battleMETAL News

Just a quick hotfix to address tank movement.

The 2021 updates just keep rollin'.

This time around the particle system has been given a moderate update. Several weapon effects have been improved for effect and readability.

Bullet impacts now render on terrain, as well as your mech's footsteps. Missiles and explosions give off clear pressure blast waves to let you know you've hit something.

Maps have been given a bump in the atmosphere with the addition of fog and particle effects. Rain, snow, dust are now all working again.

Lastly, I think I've fixed some of the resolution-rebuild headaches that some players have experienced.

I don't have any funny halloween meme-content this time around, but new mechs lurk on the near horizon.

This update should clean up and improve the entire game's UI. The specific UI styling has been redone to provide a more crisp look in-line with contemporary styles. This change affects just about ever level of UI for the game, no more stretching to widescreen!

Other new features include an expanded color picker for Metal tints, a working chat-box for networked games, a way better video resolution selection menu, and a bunch of optimizations to improve performance. Also fixed a bug where mech components that were blown off were still visible.

Seems like a few shaders were memory hogs, demanding too much gpu for minor benefits.

I also found a better sound-playback function in the engine with a few more options. Net result is better sound mixing, and a little pitch-shifting to give some variety.

ESR especially sounds better, and explosions now have some oomf to them.

TDM functionality fell by the wayside as I worked on the 2.0.0 release, this small fix should make the server type workable again.

It was mostly a case of player info not being sent upstream to the server at the right time. Using new Server/Client structure of 2.0.0, I was able to drop this fix in pretty easily.

The other big fix should be squashing the nav-point selection bug where some players reported that sometimes they'd spawn in Metal Limbo (mostly around map O2M4).

why O2M4? way back when, I had not discovered that the engine could toggle drawing the 3D world via code. So to save on framerate when player's were viewing the briefing menu, I'd actually have them spawn into a separate box outside the game map....this dovetailed with a bug where sometimes the player's chosen nav-point wouldn't reach the server and so the player would just spawn where the 'player start' entity was sitting...you get the point.

anyhoo, most maps were fixed later in development to not have this... "feature" but nonetheless, the nav selection bug should be fixed.

if its not, please post in the Steam Discussions forum under bugs, or the discord, thanks!