It has been a few weeks since our last significant media release and I failed to capture any screenshots of worth during this last Sunday playtest so I will make it up to you with a pre-release peek at the upcoming MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.5 open beta release.

Originally intended to be a hotfix, MWLL 0.5.5 ended up with a couple of new features rolled in along with a number of balance changes.  I’ll go into a few of these below:

No Missile Notification for Passive Assets
Running passive has become de rigueur within MWLL and the benefits of doing so have long outweighed any negatives for doing so.  Coming with MWLL 0.5.5 any assets that are running passive will not receive audible or visual warnings of incoming locked missile salvoes. Missiles: the new silent killer.

Dual Heat Sink Pricing Revision
A rather minor tweak, but with the release of MWLL 0.5.5 the pricing of DHS equipment has been separated to a unique entity and is no longer 2x the base single heatsink cost.  Single heatsinks will continue to cost 500 c-bills per instance, but DHS will now be 1350 per instance instead of the previous 1000.   This is an initial step towards supporting simultaneous HS/DHS equipment outfitting on variants.

AC10/UAC10/CUAC10 Balance Changes
All AC10 weapons have had a 12% increase in primary/secondary damage and also increased the round speed from 900m/s to 1100m/s.  CUAC10 and CUAC20 heat-per-shot increased by 5%

Harasser Hitbox Fix and Armour Adjustments
The resized Harasser model is still not quite ready for release so we have reinstated the 0.5.3 hitboxes on the existing asset.  In addition to this we have applied a sub-set of our draft build rules to revise the total amount of armour allowed on hovercraft (+/- 10% of base armour tonnage).  The armour levels of the dreaded Harasser “D” areno longer valid and have been adjusted accordingly.

And Also…
Numerous variant changes
Fafnir and Blood Asp price increases
Atlas price decrease, LT/RT damage transfer multiplier decreased
Surprises?

This week we are testing Release Candidates for 0.5.5 and plan to have a public release available shortly.  Thank you for your patience and continued support of MechWarrior: Living Legends!

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Some topics covered include:

• ModDB MOTY 2011 Honorable Mention Award
• Environmental Artist Recruitment Callup
• Heavy Battle Armour Development Progress
• New HUD development for each vehicle category
• Global Variant Validation Balance Pass
• Chassis Pricing Multiplier vs Base Chassis Cost Systems
• MWLL 0.5.5 release and the Harasser hitbox bug

This was the first of many such appearances MWLL staff plan to make with the NGNG team to keep the MW/BT community apprised of our ongoing MechWarrior: Living Legends project.

Listen to the latest No Guts No Galaxy Podcast now.

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2007 #4 Player’s Choice Best Upcoming Mod
2008 Honorable Mention Player’s Choice Best Upcoming Mod
2009 Editor’s Choice Multiplayer Mod of the Year
2009 Player’s Choice Mod of the Year
2010 Honorable Mention Mod of the Year

Answer: Winning again with 2011 Honorable Mention Mod of the Year.

Thanks to our community, MechWarrior: Living Legends has once again earned a worthy mention in the ModDB.com Mod of the Year competition for a 6th year straight.  We are very proud of this accomplishment and hope that you will celebrate with us as we enter into our 7th year of development.

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We are pleased to announce the immediate release of MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.4 public open beta.  This release features two headline assets, several bug fixes and optimisations and changes to game balance as follows:

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed Thor shooting from the hip
- Improved Loki texture

New Features:

- Crash reporting is now enabled in the release dlls (without a performance penalty)

Balance Changes:

- Changed tank armor distribution

New Content:

- New ‘Mech:  Inner Sphere Fafnir
- New ‘Mech:  Clan Blood Asp
- New weapon:  Improved Heavy Gauss Rifle

Other Changes:

- Resized Inner Sphere Uziel to be in line with the other medium ‘Mechs
- Various small changes and fixes to TC_Thunderrift, TC_Marshes, TC_Kagoshima, TSA_Inferno, TSA_Marshes

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Clan Blood Asp

The long awaited Clan Blood Asp assault ‘Mech makes its MWLL debut.  The 90 ton Blood Asp brings an enormous arsenal to the battlefield in a highly mobile and deadly platform.

