This update features some pretty drastic improvements to the Customize Character menu, some AI improvements, a return of the classic version of the Temple map (that some long-time ZGA players may remember as being one of the three maps included at the Early Access launch) and also some contributions from Ex3m (Max Graw) in the form of some improvements to CTS_One and some cleaning out of old, unused assets which has yielded a surprising reduction in the game's storage usage.
For those unaware, the weekly game sessions that were popular during Early Access have now resumed on Sundays at 19:00(GMT). Everyone is welcome and one will be taking place today so do please feel free to join and try out the new features.
-Jon

MAPS:

• The old version of Temple has appeared in the community made map section.
  
• CTS_One now has a rounded floor transition between the sections at 90 degrees.
  
• Various minor map fixes.
  

• The bots can now observe and remember whether a weapon pickup is currently spawned. This fixes what was previously their most obviously stupid behavior, which was standing on an empty weapon spawn until it spawned.
  

• Color wheels in character edit menu and reticle edit menu.
  
• Improvements to the layout of the helmet and shoe menus in the character edit menu.
  
• Aesthetic changes to the map select screen.
  
• Removed redundant debug messages that spammed something about destroying sessions when a listen server host quit.
  
• Added a framerate limit option to graphics menu.
  

• The main menu has been rendered unfestive.
  

• A reduction in total file size from about 7.2GB to about 5.7GB from Ex3m's clearing out of the project's old, unused assets. A great result considering that this update also added content.
  

Linux support is finally here! There might still be a few hitches still on some setups, but at this point I think it should work as well as the Windows build for the majority of users. If you run into any non-trivial problems on your system, just make a post in the bug-reports forum ( https://steamcommunity.com/app/467820/discussions/2/ )

I've been wanting to add Linux support for well over 2 years now. The problem last time I tried (before the early access launch) was that different distros had completely different and sometimes quite serious issues.

Recent testing of the Linux build has only encountered minor or very intermittent issues, all of which seem to be specific to certain systems. Most users, including myself with my Ubuntu installation, don't find any issues specific to Linux at this point.

Anyway, if you're a Linux user please do let me know how ZGA is running for you.

This is the announcement that I referred to earlier in the week. As the title suggests, Zero G Arena is participating in the Yogscast Jingle Jam. For those unaware, this is an annual fundraising event organized by The Yogscast in collaboration with Humble. This includes a special Humble Bundle, from which all revenue goes to charity. As of today, Zero G Arena has been announced as part of that bundle!

You can view the bundle here: https://www.humblebundle.com/yogscast

Previous Jingle Jams have proven to be hugely effective fundraising events, with last year's raising over 5 million dollars for charity. If ZGA's inclusion in the bundle helps in the fundraising effort then it's worth it on those grounds alone.

Anyway, as alluded to in the previous announcement, I'm hoping this will also benefit you, as players, by helping with ZGA's playerbase problem.
Firstly, the bundle can sell a maximum of 200,000 units which, going by previous years, probably most if not all of which will sell (63,900 and counting at the time of writing). The bundle features a lot of games so probably a relatively low percentage of buyers will actually play ZGA, but that's still a lot of units, so I hope that will translate to a noticeable boost to the playerbase.
Secondly, as I understand it, the Yogscast are actually going to play ZGA on stream at some point, to promote the bundle. Hopefully this will encourage more bundle-buyers to try it out, and perhaps even help ZGA's visibility in the longer term.

In any case, I encourage you to have a look at the bundle. It's going to be a great deal even if you already own a few of the games. And also, if you've been struggling to find people to play ZGA with, I imagine it will be worth checking the servers over the next few days.

-Jon

Firstly, this isn't the announcement referred to in my last announcement. That's still happening Tomorrow (8th of December 2018).
This is just a little update with a few fixes and improvements. Most notably, a rework of the map CTS_One which Ex3m started on before the full launch.
-Jon


MAPS:

• CTS_One has had a rework by Ex3m, including drastic visual and structural changes. The map should be faster paced now compared to the previous version, which was quite large and a bit too maze-like.
  

• Added a section to the new tutorial level explaining the various kinds of jumps (including the wall jump). It's a bit basic (just some text and things to jump over to one side of the weapon room), but better than nothing, as this was something that hadn't previously been carried over from the old tutorial, which was unfortunate as I think the various jumps are important in adding depth to the movement system.
  
• There is now a message before the end of the tutorial telling you to go to the Game/Team tab of the in-game menu for a description of the current game mode. Also updated the game mode descriptions.
  

• Avatar colors are now automatically set to the default white and blue when opening the avatar edit menu with no custom options saved. Previously the HSV values would default to 0 when opening the menu. This was probably even more confusing to people unfamiliar with HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) as the H and S sliders would appear to have no effect while Value was at 0.
  
