Welcome to The Blood Anniversary update for Brigador: Up-Armored Edition! Today we celebrate our fifth anniversary since our 1.0 launch with new visual effects, new content and a very special week-long sale of 66% off everything that ends June 14th 10:00 Pacific Time. Whether you only just discovered us in the past year, or have been following the game all the way since its closed alpha in 2014 - thank you.

BLOOD

Non-mechanical NPCs now meet a more obviously gruesome end
You may find that the first campaign level Awake On Foreign Shores will now feel a little different to play (this feature can be toggled on/off in SETTINGS).

CRATERS

Several weapons will now leave impact craters on the ground tiles in levels (this feature can be toggled on/off in SETTINGS).
But wait there's more

PILOTS

We spoke to our friends at Fractal Softworks and Consumer Softproducts, who have informed us that three new Brigadors are available for Freelance operations. Spoilers ahead, only click if you want to know before booting up. [expand type=spoiler] ATTENTION CITIZENS Word of the Brigador contract has reached the Persean Sector. While their gates might not currently be functioning, the SNC has arranged... other means of transport for two pilots of note to fulfill their contractual duties.
The first is former logistics officer-turned-head of a powerful pirate dynasty, Warlord Kanta, while the second hails from the barren-bombarded world of Epiphany, Brother Livewell Cotton. Also joining the Freelance roster...
MT Foxtrot has been given some downtime off-world by his handler in Cruelty Squad, but it seems this guy just doesn't want to take a break. Each pilot exclusively encounters what we call "wildcard" spawns. Runs with these pilots are aimed at those looking for... variety. Many thanks to the teams at Fractal Softworks & Consumer Softproducts for the cameos! Starsector is still in development and not on Steam, but can be bought at a discount from its own site.
Meanwhile Cruelty Squad has its own store page, is also running a discount, and will be turning 1.0 very soon. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ We see a lot of overlap in our respective fan bases, so if you've never heard of Starsector or Cruelty Squad - check them out! [/expand] These guest cameo pilots will all exclusively fight wildcard spawnlists if you choose them as your pilot in Freelance mode.

CAMPAIGN

Four optional missions have been added to Campaign mode that are powersuit-focused (completion of these missions is not required to progress the campaign).

FREELANCE

All runs in Freelance now have a chance to spawn a "wildcard" list of enemies during play. Previously, the game would pick a faction to spawn and choose a palette of enemy vehicles for that faction, while the difficulty of that palette would be according to both your run progress and pilot choice. Wildcard spawnlists still pick a faction, but on a particular theme. For example, a Spacer wildcard spawnlist might be a couple of boss vehicles, with a swarm of kamikaze agravs in tow, while a Corvid wildcard spawnlist would be almost all fast vehicles like tread bikes and grav bikes. With this change we hope to introduce more variety to Freelance runs and keep players on their toes.

VEHICLES

The Zed Prime is now available for use in Freelance mode. It is an Ultra-class agrav with twin heavy hardpoints. Please be sure to keep an eye on your ammo count when using double Otomos.
Currently, eleven more vehicles are now available for play (we will be adding more playable vehicles to the roster in a follow-up patch later this month). Meanwhile, several vehicles - like the Corvid Rat King, the Loyalist Monarch and the Spacer Usul - now have additional auto-firing turrets.
Auto-firing weapons have a separate ammo count in green and do not affect your primary and secondary weapon choices. You can toggle the auto fire function on and off by pressing V on your keyboard, which can be rebound in SETTINGS.

LORE

The SNC Informatics Division notes the addition of new material, available for perusal in the INTEL section of ACQUISITIONS, pending the transfer of necessary funds.

LIGHTING

Prior to 2017's Up-Armored Edition, the game had different lighting for Freelance levels. We have included the old lighting data for these levels which you can toggle to via the new USE OLD LIGHTING option in SETTINGS.
In order to apply old lighting, you will need to restart a level via the pause menu.

CHEATS & EASTER EGGS

You can now activate various cheats via the SETTINGS menu. Please note that using these toggles will disable achievements. The Easter Eggs toggle you see in the Settings menu will become fully functional later this month in a follow up patch.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Two new achievements have been added, which will be bestowed upon you pending completion of the new campaign missions, as well as unlocking all the new additions to ACQUISITIONS. As of time of posting, the new achievements may not yet be fully functional - we are working on addressing this.

