Here's what's changing:
* Crushers stomp radius very slightly nerfed. It was 4 tiles, it is now 3.
* A lot of old unused vanilla stuff has been removed completely. Wizards, ninjas, sorry. Yautja could beat your ass any day.
* Speaking of which, hopefully fixed endless pred spawn on pred round.
* Aiming for the head of a xeno (or eyes/mouth) now does slightly more damage. If you're asking if I'm trying to encourage lethal friendly fire.. yes. Yes I am.
* Clicking on stuff has become more responsive in general. This was done by lowering a 1-second lag that was being added to every click (to compensate for laggy connections). The lag was reduced to 1/3rd of a second, and lag was added in various other places. If someone is doing something at turbo-speed that they probably shouldn't be, inform a staff member. The upside to this is no more "missing clicks" especially if you have a habit of spamming it, so if you like this feature, don't abuse it.
* An added bonus is that the above change lets us make melee or hand to hand attacks at different click speeds. For instance, the fire axe can attack once per second, while the butterfly knife 3 times per second. Currently this isn't much implemented, but you can expect it will be.
* Speed buff to xenos in general. Should be pretty noticeable for most castes. This will be heavily scrutinized to help tweak balance.
* New weapon attachable category, stocks! Woo stocks! There aren't many of them yet. The sprite offsets are probably way off, too. But they're in, and they work.
* Prison map and gamemode have been temporarily disabled to do some renovations. It's a fun map but it needs more optimization before it's ready for nationals.
* 3 New HUD buttons! Yay!Mouse over them if you spot them and you'll guess what they're for.
* Russian! English! Some of the SS13 vanilla languages have made way for some proper hu-man words. Iron Bears can only speak Russian, but their leader can speak English. So if you want to communicate, you better keep them alive.
* Yautja can now speak Sol Common (which everyone can understand) using :1 instead of having to cheese the voice recorder to speak to humans.
* Melee weapons now have a much much lower of embedding in the target. Like, 3% max now. Embeds are just plain obnoxious. Like, really, are you just spearing them all the way through and you lost your weapon in them completely? Gross.
* The entire projectile system has been rewritten by moi from the ground up - this includes everything related to guns and projectiles, but not thrown items. Our old system was based around vanilla SS13 and was clinging like a moss to our new code mostly because it's an extremely complicated mess of a system. It's basically the same projectile system as Originalstation only with 10 tons of extra code jammed onto it over the years by different people with no grasp of efficiency or optimization. HORRIFYING.
This led to our main problem lately, in that by late game you see massive spikes in lag due to the overabundance of sheer STUFF that's been spawned and deleted into the game. Even if you delete something, a ghost of it stays in memory thanks to Byond's terrible native memory handling code. On other servers it's not as noticeable a) because they use a garbage collector, and b) they don't have to spawn TENS OF THOUSANDS of bullets, bullet casings, and use terrible code to work with them.
Our new projectile system (which I will be calling BRESENHAMS PROJECTILES or BP) does away with all that nonsense and keeps deletions and creations of items to a minimum. It uses a much better bullet pathfinding system (the aforementioned Bresenhams pathfinding) that effectively draws a line between the midpoints of two turfs, and everywhere under the line is added to a turf list. The projectile then follows that turf list, scanning the ahead turf to see if it should stop at any point. When it reaches the end of the path, if there's still empty space to fly, it rebuilds the path like in that game Lemmings where you build a new staircase on the edge of an older one and all your Lemmings avoid falling to their horrible doom.
Anyway, the pathfinding is much slicker, though it's not quite as laser-perfect as Bay or Paradise's pixel projectiles, which use pixel points to calculate the exact trajectory and x/y coordinates of the bullet as it travels. Theirs is a more complex and arguably less efficient way, but probably a lot nicer looking. Oh well.
Included in the update is a huge amount of peripheral stuff to just the pathfinding, though that's what the marines shooting around will notice first, the bullets look MUCH nicer. Every gun has been given a loving custom resprite by the insanely talented spriting team, including magazines, muzzle flashes, bullet "ricochet" animations, the list goes on! Distress teams are all fully outfitted with all this new firepower, including a spread of high-powered Russian black market equipment, mercenary and vintage weapons, and all new elite, insanely overpowered PMC gear.
So what do marines get? Well, not a lot. Requisitions has the most of it -- new attachables, including underslung firearms, are now available, as well as stocks and new sprites for other parts. In addition, RO can now purchase firearm crates using their cargo ordering console, though they're fairly expensive and the dealers aren't very reliable..
Any questions or comments, put them here!
