A month spent polishing and refining, working out and eliminating redundancies and kinks. Also, I may be moving soon, though it'll have minimal impact on our work schedule.
- First person hands expanded and polished. New animations exist for smaller tasks, including some with a bit of variety. Player hands now also only appear in animations if the according limb has 20% or more health. No, you won't be taking your broken left arm into your large-strided jogging routine.
- Abilities system saw a lot of fine-tuning and polishing. It kills me every time I have to mention this because it is so frequently under lock and key, but I think I can say a few sub-points without giving anything away.
* A lot of looking around was done with tiers, function, and redundancy. One ability got the boot entirely in exchange for a re-worked concept. This re-worked concept then was dubbed lower tier in the tree and swapped places with another. Seeing how trees all share fairly common themes such as offense, defense, or utility, this is hardly saying much.
* "On-Cast" Abilities now have more sound effects, rebalanced usage, and some now interact with the player hands while empty-handed. While empty hands aren't mandatory for usage, it's a fun way to add more immersion to the ability-usage system, once again focusing on bringing life to the canvas.
* "On-Cast" Abilities now use queuing instead of just "bam. activated". Some cast at different rates, including some that are still instant, but overall this adds a little more sensibility to not just spamming as fast as you can push your F5 key, and adds immersion yet again.
- 12G Compact shotgun now has an alternate firing mode. Previously it didn't even have the "default" safety-on/safety-off setup, but now is the only weapon in game to feature "slam-fire" setting. Slam-firing the super stubby will wear out its parts quicker, but in addition to being able to just hold down the trigger for easy firing, it also slightly increases the maximum rate of fire. For a small and low-capacity skirmish shotgun, this is a great "panic button" and its doubled effects on wear-and-tear are hardly of issue simply because shotguns are the 2nd most condition efficient family of weapons in-game, next to low-capacity precision rifles.
- RevBow is now a thing. This could've been tagged onto the last pre-update, but for whatever reason it was chosen not to be. Everything you need to know about the RevBow:
* 5-shot capacity, relatively fast-firing weapon. It is classified as low-tech and has very low noise-output, and sports a considerable array of choices for munitions. It has a medium-long reload period and is emptied fairly quickly, but has very considerable stopping power per shot and per second.
* Slight firing offset, making it the first weapon that doesn't fire where you point the cursor. This was done along the lines of A. darts coming from the center of the screen looking like garbage and B. that it is fired not in or between hands, but from under the wrist. Holding one's wrist over the face isn't always super-convenient, so its left with a slight offset. With a bit of practice, it's easy enough to compensate off the top of your head.
* It is highly flexible, assuming stealth, assault, and various other tactical roles at once. It has both accuracy boosting and penalizing effects in its ammo pool and can be Vs light, Vs heavy, and Pro-stealth depending on what munitions its loaded with.
* Revbow was BOMBARDED with nerfing after the video demonstration. Darts that shatter on "heavy armor" targets now inflict 2/3 their base damage when doing so, mostly in response to tranquilizer's super potency. Damage decreased. Twice. Ammo on crafting/purchase modified slightly. Accuracy nerfed slightly.
* This is a funny one, and was rather unintentional. Standard-Effect RevBow rounds are composed of 2/3 small-quantity steel and 1/3 plastic, and combat knives of standard quality are composed of 3/4 small-quantity steel and 1/4 plastic. What this means is that a bit of "wrap-around" has occured with the crafting system, and you can turn perhaps the most common piece of equipment into a considerable amount of RevBow ammo. Low Tech weapons, go figure.
- Debugging and play-testing all around. Shop system now updates if a new day transpires during browsing, and some other similar tweaks.
- Lots of other fine-tuning and tweaking, such as cleaning up potential weapon system bugs.
We may end up throwing more on this list as it IS a pre-update, but the schedule for the next couple of weeks is gonna be pretty complicated.
Little Edits:
-Fixed a 2 persistent bugs in persona screens. One being able to re-open the window when it's already open (button not being greyed out properly) and the other being that pickups that had themselves dropped did not update the inventory tile's information, while using them DID.
-Fixed a few accessed nones about gauging quest status. Damage control on accessed nones has been ongoing but extremely successful. All currently existent accessed nones in a vanilla testing environment are based on incompatibilities with things such as cameras and turrets, and how they search for the older aug system. All part of Hatchet's clean and professional delivery that we strive towards.
