Release announcement

Feb 06

Release Announcement: MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.5 Public Open Beta

By KingLeerUK MWLL, News & Updates, Release announcement No Comments »

MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.5 public open beta is now available for immediate download!

The release addresses a number of issues with the MWLL 0.5.4 release and introduces a few new features as well as the first complete pass of the draft build rules over all currently released vehicles.

MWLL 0.5.5 Changelog

Bug Fixes:
- Harasser hitbox values adjusted for legacy asset size
- Fixed Mk2 “C” being able to fire left arm Arrow IV missile after being destroyed
- fixed “block” font for targeted enemies and build messages

New Features:
- Passive assets no longer receive incoming missile warnings (visual or audible)

Balance Changes:
- Fafnir, Blood Asp base chassis prices increased
- Atlas base chassis price decreased
- Atlas LT/RT damage transfer multiplier decreased to 1.2
- Awesome LT/RT damage transfer multiplier decreased to 1.2
- Decreased Fafnir maximum torso pitch by 10 degrees
- Increased maximum c-bill transfer ceiling/minute to 10,000
- Rescaled ticket values for all assets for ticket-based game modes
- DHS cost now independent of standard HS cost, 1350 per unit
- AC10/UAC10/CUAC10 projectile speed increased from 900m/s to 1100m/s
- AC10/UAC10/CUAC10 primary/secondary damage increased 12%
- CUAC10/CUAC20 heat-per-shot increased by 5%
- NARC rounds-per-ton increased from 4 to 6
- Mgun multiplier increased from 0.3 to 0.7 for all tanks, hovercraft and ‘Mechs
- Blood Asp “Prime” – changed 2x CERMBL to 2x CMPL, removed GECM, decreased armour
- Blood Asp “B” – removed GECM, decreased armour
- Blood Asp “C” – removed 2x CERSBL, decreased armour
- Blood Asp “D” – removed AMS, decreased armour
- Blood Asp “E” – new configuration: 2x CHLL, 2x CHML, 6x CHSL, 22DHS
- Madcat Mk2 “Prime” – decreased armour
- Madcat Mk2 “D” – removed 2x CERSBL, decreased armour, removed 1 DHS and 2 free tons
- Puma “Prime” – removed Crusader pods, replaced with Assault Basic pods on arms for size rule compliance, Flamers moved to chin mounts
- Shadowcat “A” – changed 1x CERMBL to 2x CERSBL to preserve free tonnage, decreased armour
- Shadowcat “C” – removed Barrage pod, replaced with Assault Basic pod for ClanGauss mount for size rule compliance
- Shadowcat “E” – new configuration: 3x CMPL, 1x CHLL 6 DHS, MASC, additional armour
- Thor “C” – changed BAP to BHP and added 1 DHS
- Atlas “C” – removed 2x SRM6, reduced free tons to 3
- Bushwacker “Prime” – removed BAP, reduced free tons to 1
- Bushwacker “A” – changed pods for RAC5 to Assault Basic Pod for size rule compliance
- Catapult “A” – added 1x HS, increased armour
- Catapult “B” – added 1x HS
- Catapult “C” – upgraded BAP to BHP, increased armour
- Fafnir “A” – reduced free tons to 4
- Fafnir “E” – removed all free tons
- Hollander “A” – removed 2 free tons
- Owens “A” – removed Flamer
- Owens “B” – BHP downgraded to BAP
- Owens “C” – removed single HS
- Raven “Prime” – downgraded BHP to BAP
- Raven “C” – removed 1 HS
- Thanatos “D” – decreased armour
- Uziel “Prime” – changed 2x MG to 2x ERSBL
- Uziel “B” – added GECM, reduced armour
- Uziel “C” – changed SSRM6 to SRM6
- Uziel “D” – removed BAP, added GECM
- Uziel “E” – removed free tons
- Warhammer “Prime” – added 1 HS, increased armour
- Warhammer “B” and “C” – decreased armour
- Harasser “Prime” – removed BAP
- Harasser “A” – removed GECM
- Harasser “B” – removed BAP
- Harasser “C” – removed BAP
- Harasser “D” – removed armour, removed BHP, increased HS count to 5
- Harasser “E” – removed 1 free ton
- Hephaestus “Prime” – added 2 DHS
- Hephaestus “A” – increased armour
- Hephaestus “B” – increased armour
- Hephaestus “C” – decreased armour, downgraded BHP > BAP
- Oro “B” – added armour
- Oro “E” – reduced armour
- Demolisher “C” – removed 2 free tons
- Sparrowhawk “Prime” – increased armour
- Sparrowhawk “C” – removed 1 free ton
- Shiva “A” – variant refactored to 2x ERPPC, 2x HeavyGauss, 4 DHS, BHP, 4 tons free

Known Issues:
- AC10/UAC10/CUAC10 exceeds stated range slightly (present in 0.5.4)
- Mech torso twist and pitch and tank turret sounds do not play (present in 0.5.4)

Use the auto-updater included with your MWLL Launcher to automatically update your build to the latest release.