• Changed the text of the server list message about bots and also made it bright green, to try and reinforce the message that you can join an empty dedicated server and play with bots.
  
• Updated Pipe thumbnail
  

• Color changes to electric damage effect (such as when hit by CTS sphere).
  
• Ex3m has added some festive decorations to the main menu scene.
  

• Made default music volume lower in proportion to SFX and UI.
  

• This was not a bug by my definition of one, but I can see how it could be mistaken for one. Joining a dedicated server that had been empty, you may have sometimes found the match to have gone into some ridiculous period of overtime. The bots are removed when there are no players, so if all the players leave in the middle of a match it would just keep going and overrun, as non-team modes in ZGA go into overtime until one player has more points than any other player. Anyway, the server now just resets to a pre-match state when there are no players.
  

I just wanted to make people aware that something's coming up this Saturday (the 8th) that might be of great interest to fans of Zero G Arena. I'm not allowed to give any details until then (I don't suggest speculating too much), but I think I can safely say that it's a very positive thing and I hope it will also prove to be very positive to you as players.

Anyway, don't set any specific expectations, but I thoroughly encourage you to stay tuned and see what happens on Saturday.
-Jon

Well, with all the launch problems, I've just realised I never actually explicitly announced that Zero G Arena has left Early Access!

It didn't really happen as a single event in the end so much as a series of them:

Just as I was about to don my tinfoil hat and try to work out who I'd upset at Valve, I got a response. They've acknowledged the issues so I think ZGA should now get it's proper launch (although given the number of issues so far I'll wait and see...).

It's 01:50AM here in the UK now and I've been up late several days between all these issues and what I thought was going to be the original launch, so sadly I'm not going to be able to stay awake to see the launch in much longer.

If it really has worked, there are probably going to be a lot of new players coming in overnight. I would have hoped to be around to offer tech support but like I say, I'm falling asleep right now. I'd like people to be aware therefore: What I found on the Early Access launch is that there are all kinds of things that can go wrong with the installation process that have got nothing to do with the game. You might have found an actually issue with the game, in which case just make a bug report and I'll get back to you tomorrow, or it might just be your firewall, or Window's failure to install one or more of the dependencies. It's also worth verifying the integrity of the game cache.

Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow to find this has all really been resolved.
-Jon

I would really appreciate if you could read this as I believe the last three and a half years of my life have just been rendered all-but wasted through no fault of my own, by a series of Steam issues which are yet to be resolved.

When I tried to instigate ZGA's full launch yesterday, there was a catastrophic issue with Steam which resulted in the game vanishing from Steam rather than launching. See my last announcement for details on this.

I woke up this morning to a response from Valve claiming that they'd fixed the issues. Thankfully, the issue with ZGA being erased from existence on Steam has been rectified, so existing owners can at least play it again.

This alone would have had a terrible impact on the launch (something I'm yet to get an acknowledgement from Valve on). Unfortunately there have been more issues with Steam which are currently set to render ZGA a complete commercial failure unless fixed. Even if they are fixed at this point the launch will have been severely compromised.

Here's what I know:

Valve have also supposedly launched ZGA for me overnight, which would have been inconvenient even if it had worked properly, as it would have been way off peak times and I wouldn't have been available for tech support.
It's now marked as released and the 40% launch discount has been applied. The launch visibility clearly hasn't been applied however and ZGA is not showing up correctly under new releases. I contacted Valve about this again and their response was that the launch visibility had been applied and that I couldn't see ZGA in new releases due to it being hidden to owners of the game. They suggested using private browsing to see it in new releases.
Multiple people have confirmed to me that ZGA is not showing correctly in new releases and I've tested it using private browsing and even a VPN. We have since discovered that ZGA's launch date is showing incorrectly in some places as the 3rd of November 2016 and it's place in the new releases list is next to games that launched around this time (on page nine hundred and something). I am still waiting for a response from Valve having provided this new information. I encourage you all to look on the Store page and observe the incorrect launch date. It shows as the 9th of August on other parts of Steam so this is clearly a problem. If in doubt, I do know that an Early Access game's launch date should be set to the day it leaves Early Access.

Given these problems, I do not think it should be surprising that the launch visibility is not working, although since this is not as clear to demonstrate I am concerned that even if Valve fix the other problems they won't do anything about this.

With regards to the launch visibility, I have access to data and so far as I can tell the number of impressions and store visits is orders of magnitude less than at the early access launch (which was supposed to be less than the full launch!). It is also less than any typical sale event, so I think any increase in traffic is attributable to the launch discount, which has at least worked.

