by neognosisgames | Nov 30, 2022 | BallisticNG, Uncategorized | 0 comments
BallisticNG 1.3 is now available! This post contains the detailed changelog for the update. For more information and a broader overview, please see the Steam announcement:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/473770/view/5242758619727537901
Campaign
- Added support for the drag speed modifier. This can be set in the internal campaign editor or by adding the new Dragspeed=”True” attribute under the Modifiers tag in the XML file.
- Added exception handling to campaign loading. When an exception is thrown the game will now skip the campaign and open the console to show the issue.
- Gave the base game campaign an overhaul, adding additional events to make use of gamemodes that has come out since release and tweaking existing ones for a more fun experience. Ascension and Decension are now used to introduce and use the reverse versions of tracks. Tweaks to gamemode / track combos have also been made so events like Knockout don’t appear on longer tracks. Time trials are now separated out and you’ll no longer get two of them back to back in a group.
- Rebalanced all time trials (DLC included) so the silver and bronze requirements are quarter and half of a single lap lower then the gold.
- Time trial events now have flavor descriptions that highlight use of the afterburner.
- Points needed to unlock group sets have been reduced from 6 to 4, allowing progression with a gold and bronze or 2 silvers minimum. This change has been applied to both base game and DLC campaigns.
- Campaign content is now validated. Any event that has missing content will now show what’s missing instead of the event name and will no longer let you try to start it.
- The frontend description from a campaigns XML will now be used in place of the gamemode description if it’s present
- Livery unlock requirements lowered to 50% campaign completion instead of all gold or platinum medals
- Campaign events using gamemodes with infinite laps now show infinite as the lap count
- Campaign events where the speed class changes dynamically in the gamemode now shows dynamic as the speed class
- Knockout campaign events now show the accurate number of laps
- If there’s no previously played event, the campaign event list now always selects the first event
- Fixed scroll bars in the campaign UI interface disappearing
- Fixed the campaign event list always re-selecting the first event of a given display name if multiple events share the same display name
- Fixed the campaign event list scroll view loosing track of the current event when returning to the menu
- Fixed custom values being ignored when loading campaigns
- Fixed the campaign event list overflowing off the bottom of the UI slightly
Campaign Editor
- Added a campaign editor. You can find it at the top of the campaigns menu.
- Works off the same XML format that custom campaigns already do. No new features have been added to campaigns, this is simply a UI wrapper around the XML format.
- The UI is designed to be controller friendly. Every option uses the same UI element and all interactions are handled through the submit button.
- When using a keyboard in the input field dialogues you can press return to confirm instead of navigating to the confirm button.
- You can load exiting XML campaigns into the editor. Just note that saving an edited campaign rewrites the file, so any additional data like comments will be lost.
- The editor only uses the current iteration of attributes. Resaving an XML with legacy attributes will use the newer versions instead.
- Leaving the campaign editor reloads all custom campaigns. If you’re manually writing XMLs you can go into the editor and back out to reload your work on the fly without having to restart the game.
- Added a campaign editor. You can find it at the top of the campaigns menu.
Ship Viewer
- Added a ship viewer. This allows you to preview any ship in the game with varying lighting conditions and texture maps. This was added so you can preview custom liveries as you’re making them!
Custom Liveries
- Added support for custom liveries. See here for more information: https://ballisticng-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ingame/custom_liveries.html
User Interface
- Added Game -> Mods options menu. This allows mods to build their own option menus
- Added a load overlay which pops up when a ship is being loaded
- Increased granularity of the audio mixing sliders
- Removed a legacy custom ship load time notice message on track load transitions
- Redesigned the campaign and precision run menus
- Improved stats overlay menu formatting and fixed stat values showing incorrect times
- The campaign gamemode description scroll view is no longer scrollable and now auto scrolls over time
- The FPS overlay now pulls its information from Unity’s own profiling backend and is now accurate
- When cheats are enabled the HUD warning message now refers to the console where all enabled cheats are logged.