Discuss in our forums!

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Dec 20

Release Announcement: MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.4 Public Open Beta

By KingLeerUK MWLL, News & Updates, Release announcement No Comments »

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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Nov 01

Release Announcement: MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.3 Hotfix

By Ingrater MWLL, News & Updates, Release announcement No Comments »

We are pleased to announce the immediate release of MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.3 public open beta hotfix. This patch addresses isusses found in our recent MWLL 0.5.2 release

Bug Fixes
- Fixed VTOL spawning in aero hangar
- Switched to static linking for the VC Runtime (this will stop the need to install redistributables on player machines)
- Improved Morrigu driving behaviour
- Fixed Shiva variant with Clan weapons
- Fixed wrong naming for Clan Arrow IVs
- Fixed stuck spots and other problems for the following maps: TSA_Extremity, TSA_Sandblasted, TSA_Inferno, SA_BrokenVista, TC_Sandblasted

Other Changes:
- Thor now meets art quality and baseline performance standards.- Loki legs have been tweaked.

Discuss in our forums!

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Oct 19

Release Announcement: MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.2

By KingLeerUK MWLL, News & Updates, Release announcement No Comments »

We are pleased to announce the immediate release of MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.2 public open beta. This patch incorporates a number of performance updates, bug fixes and new features as follows:

New Features
-added sv_leaguemode_commentator to disable the commentator in SA/LMS leaguemode
-Crash reporter now sends sv_servername as the player name if it is a server no profile name is set or the profile name is “default”
-Added a server messages system
-Added server-side ban system
-Added high-ping-kick system
-added server side command to list connected players and their gamespyid
-toggleIntCvar command to ease keybindings
-added Server option to log chat (sv_logChat).

Bug Fixes
-Spectators and dead players are now displayed correctly in SA
-Active ejection disabled in SA
-Repairs stop when under fire
-Fire group chain fire states are saved
-Fixed player getting a score reward for suiciding in LMS
-Scoreboard in LMS and SA is now sorted by score and then by kills
-Fixed various flash console spam
-Fixed a crash in the chat log display
-Fixed physics drain from tank wheels.
-Fixed some actionmaps still lead to weapon group input on cbill menu actions
-Aerospace Colision multipliers on wings dropped in an effort to make them land at least slightly easier without exploding
-Fixed crash caused by jump jet sound playback
-Fix possible crash on map change.
-Fixed confusing sv_leaguemode_ams handling – now 1 is AMS on, 0 is off
-Possible fix for server-side crash
-Fix Duncan talking thousands of lines at once after being tabbed out of the game for a while.
-Possible fix for autodownloader issue on Windows XP
-Fix auto-join by moving the team picking to the server-side.
-Fixed Scrolling on the map as BA throws C8.
-improved spritesheet on laser impact
-Fixed major performance sink in stats tracking code
-Attempts to improve overall tracked vehicle movement params, particularly for hill climbing performance, neutral turning and low-speed turning.
-Fixed various stuck spots and glitches in SA_Glory, TC_DeathValley, TC_Kagoshima, TC_Marshes, TC_Sandblasted
-Performance optimizations for various particle effects

Balancing
-Address “Repair Tanking” exploit for repair frames and hangars adds a 10s delay after enemy hits until repairs start.
-Uziel A has now two tons of ammo, BAP and no LRM5
-Gauss rifles fixed. They no longer do any damage past 901m, even though they’re somehow travelling past that.
-Shadowcat max reverse speed reduced to something normal.
-Tightened up LBX10 spread by 26% Also decreased damage-drop-per-meter
-Increased LBX10 and LBX20 weapon C-Bill costs to reflect relative effectiveness of the weapon.
-modified Raven D: removed SXPL and one heatsink and changed medium lasers to ER medium lasers.
-Fixed ammo count for AC20 (12 -> 16)
-Shifting armour values for larger torsos on Cougar and Uziel.
-Naming consistency for Clan Small Pulse Laser, was “Clan ER Small Pulse Laser”
-Limited C-Bill transfers to 5k per minute

New Content
-New Solaris Arena Map SA_Vista, suitable for 6-12 players in Solaris Arena and Last Man Standing game modes
-Completely redone Huit. greatly improves performance and fixes huit crash
-new laser impact fireball sprite
-new AC2/5 particle effect

Actionmapper
-fixed conflict detection within actions in the same scope (e.g. spectator, cbill menu)
-removed coolant and radar key conflicts with aero/vtol specific controls
-added conflict detection across tabs for actions that can overlap (e.g. Vehicle over Mech/Tank?/etc)+

Please use the embedded auto-updater system with your MWLL 0.5.1 deployment to pull the newly generated content. This patch is incremental and cannot be used without an existing 0.5.1 installation already present.

Discuss in our forums!

