As mentioned in the last blog post, this is the first update of the new monthly update schedule. It features some nice quality of life features and technical improvements.

Color Picker

The new color picker can be accessed in the battle and unit editor to pick a color from the visible objects. This can be used to quickly select colors based on the colors of vanilla content or other colors you like in a scene.

File Browser Improvements

With all the different kinds of custom content, the file browser has become an essential tool when saving, loading or importing stuff. This updates adds some qol features to it:

• Bookmark paths
• Click on folders in the navigation bar to quickly navigate back
• Rename entries
• Folders are now supported for custom items
• Delete/rename buttons are only visible while hovering

Invisible Units

With the addition of custom equipment items, ghost units were "abused" to create custom unit shapes by adding custom face equipments and armor items, but the semi transparent color of the ghost units was still visible. The new Invisible and Invisible With Blood options for the unit appearance in the unit creator can be used to create fully invisible units with or without blood effects. And zombie units can also be invisible!

Footstep sounds

The player and units now have footstep sounds depending on the surface they are walking on. https://youtu.be/w1pdXEpzCqU

Player/Unit Improvements

To improve the feeling while controlling a player, there are some improvements in this update (and more are planned)

• The head is now slightly tilted while leaning
• Replaced the landing sound which now also depends on the surface
• Standing still now reduces recoil by 10%
• Crouching now reduces recoil by 25%
• Added some arm sway while aiming a weapon to prevent it from being perfectly still
• AI units will now rotate their heads up/down while aiming at a target at a different elevation

New Scripting Nodes

The planning phase for more extensive changes to the scripting system has started to make it easier to use and also allow users to add custom logic without having to actually edit visual scripts. But for now, this update only includes some new scripting and adjusted nodes:

• Added HUD/Activate node to hide the vanilla HUD elements
• Added movable object GetPosition/GetRotation nodes to prevent having to cast them to object
• Added Unit/Move and Movable/Move nodes to quickly move units/objects by an offset instead of having to calculate the absolute target position
• Movable objects can now be rotated with the Rotate/RotateLocal/SetRotation nodes
• Added Player/IsGrounded and Player/LookDIr nodes
• Added key to string cast nodes to display key bindings as string
• Added GetRight/Forward/Up direction vector nodes for movable objects
• Added Math3D/LookRotation and Math3D/RotateTowards nodes to help with calculating rotations
• Added Unit/Activate footsteps sound to activate and deactivate footsteps for individual units
• Added Unit/GetTags node to get an array with all tags that a unit has
• Added additional unit output to the GetPlayer node to prevent having to cast it to unit
• Added keepTags input to ReplaceUnit/ReplaceUnitCustom nodes to keep all scripting tags that are attached to the unit

Memory Improvements

With all the custom content from the latest update, some memory related problems were detected which caused crashes over time and overall reduced performance after a while. These issues mainly affected the load/save system when working with larger battles, so this update includes various improvements and fixes to make longer sessions with many save/load processes more enjoyable and stable,

Other Improvements

• Modular parts will no longer snap and jitter around while placing them in overlapping placement slots. This was especially annoying when placing roofs
• Impact effects for bullets (sound & particles) are now more reliable and there are some new effects for materials like glass or plastic
• All lists in the game now scroll with the same speed relative to the item size
• Poison and flame damage is now displayed on the HUD
• The visiblility of workshop items is now loaded into the UI before updating them
• Custom items from the workshop now display as "[V1_W]" in lists to identify them
• Colors can now be dragged into folders in the color management UI
• Transparent colors are now supported in the color management UI
• Increased sound capacity of the audio system

Bug Fixes

Most bugs have already been fixed in the previous patch

• Fixed a bug that caused custom objects with surface placement to be placed wrong
• Fixed a bug that caused the custom container item setting to place the door at an invalid position