- The name of a cheat typed in now briefly displays on the screen for visual feedback
- The selection highlight color now applies to the titles of selectors and sliders
- Selector elements now have their arrows faded when there’s only a single option
- Elements no longer lose their highlight color if the element is selected when the cursor leaves it
- The Now Playing HUD animation no longer plays when music is at 0%
- Exposed character input speeds to the F1 stats menu (now has a scroll bar)
- The tournament listing scroll view no longer has navigation and can scrolled with the menu scroll input bindings or the mouse
- The leaderboards menu now cancels previous leaderboard fetch requests before starting new ones
- The on-screen keyboard now has a grid design, making navigation a lot less janky. Navigation now also vertically wraps
- The on-screen keyboard now has a minus key
- Fixed the caret position not immediately updating if using the on-screen keyboard to navigate text
- Fixed big arrow buttons not resetting their internal selection color status when disabled
- Fixed the capital M on the onscreen keyboard being an N
- Fixed the campaign event group separator not being generated for the last group
- Fixed the achievements and statistics overlays not locking navigation to other UI elements
- Fixed the mouse cursor still contributing to UI highlights when it’s hidden
- Fixed splitscreen pushing a cheats enabled notification
DLC
- Bling pack ownership is now verified using a content pack data file instead of a past Steam login validation check
- All DLCs have been updated with square menu logos
- DLCs now use chunk based LZ4 compression. This increases the file sizes by around 30% but now means DLCs load instantly as the entire file no longer needs to be decompressed first.
Layout Creator 2.0
- Now uses Control instead of Command on Mac.
- Added ship speed option
- Added tangent rotation snapping. This defaults to 15 degrees and is enabled alongside grid snapping. Tangent rotation snapping is relative to the track direction.
- Added option to set the track refresh rate. The default refresh rate has been increased from 15fps to 60fps
- Added orthographic camera modes. See the hotkey reference for more information
- Added node scaling tool, bound to the S key. This will scale nodes away/towards from the average position of all selected nodes.
- Added node orbit tool, bound to the R key. This will orbit nodes around the average position of all selected nodes.
- Added route options to offset the reference end points for connections. These default to 4 on new tracks and will load as 0 on tracks saved before this version
- Added a new junction connection smoothing mode. This will be enabled by default for any new route created and can be toggled in the route tools window.
- Added options to copy shape data when appending a new node and interpolate when inserting. Both are enabled by default
- Moved Insert Segment hotkey to I key
- Moved reference image hotkey to W key
- Grid snapping now defaults to 2 units.
- Grid and rotation snapping can now be set using the new input fields at the top of the editor.
- Grid snapping now supports decimal values
- Section generation, connection generation and connection processing are now separated into three different passes to prevent geometry processing conflicts
- Implemented section data pooling to improve track rebuilding performance
- Improved handling of section transforms near the end of a closed route
- The editor will no longer respond to play mode toggle inputs until the ship has been spawned
- Reworked the node move tool to use plane ray intersections so movement is based on how the mouse cursor moves in the 3d space
- Using the move to cursor tool now supports multiple nodes. Grid snapping is now also only applied to the average position of the moved nodes, and straight locking is no longer applied.
- The camera now starts with a much faster movement speed
- Fixed an issue where routes with a single node would create connections to sections near the world origin
- Fixed input fields not being deselected when ending an edit
- Fixed a slow memory leak caused by materials not being purged from memory after exiting play mode
Camera
- Rewrote the track chase camera to improve its feel, model its behavior much more closely to the source material and better fit some behaviors with BNGs feature set. The previous version can still be used by enabling the Game -> Camera -> Legacy Track Style option.
- When on maglocks or no tilt lock sections of a track the new camera uses the ship chase pitch offset behavior. In floor hugger the pitch offset behaviour is disabled entirely.
- The new camera sits a bit further away from the ship due to changes in how the cameras position is calculated. Use the new Game -> Camera -> Use Legacy Distance option to use an approximation of the original distance, useful for consistency with the custom camera position options.
- Updated 2159 / floor hugger rear chase camera with a dampened spring algorithm to improve the fluidity of its movement. The old behaviour can be restored using the new legacy chase style camera option.
- Rewrote the track chase camera to improve its feel, model its behavior much more closely to the source material and better fit some behaviors with BNGs feature set. The previous version can still be used by enabling the Game -> Camera -> Legacy Track Style option.
Ships
- Added small vehicles ship category
- Added more liveries to the Barracuda Model B and Barracuda Model C (thanks Vista!)