STABILITY & PERFORMANCE

We have made some performance improvements to the engine that should hopefully impact lower-end machines. With the assistance of our community, we have also done a more thorough benchmarking of the game's hardware requirements on PC and Linux. The game's minimum specs to get an acceptable constant 60 fps at 720p (providing you turn off VSYNC, set NORMAL DETAILS to Low and turn off both POINT SHADOWS and DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS) on Windows are now: [quote]OS: Windows 10 Processor: Dual core CPU with Passmark score of 2900 or more Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: AMD Radeon 5770 / NVIDIA GTX 460 or better Storage: 1 GB available space[/quote] on Linux: [quote]OS: Debian 10 or Ubuntu 20.04 Processor: Dual core CPU with Passmark score of 2900 or more Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: AMD Radeon 5770 / NVIDIA GTX 460 or better Storage: 1 GB available space[/quote] Special thanks to Eschaton, Loki and Hara in particular for running benchmarking tests. Lastly the game is now a stable 64 bit version for Windows, Mac and Linux.

MODKIT

We warned in our news post last week that modders should back up their copy of the game if they wished to preserve any changes. If you have not yet done so, the simplest way to back up a modded version of the game is to make a copy of your Brigador folder somewhere else on your computer. By default on PC this is usually C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Brigador Due to the update we are still in the process of updating the community compilation to work with the new version of the game. In the next few weeks the Modkit & Map Editor DLC will be updated, along with a new community compilation in it after our follow up patch (many thanks to SCOREGOBLIN and our Discord Modding Experts for their feedback and work). However, that won't prevent you from modding your copy of Brigador. If you are new to modding, we have a guide on how to get started (check out Section 4). You will still be able to tinker via the debug panel and change weapon damage values or fool around with other data in the game.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO ALL MAC USERS

This update will be the last update for Mac OS platforms. This is for - but not limited to - two big reasons:

• Apple declared in mid-2018 that it has stopped supporting OpenGL which is the graphics library that Brigador relies on
• In 2020, Apple announced it was making a major shift from Intel processors to ARM-M1 CPUs

Both of these together mark a fundamental change in how Mac machines function. From this point on it is only a matter of time until OpenGL itself disappears from Apple's operating systems, and with it the ability to run Brigador. Though projects like MoltenGL exist, the amount of work that would be required to make Brigador functional on a modern Apple machine will be unjustifiable. That said, we don't expect any major updates to Brigador after this update, but from this point on we will no longer continue to support Mac devices. If you are a Mac user reading this in the future, please contact us about your store purchase.

Full Changelog

[expand type=details]

Game

• Updated to version 1.6 The Blood Anniversary
• Non-mechanical NPCs now leave a bloody mess on death
• Several weapons now leave impact craters on ground tiles
• Three new unlockable pilots added to Freelance: MT Foxtrot, Warlord Kanta and Brother Livewell Cotton
• Four new powersuit-focused missions operations added to Campaign mode: WE USED TO WAIT, IRIAN JAYA, SCANDAL NIGHT and SURF SOLAR
• Eleven vehicles are now available for purchase to play in Freelance mode: Monarch, Pellinore, Leviathan, Blackjack, Coffin, Usul, Widow, Zed Prime, Longboard, Brunhilde, and Fafnir
• Twelve vehicles now have auto-firing turrets installed: Monarch, Leviathan, Citadel, Rat King, Julius, Blackjack, Dragon, Usul, Aetos, Widow, Brunhilde, and Fafnir.
• "Brigadors" unlockable lore entry added to ACQUISITIONS
• Several balance changes (please refer to change log thread for full list)

Stability & Performance

• XNA Framework Redistributable 4.0 added to address launch issues with Windows 10 computers
• 64 bit builds for Windows, Mac & Linux
• Increased performance now that prop sprites update to only update props on screen (instead of whole level)
• Increased performance now that mech AI collision avoidance upper bound has been lowered

UI

• Splash screen on startup changed
• In-game UI should now scale with the UI scale setting
• A new method to add long text strings to the game has been added (this will be detailed in our modding guide later)
• New welcome screen text and three new loading screen messages added
• All new interface texts localized into all 11 additional locales
• Credits updated

Menus

• New AUTO FIRE TOGGLE bind available in SETTINGS > BINDS
• EASTER EGGS, DISABLE GRAPHIC CONTENT, DISABLE DAMAGE EFFECTS and USE OLD LIGHTING toggles added to SETTINGS
• INVINCIBILITY, INVISIBILITY, REDUCED ENEMY AGGRO and INFINITE AMMO cheat toggles added to SETTINGS

Sounds

• Audio levels of particular horn noises have been tweaked

Modding

• Modkit & Map Editor DLC is temporarily not functional - it will be updated to work with version 1.6 in a follow up patch in the coming weeks
• Packfile memory allocation increased by at least 40 MB
• Added various spatial overrides for gib data

For a detailed history of all change logs to the game, please refer to this thread on our discussion forums. [/expand] We hope you enjoy the update and thank you for reading! If you experience technical difficulties, please:

• Start a thread on our Technical Issues subforum (please read this pinned thread for the specific details to include in your message)
• Check out our #bug-reports channel on our Discord server.

- Stellar Jockeys

[ 2021-06-07 18:28:20 CET ] [ Original post ]