Inner Sphere Fafnir

The 100 ton Inner Sphere Fafnir stomps out of the hangar bringing with it a fearsome new weapon: the Improved Heavy Gauss Rifle.  Designed to point at a single target and reduce it to smoldering ruin, the Fafnir is easily one of the most heavily armed and armoured ‘Mechs in MechWarrior: Living Legends.

We are putting the finishing touches on MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.4 public open beta and expect to release within the next few days.

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We have been asked in the past what the teams position was on the tactic of legging ‘Mechs, and it has always been that shooting the legs was justified and expected; why would we make the legs capable of taking damage if they were not intended to be shot at?  Such as it is, the legs on certain ‘Mechs can be quite easily disabled or destroyed and we have recognised this as an issue for a while.  The problem was in determining the best solution that delivered a gameplay experience in which shooting at the legs or shooting at other ‘Mech components were both viable tactics.

Feature Evolution

We had initially considered increasing the allocated armour points for the legs to make them more difficult to destroy simply in terms of raw durability.  While this certainly would have worked, it would have made other components of the ‘Mechs disproportionately fragile.

Another possible avenue we looked at was applying a fractional damage multiplier to the legs to make them take damage at a lesser rate.  Unfortunately this would have resulted in a situation in which shooting the legs would have a reduced award (since rewards are tied to damage points) and would have resulted in the legs being valuable targets but difficult to actually convert on when fired at.

Finally, we looked at sub-dividing the legs into sub-components (ex. upper leg, lower leg) and requiring that they both be critically damaged or destroyed before invoking negative consequences.  This was problematic in that the leg hitboxes cannot be easily sub-divided into upper/lower sections and maintain a consistent hitbox as they move in a multiplayer environment.

Feature Solution

What we have arrived at is a solution that uses the Internal Structure of the legs as a supplementary damage soak and yields a better gameplay experience.

The Internal Structure for each leg will be represented to the player as an integer percentage and shown on their status HUD and the enemy targeting information HUD as two additional values.  Though not representative of the final version, this is how we will likely represent this information on our current ‘Mech HUD.

From a code side, the leg internal structure will be derived as a percentage of the external armour component durability points (ex. idComponentLeftLeg*0.70).  We have not settled on the actual value as yet, and we actually have planned  to have the actual multiplier value differ for each ‘Mech but it will be consistent across all variants of a ‘Mech regardless of variations in external armour.   The value for internal structure for each leg will be equal (ex. one leg cannot have more starting value internal structure/armour points than the other).

What does this mean to the player?  Well for a given ‘Mech weight category (let’s say 100 ton assault ‘Mechs) the internal structure values may differ between an Atlas and a Fafnir even if their external leg armour where to be exactly the same.  This will give MWLL another facet to balance individual ‘Mechs with an will be particularly important in lighter weight classes as a selection criteria for players.

When the external armour component has been destroyed (reduced to 0 armour points) the corresponding leg is considered “disabled” and the ‘Mech will assume a limp animation behaviour. This is a change in the current behaviour wherein the limp animation is invoked prior to the leg being destroyed.

When the internal structure has been destroyed (reduced to 0 armour points) the leg is considered “destroyed” and the ‘Mech will topple over.

Internal component structure takes damage at the same rate (at least for the initial release) as the External damage components and the awards for damage to internal structure are the same as external armour points.

Internal structure cannot be repaired.  If your vehicle sustains internal structure damage during the course of a battle and you manage to return to base for repairs, the internal structure will remain in a damaged state.

The Leg Internal Structure feature is one of many in-development features for MechWarrior: Living Legends that will be forthcoming in a future release.

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If I get a chance I’ll post the in-progress feature teaser later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Enjoy!

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Hello MechWarrior: Living Legends fans!  Once again MWLL has made it into the next round for MOTY voting and we are counting on you to take us into the next battle with your votes.  Click the image above or here to visit the Top 100 voting page and cast your vote for MechWarrior: Living Legends!

 Thank you for taking MWLL into the Top 100 Released Mods for third year in a row!

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