- Added Maceno Island liveries (requires Maceno Island expansion)
- Added Idle Sway stat
- Added canera sensitivity stats for the new rear chase camera
- Added Mako
- Added Aster LB221
- Added Aster VB221
- Added Aster KA10
- Added Scorplet (hidden, see cheats section)
- Added Omnicom CD-A32 (hidden, see cheats section)
- Added M-Tech RD-1 (hidden, see cheats section)
- Added Barracuda Mt Mini (hidden, see cheats section)
- Added Wyvern SCC Ares MK 1 (hidden, see cheats section)
- Implemented support for animated ship characters which respond to steering, pitching, speed and engine power.
- The Model B and Model C ships have been merged into a single ship with liveries.
- The original Survival Model B livery is now available (Prototype).
- Forced grounding has been changed so the maximum height is now the minimum threshold for applying the downwards force, instead of the trigger for throwing the ship at the ground.
- Drastically improved wall collision physics
- Track wall collisions now determine if the ship is hitting a ceiling before countering collision forces, fixing issues where ships can get stuck to collidable ceilings.
- Improved stability of section bounds fake collisions
- Optimized the scrape particles position calculation when generating a fake collision for section bound forces
- Ship respawn points now respect the current physics and respawn section setup for the rotation
- Rescue droid respawning now has an acceleration. Some of the rescue droids velocity is now also transfered over to the ship when released.
- Updated the ship frontend descriptions (thanks Brobama!)
- Omnicom Steering Speed increased from 1.63 to 1.7 and Grip increased from 5.5 to 5.65
- Mtechs Top Speed increased to match G-Teks and Steer Slide increased from 1.23 to 1.5
- Decreased Model B hover rot power to 20 (from 25).
- Large protonic stats tweaks. The new stats make the ship less twitchy so you can let the ship carry its momentum.
- Tilt angle decreased from 50 to 30
- Steer Speed decreased from 2.3 to 2
- Steer Gain decreased from 1.52 to 1.2
- Steer Falloff decreased from 1.26 to 0.75
- Airbrake falloff decreased from 150 to 100
- Airbrake Drift Falloff decreased from 14 to 3
- Grip increased from 2 to 3.3
- Weight increased from 0.7 to 1.2
- Top speeds are now slightly slower then Scorpio
- AI now start at the default livery if the players current livery is of an index higher then the AIs ship livery count
- Barracuda S liveries can now be selected in survival
- Model C stat update
- Reduced steer falloff from 1 to 0.7
- Increased steer gain from 1 to 1.22
- Increased steer slide from 1 to 1.2
- Frontend ship sfor internal and custom ships using the CSF format now load asynchronously. The interface will no longer lock up when loading resource heavy ships.
- Ship engines now respond to barrel roll boosts
- Improved the calculation of ship hover damping to smoothen out movement when the ship is about to leave the grounded state
- The AI trail cross plane now shares a single material
- Barrel roll success threshold reduced to 180 degrees (from 200) to match with what’s happening visually
- Internal ships are now split into individual files and use the ship bundle manager, originally used for CSF custom ships. This adds a noticeable selection load time but reduces memory overhead as all ship resources are no longer loaded at all times.
- Fixed rare issue where AI wall avoidance forces would be infinite or NAN and break the game session
- Fixed an issue where having multiple scenery floors would lock up the ship physics under a specific configuration
- Fixed the Barracuda Model B not having an illum map setup
- FIxed the menu ships not loading custom livery / livery override reflection masks
Tracks
- Added small vehicles track type. When used all ships get a x0.7 speed multiplier and x1.3 engine pitch sound multiplier
- Added Ribble Raceway
- Added Alice Mountain
- Added Forgotten Coast
- Added Maria Tide
- Added Brattelva Circuit
- Added Skylight Gardens
- Added Atacama
- Added Vega Waterway
- Remade Metros scenery
- Remade Omega Harbours scenery
- Remade Arrivon XI scenery and improved the pitlane
- Minor changes to Arrivon Peak scenery
- (Neon Nights) Optimized Basin to reduce CPU load
- Hydrome Bed now allows a massive number of spins before the survival anti cheat attempts to kicks in
- Rebaked lighting on all tracks to fix issues caused by the Unity upgrade. Some tracks there were previously not updated to the 32-bit lightmapper have been brought over.
