Hey, everyone. Welcome to our second regular monthly update. We spent half of our time in March on performance, balancing and other improvements, and half of our time on new content. Unfortunately, the new content is not ready at this moment.

Update Notes

Combat improvements

- updated melee timings, making some weapons a bit faster - melee weapons have different ranges now - updated damage of some enemies - increase damage portion on secondary targets when hitting multiple targets - compressed player health over later levels - removed general range randomization on bullets (but kept the indiviual 'scatter' value) - decreased damage reduction by resistance values - updated general damage balancing - made ranged targeting characters take movement of target into account (standard and hard difficulty) - relaxed difficulty: increased player damage, especially against bosses - updated energy weapons effect visuals and values - reduced scatter for some weapons - reduced recoil pushback for some weapons - faster attack speed for the knife - added rocket launcher audio - updated robot enemy visuals, damage and health - fixed a few enemy types not being set to aggressive combat behavior

Performance

- improved loading times - fixed memory allocation due to exploring area map; fixes some random frame spikes due to garbage collector slowdowns - fixed a few memory leaks - improved performance while in stealth mode - general performance improvements on combat actions - small per frame performance improvements - fixed a few per frame memory allocations - additional small performance improvements for various objects

Fixes and Improvements

- updated audio plugin: fixes not having audio on some PC configurations - small content improvements - fixed not being able to switch weapons (for afterwards) while attacking - improved action wheel UI - increased font size of some UI elements - minor dialogue UI improvements - fixed and improved lots of small UI issues - close map on a few input events like weapon scrolling - make enemies walk instead of run when walking away after killing player - fixed fade in from black on entering levels sometimes getting cut short - fixed world map exits in New Delphi not triggering automatically - fixed character walk from exit on fade out even if blocked by collider - fixed some enemy salvo shots abruptly ending - fixed issues with feedback form - fixed item description when weapon was modified - fixed player dodging all damage through rolling for some cases it was not intended for - fixed worms and worm spawner in Flesh Crater boss fight not being clickable - controller: when picking automatic target by melee without having direction input, prefer enemy characters over destructibles - controller: apply optional targeting help to using directional abilities, too - controller: on large UI, use tooltip UI instead of bottom descriptions - controller: fixed skill modifier missing in character creation - fixed some potential script errors - fixed an issue that could make a bullet potentially hit the same target twice - fixed a few tutorial issues - fixed a few issues with the debug console - fixed Agira walking into the house when trying to distance from player character - fixed an aggro issue when NPCs accidentally hit characters from other faction - fixed being able to try entering stealth again when at 0 energy for it - fixed a few issues with new energy weapons - fixed not being shown Continue button in some cases despite having existing savegames - simplified main menu - updated camera scale for some resolutions - allow bold text usage for localization mods - added key binding for quest window - additional bug fixes and small improvements

Details

We touched a lot of combat-related values in this update. The goal here was to make the combat more tight as well as keeping it intense enough especially in later levels. Previously, there was a big drop off in difficulty in later levels. We will continue making changes to the combat in the following months. I would like to get rid of some moments where enemies take way too many hits before going down. Any combat-related feedback is appreciated and it's best to send it via the in-game feedback form with the game data attached, so we can look at your current stats and equipment as context to your feedback about a combat situation. We also improved the performance of the game. Loading times for each level have been decreased, and we also fixed some memory leaks, which lead to a creeping increase of time spent on the loading screen the longer the game was running. Previously there were also some low frame spikes happening randomly, which were caused by the dynamic memory management of the game engine triggering a "garbage collection" at that point. We fixed a lot of cases where memory was allocated temporarily during gameplay time, so these moments should either be gone now or a lot less frequent. One problematic area regarding performance on less powerful systems is the stealth mode, due to the method the visual cones of enemies are generated. We improved this now, but it will require additional future work to bring it closer to the performance of standard gameplay. As I mentioned before, we also spent half of our time in March on new content. Sadly it wasn't enough time to get it to a good shape.

Next Update

The next update will happen in April. Don't know yet when and what it will actually contain, and this time I'm not making any predictions. What I can promise is that we continue to work on the game to the best of our abilities and as motivated as ever. Thank you for your continued interest in Death Trash. Have a nice week! - Stephan