Hello everyone, it is now time for the Dangerous Rays Alpha 15 update release !
August has been a quite busy month for us with the launch and the success of our Steam Greenlight campaign and the fact that i took one week of holidays. That's why this Alpha 15 update is not as big as expected and why we delayed some features. Anyway there still some interesting things to see.
First i have made a completely new sound engine, based on FMOD technology this new sound engine brings some very cool features like a proper support of 5.1 and 7.1 speaker systems, improved hardware compatibility, faster processing time and a lot of other various improvements. This should improve the game experience a lot in the future when more sound will be added in the game.
A new AI navigation system have been added, this system is faster and support "crowds" so NPC are able to stay in groups and avoid each other. We are planning to increase the zombies density as soon as the navigation will be cleaned up. Be aware that the system is in prototype state at the moment and you can expect some navigation bugs from time to time, especially if you are loading a saved zone. I am working on those remaining issues. Once this navigation system will be clean enough it will be used to add the first animals in the game and then some new monsters / mutants.
3 new guns have been added by Mxthe and he also changed most of gun fire and reloading sounds. Don't forget that you can use "actor_spawn" console command if you want to test guns and other items quickly. 2K9CON have made a nice list of spawnable objects and a quick tutorial to show you how to spawn objects at viewtopic.php?f=5&t=291.
Other than that you may find some various small improvements in different areas of the game and a nice batch of bug fixes.
At least two updates should be released in September because we can get back to work properly now after this crazy month. We will update our Roadmap very soon.
You should receive this update very soon in your mailbox. Have fun and thank you for your support. 
[NEW]
- New sound engine
- 5.1 speaker system support
- 7.1 speaker system support
- Added .mp3 file format support in sound engine
- Added .wma file format support in sound engine
- New AI navigation system (prototype state, expect some issue within the first weeks)
- Added crowd support in AI navigation system
- New weapon: Glock22
- New weapon: M11
- New weapon: P226
- New reloading sound for most guns
- Added copy/paste support in the console
- Added sounds when switching a flashlight on or off
- Added new sound when eating food can
[CHANGED / OPTIMIZED / IMPROVED]
- Improved sound engine 3D spatialization
- Improved sound engine performances
- Reduced sound engine memory footprint
- Reduced sounds loading time (~300% speed improvement)
- Improved AI navigation performance
- Improved AI navigation efficiency
- Improved AI navmesh building performance
- Increased player movements speed
- Improved guns recoil feeling at low framerate
- Improved terrain rendering
- Improved sky atmosphere simulation
- Improved grass plants generation algorithm
- Reduced objects memory usage
- Optimized objects spawn time
- Reduced player view punch amplitude when melee weapon hit something
- Increased pine leaves green color channel intensity
- Tweaked footsteps sound volume and pitch according to the player speed
- Tweaked grass density
- Improved terrain satellite texture procedural generation
- Reduced plants and bushes "popup" effect
- Renamed "Global volume" audio setting to "Effects volume"
- Various small changes and optimizations
[FIXED]
- Fixed numerous AI navmesh generation related issues
- Fixed zombies stucked at buildings corners issue
- Fixed low volume sound issues
- Fixed sound engine hardware compatibility issues
- Fixed FPS drop when mounting ladders
- Fixed water surfaces bright color bug
- Fixed player not able to move on terrain slopes when crouched and proned
- Fixed pink tint of red colors
- Fixed memory leak related to gun fire
- Fixed wrong bullet penetration for "fabric" type surfaces
- Fixed wrong reload sound 3D spatialization when moving while reloading a gun
- Fixed "PhysX: invalid operation (PxScene::removeActor(): Actor not assigned to scene or assigned to another scene. Call will be ignored!)" error
- Fixed uppercase XML elements not recognized correctly in localization files
- Fixed potential issues in the XML file parsing system
- Fixed torchlight not responding to "Turn On" and "Turn Off" player action (Dangerousrays.com)
- Fixed "$objectname_gascan01" wrong localization issue (Dangerousrays.com)
- Fixed invisible objects in forests issue
- Fixed roadblocks wrong meshes rotation issue (Dangerousrays.com)
- Various small bug fixes