- Removed an unused tonemapper component from all scenes and custom track camera prefabs (with tonemapping enabled it would just making the screen darker without anything being configured)
- Team logo holograms now have a material per submesh to correct transparency sorting (fixes problem introduced with engine upgrade)
- Surge now has a different track illum color. Surge reverse has also been given a lighting makeover
- Added missing lights to illum circles on Nova Park reverse
- (Neon Nights) Added light for missing flood light source on Thunderhead
- (Neon Nights) Fixed flickering UVs on Hotel 5s hologram
- (Neon Nights) Fixed Metro Reverse using the night texture maps
- (Outer Reaches) The Project 9 suspension vehicles now use a double sided material
- 3d pads updated with new textures that have bloom baked into them
- 3d weapon pads now have an animated illum that matches the track tiles
- Model C tracks are now flagged as drift tracks (for campaign auto ship set selection)
- Fixed the autopilot not avoiding light bridge walls on Nova Split Reverse
- Fixed 3d speed pads not being disabled when a gamemode requests it
- Fixed mispelling on Nova Parks location text
Custom Race
- Added a button to reset cheats
- Added speed multiplier setting. This stacks with hyper and drag mode
- Barrel rolls and sideshifts can now be separarely enabled for 2159/floor hugger. These disable saving like other cheats. This also comes with some other changes:
- In 2159 there is a 250ms delay before BR inputs are accepted after leaving the ground
- Barrel rolls can no longer be done in zero G
- The input cooldown on barrel rolls has been reduced to 150ms and a 50% register deadzone has been added
- Fixed an issue where the barrel roll animation would stop
- Gamemodes can now enable barrel rolls and sideshifts in their configuration data.
- Implemented custom AI rosters. You can set the exact ship and livery you want each AI to use and save/load presets.
- Presets are stored in User -> Config -> Ini -> Ai Presets as ini files. You can use these to share presets with other people.
- The UI will grey out ships that won’t be used by AI but you can still edit them, the greyout is only a visual indicator
- Custom race tournaments no longer have a track limit
Cheats
- Added nanomachines cheat. This unlocks the Scorplet, Omnicom CD-AG32 and M-Tech RD-1
- Added spacerace cheat. This unlocks the Barracuda MT Mini and Wyvern SCC Ares MK I
- Added funallowed cheat. When activated, the state of ship unlocking cheats will be remembered across game sessions. Typing again will disable it
- The typed cheat system has been rewritten to support custom cheats added by code mods. You can also use the new debug_logcheats console command to log out a list of all cheats and a description of what they do.
- The survival ship cheat message has been updated to read survival ship instead of Barracuda Model C explicitly
- Carving has been re-added. Enabling it will force the AI to always use small vehicles
- Devfunds is now a multi-stage cheat. Typing it a second time will force all AI ships to use the p-nut when you’re using it.
Weapons
- Weapon collision configuration now works with a cached list of track colliders instead of hard coded and heavy GetComponent calls. This improves weapon spawn performance and allows intended collision behaviors on scenery walls and floors.
- Reduced turbo drop chance weighting by 70%
- Fixed an issue where the missiles will sometimes try to follow a target that didn’t exist
Photomode
- Fixed no tonemapping options showing on a select few tracks
Options
- Added option to set the monitor refresh rate when using exclusive fullscreen
- Added assist option to toggle ai using the players top speed, which is now also disabled in multiplayer. This is a preference option and doesn’t affect your ability to progress.
- Added option to change the track introduction style (Track Overview, Start Grid Pan or None). Game -> General menu.
- Added gameplay option to allow AI to use the post release ships, disabled by default. Game -> General -> Ai Expanded Roster
- Implemented sun rays post processing effect. These are enabled by default without going through the initial startup process
- Implemented weapons quality option. Setting this to low uses alternative particles with much less overdraw for weapon impacts, which will be used on the Switch.
- Implemented shield display mode option (percentage vs absolute)
- Renamed the tonemapping option to vibrancy boost to better reflect what the option does
VR
- Updated to newer versions of OpenVR and SteamVR
- Fixed various generated UIs having their elements placed far away from the viewpoint
- Advanced content selectors are now correctly curved on the main menu
- The VR controls notice has been moved to the top of the introduction interface.
