Development update - December 10, 2024

Plazma Burst 2 HTML5 - mostly Multiplayer progress. Still not published since I still need to setup server and make sure obfuscation doesn't cause naming/order bugs between server and client.

Plazma Burst 3 - added rocks, some more Level Editor quality of life functionality and loading screen UI improvements. Also CS and C9 versions of TGS Mobiles are mostly ready now, finally added models into the game and currently working on a vehicle logic itself.

It is almost a New Year, meaning next development update will be in 2025. 2024 has started with features being added for potentially good story mode and features that could be used in story mode are still being added to this day. Still no actual story mode levels done besides script and ideas describing various moments to add to the levels.

Are there people who miss more Star Defenders 2D updates?

As I've said before, stable 100+ patreon supporters is when I'll start Plazma Burst 3 closed beta, which might include Level Editor, basic clan/group system, Settings/Controls screens, Multiplayer (custom maps and self-hosted servers only, no official servers for now). Game does miss multiplayer game modes and any sign of ranking so it is practically in a sandbox state (but these can be done in Level Editor). Level Editor is spoilery-y since I don't think it will be easy to cut away any spoiler-related logic.

Still, don't subscribe with multiple accounts. If we won't meet 100+ supporters I'll release game when it is ready eventually anyway.

This post will be free ^

Happy Holidays everyone! ~

Plazma Burst 3

Sounds

- Replaced explosion sound for CS-BNG (1 sound);

- Made disable/enable sound whenever Level Editor item gets disabled/enabled (2 sounds);

- Added sound effect for Level Editor's easter egg (1 sound);

- Made character appearance sound in loading screen (1 sound);

- Made loop sounds for TGS Mobile CS and C9 versions (2 sounds);

- Made startup sounds for TGS Mobile CS, C9 and another vehicle (3 sounds);

- Fixed loop sound spiking for M-entity (1 sound).

Gameplay

- Made it possible to apply seed/displacement/smoothness-based deformations to rocks, essentially letting map makers create randomized destructible stones;

- Added slight local shade in deeper displacement points of rocks;

- Fixed a bug causing rocks to randomly explode when created as a group of welded rocks;

- Fixed a bug causing rocks to be not freezable visually at all;

- Made it so entity debris continue look frozen even after destruction;

- Fixed an issue causing slice material of a broken ice to look extra frozen whenever ice is being broken inside of a cryo liquid;

- Made it so extra small particle rocks and dust are spawned whenever rocks are being broken;

- Fixed a bug causing elimination sound to not being played if entity was destroyed via weapon's splash damage;

- Made it so frozen ice/rocks aren't physically extended in front/behind the playable area (and so their debris won't shake aggressively);

- Made it so port-grenades can save players from certain kinds of attacks;

- Fixed a bug that was letting frozen players control their grappling hooks;

- Fixed a bug causing beams of some weapons to stay whenever character does not drop weapons whenever eliminated;

- Made it so zero-gravity areas can't be frozen;

- Fixed a bug causing zero-gravity areas with sound muffle to not have muffle effect for sounds played in them;

- Fixed a bug causing pressing swim-up key in zero gravity area to teleport player to the very top if top is physically separated with a wall from player's current position;

- Made it so rocks take less damage from fire. Removed bonus from explosion damage on rocks;

- Removed underwater explosion effect in zero gravity areas (one that turns fire particles into white bubbles);

- Fixed a bug that was making it possible to destroy entities that do not take damage with some of new weapons;

- Made it so textures of rocks have randomized offsets and larger than before (seed-dependant);

- Fixed a bug causing camera projection matrix to be updated before screen shake effect is applied, causing non-zero z-offset lens flares to not react to screen shaking at all;

- Added hint description for smoke cloud objects whenever hovered;

- Made it so rock/ice isn't called neutral in hints (just like crates and barrels, since it sounds pointless);

- Started adding TGS Mobiles (CS one from PB2 and C9 one from PB:FttP) to the game;

- Implemented a simpler way to create collision models for entity parts since previous one was relying on a buggy Flash export and resulted into some of points being not exported and some being exported into wrong frames;

- Fixed a wheel placement bug caused by Flash export;

- Fixed an issue of TGS Mobile visual position not matching collision model;

- Added an extra pair of background wheels as separate rigidbodies because destruction looks more meaningful this way (more wheels to bounce around too);

- Fixed a bug causing 2nd player to shake violently whenever driving in the same TGS Mobile;

- Fixed an incorrect attachment position of driver/passenger whenever TGS Mobile is facing left direction;

- Improved entity smash detection logic since previous one wasn't working correctly with concave collisions and would occasionally falsely assume that TGS Mobile touching movables with their bottom parts is a perfect time to explode;

