0.93.1 available in Desura!

Ok, this one is starting to look more like the one that could be put to Steam but it's not going to be the one.

We all know Steam noobs need a bit of handholding - fine, we all do - so we'll be looking into providing some brief help in the menu, also AI will learn to chitchat which should've happened 2 years ago, maybe they'll gossip about some of their tactics to help the player and brag with their driving skills.

Change log for 0.93.1:
campaign: campaign difficulty settings and initial presets added, hard difficulty changed slightly
campaign: non-neutral center base in Insular Complex fixed
maps: maps with designated start bases now spread forces in all initially occupied bases
online: grenade throwing sometimes causing stuck to walk fixed
characters: equipment and rank bound model support added
characters: characters now stand and crouch in against wall -mode when colliding with non-moving vehicles
general: menu UI texts externalized
general: stash and armory interaction points are now visualized with text when hovering over
general: physical-visual non-interactable items externalized, crate debris
items: non-respawnable items are indicated with cyan background in inventory view
items: unaffordable items are indicated with darker background in inventory view
weapons: APC HMG tweaked
vehicles: several smoke bugs fixed
general: frame stutter bug fixed
appearance: flying smoking junk visuals added to vehicle destruction
menu: status bar / help text support added
weapons: invisible weapons bug fixed
ai: shield behavior added
ai: vehicle weapon aiming bug fixed
ai: driving logic tweaked
general: linux campaign start changed

Why do characters behind buildings look like static now? It's strange, not sure if I like that change.
Apart from that, it's a nice update. It's nice to see the AI finally using shields. Vests being visual is also a plus.

Not sure what you mean with static.. They've been solid all along to differentiate from not being behind buildings. Screenshot?

EDIT: ah, they used to have that dark halo from post processing for a few versions time, it's gone since 0.93 - is it perhaps that what you mean? It was removed because of performance reasons. I believe there will be higher detail levels before 1.0, so it might make a comeback then. Another alternative is that there's some graphics bug happening now on your system, e.g. if the character shader can't be loaded, it'll resort to the worst possible character rendering mode, which doesn't handle faction coloring for ghosts, so they all look.. silvery.

How do you make it so that different soldier-models get different "armoured"-skins in the Voxel Editor?

The reason I'm asking being that it looks weird to have a soldier with short sleeves and a back-slung communications-thingy suddenly change his entire uniform the second he puts on a vest.

I see there's some new code in the "Green"/"Brown"/"Grey"-text files regarding vests, but I haven't been able to designate a particular vest-skin to a particular model.

There's a small issue wth visuals, characters behind walls and buildings appear liek this
http://imgur.com/hWewCPW

This didn't happen at the build we played at the gather.

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Edit: this is weird: it only happens when i use the laptop monitor, not when using an external one.

Yes, that's the issue I've had. It's weird, on 0.93 it didn't look like this though.

That's a bug, it certainly shouldn't look like that and doesn't here. A change was made in the character rendering in preparation for some smoke/fog effects, need to revise that.

You need to make the soldier group have just one default model, otherwise it'll randomize.

The factions will support multiple soldier groups in 0.95.

I wasn't even aware there was such a thing as "soldier groups"...

What are they used for?

Oh right, I didn't name them soldier_group after all.

Anyway, I mean this


That is considered a group. If there are multiple model entries with same requirements, then the shown model is randomized between those.

0.95 will allow defining several of these groups with some new stuff like rank ranges and equipment set and probability for a spawned soldier to be in a specific group, basically allowing us to have more low ranking soldiers than high, and have just a few very high ranking bots with better vests, rare weapons, valuables and unique appearance and character parameters.