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.