I'm not sure if many people will appreciative the significance of ZGA not getting it's launch visibility. Every game that launches on Steam is supposed to be given a chance to show that it can sell when shown to users on the Steam store. This is the entire reason that Valve can take such a hefty chunk of a game's profits (I am not allowed to divulge the exact number), in exchange for visibility on their platform. ZGA has had a negligible increase in page views and a negligible increase in sales. As I say, any increase is more likely attributable to the launch discount and perhaps people who were waiting for the full launch (excluding those who tried to find it when it was vanished yesterday!).

If there is any doubt, I do know for a fact that a game releasing from Early Access should get launch visibility. In fact the documentation clearly states that a game doesn't even receive it's full launch visibility until it's full release, so right now ZGA should be getting more visibility in the Steam store than it did for the Early Access launch. I read the documentation over and over to be sure of this before making the decision to continue developing ZGA to this extent. I've also reinvested most of the money ZGA made in Early Access back into the game.

The consequences of all this are that ZGA has sold a negligible number of copies since the launch and as such the servers are all but empty and, unless something changes, I am, without a shadow of a doubt, not going to be able to go on making games for a living.


Thank you for reading this,
Jon Wood, developer of Zero G Arena

Well, at 8 minutes past 8pm (British time) I pressed the button to release ZGA from early access. Steam gave me an error and ZGA vanished from the Steam store. I've sent a message to Valve and hopefully they get back to me soon.

Anyway, ZGA's community HUB also became hidden. I saw in the Steamworks settings that ZGA was now in an "unreleased" state. I tried marking it as "coming soon" in the hope that I could at least make the community HUB visible again to let people know what's happening. This did actually make the community HUB and Store page visible again (or possibly just the Store page, I'm not sure if I checked the community HUB), but it seemed to revert to being invisible again shortly afterwards, despite no further action on my part.

I'm not sure if it was me trying to mark the game as "coming soon", or if the issue that'd already occurred was the cause, but it seems that people who already own ZGA now can't even run it. I'm sorry if that was me, although obviously none of this should have happened anyway...

Sadly I don't think there's anything else I can do on my end so I've just got to wait for a response from Valve. I am all but certain they'll be able to fix it and you'll be able to play ZGA again, but I can't give you a timeframe unfortunately.

Although the community HUB seems to be hidden, my hope is that people can see this in the announcements section for ZGA in their Steam libraries. Otherwise people are just going to find they can't run the game but have no means of contacting me.

Well anyway, pretty much everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong lately, so I'm not even unduly surprised by this turn of events. In the interests of positivity, I'll just say that I don't think this will be anything other than a temporary setback.

-Jon

For those unaware, this is ZGA's last couple of hours in Early Access (all going to plan [which will be a first]). I just wanted to thank the entire community for being great in so many ways.

Firstly, without your help in testing ZGA would, without a shadow of a doubt, be a borderline-unplayable-bug-ridden monstrosity right now.

It's hard to maintain any kind of realistic perspective on something that you've been working on every day for years. When putting ZGA in Early Access, I genuinely had no idea if people were going to love it, hate it or anything in between. I initially made the game free so that I could abandon the project if nobody liked it, without ripping anyone off. As it turned out, people, for the most part, loved it. So, I would also like to thank everyone who's ever told me what they think of ZGA. Without you, I literally would have stopped work on ZGA two years ago or otherwise would not have had the motivation to continue developing it to this extent.

I'd also like to thank everyone for their patience over the course of Early Access. It was inevitable that there would be some pretty serious issues at some points during Early Access. I've always tried to resolve these as quickly as possible but I really appreciate that no one's ever been anything but helpful and patient with these.
Also, I'm aware the playerbase has not always been as active as ideal (in fact some work has been required to find a match for the most part of ZGA's time in Early Access). Before making the decision to enter Early Access I had looked at other multiplayer games and seen that, all too often, they were review bombed for not having an active enough playerbase. This can, of course, become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy and potentially render an Early Access game dead-on-arrival. Somehow ZGA has managed to escape this fate, even in recent months when the playerbase has been least active. Once again, I'd like to thank the entire community for their patience in this respect. All going to plan, an inactive playerbase shouldn't be a problem again for a long time after launch.

Also, I've mentioned bug reports, but I'd also like to thank everyone for all the general feedback. A lot of player suggestions have been incorporated into the game and I think it's definitely much better for it. I wanted to make a full list of suggestions that made it into the game, but sadly I'm too pushed for time before the launch now. It was a lot in any case.
One such suggestion (which was suggested by many people) was the community made maps feature. This was an insufferable faff to add, not least because I spent a long time trying to implement it using a UE4 system that turned out to be a dead end. But it was definitely worth it. The quality and inventiveness of the community made maps was amazing and I was deeply moved that anyone had the enthusiasm for ZGA to put that much effort into it. As most will know, I asked one such map maker (Max Graw) to join the project as an artist for the last 6 months or so.

Anyway, thanks most of all for believing in the game.

