Release notes for Waves of Steel v0.58RC6

One last build for 2022! The big news in this one is the addition of Chaos Mode, which can be enabled via the "Custom" difficulty setting. Chaos Mode triggers various random events during combat, such as inverting your controls, changing the size of enemy ships, and much much more! Some folks may recognize it as a variant of the "crowd control" plugin for Twitch streamers...rest assured, proper Crowd Control support is coming!

Gameplay:

• Add an extra-special treasure to the "Stress Test" mission. You'll have to be quick if you want to get it!

• New weapons: VLS anti-ship and anti-sub missiles

• Add some new loading screen tips

• You can cycle through loading screen tips

• The special icons in the HUD now visually indicate remaining duration

• Ship paint jobs can be loaded from an existing ship, so if you have a paint job you like you can easily re-use it across multiple ships

• "Stress Test" startup should be smoother now

• The Railgun weapon weighs more than 1 ton

• Add an indicator to the mission select menu if all techs (including the treasure) have been found for a mission

Bugfixes:

• Fix a bug causing "Scylla & Charibdis" from not completing if the player skips cutscenes

• Ships with active shields are now properly immune to area-of-effect damage

• ASROC weapons should more consistently hit submarines

• Fix the flavor text on large naval cannons redundantly referencing fire control and autoloaders

• Fix some mesh issues with the Nagato and Super Nagato hull models

• Fix a layout issue with the tutorial dialog in the ship designer

• Fix bad decal positioning for decals that aren't on the ship's hull

• The "Midway Raceway" bonus mission should be better about enforcing sequence

• Fix a minor issue if aircraft carriers get cut in half while they're busy launching planes

• Fix player retaining target lock on targets that have been disabled

• The command center cutscene in "Shadowy Waters" does not play if it has already been destroyed

• Doing "Shadowy Waters" backwards no longer leaves you with a bunch of un-removable guide arrows

• "Ratatosk" and "Denali" are consistently italicized throughout the game's text

• Fix excessive screenshake if the player takes unusually large amounts of damage

• Laser Torpedoes are now under the "Laser" subdirectory instead of "Energy"; this fixes erroneous help text showing up when the directory is highlighted

• Reduce excessive pop-in for guns on AI-controlled ships

• Fix some issues with energy shield specials being oddly-scaled for some ships

• Fix option sliders behaving oddly if the player uses both keyboard and mouse to control them

Modding:

• Fix a bug causing the game to load every resource if any mod is enabled; this should substantially improve loading times

• Add a loading dialog to the intermission screen to show loading progress when loading mod models

• Add a new projectile collision type, SPHERECAST, which can be used for certain chunky projectiles. Performance is slightly worse than the default RAYCAST though, so don't use it for everything.

• Mods rewrite their metadata.json file based on their current directory names; this should prevent mods from uploading to the wrong location.

• New field "damageIsPercentile", which causes the weapon to deal damage in fractions of the target's total HP (e.g. a value of .1 means it does 10% damage per hit)

• New particle effect "rocketWithSmoke" which can be used for modded projectiles