Early Access Update V0.8.5

Poached : Hunt The Hunter V0.8.5

Update Notes:

Improved enemy A.I. animation jitteriness.
Improved enemy A.I. cover finding and flanking abilities.
Improved enemy A.I. movement including speed and general pathfinding.
Improved enemy A.I. general behavior, while still maintaining their personality as stupid bumbling poachers.
Optimized enemy internal resources and memory management systems used by scriptable objects for state management.
Fixed responsiveness issues with reloading and jumping caused by input functions inside physics FixedUpdate() loops.
Doubled carbine weapon texture detail size.
Doubled silenced SMG weapon texture detail size.
Doubled rhino animal texture detail size.
Increased enemy A.I. chance of shooting you from a far distance.
Dead animal ragdolls are now "baked" after a few seconds when a mission starts to improve performance and also prevent weird movements and behavior on the still corpse.
Re-baked occlusion culling for all scenes to make sure culling is up to date for all geometry.
Decreased likelihood of player shooting up into the air when de-crouching after being pinched into geometry.
Pressing "Jump" while crouched will now un-crouch the player.
Sprinting from a crouched position will now also un-crouch the player into sprint.
Improved rhino path stampede finding A.I. to prevent strange behavior such as freezing or running on the spot for more immersive animation.
Vehicle driving is now mapped to the customizable movement keys instead of hardcoded to WASD/Arrow Keys.
Fixed missing collider and some minor texture issues on transport vehicle used to leave shooting range.
Improved AK47 ADS aiming alignment.
Deprecated the Scarr/Mufasa rifle to keep game more realistic and also spare more texture memory space to increase detail on other more commonly used weapons. If you did have a game saved with this weapon, you will be given a silenced SMG instead.
Fixed missing cactus colliders outside shebeen and other areas.
Added "Cactus Damage" to all cactus objects, which multiplies damage by magnitude of relative velocity of the player. So lightly touch a cactus and not much will happen, run into it with force and feel the pain. Just like a real cactus!!!
When the player already has an RPG equipped, and takes the ammo from another RPG weapon lying around the model will now show as an RPG with the rocket missing to show that its been taken out of the RPG and added to the players ammunition.
Fixed some trees with exposed roots showing holes in the mesh.
Fixed issue with certain areas of the wall not receiving light when using flashlight/lantern inside Mission 6 warehouse.
Fixed issue with Tranquilizer Rifle reload animation not resetting if players switches weapon while Tranquilizer Rifle is being reloaded.
Fixed issue with Rocket Launcher reload animation not resetting if players switches weapon while Rocket Launcher is being reloaded.
Fixed some texture issues in final mission bunker.
Fixed some minor audio compression issues in final boss fight.
Made poacher conversation heard in camp when returning to find it invaded after first mission more audible.
Added 6 more enemies to wave 2 of mission 3 when playing on "Hard" difficulty setting for extra mayhem.
Made running audio of coins and bullets jingling in players pocket while sprinting slightly less high pitched and easier on the ears when heard for long period of time.
Made television audio in shebeen more audible.
Made "Piet of the Jungle" Arcade cabinet music more audible in shebeen.
Made "Piet of the Jungle" Arcade cabinet controls work with custom binded movement keys instead of defaulting to WASD/arrow keys.
Made "Memoirs of General Gideon" Tape 02 - The Hippo - as found in the shebeen more audible.
Fixed missing enemy finder waypoint in Mission 7.
Fixed some waypoint issues in Mission 10 that could cause certain enemies to stand idle without a purpose.
Enemy A.I. head-look inverse kinematics now makes the enemy face their personal target position instead of only the player, to prevent unrealistic animation scenarios when enemies are hunting for the player while staring directly at them.
Fixed issue with binoculars sometimes leaving behind their loot "ghost" highlight after being picked up.
Fixed strange fishing rod animation issues.
Added asynchronous loading to the intro splash screen to prevent issues before loading main menu on older/slower systems.
Improved main starting menu loading speed.
Fixed issue with weird red overlay on death screen when being killed by a rhino.
Increased Rhino stampede collision detection accuracy.
Fixed issue with master audio volume sometimes not saving when restarting game or any other parameters caused by prefs not always being saved if user exits menu with escape key instead of the back button.
Fixed issue with poachers in Mission 1 camped by water tower sometimes hearing you a little too soon before you have approached the mission zone.
Fixed issue causing visual side-effect from hallucinogenic "Bird of Madness" healing item to not display.
New improved pencil-sketch style loading screens.
Fixed issue that would sometimes cause pistol ironsights to be misaligned if reload animation is played when the weapon is selected.
Added audio cues for when buying or selling stock from the online stock market.
Increased weight and torque of vehicle to reduce floatyness while driving.
New achievement for acquiring the Hiking Boots from the online shopping same day delivery service to increase running stamina time.
Cleaned up many unused scripting assemblies and references.