-Jon

This is it! The launch is this Wednesday (08/08/2018) and unless there's a critical issue, this will be the final update in Early Access. Any remaining minor bugs will now re-branded as quirks or in some cases features.

To be as sure as possible that everything's working, it would be good to get as many players as possible for the weekly game session tomorrow (which, for those who don't know, is every Sunday at 20:00 [GMT+1]). I'll be on the the Official_EU_Advanced server, and there should be at least one other server up if that's full. I'll be setting up more servers before the launch in any case.

Anyway, barring any more catastrophes to fix (see the official discord for the most recent catastrophe), I'll be spending the next few days on marketing, so that hopefully you'll have plenty more people to play with post-launch, and hopefully ZGA sells enough units for me to fund future game projects!

-Jon


SOUND:

• Made some changes to In The News This Week to make it sound more energetic. It has different sounds and mixing, and some new guitar parts.
  
• Minor changes to Rise And Shine, including minor changes to the mix, and re-recording of a guitar part that had a mistake in.
  
• New SMG firing sound from Deika. The previous sound was made when the SMG was still styled more as a conventional projectile weapon rather than the sci-fi-laser-plasma-zappy-thing it is now. The new sound is more fitting for it's new aesthetics.
  

• In KOTH modes (at least on the dedicated server), next to the score limit there is now a message saying occupy the KOTH zone to score. This is a rather inelegant solution to the problem of people not realizing the current game-mode is KOTH.
  
• Also decreased the dedicated server team KOTH score limit to 100 from 120. This is because Team KOTH tends to take longer than normal KOTH.
  

• Dedicated servers now automatically revert to either Pipe or Factory after being unoccupied for more than 10 minutes. This is because Pipe and Factory are reasonably rounded introductions to the game for new players and also work for a range of player counts.
  
• For the launch, I've changed the map voting pool so that there are now more official maps than community maps. I will most likely change this back a while after the launch. I just wanted to make it more likely that new player's introduction to the game is an official map and that confusion caused by the maps not looking like they do on the store page is reduced.
  
• There's some more cover objects, and some floating rocks in Laboratory. From testing, it felt a bit empty before.
  

• Bots still seemed to somehow end up spawning in unsupported maps. I've spent a long time looking for the cause of this and I am certain that it's impossible. Due to reality's refusal to conform to the possible, I have been forced to just add some extra code that manually checks for and de-spawns bots in unsupported maps.
  

I'm aiming to have the game in it's final launch state by next Wednesday, which will be exactly a week before the launch. I think it's just about there, but there's time for some last minute improvements, and/or fixes if necessary.

-Jon


USER MADE MAPS:

• There's an amazing new map from DarkGuy1001, the creator of the map Prota. The new map is called SelfTendedArchive and seems to be themed around a kind of archive that's fallen into a considerable state of disrepair. I absolutely love this map, it's super inventive and it looks great too, so I think it's very fitting as what will almost certainly be the last user-made map before the launch.
  

• I've set most of the SMG's particle effects to be hidden when Effects Quality is set to Low. I think the complexity of the particle system might have been the cause of framerate drops on very low-end PCs. This needs testing though.
  

• The tutorial now features a grapple beam weaponizer pickup, along with an explanation of it's function.
  

• The tutorial now has a chilled out (ambient?) music track.
  

• Reworked particle effects for the shotgun.
  

• In the pre-match phase, bots will now change team in order to try and balance the teams. This should also fix an issue where the initial bot team allocation seemed to create unbalanced teams.
  
• Stopped bots spawning on dedicated servers in any post-match phase. I think this might fix an issue where bots invariably managed to travel over to unsupported maps or game-modes.
  
• Added collision to Spaceball ceiling-light models, which seemed to be lacking it. Not sure if that's new or if it's always been the case and I never noticed...
  

Exactly two weeks until launch now!
Since I've started leaving the game packages to build overnight it's significantly reduced the overhead of releasing updates, hence the current assault of tiny updates. Some of the current issues are impossible to test without releasing an update, so I'll most likely be releasing small updates every day until they're fixed. Hopefully most of the remaining issues will be fixed with this update though.

-Jon


OPTIONS:

• The resolution scale text box now permits the entry of values over 100%. The slider still goes from 25 to 100 though, as setting the value over 100 will not be a common use case. This option was suggested to me by the Steam user Cheezitupp as an alternative to the anti-aliasing options which, while quite efficient, do produce some artifacts. Setting the resolution scale above the resolution of your screen will have a similar effect to anti-aliasing, but with none of the artifacts. The downside is that the performance cost will be disproportionate for anyone who hasn't already got a needlessly powerful GPU. If you have got an overpowered GPU and plenty of frames to spare then you will probably find this to be an improvement over the anti-aliasing options available at the moment.
  

