Break thru walls, tear down buildings, and send structures crashing into each other in Instruments of Destruction, a vehicle-action game featuring advanced physics-based destruction. Pilot a variety of vehicles across dozens of missions and high score challenges in this highly-interactive world.
This is a slightly smaller list of changes, but an important update. No changelist this time, but each change needs a few words, so here we go.
[b]SKY IMPROVEMENTS[/b]
I messed with some volumetric clouds, and they looked pretty good, but not worth the performance hit (about 1ms on my PC). Just using nice high-res textures turned out to work the best, with no real performance hit and a nice visual improvement. I tried messing with different visual styles of clouds, but realistic ones seemed to fit the best. The sun/moon is also now visible as a very bright sphere. If you look towards it, the post-processing adjusts appropriately. Overall, this was a nice bang-for-the-buck improvement in making the world feel better (it's also the reason why this update is 100+mb in size). There are a few things left for the UI/etc that need touching up, but this is one of the last in-world tweaks before 1.0.
[b]MOUSE CONTROLS[/b]
This was a not-too-complex task that required balancing a lot of different issues, so there's a little clunkiness in how you make a vehicle use mouse controls. But I think the result is a good compromise. Basically this dialog handles all the mouse controls.
[img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40401905/04432081561a96586b3de1b6bb9c9d202ed6b727.png[/img]
The majority of that dialog controls how the X/Y axis function and which controls/inputs they override. The bottom part controls which controls/inputs the mouse buttons override. Except they don't override anything, they share/piggyback on existing controls. Originally I had mouse buttons mapping normally, but this made for some awkward issues, especially for those who use Orbit cam instead of Follow cam. Instead everything mouse-related is on this popup, and the mouse controls only function when you 1) use follow cam and 2) are not using a gamepad.
I switched some of the mission vehicles to use mouse controls (the ones that fire something), but aside from Hover Hornet I think using the keyboard remains identical to before. That vehicle I felt ok changing because it never controlled great with keyboard in the first place (it's always been far better with gamepad).
[b]SPACEBAR CHANGE![/b]
This is a side-effect of having mouse support. I decided it was time to switch the main shortcut for starting/ending the game to ENTER instead of SPACE. The mission vehicles will be changing soon to use SPACE as the main fire/action button, and LEFT SHIFT as the main turbo/boost button. This should make the game a bit easier to pick up and play for new players.
[b]LOGIC CODE CHANGE[/b]
Some logic stuff, particularly with things that toggle, has always been a bit buggy. I decided it was time to bite the bullet and change anything with part controls/logic that's not visual to use the same code path, and it seems to have worked. I have tested a lot of different vehicles and things seem to be working as expected (aka better than before), but please let me know if you see any logic-related glitches/etc. A link to the Steam Workshop vehicle always helps :)
[Logic also no longer runs in Build Mode. It was still doing so for a few parts.]
[b]STEAM WORKSHOP FIX[/b]
I fixed the issue with Workshop Vehicles not having their creator names showing up (and maybe sometimes showing the wrong vehicle name). It was an easier fix than I expected, sorry that took so long.
[b]PART COLORS[/b]
New part colors now make a little more sense. If you change the color of a part, that's the color any new part will have. It no longer cares about any parts you may have selected/highlighted, only if you changed colors. I think it also changes the default if you assign new colors in the Edit Palette menu, but that feels ok to leave as is.
[b]NEXT UPDATE PLANS[/b]
The next update will be coming...I don't know when, sorry. I'll be working on more turrets/enemies/etc starting tomorrow, and more missions soon. It may be January before the next significant update. I'm looking forward to making lots of fun/varied missions, and development has gone pretty well the last month or so. But estimating/predicting how that will go is difficult to do with any accuracy. A new release date trailer will be coming in January/February when I have a better idea of how long it'll take to finish the game.