- The scanline effect on virtual skies is now disabled
Audio
- The track introduction voice is now stopped when the countdown starts
- The oneshot manager now operates with null references instead of object activation. (performance improvement when there’s lots of sounds)
- Updated Steam Audio from version 2.0.18 to 2.0.20.
- Fixed voices being much quieter when spatial audio is enabled
Music
- Added Vonsnake – In The Depths
- Added Altanticore – Slipstream
- Added Vonsnake – Twilight
- Added Xpand – Bay Sound. A vocal mix is also included in the soundtrack DLC
- Added Shiftdelete – Shockwave
- Added Vonsnake – Mako
- Added Vonsnake – Smooth Gliding
- Added Vonsnake – Make Your Move
- Added Vonsnake – Aster
- Menu music now uses absolute pathing (Mac fix)
- The music visualization processor now correctly handles audio streams with less then 2 channels.
- Fixed the pause menu not showing the name of in-scene song overrides
- Fixed custom music being loaded if it’s not a sub-directory of the Ingame Music folder
Input
- Updated to a newer version of Rewired (Dualsense is now supported with button names and controller icons)
- Multiple controllers can now be assigned to players. The UI has been split into separate Add/Remove buttons to provide manual control over controller assignments.
- Inputs are no longer polled when the game window isn’t in focus
Stats
- Barracuda Model B and Barracuda Model C now have stat trackers
Engine
- Updated from Unity 2018.3.8 to Unity 2020.3.5 and started using Unity’s incremental garbage collection
- Added supported for instanced lighting using VLM 2.0
- Added Virtual Reflection Listener, allowing reflective surfaces left in Survival mode to have their baked reflections updated on environment color changes
- Implemented Dear Imgui (currently used for debug hub, will be used for editor tools in the future)
- Implemented render zones, allowing 3D areas to be created which control rendering of various visual elements. Render Zones are currently implemented in limited scenarios for internal tracks and will be available for modding in 1.4 alongside the Switch release once we’ve finalized the implementation and tooling surrounding them.
- Implemented dust zones and surfaces. These allow particle systems and looped audio to be setup in the scene which will be used as dust kickup from ships when inside of zones tied to the particle system. A new option has been added to the effects menu to control the effect.
- Implemented splitscreen survival environment rendering
- The legacy ship importer is now completely removed from the game (.ship and .shp files are still read)
- Track section dimensions will now be calculated for tracks which don’t have a TRM wall (falls back to floor geometry)
- Track/scenery floor mesh data is now cached on the meshes object instead of by the ships as they fly over different hoverable surfaces. This reduces memory usage and fixes performance issues caused by ships caching large amounts of mesh data.
- Game assets are starting to be moved out into Asset Bundles so content can be loaded when needed instead of all the time. Right now this applies to internal track and ship content, with more being moved out as we develop the Switch version.
- The FMV playback is now smooth (fixed by engine upgrade)
- All terrain shaders now have built in fog for underwater effects
- The audio manager and mixer is now always initialized on the first frame of track loading if they’re not already. This fixes many sounds in fast play ignoring the audio settings and playing at max volume.
- Light flare json data is now always read and written with invariant number culture
- Most file operations are now abstracted to support multi-platform development
- Shader database translation failures are now logged as warnings instead of errors
- Discord libraries are now bundled into the Unity project instead of added after each build to fix errors when using Discord rich presence.
- Fixed the autopilot disengage exploding if disengaging immediately after engaging
- Fixed soft locks in specific scenarios when speed pads are being disabled
- Fixed virtual scenery track illuminations not displaying in 2280
- Fixed the airbrakes for the other splitscreen player rendering when in the internal view if the mesh renderer isn’t attached to the transform object
- Fixed soft locks that could occur when alt tabed while a track is loading
- Fixed weather systems not being setup for player 2 in splitscreen
- Fixed countdown display z fighting when using OpenGL
Commands
- Added Debug_Hub to toggle the debug hub overlay. Intended to be used with autoexec for debugging instances.
- Added mod_exportshipstats command. This will dump the currently loaded ship stats to an XML for loading in the Unity tools.
- Added debug_logcheats command. This logs out all typed cheats and a description of what they do into the console
- Added opendir command. This opens the game’s directory.
