Development update - May 4, 2023 (Patreon)

Does new lava look better (02:07)? It was suggested that old lava was too realistic.

Most changes done in April involve preparations for natural world designing as well as level designing features in general.

I also did some work on Star Defenders 2D updates such as open world support and admin tools.

It is somewhat interesting to me how many of Star Defenders features were originally intended by me for Plazma Burst series (such of open worlds that consist out of connected servers hosted by different people) yet Plazma Burst will likely stick to arena/story kind of a game.

Gameplay

- Update physics of spine-broken characters - parts coming from spine and pelvis no longer spin as freely as they do in PB2 (legs don't turn 180 degrees as easily and head can't be parallel to remaining part of spine);

- Fixed bug causing ledge grabbing to fail if player's sword was stuck in a wall nearby;

- Made it possible to drag ragdolls while climbing ledges;

- Fixed bug causing decals to appear with significant delays on movable walls due to inproper offscreen hiding when sound effect is attached to movable;

- Added wall-sword-stuck cancellation if distance between player's arm and place of stuck is large enough yet player is pulled gently enough in opposite direction (for example with grappling hook);

- Optimized large liquid pools generation;

- Optimized decoding speed of downloaded sounds;

- Fixed bug letting players grab region areas and liquid bounding boxes;

- Made it possible for players to grab other players by their knees rather than feet/pelvis. Same for grabbing by the spine;

- Fixed bad sound effects trimming for looped built-in sounds;

- Implemented flood entity spawn detection in order to prevent game completely freezing or crashing (for example when Hound Walker-CS is spawned on each frame due to level designer's mistake);

- Reworked perspective calculation to more accurate one for offscreen 3D object occlusion (long doors, long water);

- Fixed bug causing in-water sounds to be non-muffled occasionally;

- Added support for "endless" water objects;

- Fixed bug causing background water to be drawn in front of background foliage;

- Updated particle systems to handle water collisions with extended water objects;

- Fixed bug causing rain drop splashes to be darker for background rain particles;

- Fixed bug causing ambience sounds (rain, lava) to be too quiet in 2D mode;

- Fixed UI sounds being silent in 2D mode;

- Reworked sound & stereo to work in exactly same way in 2D mode as it does work in 3D mode;

- Moved extra weapon sounds such as clicks on low ammo to be played on weapon rather than owner's chest - was especially noticeable when player shoots whike swimming;

- Implemented support for "endless" water objects horizontally as well (can be specified to be extended infinitely both ways, won't have physics or affect player/rain particles in any way there though);

- Added texture filtering for far lava objects;

- Added fog support for endless water;

- Added fog support for endless water that has reflections;

- Added fog support for endless lava;

- Disabled spawn of physical engine version of regions that do not have callbacks (perhaps they could work faster like this if there was too many of them);

- Grappling hook how has slight acceleration towards cursor if it hasn't attached to anything yet (otherwise trying to go up the tall wall will occasionally cause grapphling hook to shift randomly from the wall due to rope physics);

- Added decaying 1.25 damage multiplier when sword activation sound was played.

Interfaces

- Fixed hint window size for code editor in fullscreen mode;

- Code editor now can print function parameters when shows hints for built-in functions;

- Fixed bug causing focus loss on save attempt in code editor while in a fullscreen mode;

- More proper notifications location while editing code in fullscreen mode;

- Fixed bug causing notifications not redirecting level designer to object with an issue;

- Fixed bug causing menu image to be stretched when game window is resized yet not active;

- Allowed pressing Ctrl+S while editing properties of something like map description yet text field is still in focus;

- Some design changes to multiplayer game mode selection screen;

- Better error screen if game can not run for some reason.

Level Editor

- Allowed execution blocking timers in auto-start triggers;

- Level startup is prevented when level verification has caused an error now;

- Added custom shape regions (they can call triggers when something enters/leaves/stays in them);

- Reworked regions into walls/doors-like class so they will likely have similar properties except for regions being invisible and not synced;

- Added region destruction on level restart;

- Added attachment support for regions (they can be attached to movables now);

- Fixed bug causing parameters panel to show error messages when in-line comments appear in values;

- Did some optimization to amount of information about walls/doors/regions that is stored in compiled version of map;

- Fixed issues such as objects pasted with Ctrl+V into structure list were kept following the mouse;

- Fixed issue causing lack of fog effect on really long doors;

- Added possibility to shift and rescale natural tetures (grass, cliffs, sand, dirt - for generated background terrain as well);

- Added options for foliage and background terrain, similar to ones that exist for shadowmap generation;

- Fixed bug causing trees to disappear on "KEEP" update mode;

- Fixed bug causing foreground grass to not spawn even though it appears on "KEEP" update mode;

- Fixed bug causing fog to have wrong color if map was launched without shadows for the first time;

- Fixed bug causing view to be not updated instantly when designer switces between 2D and 3D modes;

- Added live update for water objects when depth and infinitiness is updated;

- Added live fog update for liquid objects;

- Fixed issue causing inverse fog value on foreground doors when fog is too dense;

- Fixed strange grass elevation on angled terrain;

- Fixed bug not allowing creation of walls with cliff surface as basis;

- Disabled grass generation underwater;

- Disallowed upside down grass generation in rare cases;

- Fixed issue with assymetrical natural materials application on symmetrical geometry (one side has grass, other one doesn't);

- Made it so blueprint mode hides environment geometry;

- Fixed bug causing compilation mismatch warnings on map load when partial preview was enabled during save;

- Fixed crash when map designer deletes object and clicks on parameters panel;

- Added visual rectangles around trigger groups;

- Added support for object drag and drop into groups (in addition to it being possible to do via structure view);

- Made it possible to move dragged object out of the current group by right clicking;

- Fixed issue causing concave-shaped regions to call callback triggers multiple times (which could double the anti-gravity-like force, for example);

- Implemented better triangulation algorithm for concave walls since previous one would occasionally fail (for example on star defender from cardboard star defender map);

- Added possiblity to drag items strictly horizontally, vertically and diagonally while level designer holds Shift key after dragging was started;

- Changed lava appearance to be "less realistic". Not sure if it is better?

- Implemented new UV application algorithm for natural sufaces so there is significantly less probability to end up having some side that has extremely stretched surface texure (previously it was a simple plane projection from top right but it does not work that good with walls that have 45 degree sides);

- Disabled contour calculation for backgrounds walls (optimization);

- Made it so few walls having same material do not have same texture offsets;

- Fixed accuracy errors that caused more assymetry in terms of where cliff and grass are applied;

- Fixed wrong texture (ground) instead of cliff on corners of natural walls;

- Fixed triangulation issues for thin natural walls that previously resulted into holes;

- Fixed index shift when front face triangulation was built for large concave natural walls.

Plazma Burst 2 updates

- Re-added chat logs for new servers upon moderation team request;

- Better map search and map search by years.

Star Defenders updates

- Open world mode support;

- Players who have started playing at the same time on a same server will spawn together as well now;

- New Cut Droid enemy;

- Matter stealer enemy;

- More cable node logical types, sensor types and buttons;

- Some admin tools including bans and browser fingerprinting;

- More server config settings (for example PvP mode damage scaler, list of allowed BSU modes, server access password etc);

- Star Defenders is officially an open source project now;

- Water can flow a bit more fluidly;

- Bugfixes & optimizations;

- Some project folder structure reorganization;

- Bot factory supports coding;

- Stream logger feature which is available to server admins (for streaming their server events to stream services perhaps?);

- Other additions from other project contributors. More updates are here https://github.com/Eric-Gurt/StarDefenders2D/commits/main