- Fixed a bug causing wheels to be shrinked twice due to collision model being reused for each wheel;

- Fixed a bug causing cap window/door to react to TGS Mobile braking and lose its' rotational limits;

- Decreased loudness of wheel friction sound;

- Made it so TGS Mobile turrets don't block dynamic lights;

- Removed glow from diffuse texture of TGS Mobile C9;

- Fixed incorrect center of TGS Mobile C9 turret;

- Fixed incorrect inner back wall collision shape of TGS Mobile C9;

- Made TGS Mobile glass transparent;

- Fixed an issues with glass polygon order causing weird overdraw/out of order drawing;

- Made it so player isn't drawn in front of TGS Mobile glass;

- Fixed incorrect parts positioning of TGS Mobile flip logic;

- Fixed a bug causing wheels to be swapped on flip and pulled back to their correct positions at insane velocity right after;

- Made flips on TGS Mobiles less likely on low velocity;

- Reworked smoothed flip logic to a more universal approach for Mobiles and any new entities that might need it;

- Fixed an issue causing cap/wheels rotation to work incorrectly on TGS Mobile that is facing left direction;

- Implemented physical car suspension for wheels. Sliding parts, springs and regular wheel rotation (and rubber simulation additionally);

- Reworked braking to be not limit based for TGS Mobiles in order to fight physics accuracy issues related to high number of joints;

- Made it so certain parts of TGS Mobile are instantly destroyed whenever body part is broken (for example caps since they do not really have a collision model that covers the whole model);

- Fixed a bug causing wheels to not spin after TGS Mobile body was broken;

- Made it so z-offsets of mobile parts are reset to 0 for broken off limbs (so wheels can actually visually collide with players and projectiles);

- Fixed a bug causing wheels of TGS Mobile to stop simulating rubber soft-body collisions once body part is destroyed;

- Fixed an issue causing TGS Mobile's wheels to chaotically collide with each other once TGS Mobile becomes destroyed but not broken into pieces yet;

- Made it so TGS Mobile C9's glass is broken whenever top metal cap part is broken.

Level Editor

- Made it so any new rocks made in Level Editor have automatically random seed;

- Added support for assigning random property values to selection as well as ID-number in selected group;

- Fixed a bug causing displaced rock welding to not work reliably in Level Editor;

- Added live update whenever area of ice/rocks or custom depth ranges are changed in Level Editor;

- Fixed a bug causing entity class names in scripting to be based on first ever made entity inherited class rather than main extended class name;

- Made it so it is possible to switch off Level Editor objects without deleting nor wrapping them into disabled triggers;

- Made it so object disabling works properly with trigger groups;

- Made it so Ctrl+A doesn't play extremely loud trigger group unwrapping sound (which happens whenever object in a closed trigger group is selected);

- Global performance optimization for hide/unhide/lock/unlock/disable/enable operations (it could take about a second to complete for relatively big map before);

- Made button to quickly randomize selected rock random seeds;

- Made it possible to click and drag to mass change disable/hide/lock objects in a structure list. I guess it is similar to how someone can disable/enable layers in Photoshop. Feels faster than right clicking and selecting "Disable selected objects", but both options are left in there;

- Added "Show driver zoom" and "Show player zoom" instead of resetting to arbitrary default zoom that doesn't really represent anything anymore;

- Added another Level Editor easter egg.

Multiplayer

- Implemented synchronization for ice/rocks;

- Added synchronization of z-depth limits of ice/rocks;

- Fixed a crash whenever client sees anti-gravity area in multiplayer mode.

Interfaces

- Added new loading screen, added loading captions, added grain effect to loading screen as separate image to save on file size;

- Fixed font issue on loading screen;

- Made it so loading screen shifts and slowly shows the whole image no matter what image aspect ratio is;

- Implemented character-by-character appearance for loading screen captions;

- Added tick sound whenever loading screen text characters appear;

- Fixed an issue causing loading screen text animations & sounds to continue on being processed whenever loading screen was skipped and player is already in the game;

- Changed colors on a new loading screen a bit to match in-game color scheme. Though probably it might change later once again;

- Some more loading screen image changes.