• As I will presumably be saying in every update from now on, I hope to have fixed the issue where team colours intermittently persist after map changes to a non-team mode, but it needs to be tested. Last update's fix for this evidently didn't work...
  
• Added a delay in spawning bots after a map change on a dedicated server. I'm not sure, but I'm hoping this might fix the issue with bots spawning in unsupported maps. There have been some very strange issues that occur only after map changes lately so my working theory is that there can be some strange conditions immediately after that could throw some assumptions off.
  
• Changed skybox in Space, as I believe it was another cause of memory issues due to it's obscene size.
  

Weeks and 1 day until launch now. In accordance with sod's law there seems to have been a slew of new issues lately, but I think I'm just about getting through them fast enough. The pressure's really on now. Thanks very much to everyone who's continued to make bug reports and do please let me know if you find any new bugs.

-Jon


ACHIVEMENTS:

• Since it hardly features in any maps now, and was all-but impossible to get kills with, the homergun achievements are no more. I profoundly regret the inclusion of these achievements in the first place, which have tragically driven many achievement-hunters to insanity. I would also like to recognise the almost-implausible persistence of TheSodaCow in being the only user I'm aware of actually having got all of the homergun achievements (and, indeed, all of the achievements). Let me know in the comments if you also managed to achieve the impossible.
  

• Made the lights in Laboratory less costly on performance.
  
• The fire particle effects in the map Temple are now removed when Effects Quality is set to low.
  
• I don't normally edit user made maps, but while I was at it, I just changed the lighting type in BlueIsTrue's Orientation to make it perform better. It will hardly look different and won't play differently at all, but should hopefully run substantially better for people with lower end PCs now, who had previously reported this particular map running a lot slower than others.
  

• There have been various intermittent issues with the player colours lately. This is not confirmed yet, but I'm hoping at least some of these should be fixed after deleting some definitely dodgy code.
  
• It's come to my attention that people who had modified their weapon hotkeys might have found that neither they, nor the default keys worked after the last update, following a change to the controls config format. I've now added a system that will convert your old settings to the new format.
  
• Similarly, people who had modified any controls at all found that the open-in-game-menu control didn't work at all anymore. I've made sure that in this case, ESC is always added as a default menu binding, as it cannot be set to anything else anyway, due to being used to cancel the current keybind recording in the edit controls menu.
  
• On another similar note, some people have reported that following the addition of the disable-HUD setting, their HUDs were disabled by default. I couldn't think of an ideal solution to this, so I've just automatically set the HUD to enabled whenever you open the main menu. This might be annoying if you really want it to be saved to off, but that seems like much less of a risk to me than, for example, a lot of early access players picking up the game again at the full launch and taking the missing HUD to be a bug.
  
• A few updates ago I listed a change that let the server change maps to Pipe after being unoccupied for too long. Turns out this didn't work due to a stupid typo. It should work now, although I'm considering changing this functionality to use a rotation of the official maps that are more flexible in terms of player numbers.
  

Whoops! As a side effect of the menu controls becoming rebind-able in update 43, anyone who had modified controls will probably find that the in-game menu doesn't open when they press ESC or M any more.

You can either go to the edit controls menu and add a key for the menu (unfortunately, I've also realised that you won't be able to enter ESC for this, as it currently just cancels the key input), or just reset the controls to default, which is a function available in the edit controls menu.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

I've got just over two more weeks to pull this kind of nonsense after which I will try to avoid this kind of thing so far as possible...

-Jon

Finally, a replacement to the old and extremely outdated tutorial. I personally feel like this is the final addition that promotes ZGA from an early access game into a finished game (although the full launch is still not for a couple of weeks or so [08/08/2018, don't forget!]).

Anyway, I am now planning to make very few functional changes apart from bugfixes, in order to reduce the risk of introducing new bugs before the launch. Please do continue to let me know of any bugs you find.

-Jon


Changes

FEATURES:

• A brand new and improved tutorial! This is largely Max's work. It should be a better experience to the old tutorial, although it doesn't go into as much depth. It should provide new players with enough information to quickly grasp enough of the mechanics to join games and start having fun though. I would like to add Advanced tutorials in future, but that will most likely not be before launch.
  
• You can now grapple dead players.
  
• The open-in-game-menu controls are now rebind-able in the edit controls menu.
  
• Increased the level of the default graphics settings to a medium level of detail. This means that people with lower end PCs will probably have to turn down the graphics settings as soon as they run the game for the first time. The next addition will hopefully encourage them to do so.
  
• There is now a message that displays in the main menu when you haven't set any graphics options yet.
  

• Laboratory is now about half the size as it was before. It also now has basic AI support, although the bots won't be particularly good at making full use of the cylindrical sections yet.
  