Optimized game scripting and memory usage as well as general performance.
Fixed issue causing leader ragdoll to sometimes exhibit weird breakdance-like behavior when defeated during Mission 8 rescue battle.
Inventory window can now also be closed with "ESC" key instead of only by pressing the inventory key. ["Tab" by default]
Mission 8 rescue mission waypoint now points directly to the target instead of the target area in case target strays too far from the objective.
Added new Graphics Option "HUD DAMAGE EFFECT" which can be used to disable the red flash on screen when getting hit, if desired.
Added an option slider to adjust intensity of screen-shake effect when getting hit.
Mission 8 rescue mission waypoint now points directly to the target instead of the target area in case target strays too far from the objective.
When game autosaves progress after completing an enemy wave it will do so without a screenshot so as to not cause weird flashing during the heat of battle end, as well as when loading a new level to not have a black and white screenshot as the new level loads or during a end of mission scoreboard so the screenshot does not interrupt the screen.
Picking up a weapon with a lower magazine capacity while you have a higher amount of bullets stored will no longer cause an overflow situation where your weapon has more bullets in the magazine than its technically able to store and the excess bullets from the magazine will be added back to the ammunition pool.
"Extreme" Violence mode now won't increase the size of the blood pools, as they already a bit excessive but it will still activate the "Blood-On-Hands" effect when picking up weapons from a fallen enemy.
Ammo text label is now invisible when "Unarmed" weapon slot for dragging items is selected to eliminate any possible confusion.
Removed all black emissive properties from materials that weren't doing anything with the emission.
Fixed a small 2 second delay in lighting when opening graphics menu from main menu causing lighting to switch from dark to light.
V-Sync is now off by default.
Doubled framerate of "Death" screen by removing unnecessary camera layers.
Removed unnecessary blend shapes from certain skinned meshes.
Simplified dung beetle & rhino beetle mesh skinning rigs.
Made animal bone skinning weights adhere to graphics settings.
Added 2 more enemies to Mission 1 Wave 2 when playing on "Hard" difficulty.
Added 1 more enemy to Mission 2 Wave 1 when playing on "Hard" difficulty.
Fixed an issue causing some poachers in mission 3 to be significantly shorter than other enemies in such a fashion that just looked simply ridiculous.
Removed all discrepancies between trees placed as meshes and trees instanced as part of the terrain data, allowing for less scene memory usage and increase billboard optimization when rendering trees from a distance.
Added further optimization to "Zone" culling when loading in extra detail groups outside of the main reserve area.
Recalculated bounds for all LOD groups in the environment map to increase the accuracy of all Level Of Detail Meshes.
Optimized A.I. nav-meshes with different more concise configurations for each mission.
Fixed a glitch that causes the female gardener NPC's head to disappear if you move too close to them during the Tutorial mission.
Fixed issue causing anti-aliasing settings to not save properly.
Adjusted maximum "Exposure" threshold in options and added an additional "Contrast" setting slider.
Made "Exposure" slider from left to right like all the other sliders to minimize confusion.
Moved "Contrast" / "Exposure" to advanced graphics menu to make more space for gameplay options.
Fixed once and for all issues relating to spawned enemies in Chapter 2 sometimes appearing in trees or inside rocks by creating fixed spawn points around the map that are randomly selected as opposed to nav-mesh approximation based random spawning.
Improved quality and brightness of night vision goggles.
Equipping night vision goggles will now deactivate the flashlight if equipped and vice versa. The lantern can still be used in conjunction with either item, but only flashlight or night vision can be equipped at one time.
Improved grenade throwing through inventory. Now after selecting the grenade you can aim it and press the mouse to throw it instead of just throwing it on click.
Re-thought the layout of Mission 3, forcing the player to venture out much further to find the enemies for a more realistic mission as opposed to poachers camping right outside the rangers base, as well as new grizzly set dressing for the poachers operations to drive home the nature of their activities to the player.
Various other small fixes & improvements.

Important Notice:

This is the the last major update planned for 2023, on account of the fact that I will be taking a small break away between 19 December - 5 January, and I don't want to introduce any new features that might possibly break while I am away from my development PC. That being said, I will still continue to patch this update just launched and fix any bugs found up until 18 December, so please do submit your bug reports to the discussions forum and Discord. [If any.]
While I am away, I will still be checking in periodically on the forums and Discord and reading all your suggestions on my laptop so keep them coming!
Next year is going to be a huge one with hundreds of updates and changes as well as many new features and content which I have planned, so stay tuned and as always - thank you all for the overwhelming support!

Speak soon. :)

- Twelv