-TrenchKat's weight has been increased from 2 pounds to 3. The original design was for a heavier duty 2 pound knife, but the blade of the knife ended up much meatier than originally imagined, but stuck assuming that A. a jury rigged knife is desired to be meaty for a higher durability and B. that the blade eventually reaches the desired point anyways. As meaty knife is now canon, so is its accordingly increased weight.
-Additional sound works, yet again. All but 2 on-cast abilities now have sound effects on use.
-Bug and quirk fixing, yet again.
-Fixed a bug with super stubby shotgun not spawning casings on slam-fire mode. Very sneaky.
-Code slightly cleaned up in some areas to accommodate for improved function.
-Selling an item with copies left in its stack now re-selects the item immediately after resetting the listing in a trade menu. This helps with pawning off excessive "stock" ammunition and large stacks of pickups deemed excessive.
-Medkit weight dropped from 2.5 to 2.0 pounds exactly. Encumbrance system doesn't like having decimals and parsing whether or not to use them, so keep the weight nice and integer based.
-Melee weapons now lose up to 40% of base damage depending on their condition level. This is to simulate Dulling or Damage to their components. Blunt weapons lose up to 20%, which currently includes nonlethal modes on RevKat/TrenchKat and any form of hit dealt by the P.A.S.
-Modified the way NPCs receive ammo count, so they have a balanced, practicable amount of ammo. Per ammo this is unique, so we can differentiate between X mags of handguns Y mags of rifle, and Z count of grenade shells, as a wild example.
-Modified the way weapons produce a percentage for condition. Previously, they would get an overall average of all their components' current vs max conditions, and output a universal percentage. To indicate breakage, they would register condition as 0% upon a part's expiration. This obviously produces a sharp gap when 175 condition part expires but 225 condition parts still have 50 left, that 1 vs 51 prior would be something odd like 11-13%, then BAM, 0%. ANYWAYS, parts now are iterated for the lowest current condition, as that represents the REAL expiration rate, more often then not. It iterates this lone, puniest part vs its max and outputs that as its percentage. This now produces a quicker transitioning percentage that is more accurate, so the 11-13% or so gap never occurs, and you're aware of incoming doom just a little bit more... as if guns jamming up didn't already, lol. This was much needed for a very, very long time, and we're amazed it took so long to get around to it.
BIG EDITS:
-Completed persona edition of quests tracking screen.
-Fixed an issue related to giving players XP on kill. Most of the time this was not an issue, but it became apparent that those kills or knockouts acquired through incendiary (which, is kind of a cheap kill method if you consider incendiary bullets) and kills/knockouts dealt by abilities (with an offense tree this isn't too surprising to say exists) never yielded XP, possibly in addition to some other cases. A quick fix implemented now checks over data related to kills and who hit who with X, and resolves the issue cleanly.
-Player encumbrance limit lowered to 150 from 200. Previously it was even at 250 or 300 in very early development, but the good news is we've shied away from too many options, meaning a play style can be better defined by limited inventory choices.
-Added 5 new "utility" items. These allow for mid-action repair of items, although at a horribly inflated cost. All of which are also non-craftable, meaning shop or loot only!
*Industrial glue. Repairs any weapons with 0 condition "broken" parts back up to 1 condition, meaning part replacement is no longer necessary. Non-applicable to melee weapons, as they shatter into loose parts on expiration. 1% condition still needs additional attention for costly repairs.
*Duct Tape and Forging Hammer. Duct tape repairs any gun below 66% condition and above 0% by 10-15%, depending on crafting skill. Forging hammer does the same to melee weapons.
*Cleaning Kit and Whetstone. Cleaning Kit repairs any gun above 66% condition and below 100% by 12-18%, depending on crafting skill. Whetstone does the same to melee weapons. Both are several times cheaper than duct tape or forging hammers as they are for minor damage.
-All 5 Utilities are now fully functional (Including giving a mild crafting skill increase on use) and have icons/meshes. That's a good way to dust off half a day, if you ask me.
-Reticule was almost completely redone. It has a new circular center, milder "wings" off its 4 shoots, and has modified function. Neutral faction entities now appear as yellow under the crosshair (and they are very, very, rare speaking of which. Fun fact on that.) and as HUGE news: The reticule will no longer recolor for friendly, neutral, and hostile colors if either A. Current lighting level is very dark (no psychically detecting amongst pitch black, guys!) or B. the target is at incredibly long distance. This long distancing is relative to current FOV, meaning scopes and the like allow you to ID enemies at ranges where you previously couldn't. Or... you could just squint your eyes and hope you know who the heck is on the receiving end of the trigger, but that's your call entirely. This is probably the last addition to the pre-update, happy halloween guys!
