Ongoing Updates

Geometa are keeping the game alive with bugfixes, the 1.5.18 update fixed a LOT of bugs reported in the issue tracker.

One of my favorite changes in this release was “fixed explosion damage and falloff calculation” which has the effect of making splash damage of bombs, rockets and missiles more varied. A bomb/IR hit will sometimes kill a fresh unit outright, and will often deal a range of damage to targets nearby rather than the old “it takes 2 missiles to kill a walrus” rule. I also feel like IR missiles behave better, I’ve been able to shoot down and albatross with an IR missile from a seal twice recently, I’ve never been able to do that before. It was also great to see the Mac players getting bugfixes too!

Aircraft Hitboxes

1.5.14 made it significantly easier to shoot down aircraft. Overnight, the most capable air defence platform became the Razorbill with it’s droid turret (modded). While fun at first the hitboxes of incoming aricraft were so wildly unbalanced that spray-and-pray were nearly 90% effective. The Manta became redundant, easy to intercept and expensive. Coupled with the simulated drag with bomb payloads and CIWS shooting bombs, if you got one through there was a good chance some of bombs would be intercepted and a greater chance your Manta would never escape.

These changes coincided with a sharp drop off in players joining PvP events. In response I’ve done my best with a mod to reduce the vulnerability of aircraft back to nearer the feel of 1.5.13 which I demo in the highly scientific video below:

It is still slightly easier to kill aircraft, but it’s not longer a turkey shoot, the Albatross is still useful and a threat. I hope this fix brings more of our fun players back to the game.

We’ve played a fair number of PvP games since with my mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3700567137

Experimental attempt to mitigate the effects of larger aircraft hitboxes on anti-air guns.

All small caliber guns have reduced damage and aircraft have increased armor, ground units have reduced armor to compensate

Game Stability

It is a challenge to triage bug reports, especially in a game that allows modding. You essentially have bugs out there that can be due to broken hardware, bad drivers or badly written mods (like some of mine). For a period during my work on Rev 1.5 I had introduced a bug that would crash the game in some rare cases. Because my mod was so popular, this crash would get reported as a core game bug. I eventually fixed it after someone was able to send me a save file that reproduced the bug reliably.

Since 1.5.14 (or maybe earlier) there do seem to be some bugs that cause the game to crash in PvE games. When I first saw reports of this I again assume I had messed up my mod code or the players were using edited or old saves. That is until I got sent another save file that would crash, but this time with no mods at all. I was curious as to what was going on. I was able to prevent the crash if I deleted the AI carrier from the save.

So it seems that with AI carriers, at about the 3 hour mark something goes wrong that causes the desktop game and the dedicated server to crash out.

Community

New Mods

We are seeing some new mods. One of particular note is Playable vehicles by dr.RazdalByte.

Changes vehicle fight tactics to who first sees – wins.
Don’t try to tank damage.
Hide around corners, dig in, set ambushes, shot at long distances.
2 operators can focus fire entire convoy.
Vehicles are fast on water and turrets can fight ships.

I’ve played this and it is great, a refreshing new sound back and new ground tactics. Units on the land now feel more realistic and the sounds of explosions and gunfire add to the immersion a lot.

Discord and Events

We’ve had a steady stream all year of informal events hosted on the main discord servers, including the regular Tricky’s PvP games but also increasingly smaller PvE games. Some played on the bredlab servers and many more played by new faces posting in the various “looking-for-crew” channels.