Hello mates! The Baron here and it's time for another little progress check with U6. U6 was intended to be a solely SDK and tech related update, but KospY was particularly off the radar these last two weeks and when that happens it is usually because he is cooking up something good. This was indeed the case and outta nowhere he has hit us with some cool new features! So, soon coming to Update 6, I present to you -
Climbing 2.0https://youtu.be/IeeZPRYMnZs
I was pretty surprised to see this! With climbing 2.0 it is now possible to latch onto things with your grip rather than having to make fists and hoof yourself around like some kinda of savage, haha. Best of all, this will be available for people who have the Valve Index knuckles, but also normal controllers! So no worries Rifters, you are not locked out. There is nothing special about the map to allow climbing by the way, meaning custom maps will be climbable too - Since it's physics based and not some hidden property attached to special parts of the terrain to make them grippable, this means you can latch on any surface that has a grippable point that makes sense. So you could grip onto a jutting piece of wall, but not a flat wall for example. (Although kospy has a "spiderman mode" hidden in the code, just in case he feels like releasing it for fun, lol.) Oh and before anyone asks - the map in the video was just a test map. Though KospY was toying with the idea of adding a "KospY's Tower" bonus map for fun. :)
So you may be asking, where is this all coming from? Well remember, B&S is an early access game and the is much that will evolve. Remember the naysayers who said B&S wont be more than a tech demo arena game? Well this climbing mechanic is setting the stage for future dungeons, where the player will have to climb at certain points to figure out how to traverse the map.
As a little bonus, climbing will have some foot snapping, which is.... well... something. xD
Foot snappinghttps://youtu.be/QooIWz_3b8g
The idea being if you look down you will see your feet snapped to the wall so it will look cool, but a little janky (for now!) in 3rd person haha. KospY's comment on this - "It's far from the assassin creed animations, but it's better than nothing xD"
Oh and another nice little bonus!
No more pushback when in climbing mode!!! Yay! You might recall some jankiness with climbing enabled, particularly with 2 handed weapons, where you feel a little "pushback" when trying to stab. Well now the system is climbing physics will be disabled when the player has 2 feet on the ground. In a way you could consider it like an auto turn on/off that is context based. :)
The last physics related thing to mention is
hand collisions, which is essentially the hands will now be an interactable part of the world all the time. KospY didn't have time to go into this much but I believe the implication here is that it sets the foundation for some possible future Knuckles stuff that involves individual fingers. Will post more info on that when I have it.
What else... oh weapons! Our weapons man has been hard at work with some cool new goodies. If you missed my last post from reddit and discord, I mentioned we already have confirmed:
Claymore
Comparison to longsword for scale
Revamped Dual Blade Staff
Comparison to the original model - although it's gonna be even longer than shown here. The final blades should be as long as the originals. The longer shaft will hopefully make it more staff-like to operate.
But we have two more things to hopefully look forward to in U6. Just to temper expectations however, it has not been 100% confirmed to me that these two new weapons will make it into U6 in time, though I think it's likely. But anyway, they are:
Maul
Push Blade (assassin's creed style)
Speaking of weapons, hopefully you are all enjoying the vast array of custom weapons that the modding community have been churning out. It is now confirmed that when the U6 SDK drops, all mods will be moved from the Discord to https://www.nexusmods.com/bladeandsorcery/. Some modders are already migrating, which is excellent because they wont be caught off guard. Nexus will be a million times better than Discord for organization, searching, images, checking what's new released, what's most popular, avoiding obsolete version confusion, etc. If you are a modder I recommend you start making the move now (you can still post your nexus link on discord). Of course no one has to use nexus to host their mods, but I encourage it for your own visibility sake, as that is the official location I will be sending people who ask where mods are hosted.
Last of all, there is now a rough ballpark for U6 release!
The ballpark for U6 is late June, which is approaching fast, folks. ;) That's it for now! Hope you all have a lovely week. Cheers!