• The melee kick now does less damage at lower speeds and more damage at high speeds. In other words, speed now has a bigger impact on it's effectiveness. As another result of this, the kick can now kill in one hit for an extremely high speed difference to the target. I usually avoid one-hit-kill things, but I'm making an exception for particularly epic kicks here.
  

• Temple has a new skybox.
  

• New soundtrack piece Hypermassive Rotating Object. I was initially very pleased with this one, but I'm now not sure if it fits into the game very well. I also tried a bit of a musical experiment for the second half of this piece of music. I've got a feeling it's going to come across as some kind of mistake though. Well let me know what you think of this one if it comes up anyway.
  

• If you've changed the weapon hotkeys from the defaults I'm afraid I might have invalidated those particular settings, so you may have to set them again. I'm going to try to avoid these kind of shenanigans after Early Access
  

• Added a brute-force fix for the pre-match timer being occasionally inaccurate for clients.
  
• Added a similarly brutish fix for a highly intermittent issue I've observed whereby you are still on red or blue team after a dedicated server map change to a non-team mode from a team one.
  
• Eliminated the cause of a memory spike that I believe was still occasionally causing a crash on the dedicated server when changing maps to Temple.
  

Well, it looks like there was a new server crash bug introduced with today's update. Luckily I think I just managed to break my personal record for fastest hotfix.

In addition to fixing the crash, I also made a slight fix to the AI, as I noticed it was sometimes standing on a spawn platform and waiting for a weapon to spawn whilst ignoring other players (not good tactics, by the way).

Just over 3 weeks until launch! This is really the last sprint to the finish now. Between now and then I'll most likely be focusing primarily on fixes, polishing and perhaps a bit more content such as soundtrack pieces. You can probably expect another couple of update or so before launch.
Ex3m is working on some really cool new graphical improvements, and, for this update has made an entirely new official map, Laboratory.

-Jon




Changes

Functional

• In team modes, automatic victory is now granted if there are no more players on the other team.
  

• There is a new official map, Laboratory, made by Ex3m. The map may not be entirely finished, and does not yet support bots, but should otherwise be in a playable state.
  

• Avatar armour now has glowing sections irrespective of colour options. The 2nd colour on the suit no longer glows for bright colours or during team modes. Also, the new glowing armor turns off when dead, as it wasn't that easy to tell before.
  
• Improved grapple beam appearance.
  

• AI now supports King of the Hill and Team King of the Hill! Unfortunately I doubt I'll have time to add support for the ball-based game modes before launch, as that could be a lot more complicated.
  
• Bots are now removed before a map change on a dedicated server. New bots will spawn after the map change, if appropriate. This will result in the bot types changing more often, and also prevents a few possible issues.
  
• Bots now consider finding weapons more desirable if they have less ammo across all their weapons. Previously, they would only consider the desirability of each weapon in isolation.
  

• In the map vote selection, each option now has an indicator as to whether bots are supported.
  
• There are now links in the main menu to the official Zero G Arena Discord server and Twitter account.
  
• A lot of the HUD messages now have grey backgrounds.
  

• Music:
  
  
  
  • New piece: In The News This Week
    
  • New piece: Every Time, which you might recognise as being a slightly refined version of the piece used in ZGA's very first trailer.
    
  
  
• There are now sound effects that play when you score a hit (for you only). These were made by Deika, as usual.
  

• Wall panels now have thicker collision geometry. Hopefully reducing the chance of the ragdolls getting stuck in them even further.
  

• (Unconfirmed) Last week I observed an issue where my avatar still had team colours after changing from a team mode to a non-team mode on the dedicated server. I might have fixed this, but it's hard to be sure as the issue was clearly very intermittent. Let me know if you see this again.
  

• As a side effect of something else I was working on, your health and defence now no longer go into negatives if the damage dealt exceeded your remaining health.
  

There were a few issues with the last update that I thought were serious enough warrant a hotfix, so here it is.
-Jon


FIXES

• The stationary kicking-practice-bots have found their way back to the tutorial. Why on Earth would they want to leave?
  
• The server list menu now has a sane layout again. For that matter, this is probably the sanest it's ever been. For some reason it was such an insufferable faff just getting the headings to line up with the info that I considered just claiming the bizarre text discrepancies of the update 41 menu as part of my artistic vision.
  
• I've regenerated the AI navigation data for the map Inception, as I believe it was out-of-date and causing the bots to get stuck in the round room.
  
• I think the problem with global stats not showing that I mentioned in the update 41 patch notes may just have been some temporary hitch with the Steam servers, as it seems to have resolved itself.
  

• There will now be 3 bots on a dedicated server for a lone human player.
  

There is now an official discord server for Zero G Arena:

discord.gg/SXET9j6

If you're a discord user then I encourage you to join. I'm not very familiar with discord (I've got some more experienced Discord users to help me), but I think it will be useful for organising games, discussions, perhaps in-game voice chat and I plan to use it to make announcements and perhaps organise some fun events or competitions at and in the run up to the full launch.


