SUBFAULT Alpha v1.3.0

New features, mechanics, and improvements:

• New crouching animation, crouching and standing up is no longer instant.

• Visual improvements; new deferred lights and shadows method, stochastic lights and shadows are less noisy, added floating dust particles into scenes, improved level detail, and better lumen reflections (they shimmer worse than before, but show more scene detail… I’m looking into this).

• New FOV setting which allows you to adjust your field of view from 60° to 140° degrees.

• Implemented an FPS cap setting in video settings.

• New gameplay menu, which can be found in settings. Here you can adjust how looking around feels and how your flashlight model behaves, including how intense the bobbing animations are.

• Added a third flashlight handling model - traditional. You can adjust how your flashlight behaves in settings > gameplay, and choose between realistic, traditional, and classic behaviour modes.

• Implemented a health system. You can now take damage without dying, and you can heal yourself with med cabinets scattered around in levels.

• Added reinforced vent covers which can’t be unscrewed or kicked off. Right now you’ll only see these when playing on hard difficulty.

• Deadhead may now enter a new “flank” mode. Instead of chasing and going right for you when you’re spotted, there’s a chance he’ll decide to flank - where he’ll go to a random point of interest in the map, and then go to where he last saw you. He’s also been given some animation improvements, and is no longer blocked by open locker doors.

• Facility01 improvements; new and improved light models, new textures and materials for some props.

• Two new modifiers; invincibility and spawn monster.

• You can now access the settings menu while in-game.

• Implemented TAA anti-aliasing alongside TAAU. In previous versions, TAAU was incorrectly displayed as TAA.

• Slightly improved flashlight bobbing animations.

• Leaning improvements; it’s still not perfect, but it feels better and looks accurate - your playermodel leans now too.

• Main menu scene improvements.

• Implemented a new tooltip system in a couple menus. Other menus still use the old system, but will be updated soon.

• In the play menu, the images representing Facility01 and Deadhead have been replaced with better looking ones.

• Updated credits.

Changes:

• The TAA anti-aliasing setting now correctly reads as TAAU.

• Shadows in video settings is now Lights & Shadows, and a new default method has been implemented (deferred). The previous default method (stochastic) can still be used as an alternative.

• Disabled mipmap generation for a handful of textures.

• New vent cover texture.

• Various balancing done to easy, normal, and hard difficulties.

• The tutorial has been temporarily overhauled into a slideshow-style guide. A far better tutorial system will release once more features and mechanics have been implemented.

Bug fixes:

• You can no longer open/close security doors through walls.

• Fixed a bug where light pixelation wasn’t being saved properly.

• Deadhead sometimes liked to keep spinning as he moved after leaving sentry mode, this was fixed. He also should no longer be able to kill you while you’re hiding in something.

• Implemented a new system for how the game detects when you’re in a vent, this should have fixed many bugs associated with crawling through vents.

Optimizations:

• Fewer player functions rely on event tick.

• Scripts related to retrieving a point of interest for Deadhead when entering sentry mode have been made more efficient.

Removals:

• Vsync interval settings are currently no longer accessible. They’ll likely come back at some point.

• Substrate is no longer used and supported as it was causing me some problems, plus I didn’t really need it. It may come back in the future.

• The greyed-out cheats menu in the extras menu was removed, this is because all planned cheats will eventually just become modifiers.

• Removed glow cubes, including other specialty items and customization-related content - just for alpha v1.3.x. They will be returning bigger and better in alpha v1.4.0 (see notes for more info)!

Notes:

All existing customization features that were available in previous builds have been disabled for this build. A decent amount of alpha v1.3.0’s development was spent on specialty items (which is strongly associated with customization), however I decided that it’d be best to leave them for alpha v1.4.0 - which will introduce the customization menu (in an incomplete state) along with 3 to 5 specialty items to start.

Despite motion blur working in previous builds, for some reason it likely won’t work for you in this build. That, alongside an exploit where you can run away from interactables while still interacting with them - are two things that I’ll be addressing as soon as possible. Of course there’s also a lot of other things on my laundry list of things to-do… Lots of things will be tended to in upcoming updates.

Also… I’m tracking why screen space settings either refuse to be set, or sometimes set themselves on their own. I’ve looked into this for what feels like a half-dozen times by now, but I’ll get this fixed eventually. All my programming related to it looks fine to me, so I’m very confused.

Overall, alpha v1.3.0 was a very eventful process on my end. I experimented a lot, learned many things, and I can say that I’m now in a state where I should be able to deliver updates at least once or twice per-month. Alpha v1.4.0 is not another few months away, expect it sometime mid-April.

Thank you!

• Ian