And it is finally time!
Firstly, a (belated) happy new year to all you fine folks reading this! We closed last year by celebrating MWLL's fourteenth anniversary, and teased a preview of what's to come in this update. We were really hoping to release 0.16.2 around Christmas/New Year's time, but alas a major blocking issue stood in the way (free ret again). Thanks to admanter – our one active and quite persistent coder – that block has been obliterated! So if you see him around, give admanter a thanks for making the release both less buggy and not further delayed!
With that, let's dive into v0.16.2's changes!
New and Updated Cockpits
The most visible change, a staggering total of 28 ‘Mechs, ASF, and VTOLs have received new or more finished cockpit art. Quality will vary, frankly, but at least now these assets have a bit more immersion (“muh immersion!”) factor to them! Some of these assets have been missing this for almost a decade! Here are the coolest ones:
Fun fact about the Atlas one: it's the only ‘Mech with a “screen” view and not the traditional “window” view, in that you have a forehead camera displaying what's outside the ‘Mech to a screen that acts as the cockpit's “window.”
As well, normal maps have been added to the Commando, Sunder, and Cauldron-Born cockpits.
Huge props and respect to project lead Invictus for slaving away for about three months solo, putting together all the art and other work for these cockpits! That's some seriously legendary dedication!
New Camos
Another visual update is the addition of three new camos: WaspBlackBlue, WaspBlackPurple, and WaspBlackGreen. Here's a Mad Cat/Timber Wolf sporting each one:
Gameplay and Systems Adjustments
All Tbolts now refire a bit faster, and hopefully their ammo's missile behavior will be more consistent. The Masakari/Warhawk got shrunk slightly, had its hitboxes adjusted, and the missile-spawning-in-cockpit-itis has been mitigated. Lastly, as usual, a handful of variants have had their loadouts adjusted.
The game's graphics.cfg has also been updated to provide better stability without sacrificing too much visual goodness. This means better shadow rendering and enabled SSAO (less flatness everywhere). The file also now incorporates several new keybinds by default to let you toggle some visual features and info, in case you're running into FPS and stability issues. There's also a key to toggle the net_channelstats command ( Wiki.mechlivinglegends.net ), which is quite helpful for troubleshooting connectivity problems.
Bugfixes
Biggest fix of all is to do with keybinds. As of the previous version, an issue with Actionmapper would cause some peoples' coolant flush key (C key) to be unbound. This has been resolved! Clanners feel free to ignore; we know you like your ‘Mechs HOT! Also certain jump-jetting Orions can no longer gain infinite heat capacity. Was pretty neat while it lasted, though.
And that covers just about all the important points in v0.16.2! You can view the full changelog at Wiki.mechlivinglegends.net. This doesn't include all the map updates (TC_Clearcut, for one...) that have happened since last summer, but perhaps we'll cover that next!
You can download the update through the MWLL launcher or directly from ModDB!
One last thing: we'd really appreciate hearing your feedback on our Discord server and seeing your reviews on our ModDB page.
Thanks for your time, support, and help testing via the last PTE.
Enjoy the new update, and we'll see you legendary pilots on the battlefield!
