Development update - August 11, 2023

More important polishing and optimizations. Due to request, video of this post showcases Skin Editor in its' current state, fairly unfinished in few aspects. Found at least ~7 bugs during recording and have fixed some of them.

Also, apparently my twitter tweets past 2021 year aren't visible for unauthorized users anymore. Looks almost as if I just stopped posting there...

Interfaces

- Made it possible to cancel search in lists via pressing Esc key;

- Made it possible to navigate through found items in a single-option list with arrow keys;

- Fixed bug causing arrow keys to not work when jumping between found items on Level Editor's structure view;

- Made it so system time can be seen in Level Editor and would also shift in Skin Editor;

- Made it so performance graph shifts its' position in both Level Editor and Skin Editor;

- Fixed bug causing scrollbar carets to not appear (after video was captured).

Gameplay

- Added navigation cost increase for AI whenever path requires movables to be destroyed;

- Implemented a better stuck detection for AI characters that are trying to swim;

- Implemented sub-tasks for AI, such as swimming towards closest oxygen source for refill while AI is in water;

- Implemented detection & removal for unneeded connections from outside of water towards waypoints that are deeply inside of water - previously it would interfere with unreachable connections detection and cause AI to attempt way too many tries to dive where it is not possible;

- Implemented logic that prevents AI from repeatedly trying to heal unreachable teammates - it was causing them to freeze in place and not do any other tasks such as trying to find player on a map;

- Fixed an improper AI self-boosting in specific case;

- Implemented AI avoidance for waypoints where teammates have been dying or were taking damage;

- Added AI path prioritization over waypoints from which teammates were able to deal damage to enemies;

- Made it so path failure timer is independent from AI's ability to follow path - AI used to get stuck because of that while trying to constantly jump to somewhere;

- Fixed a bug causing player to explode whenever he tries to grab ledge through other unconscious character;

- Increased maximum hitpoints of legs and arms (relative to what it was in PB2.5/3 - it likely was different from PB2 already) to make it impossible to break them with a single railgun/sniper rifle hit. Heavy railgun still can do it though. Repeated hits after full player health regeneration can also cause limb loss (limbs regenerate at slower pace);

- Implemented a bit more uniform impulse from projectiles hitting ragdoll (PB2 has it too, but PB2.5/3 didn't had it previously) in order to prevent single bone inconsistently impacting with walls behind attacker character as well as prevent extra spin in some cases;

- Better handling of PC hibernation/sleep mode while game is running, better handling of other rare GPU errors;

- Made it so stability decreases much faster when character has lost legs (it is slower if character has lost arms);

- Fixed a problem causing extra ragdoll spins whenever legs length changes as a result of legs breaking;

- Reworked how fall damage affects maximum health handicapping - previously the character falling horizontally would not receive any handicap due to each separate bone impact causing only a small amount of damage even though it was high damage in total. Now, it applies such handicap with a delay;

- Reworked amount/sensitivity of damage dealt by fall damage for it to match PB2 but perhaps a slightly more realistic, especially if character falls upside down;

- Fixed an issue causing AI to keep trying to self-boost on the ground when AI character has already lost its legs;

- Level shadowmap generation optimizations (faster map loading);

- Optimizations for algorithm that pre-optimizes projectiles holes and decal spawning on world geometry (faster map loading, especially for larger maps);

- Fixed a bug that was causing "mosaic surface builder" to waste a lot of time on array rebuilding where it wasn't needed (faster map loading, especially for larger maps);

- Implemented blood decal vanishing over time (about few percents of opacity per minute) as it was a little too messy rather quickly as for something like deathmatch mode;

- Fixed a bug causing new weapon to not have trails visible;

- Fixed a bug causing flyby sound effect to not be heard in singleplayer mode due to incorrect pitch;

- Implemented automatic ability for characters to pull guns closer to their body whenever weapon might collide with a wall - this way there should be significantly less cases when player would accidentally fire in the wrong direction because of weapon & wall collisions;

- Fixed a bug causing drowning sound effect to be played whenever character dies within anti-gravity field area;

- Made it so grappling hook has significantly lower mass until it attaches to a target - this is done to prevent player from being pushed backward/forward after hook is launched;

- Implemented altered underwater behavior for grappling hooks;

- Fixed a bug causing hitpoints on the overhead to be improperly centered (due to delayed impact handicapping not triggering overhead update);

- Reworked overheads to show groups of 30 hitpoints rather than each dot representing 10 hitpoints as it looks much more useful and easier to tell how much hitpoints character has, especially with handicapping that isn't really reflected on overhead. It does seem to work nice, especially since dying starts at values below 30 and maximum hitpoints are either 130 or 150;

- Fixed a bug causing regeneration speed to be independent from game speed;

- Replaced weapon repositioning near walls with placement checks (previous implementation was searching distance towards walls but this would frequently cause characters to keep moving certain guns backwards and forward repeatedly);

- Optimizations for weapon placement checks;

- Adjusted the no-decal area tolerance around liquids;

- Implemented removal of head bone whenever character loses head (previously it was only hidden yet would still collide with walls);

- Fixed a bug causing AI to get lost and unable to find a closest waypoint while holding on a ledge;

- Fixed a bug causing desynchronization of removal status of character bones - it was causing over exaggerated deaths and bodies randomly exploding on hits;

- Optimized anti-gravity tracing towards potentially affected bodies (anti-gravity areas are not working through walls & movables);

- Disabled matrix updates for some of static objects.

Multiplayer

- Implemented synchronization for vanishing blood decal speed variable;

- Implemented "forgetting" of too old blood decal spawns if blood decal vanishing is enabled on a map;

- Implemented blood decal & particle systems reset command which custom maps/game mode modules can trigger at the round end;

- Disabled conditional event sending whenever replay is being played for connected player;

- Implemented static world snapshot compression;

- Fixed AI errors happening on client-side;

- Fixed a bug causing antigravity areas and attachable turrets to be physically in wrong places & flying around on client-side due to automatic client-side attachment logic;

- Fixed a bug causing other characters' held weapons to visually shake due to client-side data decoding expecting a different format of direction data in snapshot for non-teammates;

- Implemented a faster lookup of nearest ledges whenever network snapshot is generated by server (optimization for larger maps);

- Added synchronization of inner texture of surfaces used for breakable movables;

- Fixed bug causing grappling hook rope to constantly teleport up/down by the length of multiple segments due to disambiguation in a result of previously existing network snapshot size optimization.

Level Editor

- Implemented AI path debugging tools (not added to interface yet);

- Fixed code execution bug causing elevated permissions where it should not have been allowed;

- Updated my development tools to support Level Editor features;

- Fixed bug causing static world snapshot to not include static lamp positions.

Skin Editor

- Fixed a bug causing point insertion to pick first segment for point insertion;

- Made it so dropdown lists have proper width;

- Updated accessories positions in preview, made so they are hidden during whole skin preview;

- Fixed z-fighting for glowing layer of accessories.

Plazma Burst 2

- Fixes on website and few moderation features for staff team.

Star Defenders 2D

- Shark enemy rework;

- Automatically firing turrets;

- Other small changes.