple on an explosion ends where the blast and concussion end. HEDP was rippling out to 8 tiles over a blast that reaches 5.6, and C4 stopped at 9 while it knocks you out to 11.
Sound
- Nearby ambience blends in under the one you're standing in, up to three at once, so you hear the river before you're in it and crossing between areas doesn't dip and restart. Rivers carry 6 tiles and streams 4. Room tone stays inside its room. The LV759 street, cave mouths, the LV376 caves and the sewers are heard a couple of tiles before you step in.
- River and stream ambience recorded for LV976.
- The M60 takes Chaz's second pass of recordings.
Smoke
- Standing in dense smoke, no AI can see you. Any distance, any layer, the same tile, and your muzzle flash stays hidden. Noise still draws them in, and anything you hit from inside the smoke comes for you, zombies and a hunting Old One included.
- The close range sense that let a rifleman find you inside a cloud at 2 tiles and a xeno at 8 to 10 is blind in dense smoke, whether it's you or them standing in it.
- Wild shots into smoke miss the way aimed ones do. Only the person being aimed at was getting the smoke cover before.
- The HIDDEN chip has a green smoke state that spells all of this out while you're in it.
ERT
- PMC and CBRN teams, the ones that don't bring their own vehicle, can deploy into a helicopter that's already in the air. Hit DEPLOY on the briefing and you get the same chooser a late joiner gets. With no helicopter up you parachute in as before.
- The ERT offer popup closes when you stop being eligible. If you spawned in, got revived or were queued for a respawn it sat over your game for the rest of the vote and you couldn't dismiss it.
Medical
- The HealthMate HUD switches off and on. ALT click it in the eyes slot, Toggle in the slot menu, or Z with it in hand.
- The surgical line stitches the brute damage first and closes the skin on the next click, because if you're holding the line you're trying to close the wound. A vein that needs fixing still comes first.
Other
- The arrow from pointing at someone follows them as they move, as long as you can see them.
- Explosive pouch added to the ATM for 100.
Fixes
- Firing the helicopter's pilot guns in the first moments after liftoff crashed the game for everyone who saw the shot.
- The health bar, typing bubble, chat text and busy wheel trailed behind someone you were dragging or carrying. They ride with the sprite.
- Incursion on LV759 had thirteen EAST squads parked on a roof whose only ladder down was sealed inside the landing zone tower, and the commander kept dropping more on top of them. Squads walled off from a roof's ladder step off the edge.
Maps
- LV976 got a lot more flora with the new jungle plants, LV376 got new vegetation, and LV759 got small tweaks.
- BR135 keeps getting built out with its river, more areas and more detailing. Still not in game.