Anyway, on a related note, I've also been using the Zero G Arena Twitter account to make more frequent announcements, and I also find Twitter quite useful for getting quick feedback from the community, so if you're a Twitter user, please do come and say hello on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Zero_G_Arena


There's going to be a lot going on between now and launch (and most likely even more so after launch), so now is the perfect time to get involved.

-Jon

It's been quite a wait since the last update, but I think you'll find it was worth it, as this is easily ZGA's biggest update so far!
There will probably be one or two more updates before the main launch on 08/08/2018, mainly for fixes and perhaps minor improvements. I'll also be setting up a bunch more dedicated servers just before the launch, to accommodate the (I hope) large influx of new players.

See below for my best approximation of a full list of changes (this time in particular, I may not have been very diligent in recording every change).

-Jon



CHANGES:
FUNCTIONAL:

• AI added! I can't tell you how happy I am that I was able to add AI, as I really wasn't sure if it was going to be practical, or even possible, due to the unique challenges presented by ZGA. Indeed, this was an enormous feature to add, taking the majority of my time since the last update and now amounting to about a third of the overall size of the codebase. It might not be of near-human intelligence, but it's now at the point where I think it can provide a good challenge at multiple skill levels.
  
  
  
  • The bots can have a variety of traits, to change their skill level and behaviour. A type of bot also has a Level to describe it's difficulty. Right now, I've just set 9 basic bots of increasing skill level, but more interesting variants could be added in future.
    
  • It was important to me that the bots were sufficiently similar to humans in behaviour that the same tactics were effective against them. For example, no matter how high the bot's aiming traits are dodging will always be effective, and, like against humans, the more unpredictable the better.
    
  • Bots will automatically spawn on a dedicated server if there are only one of 2 players.
    
  • Listen server hosts can add bots at will.
    
  • You may notice not every map and game mode is supported for AI yet. I'm hoping to add support for some if not all of these before launch, but can't make any promises due to time constraints. In general, there are various improvements that I'd like to make to the AI, time allowing, but I think it's in a good enough state to be a very important addition to the game still.
    
  
  
• Brand new gamemode, Spaceball! Spaceball was supposed to be a temporary name, but having built the update, I've just realised I forgot to rename it. Anyway, the game mode is a sort of sports-ball type, more like soccer than the existing Capture the sphere mode. It has it's own new map, made by Ex3m.
  
• Spawn points now prioritized first on team then on distance from other players
  
• For auto-managed (including dedicated) servers, instead of a 10 minute timed game, the automatic game type for kind of the hill modes will be first to 120 points (still sort of timed for king of the hill...).
  
• The dedicated server will eventually change back to Pipe and Free For All if left unoccupied for a certain period of time. This is to prevent it from being left on a map that's unsuitable for one or two players (so could discourage people from joining again).
  
• If there is only one player on a server, the map vote will end as soon as they cast their vote. Also, if there is only one player and bots are unsupported for the current map or game mode, the map vote will begin instantly.
  
• Servers now have an optional skill level setting. This can be set by listen server hosts as an option when hosting. It is not enforced in any way, but rather just a label to help people find a game against players of a similar skill level to them. I plan to set up dedicated servers with different skill levels for the main launch so that newbies aren't destroyed by you veterans.
  

• Changed ERC rate of fire from 5 rounds per second to 4.5. Not a big change, but I think if it was overpowered before then there wasn't much in it. This is really just to make it a bit harder to get close ranged spamming kills.
  

• Huge changes to the layout of Temple.
  
• Boxes in the railgun room in Pipe are now less densely arranged.
  
• I finally put something in that big flat floor in Factory. I've been meaning to do this pretty much since I added Factory to the game nearly 2 years ago.
  

• New decals on all official maps. These include fictional logos (the closest thing you'll find in ZGA to lore), warning signs and the like.
  
• Max has done a major overhaul of the graphics on Temple, turning it from one of the more outdated official maps into the fanciest visually.
  
• New weapon models
  
• New weapon visual effects
  
• Main menu scene changes
  
• New Boxes on Pipe
  
• New model to represent spawn point of CTS sphere
  
• New weapon spawn location model
  
• New splash screen
  
• New models in Inception.
  
• Improved reflections in all maps.
  

• I've put together and integrated the beginnings of a soundtrack. Right now there are just 4 pieces, which are selected from randomly when a match starts. I'll most likely do some more work on these pieces, and I plan to add some more pieces to the soundtrack. There are some quite different styles among those 4 tracks, so feel free to let me know which one you like best (the track name appears in the HUD when it starts playing) and I can take that into account making future tracks.
  