Gamemodes
- Added Stunt. See the in-game description for more details.
- Updated all gamemode descriptions to more clearly explain mechanics
- All ships now have weapons in Team Race
- Eliminator can now be played on Model B tracks
- Team Race is now playable on Model B tracks
- Survival is now playable on Expert tracks
Upsurge
- Implemented obtainable target message and notice sound
- Ships no longer lose zones after being eliminated
- Zone colors are now used, including in splitscreen
- The shield fill bar now correctly correlates to the shield refill percentage
- Increased the shield time from 1.5 seconds to 3 seconds
Survival
- Replaced the death sequence with a ship mesh based particle explosion and a flavor text sequence. This new sequence is compatible with all ships.
- When in debugging mode, pressing the afterburner button will now skip zones. This also applies to the layout creator, which already had this enabled by default but no longer uses the home key.
- Drastically reduced airbrake slip falloff (1000 to 25)
- The track and ship are now listed in the footer of the results screen
- Fixed the mode continuing to think that a custom ship is being used in survival if using the change ship and track option on the pause menu and changing to the Barracuda Model S
- Fixed scores lower then the PB overwriting records saved to disk
Multiplayer
- Added an option to set whether IP hosted servers will use UPNP or not
- Added speed multiplier setting. This stacks with hyper and drag mode
- Added setting to control the results screen time
- Added setting to control the event finish time
- Implemented bot count option
- Implemented barrel roll and sideshift options
- Implemented lobby presets. Same system as Custom Race rosters.
- Stored under User -> Config -> Ini -> Lobby Presets
- Host handshake packets now pull the hosts ship selection directly from the new content manager reference value instead of running a database search. This should drastically improve host performance when new clients join and lots of custom ships are installed.
- Steer and pitch inputs are now sent to apply character animations. With a full 16 player lobby, this adds an additional 960 bytes per second to the required bandwidth.
- Liveries selections are now sent by name instead of index to prevent desync with custom liveries. The same fallback behavior of using the default livery if not present still applies.
- Remade the lobby settings menu and list. They are now more easily extendable and future proofed with scroll areas.
- The lobby settings laps slider now uses the custom race menu behavior
- The lobby ship list now shows the name of ships that aren’t installed
- Optimized the generation of ship tick packets
- Fixed previously viewed custom ship resources not being freed in the lobby ship selection turntable when moving to another ship.
- Fixed unregistered hidden ships not being displayed in the lobby until a 2nd refresh
- Fixed the menu selection not jumping back to the options strip from the chat box when playing multiplayer as a client
- Fixed selection not being restored when leaving the lobby settings screen
- Clients are now limited to the hosts installed pickup pool (modding)
Modding
- Added template livery PSDs. They can be found in Modding -> Livery Templates
- Added Bike Track Template.blend file
- Added Small Vehicles Template Layout.ctl.
- Added Bike Track Start Line Template.blend
- Added uplift.wav for custom soundpacks
- Added overtime.wav for custom soundpacks
- Added typechar.wav for custom soundpacks
- Implemented custom survival and virtual environment palettes. See the Modding -> Palette Templtaes -> Survival Palettes Help Sheet.png image for more information. The option to select created palettes can be found in the Gameplay -> General menu.
- Implemented Debug Hub, a Dear Imgui based debugging tool for creating tracks and writing code mods. Press F9 to open it. This can be expanded with custom tools using code mods.
- Extended the text field length of custom sound entries in the soundpack testing menu so it can fit longer names and filenames on it
- Moved warnings.wav to the Warnings category in the soundpack testing menu
- All mod content can now be loaded from exteral locations using external.txt files. See here for more information: https://ballisticng-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ingame/installing_custom_content.html#external-txt-files
- Survival scripts now work for objects that are disabled in the scene (disabling an object you don’t want to show up in reflections but should be visible in survival for instance)
- Ship airbrakes can now be configured to render in the co*ckpit view
- Packed the texture resources for the Light Bridge template into the Blend file.
- Fixed Survival behavior scripts on Billboard Sprites not doing anything
- Fixed spelling mistake in `Emergency Pack Use` in the soundpack testing menu
- Fixed spelling mistake in `No Medal` in the soundpack testing menu
- Fixed the back button making the select noise in the soundpack testing menu (it’s force selected)