It has been silent here but Phobos Down project is still very much alive.

I have done a major input system and weapon UI refactoring. This should not cause many visible changes but makes further development easier and enables touch input for a mobile version.

Mouse aiming has changed a bit. Now the mouse cursor is always captured in-game, so you don't accidentally click outside of the window. The "constrained mouse aim" toggle has been replaced with three-level "mouse aim range" setting that controls how far the mouse cursor is allowed to move from the player. The end results is the same but a bit more customizable.

Although the weapon wheel UI looks the same, it is now scalable and supports more traditional point-and-click style interaction with mouse (or touch):


It was pointed out in the feedback here that the player needs to be aware of the containers outside of the camera's view. To help with that, I added constant screen edge indicators that show the positions of all containers beyond screen edges (the grey bars in the gif above).

I started testing a new weapon modifier that goes by the name of "ballistic modifier" for now. In practice it turns the rocket launcher into a grenade launcher. This is going to need a lot of work before it is usable but I see great potential in it.


The auto-aiming works so that it uses the lower and more direct arc if target is close and the line of fire is not blocked. Otherwise the higher arc is used. This allows shooting in high arcs over obstacles while still shooting nearby enemies directly in the face. Currently the aiming does not account for targets velocity so hitting moving enemies is very hard. That is something I'm going to work on next.

The next game update with these changes is still [u]at least[/u] some weeks away.