• Here are a bunch of great new sound effects from Deika:
  
  
  
  • New rocket fire sound
    
  • New weapon switching sound
    
  • New SMG impact sound
    
  • New rocket explosion sound
    
  • New sound on picking up weapons
    
  • There is now a feedback sound when you get a kill
    
  • CTS goal and sphere respawn sounds.
    
  
  
• The weapon noises now have a low-pass filter (less treble) applied that increases in intensity with range.
  
• The volume of the grapple sounds now drop off in volume faster with range.
  

• There is an addition to the Server tab in the in-game menu (accessible to listen server hosts) which enables kicking players and removing bots (through the same menu).
  
• The chat box now ignores capital letters. To my mind, the communicative facilities afforded by capital letters were far outweighed by having to constantly type excuse caps to avoid appearing ANGERY if capslock was on without your knowledge.
  
• Added individual SFX, Music and UI volume settings to the audio settings menu.
  
• After much deliberation about what to do with Cityscape, I've just decided to move it to the community made maps section.
  
• Also removed the creator field from the official map list, as now that Max Graw has contributed to all of the official maps in some way (most notably Temple), it would now be an oversimplification to specify a single creator, or both of us as creators. Max's contributions to the game are, of course, credited in the credits screen.
  
• Server browser rearranged slightly. Dedicated servers are now above listen servers. Also removed quite a lot of not-so-important text.
  
• New HUD weapon icons to match the new weapon models
  
• The HUD menu now adheres to the same layout as the other sub-menus.
  
• Added Disable HUD option to HUD menu
  
• Also added an option to disable just the magnet indicator in the HUD.
  
• The map info that shows on loading a new map now has a grey background.
  
• Moved the map vote screen so that it no longer obscures the chat box.
  

• Hopefully your feet/legs should no longer get stuck in the floors/walls. Unfortunately this is one of those things that's not really a bug that I can locate and remove so much as a limitation of various systems that requires some inelegant fix to be slapped on top of. With that in mind, I'm not sure yet if we've truly seen the last of this issue or if it's just less likely to occur now. Let me know if it happens to you again.
  
• Previously, only your personal total kills showed for the global total kills stat. This should be fixed now.
  
• Fixed audio control not working in main menu.
  
• Fixed grapple beam failing to de-weaponize after warmup
  
• Fixed blue team score indicator obscured for timed team gamemodes
  
• Fixed player icons persisting in the TAB menu after the player leaves (I'm pretty sure, but needs testing online).
  
• Made detection of when weapon is obstructed more accurate and less glitchy (it was the cause of various jittering bugs [jitterbugs, if you will...])
  
• I think the weapon obstruction code also failed to detect when a weapon was obstructed by the floor below (when pointing downwards). This is fixed now.
  
• Fixed bug where timed match would sometimes go into overtime even when there is not a draw.
  

• In a last minute attempt to fix a layout issue in the server list I somehow managed to produce another layout issue that's considerably more ridiculous. The original issue was actually fixed, but some text may be pretty much illegible in some cases.
  
• The static bots from the tutorial have vanished. There will be a revamped tutorial soon anyway.
  
• The global stats suddenly all list as 0.
  
• I think the bots might be having some trouble in the round room in Inception. I'm pretty sure I just forgot to rebuild the navigation data after some changes to the map.
  

This is it! The moment I've been working towards for the last three and a half years or so will be arriving in just over two months. Some Early Access games seem to consider the initial Early Access launch to be the main launch, but for Zero G Arena my plan has always been to use Early Access to work with a small but dedicated playerbase to make the game as good as possible and then treat the main launch as the real start of the game's lifespan.




There should be at least one very large update before then. I'm still undecided on whether to release one soon or just wait until the final update. In any case, there's a lot of things to finish off and a lot of promotional material to produce, so it's going to be an extremely busy couple of months. Do stay tuned for more news.

-Jon

As some of you known, we're now doing weekly ZGA matches on Sundays at 20:00 (GMT+1 [British summer time]). I plan to participate in this every week, if I can.
This will generally be on the official server, but this week (today, 13th of May 2018), we'll be testing an early version of a new game mode. Anyone's welcome to join, so if you want to, you'll need to download a beta branch of ZGA. Refer to my forum post for how to do this: https://steamcommunity.com/app/467820/discussions/3/2828702373004065220/
You'll also need the password there to join my listen server.

Anyway, I'm aware that the playerbase isn't particularly active at the moment (not to my surprise at this point), so hopefully this will provide at least one time a week that you can find a game between now and the full launch. I can virtually guarantee that there will be a lot more players online at the point of the full launch and hopefully for a considerable amount of time afterwards. All going to plan, this shouldn't be long now.

-Jon

If you're wondering what the latest state of ZGA's development is, here's a long-overdue new Dev-Vlog entry.

https://youtu.be/FcQGqxXJ4RY