Plazma Burst 2 HTML5 port

- Made command rate limit per IP on server-side;

- Fixed an issue causing buttons behind congratulations screen in singleplayer are clickable;

- Resolve cases when multiple players try to pick up same gun(s). Implemented server-side awareness of gun ownership;

- Synchronized gun throwing;

- Made it so game uses system cursor while custom cursor is still being loaded;

- Made it so scoreboard shows other players;

- Made it so scoreboard can show past 9 items (lack of scrolling support was hiding extra players);

- Fixed an issue where scoreboard loses button focus when Tab key is held;

- Added some kind of basic encryption to message streams;

- Added incoming/outgoing packet size netgraph;

- Fixed a bug that started to happen due to increased client-side projectile life time, causing swords and railguns to end up being extremely long and spawn impact effects across the rooms;

- Fixed a bug causing 2nd connected player not see 1st player equipping any weapons which he has picked up right before player 2 joined (in another case active weapon wasn't synced and only 1 gun out of 2 was synced);

- Fixed an issues with incorrectly divided grid cache space on map like reject-sgw;

- Made it so clients instantly leave match when they leave them. Added server-side weapon ownership logic to handle disconnection cases properly;

- Fixed an issue causing scoreboard keeping team/score/deaths/ping after player disconnected;

- Fixed an issue causing scoreboard to not show Empty slots as dimmed;

- Implemented a better grenades/projectiles synchronization;

- Added much more detailed skin customization support & sync (at least for custom maps for now);

- Made it so current player as well as teammates are properly highlighted in scoreboard;

- Fixed an issue causing scoreboard buttons hovering ignore scroll;

- Changed layer order for scoreboard so it is on top of chat and below Esc menu;

- Made it so Score can be turned into KDr and Nicknames into Login names by clicking on leaderboard titles (can't wait for someone to discover this by accident);

- Added handling of nickname length overfill in both scoreboard and in-game;

- Added tooltips for scoreboard icons, especially for new buttons;

- Re-made scoreboard button icons. Made 2 new buttons for reporting and supporting;

- Re-added current players count and K/D Ratio info to bottom of scoreboard, also time since join;

- Fixed an issue causing timescale to be not reset on map restart;

- Implemented grenade pushing whenever grenade is being hit with other projectiles;

- Made it so players won't collide with their own grenades in slow-motion and on high framerates;

- Implemented reload state sync for long/manual reload weapons like sniper rifle, CS-DAZ shotgun and Lite Railgun, even when held on the back;

- Made it so bleeding is cleared on respawn;

- Re-added projectile damage sync;

- Impended reliable messages capping not by count but size in snapshot, so map chunks are sent one by one instead of being sent multiple at once;

- Made sure server doesn't self-overwhelm by sending map data dozens of times in a row while confirmation hasn't arrived from the client quick enough;

- Fixed a bug causing health values to become strings occasionally in Multiplayer;

- Fixed a bug making it possible for players to still occasionally take damage when respawning while their body was attacked;

- Fixed a bug causing limb/health regen blocking to work even after respawn of a player, making players have no limbs for about a second if their bodies happened to be attacked right before respawn;

- Re-added explosion damage sync. Made it so explosion data is not sent again until previous data delivery was confirmed via server responses (server won't get overwhelmed when trying to figure out damage over time from BNG/acid grenade launchers);

- Added vanishing copies of ragdolls on respawn so dead bodies aren't disappearing that suddenly (just looks nicer this way);

- Fixed an issue causing BNG/Plasma glow appearing at zero coordinates for a single frame on projectile spawn;

- Fixed out of order snapshot and respawn commands being sent;

- Fixed a bug that would happen in case of high ping where second player won't play any hurt sound when he takes splash damage (when seen from first player's POV);

- Fixed an issue causing scoreboard sorting not working;

- Re-added server-side kills/deaths sync/counting;

- Fixed a respawn bug that was happening due to server not aligning reliable and unreliable messages that were sent at the same time together;

- Fixed a bug making high ping players constantly falling off the ledges from other players' POV;

- Some basic anti-cheating measures;

- Re-added healing sync;

- Some more basic anti-cheating measures;

- Fixed a bug causing projectiles to sync incorrect property of projectiles, causing them to not sync velocity;

- Fixed shields sync;

- Re-added damage over time sync;

- Fixed an issue causing incorrect death message to show up when player dies to fall damage. Changed some death messages;

- Re-implemented overhead text bubbles;

- Re-implemented all/team chatting in-game support in Multiplayer;

- Added number of players in lobby, removed authentication screen completely from Multiplayer;

- Re-implemented match start screen, made it possible to add match join limitations by criteria such as community reputation;

- Made match browser/joining logic;

- Made server-side skill counting (hopefully could be used to skill-based matchmaking, it is similar to Average Skill Points);

- Added account cleanup from Multiplayer server Database;

- Drew and added emojis (menu opens via Alt key);

- Fixed weird selection offset whenever trying to select text field text and cursor goes outside of the pseudo-element (likely to some Chromium bug).