Development update - January 2, 2023

Lots of visual optimizations that mostly benefit single-player experience and multiplayer mode on a large maps, then bug fixes related to them and not only them.

I've also did many Star Defenders 2D updates through December, in addition to updates that were done by other SD2D Discord server developers. Plazma Burst 2.5/3 will likely use similar approach to translations as it is done in Star Defenders 2D except it won't delay downloading of translated phrases. But I guess I should try different approaches before adding something like this to Plazma Burst 2.5/3.

Been also working on another mini-game, might publish it eventually. I don't think it will be as interesting to people following me though, since I rarely see people mentioning my horror-ish games.

Visual

- Decreased frequency of lava's idle splashes;

- Fixed bug causing particles to appear out of sync with their position and opacity;

- Made fire more transparent;

- Made fire particles spawn with offset and not always strictly at the center of combustion, also added velocity varying;

- Replaced lava's water splashes with glowing lava particles which were previously only used for idle splashes;

- Fixed bug causing transparent walls to work as z-ordering separators (technique used to sort OpenGL transparent objects, in case of PB2.5/3 glass surfaces are using it to clip characters more accurately);

- Fixed case where knees and held guns could appear on the wrong side of z-ordering separating glass surfaces;

- Implemented z-separation for arbitrary shapes, not just vertical and horizontal ones;

- Added decrease of z-separation influence when 2D sprites are too far from z-ordering separators;

- Prevented bright pixel amount recalculation whenever character dies and gets dimmed;

- Implemented offscreen sprite & geometry unloading which highly improves performance on large single-player scenes;

- Fixed bugs related to laser sights not working with offscreen sprite & geometry unloading;

- Fixed improper particle system deactivations;

- Prevented offscreen water reflection calculation;

- Fixed issue causing last step of laser beams to not being shown unless beam hits anything;

- Made sure bullet holes and bleeding works properly with offscreen sprite & geometry unloading;

- Made spiral trail of Heavy Railgun v04 CS-OneSOneK more noticeable;

- Fixed bug causing decals to be drawn behind glass surfaces;

- Fixed bug causing quality to not update visor sprite quality unless face state is changed;

- Added dimming and visor state restoration after Skin Editor is closed;

- Fixed bug causing sword quality not being updated;

- Fixed bug causing swords to randomly appear behind character whenever character is near z-ordering separators;

- Fixed bug causing improper entity offscreen sprite & geometry unloading in Level Editor;

- Made offscreen sprite & geometry unloading work with Level Editor's turning camera;

- Fixed bug causing some entities like Walker-CS to not appear instantly whenever they appear on screen due to loop sounds attached;

- Fixed bug causing some entities to not have proper debris slice texture.

Interface

- Fixed bug causing improper UI element to be click-assisted to;

- Added Level Editor's clicking sounds to Skin Editor whenever layer is changed.

Gameplay

- Made some optimizations to make level loading faster;

- Fixed optimization bugs that were causing weapons to miss glowing parts as well as laser sights on weapons;

- Fixed physics engine memory leak;

- Implemented logic that prevents characters from starting climbing up on a flat surface if they hold only the A or D key but not the W key (this could prevent unwanted climbing);

- Made it possible for characters to perform step-up logic easier whenever they are going towards very small up-going sliding parts of a floor.

Level Editor

- Prevented some of possible infinite loops that can happen in Level Editor due to improper or too large sizes of some objects;

- Made it more clear when snapping is enabled during dragging (since it might seem like entities are locked in place and can not be moved if user happens to have snapping enabled, especially by accident);

- Implemented better property evaluation checks that would detect level start errors earlier (since object properties allow actual code and expressions in them, for example "20 * ( x++ )" in case if someone would like to use variable the increases during creation of object);

- Added more clear error descriptions whenever in-line comments are added to properties.

Star Defenders 2D

- New sdRoach entity;

- Start of centralized (across all connected servers) databases support;

- Database editor, start of interfaces rework;

- Start of multi-language support (Ukrainian language might almost work);

- Bugfixes related to anti-raiding systems abuse;

- New bullet hit effect;

- Notificator for in-game events while player is not in a game;

- Other optimizations, fixes and visual improvements.