We're currently working on an update that will be released in mid December that is focused on significantly improving the multiplayer performance and client experience, fixing major bugs and many other quality of life improvements. We'll detail some of the changes to expect below.

Composer

In very exciting news we have brought on a fantastic addition to the team: Jeff van Dyck. Jeff is a two-time BAFTA award winning Composer and Audio Director that we had the pleasure of working with around 10 years ago at Creative Assembly and will now be working with on the creation of music for Paint the Town Red. Jeff has been creating music and sounds for games since the original Need for Speed and FIFA titles and is well known for the audio direction and award winning soundtracks of the Total War game series. At a minimum we were planning on having original music for Beneath, but now we'll be working with Jeff to create a complete soundtrack for Paint the Town Red including replacing much or all of the existing Scenario and Arena music with new original tracks. All existing music will still be available in the game for use in Workshop levels however. We've been big fans of Jeff for a very long time and have no doubt his music will elevate not only Beneath, but Paint the Town Red as a whole. In addition to composing original music for the game, Jeff will also be assisting on sound effects going forward.

Beneath

After some recent design improvements we have made based on our play-testing and with not having brought on a composer earlier in the process, we have a few factors affecting the release of Beneath. We're currently adding new environmental weapons to bring the flow of combat more in line with the Scenarios and we're adjusting level length and enemy variety to get the urgency and difficulty of the game feeling right. It will all be wrapped up early in 2019, but we might make the first areas of Beneath, including the first Boss, available earlier in a separate beta build for testing and feedback sooner. Keep an eye on the Paint the Town Red Discord server over the coming weeks for any information on that.

December Update Features

For this update we've brought forward some of the improvements and polish work we planned on doing early next year. We'll have a full changelist when the build is released, but below are some of the main changes we've already completed or are working on currently. Multiplayer Packet and Backwidth Reduction Depending on the hardware and bandwidth limitations of the host and client players, currently there can be issues with the number of packets being sent and received causing increasingly large de-syncs between players. We've reduced the number of packets being sent on average by a factor of 10. This should eliminate this as an issue. The up and down steam bandwidth was already quite low, but due to the reduction in packets there are fewer bytes wasted on packet headers which reduces the bandwidth being transferred by around 5x. This change will improve the consistency and reliability of the online multiplayer experience. Improvements to Client Multiplayer Feel The primary issue currently when playing the coop multiplayer as a client (i.e. a player that joins a Host's multiplayer game) is that the overall game experience does not feel close enough to playing singleplayer or as the game host. There are a number of causes for this and it usually relates to a delay in feedback on your interactions with enemies. We're shifting more authoritative control over elements of the game to the client when it makes sense to and will favour game feel over exact synchronisation of non-gameplay critical elements like effects and ragdolls. This is also an important prerequisite step for the Beneath multiplayer. Caching of Pathfinding Data for Workshop Levels There are some truly massive levels that have been created using the Level Editor and with great size comes great load times. By far the biggest contributor to load times on large levels is the generation of the navmesh for pathfinding. In this update when you load a Workshop level for the first time it will generate a navmesh cache file. This will then be used on subsequent loads instead of calculating the navmesh again. On some of the largest levels the navmesh generation could take over 30 seconds and when loading these with the cache file, the navmesh generation should now take under 1/10th of a second. We're also exploring the viability of creating and including the cache file when Workshop levels are uploaded so when you download a new level the first load will be just as fast as the following ones. Speedrunning Support We've put some time into developing the best way to support the Speedrunning community going forward. There is already a small speedrunning community for the game as it is now, but we believe with the release of Beneath and updates to the Challenge mode of the Scenarios, there will be a lot more opportunities for great speedruns. To best support this community we now write out a ton of data useful for speedrunning into a separate DLL. This gives the data a consistent memory location as offsets from the DLL's loaded address. With tools like LiveSplit you will now easily be able to have an Auto Splitter that can do things like pause the timer during loads, immediately split on various conditions, etc. With how we're writing the data, the memory addresses should not need to be changed when Paint the Town Red updates. We'll provide an example LiveSplit Auto Splitter file and information on the variables and memory addresses with this release and as we add to it in the future. There are many more changes coming in this build and similar quality of life improvements will come to subsequent builds as we work to improve all unfinished elements of the game for release.