Update #74: Cleaning House

Welcome to Update #74 where everyone is just suddenly a lot more stylish and good looking! Today, we've got a big visual upgrade to the material and texture stack for faces, fixes for your Stressed out Hacker and an unwinding of a bug that was reading Contact Power Levels as one big upgrade instead of pinning the upgrades to each individual Contact.

Our next major roadmap milestone is chewing up the majority of the team's time and none of that work can be released until base building is ready. But it is coming closer by the day now! Between now and base building, we'll have a series of additional updates with new heists and new recruits as we prep that colossal release for prime time.

If you like the pace of updates, continual improvements and the direction we are heading with Cyber Knights please take a moment to leave a review 👍 and help us continue this frantic and exciting pace of Early Access!


[h2]Upgraded Faces![/h2]
With Update #74, we've completed a major upgrade to the detail and quality of all character face textures in the game. This upgrade has a number of pieces that come together to form the look, including (1) increasing the texture quality of all faces, (2) adding subsurface detail and roughness to the faces to help them act more like real skin (3) adding small shadows to all faces to help highlight areas and prevent the face from feeling flat (4) adding a new Face Details cosmetic choice that will expand with more types of facial detail options.

The results feel great! The results speak for themselves. Without leaving behind the unique style that we set out to hit for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, we've still achieved a big upgrade here.


This one follows on the big lighting engine update as one of the other highest priority and most discussed visual upgrades from the game. We've heard so much about the character look from both players who are playing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint and those who are taking a look from a distance.



This upgrade affects characters in all cases which they appear, making improved headshots as well as making them look cooler in dialog and on missions.

To make changing skin color easier, we've moved it be an option of the Face selection and the new Face Details option has 2 choices within it right now - smooth skin and freckled skin, but this category has a lot of cool potential to include scars, burns and more.



[h2]New Facial Hair Options[/h2]
We also added 2 new facial hair options giving you some variations of a lighter, unshaven look. The classic 5'oclock shadow is looking good!

[h2]Matrix Stress Reduction[/h2]
A few updates ago, we punched up the Stress generation capabilities of the matrix, high damage lethal feedback and also Dumpshock. We've heard a lot of feedback that we went overboard and your Hacker's rapidly skyrocketed to the most Stressed out team members. This was related to (1) issues with how Lethal Damage was calculated an passed to the Stress generator before being blunted by your Deck's defenses and (2) Dumpshock just granting 50% too much Stress.

Both are resolved in this update and should be significantly more inline with the Stress that other team are suffering for their job as part of the heist team.

Sorry for the Stressed out Hackers, they will recover in time! Try to use a Hype Limit Break or two to get them back on track.


[h2]Ballooning Contact Power Levels[/h2]
Thanks to great F10s, we found and fixed a bug where any Power Level increase to one Contact was actually a Power Level increase to all Contacts! This was causing the entire Contact list to end up with 10+ Power Level after a little while.

Notably, this is not a form of data corruption or loss, this was just a bad query to the saved game that would read all Power Level increases to any Contact when asking for those of a specific Contact :sweat: so you'll see your games immediately snap back to the right values as Update #74 lands.

This is fixed just in time for the upcoming Exposure and Influence LImit Breaks.

[h2]Carnivore Fixes[/h2]
We've made a few small fixes to Carnivore, including swapping the objectives for the extraction points which were switched. Thanks to everyone putting in F10s!

Enjoy the new update, mercs! We'll see you in a few days with more :D



[h2]v1.5.13 - 4/18/2024[/h2]
- Improved all face textures, detail and roughness to look less plastic and just better
- Added new appearance option "Skin Detail" - current options for smooth and freckled skin with more coming
- Moved skin color option under face for much easier selection when modifying appearance
- Reduced Stress caused by hard disconnect in the Matrix by 50%
- Fixed issue with previewing short beards just disappearing constantly
- Fixed issues where sometimes character or contact eyes would be a dead gray
- Fixed bug where each Contact's Power Level was calculated by summing all bonuses to all Contact Power Levels (oops!)
- Fixed issue where extraction objectives in second stage of Carnivore were switched
- Fixed bug listing the wrong Trait level after Hype Limit Break mutation (1 instead of 2)
- Improved performance in appearance tab