Hey everyone! BallisticNG 0.9.2 is now available and features many new things. This update is quite a big one and it's been fun working on it, there's been a bit of everything from basic tweaks to new tracks and a whole load of interface improvements. Below is all of the most important changes, if you want to see what's coming next then check the bottom of this announcement!
Note to track creators: see bottom of the changelog for Unity Tools update
Important stuff first
- The crash on exit has been fixed, it's only a workaround for the time being as we're still waiting for the cause of the issue to be fixed on Unity's end but you no longer have to fear clicking the quit button.
- Barracuda now has separate leaderboards from the rest of the teams. This has resulted in the game's final leaderboard reset!
- Workshop tracks now have leaderboards
- Ships now use the weapon damage multiplier setting. All custom ships had their multiplier value defaulted to zero before this update, so if you've uploaded custom ships to the workshop without changing that value you'll want to update them otherwise their weapons will no longer deal damage.
- The game has a new system for managing content so built in and custom content get treated the same. The old way of managing ship categories has been deprecated and categories for both ships and tracks are built automatically from the MyShip and MyTrack folder hierarchies - anything sitting in the root of these folders will be moved into an uncategorised folder.
- Custom track caching has had an overhaul, there might still be a few kinks left though. If you find yourself not being able to get past the loading UGC screen, please upload your output log to pastebin and link it on the bugs forum! To get to your output logs, press Windows Key + R and enter %AppData%..LocalLowVonsnakeBallisticNG
- Splitscreen is currently in a state of needing a bunch of work done. It's functional, but not the optimal experience yet!
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0.9.2 changelog
Campaign
The campaign has been rewritten from scratch and is now built out of a lot more events covering more gamemodes with unlocks (most of the unlocks are coming in a future update). This new campaign system has been designed so custom campaigns can also be implemented in the future!
User Interface
- The main menu has been redesigned from the ground up to be more user friendly and intuitive. A lot of the same concepts are here, just expanded upon.
- The main menu now has a quick race option if you don't care for going through all of the options custom race provides.
- Ingame menus now have a select track option which lets you quickly change track and ships (these are still a work in progress)
- Options menus have been remade
- Added tooltips, keep elements like options highlighted for a brief period for them to pop up
- Removed tutorial overlays in favour of tips on the menu and a brief handling tutorial at the start of the campaign
- Fixed mouse keeping UI elements highlighted if switching to keyboard/gamepad menu inputs
Gameplay
- Tournaments have been re-introduced back into the game
- The prototype ships, Barracuda and Caliburn are now locked until you unlock them in the campaign
- Added clean liveries
- Finished all donator liveries
- Rewrote ship roster selection. Roster selection for custom ships is no longer random and added options to disable roster limits for teams like Barracuda.
- Updated the handling on most ships. There is still work to be done, but this is a start
- Omega Harbour now has thunder like previous iterations of the track
- You can now tilt and zoom the photomode camera will a controller, hold the menu special bind and move the right analog stick
Weapons
- Ai can now use the energy wall in elite and hardcore
- Ai's plasma hits now instakill in elite and hardcore
- Ai now become more aggressive with weapons in the harder difficulties
- Tremor now inflicts 50% more damage
- Rockets pickup now fires three rockets into of two, the outer rockets have a spread
- Improved ship hover response to being tremored
Tracks
- Remade Ishtar Citadel's scenery to bring it up to level with other tracks in the game
- Arrivon XI and Nova Split are now back in the game as official roster tracks, remade from scratch
- Updated Omega Harbour's sky, ocean color and added some variation to lit window colors
- Added sun flares
Visuals
- Brightened up engine effects
- Most tracks now have baked building facade glass reflections
- Toned back bloom, lens effects and tonemapping
- Increased view distance setting cap to 200 units
- Corrected Wyvern's illumination map
- The 3d medals are now the speed class icons
Other
- Added Shiftdelete - Antigraviton to the soundtrack
- Added Vonsnake - Zen Zeus (BnG Edit) to the soundtrack
- Every ship now has a unique engine sound
- Updated many sounds, most notably the plasma and explosions
- The game can now read .flac and .ogg files for custom music, if metadata is present then the game will try to load that for the music's display name too
- Added Discord Rich Presence support. It defaults to off, you can enable it in the gameplay options.
- The SFX channel is now ran through a compressor to save your ears if loads of loud stuff starts happening
Ballistic Unity Tools (reimport package for update)
Important Note: For new features such as custom track descriptions to work, you need to remove your track caches so this information can be baked into the cache files
- Added point to point tracks toggle to Scene References. With this enabled the mid laser becomes the finish line
- Added ai speed multiplier to Scene References
- Added custom track description and display image options to Scene References (for the new track turntable) - make sure your display image has read and write enabled otherwise the game won't be able to read it
- Added zone ignore script
- Added four new shaders: additive, additive vertex alpha, vertex lit (no clip) and skydome
- Added Ballistic Flare (documentation on this and how to setup flare occluders will be coming soon)
- Most interfaces have had an overhaul to make the tools more user friendly
- Jump zone bounds and rotation offsets are now edited visually in the scene view
- Added invert button to tile flag menus
- Fixed setup wizard not finding track meshes by default
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What's coming next?
0.9.3 is going to be introducing the additional content that you can currently unlock throughout the campaign. This includes:
- Two sets of ship liveries
- Glide and Ballistic64 physic modifiers (you can currently use Ballistic64 by typing it on the menu)
- Two expert tracks, these will push your piloting skills to the max
- Precision runs, a series of short point to point track challenges which require pinpoint precision to navigate
- A first person gallery featuring a history of the game's content iterations
The game's achievements are also going to be redone. Now that the game is in a much more finished state, the achievements can be properly designed around the game as it is now. There's also going to be a menu for managing C# mods. C# modding itself is also going to be getting documentation and examples sorted out soon also.
After 0.9.3 the game is going to be on the home stretch. Public updates will come much more frequently as bugs are fixed and everything is polished up for the big 1.0 release!
Have fun with the update, more is coming soon!
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