Update

This is a pre-patch before a major content update that's coming soon.

Training Area Steam post image

The new Training Area content is a new player onboarding tutorial. New players can follow the tutorial to learn the basics of combat and equipment.

Hostile NPC's ( bots )

This new area introduced NPC's ( Non-Playable Characters ) to the game. The two hostile NPC's in the Training Area are stationary and can fire at you from a distance, so nothing spectacular yet, and are essentially training dummies that can fire back at you. Proper pathfinding for the NPC's is also almost complete and when done will see the introduction of game-controlled bots that can move around a map autonomously and engage in combat. This will open up Player VS Bots game modes, where real players can play against bots in unranked 1 vs 1 and Team Deathmatch mode ( coming soon ).

Steam post image

Friendly NPC's

Friendly NPC's are added to the game which can contextually interact with you based on what's happening in the Scene.

A friendly NPC might give you backup during combat, provide tips or just be a background character making unnecessarily witty remarks.

Chat bubbles have been added to the game as well. NPC's can have scripted dialogue being played out in sequence.

Player Pickups

A pickup system has been implemented that allows players to pick up objects in the world now. While this mechanic is only present in the Training Area for now, it has also been tested in multiplayer and works as expected. For now I've decided to keep it simple and let players walk up to a pickup and left-click it to equip it.

( Minor ) UI Improvements

As you can see in the image above the Weapon Loadouts section ( bottom-left ) has also been slightly reworked to blend in more to the HUD.

Game Engine & Combat

Changes to the game engine now allow for models with way more complexity than before. The Combat Drone alone is the size of a small Minecraft map and runs steady at 100+ FPS.

A huge change was finishing up the new V2 Pooling system. Weapons, equipment and bullets are now pre-loaded before a match ( and in the future: single player level ) starts. While there was a basic bullet pooling system in the previous build, this new pooling system is a major upgrade performance-wise and allows for the pooling of weapons, equipment and bullets.

The V2 Pooling system has drastically improved how bullets are handled during multiplayer matches. This is now done 100% through reliable RPC. Previously, a player would fire a bullet but the bullet would not always show up on the other player's game client due to this being handled using unreliable UDP.

Another major change was the implementation of Raycasts. The previous build used traditional physics-based collisions to handle damage events. Bullets are now kinematic bodies which use Raycasts to calculate collisions and are much more efficient performance-wise than before.

PVP combat is now much more accurate in determining collisions and handling player damage events in a lobby.

1 vs 1 Mode Update

The 1 vs 1 Mode has been updated with the first player to get 3 kills winning the match.

Servers

The US server has been replaced with a new machine and a new strategy for FLH's back-end has been adopted. Both EU and US regions are now available again. Unfortunately the Singapore server has been removed from Hell.Net and is unavailable until further notice.

What's Next ?

The next update will see the first single-player content, more weapons and equipment and character customization. I am also experimenting with a simple Battle Pass system which will allow players to unlock new content, but there is no ETA on that yet.