It must be Thursday and we're rolling out a new update with a full rebuild of our character's ragdolls, adding missing ambient SFX to the game, visually linking doors to their trigger panels to reduce confusion, fixing auto-duck bugs and more! A big thanks again to everyone playing and posting feedback - we're hard at work during our Early Access phase and on our way to 200 updates here! Every few days, the game takes a lunge forward, getting better or larger - so let's keep grinding together. We've got a new Weekly Map Release coming up and more content to follow it as well. Did you notice we do Early Access a bit differently? We vow to keep EA a crazy, relentless march to the finish line. You've got feedback? Post it and watch the game get better constantly. If you're having fun or like the direction of the game, please leave a review to help us keep trucking.

Ragdoll Rebuild

We're excited to have finished a big background project that has been in the works for a while - the ragdoll rebuild. The old ragdoll setup - triggered when anyone dies and the physics engine takes over - was not the best looking, so it is grand to roll out the new one.
What have we done? We've adjusted all of the character joints and colliders in use to try to improve the realism of the ragdoll as it goes to the ground and as it finds its resting position. We've removed the awkward T position ragdolling that was so common on in the other system. We've also configured weapons to drive some percentage of the final physics force that is applied, so a Sniper Rifle kill should feel and look different than a Pistol execution or even a Revolver boom-boom.
There were some times along the way where we thought we might be dealing with aliens or something escaped from a cyber lab.
And unfortunately, any bodies that are currently lying on the ground when you get the update will be corrupted, stretched and munged. All new bodies you drop to the floor will be good. So this is a temporary setback.
The completion of this task also comes along with a number of improvements to character models, especially around necks and the connection of head-neck-body not having any gaps, clipping or overlaps.
Of course, there is always more to do! Ragdolls are fun to play with and we could clearly spend a lot more time tweaking and improving but for now we're excited to share the second-generation ragdoll and let you get back to heisting! For example, we know that there are issues with lower back flexibility in the ragdoll ... we've appealed to the megacorps to fund a robo-masseuse to help us straighten that out for the next iteration. If you do see anything odd, please F10!

Environmental Ambient SFX

We've restored the ambient SFX for areas which was accidentally lost early in the Early Access process to some coding mistakes. This ambient SFX helps give background noise and atmosphere to the room spaces and is part of the SFX volume slider. While the ambient is back, the level spaces we're working in have changed a lot since we started. We are working on a review of the SFX vs. the areas we're playing in to see how to adjust and improve them.

Connecting Doors to their Terminals

We have now added the same blue line connecting doors to their trigger panels as we have between Matrix Terminals and security devices and doors. This allows you to quickly see where you need to go to open any given door and hopefully can reduce any confusion about how to get a door open.

Auto-Duck Fixes

Auto-duck is a longstanding feature that removes the need for you to manage your crouch / sprint state. I an enemy happens to be moving toward a standing merc and crouching would help the situation, then your merc immediately does that. We've been processing a number of F10s about situations in which auto-duck wasn't working and fixed all of the known cases now. One case was caused by 2 mercs in the enemy's view that both needed to auto-duck but only one of them would. This is a lovely feature that reduces your need to manage state on your mercs so we hope everyone can get back to using it with confidence. We are working on the paired issue - the inability to plot a sprinting move while crouched - now and will get it fixed soon.

Stressed Tag in 3 places

We've added the Stressed Tag to the roster and the safehouse barracks list as well. It was appearing in mission deploy screen but that is not always where you need the valuable heads up that a negative Limit Break might be brewing.

Building Fixes

While working on ragdolls we kept having ragdolls slip through parts of the edge of the raised buildings and fall down a floor. This lead us to finally finding and fixing the whole that has made buildings so troublesome - this allowed both corpses to fall through and be discovered but also for enemies sometimes to shoot up through the invisible hole even though you should not be a valid target.

Other F10 Cleanup

We hit a few other nice QoL F10s for this update. There are still lingering issues with +25% Font Scale but we're getting them as they come in - this time we fixed issues with the Talent LImit being hidden on the class tree at that Font Scale. Using Leverages in the HUD left an odd "Button" text showing - now fixed. Sometimes if you swapped mods on your weapons and then went to the Appearance tab, you would visually see the old mods - now fixed. And if you were targeting with Agent EX Glitch it would let you drag the target circle as far as you wanted which isn't consistent with how other ranged targeting circles work. it is now limited to the range of the Talent and fixed.

v1.9.39 - #183: - 12/4/2024

- Rebuilt all character ragdolls for more realistic and visually appealing joints and deaths - Added blue line from door to door trigger on hover to make connection more clear - Added missing environmental ambient SFX by different mission map themes and safehouse - Fixed issue that could prevent merc from correctly auto-ducking when enemy is moving - Added "Stressed" tag to Roster and Safehouse Barracks overlay to match Mission Deploy screen - Finished all dual pistol/revolver animations for all characters - Fixed major sight line holes and spaces where bodies could fall through building rooftop edges - Fixed Agent EX Glitch Talent allowing target to be shown beyond maximum range - Fixed issue with +25% Font Scale preventing Talent Limit from showing in Class tree - Fixed issue with appearance not always updating after swapping mods on weapons - Fixed odd gray text "Button" appearing in HUD sometimes

[ 2024-12-05 19:30:11 CET ] [ Original post ]