RWR 0.98 is out!

Hey there – the wait is finally over, RWR 0.98 has been released!

This update was a huge crunch for us taking 9 weeks to get here. We began the work with the finale battles, bringing out the first one in this update. What it means is that once you defeat an enemy faction so that they have no presence in any of the areas in campaign, the final mission extraction point becomes available in all maps. In Invasion online, the final battles are just fought after all regular maps.

The final mission against the first fallen enemy is a stealth themed mission. This effectively made us take a closer look at the AI stealth defense behavior and we found a number of things we could adjust to improve the experience. The behavior of the defending AI should be a bit more predictable this way, also you can use distraction to a greater effect now. The AI is more aggressive though so you may need to bail out more often; good to change position a lot anyway!

The mission is designed for single player or for a small number of cooperative players. We have no idea if it makes sense in Invasion with 20-50 players in the same team but it’s there, will be interesting to find out!

We are mainly in polishing phase currently on our way towards the 1.0 release. This results in crazy amount of tiny but much needed changes here and there – here’s a few:

* squad names and color matching, for organizing players into squads in online, with squad chat
* new player markers, with Steam friends shown differently
* sortable scoreboard
* pause state for single player, check your key config
* bigger capacity for stashes, you’ll need it, trust me!
* a bunch of vehicle delivery objective fixes
* ladder visualization behind buildings
* new settings for quick matches, also with possibility to play with customized start commands
* more audio volume controls
* some RP rewards tweaked
* connection error messages now show properly inside menu
* a short celebration occurs after a map is completed, will be further worked on in the next update
* speech bubble fader option, fades out all bubbles if mouse hovers over one
* riot shield can now stop one blast, second stuns and consumes the shield
* neutral faction related reports removed
* server mode shown in server list
* see the complete list here

We also worked a bit with a few active community members (thanks to warbrand, DoomMetal and harr for the great character models) to extend the racing mod that has been floating around for a while. It’s now included in the RWR release so make sure you join us sometime on a racing server for some serious laughs, we’ll be setting up a server soon!

Mac port is also starting to be in a pretty good shape. It runs fine already so what’s on the lacking side is just the packaging and making it available in Steam and get a few more people testing it out and find if anything’s missing.

Chances are we’ll be making a few smaller update releases before 0.99, the Mac variant will likely be included in one of those. We’ll see what happens in the coming month!

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4 Comments

  1. woczarder
    Posted September 13, 2014 at 23:15 | Permalink

    Yes! Stealth, moar stealth. Stealth is life.

  2. nnsoch1776
    Posted September 14, 2014 at 05:36 | Permalink

    It is really great to see the work you have done. I am a mac user and I bought your game off steam just because I think that this game will be so good. I just had a question, and no it is not “when is the mac release coming out :P ” but I was wondering if you could clarify that you meant the Mac beta will be released on steam or if you meant the mac version will come out after the full 1.0

    • Posted September 14, 2014 at 12:32 | Permalink

      Mac version will be in Steam before 1.0, possibly for 0.99 or even earlier.

      I was initially looking to make it public for 0.98 but didn’t count in the effort needed to set up the package in Steam – and we really needed to get 0.98 out now.

  3. Bishop
    Posted September 14, 2014 at 20:43 | Permalink

    YAY.