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Oct 16

MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.2 Sneak Peek

By KingLeerUK Media, MWLL, News & Updates, Release announcement No Comments »

Hello MechWarrior: Living Legends fans! Today I would like to bring you a preview of our upcoming 0.5.2 release and some other work in progress for the project and a retrospective of Summer ’11 for the team.

Summer ’11 Retrospective

For anyone who has been following MWLL for the past few years it should come as no surprise that we tend to go a bit dormant during the summer months. The reasons for this are varied but the usual suspects are the simple pleasures of warm summer days and the allure of getting outside on a Sunday – we are also usually coming off a major release effort from late Spring. Every year during the summer we struggle a little in keeping productivity up and this year was no differnt. After getting 0.5.0 out in May there was an unspoken push towards throttling back a bit; 0.5.0 was a huge effort for us and was the culmination of nearly 9 months of effort in terms of long-dev cycle features (SA & LMS game modes, Duncan Fisher audio, etc.). Summers are usually spent in a more conceptual mode with the aim towards picking back up with full production come the Fall.

This Summer we were able to establish a solid set of build rules in a system that marries our weapon and equipment features with our version of a crit spaces concept. More on this will be coming in the next few months. We’ve also been busy learning more about asset optimisation within CryEngine2 since the release of the CE3 SDK documentation has a great deal of backward compatibility towards our effort. The fruits of some of this knowledge will be delivered as part of 0.5.2

We also spent some time this summer codifying our various workflows for producing assets and getting work through the art pipeline. As mundane as this sounds it was absolutely essential to try and relieve some of the bottlenecks that are incurred in trying to create art assets that are suitable/viable for CryEngine2 and MWLL. When you see a nice 3D render of an asset in our forums know that it only accounts for about 15% of the actual effort in getting something playable in-game. The other 85% of the work is tedious, frustrating and carries little glory and you never get to see that side of things. My hat is off to our art team for soldiering on and continuing to make the dream of multiplayer combined arms BattleTech combat possible in MWLL.

MWLL 0.5.2 Sneak Peek

MWLL 0.5.2 is getting very, very close; this week we are testing a release candidate and working through some build issues resulting from some changes to our build script system. To offset the echoing void of information I would like to share the following…

Completely Revised Huitzilopochtli Model
The Huit has received a complete makeover due to the random instability it can cause for some game clients. Redoing the Huit has been a major effort as even our redo was encountering some odd issues initially. The new Huit now features front-mounted “fixed” missile mounts for the Arrow IV missiles instead of the previous logical-only version that we had.

Improved Thor Model
Some much needed upgrades to the Thor have been completed, including a complete retexture.

New Tank HULL System
All tracked and hover assets now have an additional HULL component that must be destroyed in order to fully destroy the vehicle as a whole. One of the things we had noted about tanks was that their survivability was relatively low, which we attributed to the fact that killing an of the exterior components immediately ended the vehicle. By introducing the HULL component our objective is to increase the overall staying power of tanks while (eventually) introducing some additional damage effects when outer components are destroyed (ex. slower turret turning, slower vehicle rotation, loss of acceleration or boost). As currently implemented, the HULL component will only take damage when an external component is completely destroyed, after which time damage is transfered to the internal HULL at a chosen multiplier. The multipliers will differ by component and by vehicle.

Global ‘Mech Asset Texture Optimisations
We have done a global pass on re-exports of textures for ‘Mechs with the aim to improve loading times when these assets are loaded (built) the first time in a game. This issue was particularly apparent with the Clan Thor due to its default texture size.

Weapon Balance Changes
We’ve been tweaking all summer and trying to dial things around again after noting some community feedback and our own observations. Without going into great detail some of the notable changes are: tighter choke on RAC2/5 spread, AC10/UAC10 round velocity increase, less spread on AC2/5 versus their UAC counterparts and tightening the spread cone on the CLBX10/LBX10. These are in additional to numerous other small changes.

C-Bill Transfer Ceiling (Interim)
We still haven’t finished the proposed banking code changes so we have decided to implement a hard limiter of 5000 C-Bills transfered out, per player, per minute. This value does not change based on rank or disconnecting/reconnecting. If you are playing on a server with League Mode rules enabled the transfer limitation does not apply, it also does not apply in Test of Strength modes.

Repair Tanking Prevention
Players will no longer be able to continue repairing when they take damage whilst sitting on a repair pad or in a repair bay. We have set a damage threshold at which repairs will be halted for 10 seconds from the last damage received.

Improved Tank Handling for Inclines
Pretty much what it says on the tin. Tanks now handle a bit better when encountering steep hills.

New Map: SA Broken Vista
We are exploring more vertically oriented combat options with this map as it features a large amount of elevation change within a very small area. In our playtests of this map we’ve found it to be very fasted paced and suitable for 6-10 players.

Coming Attractions

On the near horizon we have the Fafnir on deck, a new IS Light wheeled tank, several new TC maps, a new aerospace or two and several new ‘Mechs which I’ll be teasing over the next few months.