by Bod9001
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 27th installment of our weekly update, which, by now, arguably deserves a new name.
In this month of development, we have done some good work, predominantly focusing on bug fixes of all kinds; small, big, complex, but always appreciated by our small but loyal player base. However, we know that what you truly crave for is features and improvements, so here is a brief list of some highlights. As always, if you wanted to read a full list of changes, please visit our Changelog Page.
If you remember our last blog post, we introduced the plans for the new mapping system that would work within the game itself, eliminating the need for Unity Editor. Bod9001 has been slowly but surely implementing more and more functionalities so that it becomes a reality. This time, he made some new mapping tools that are also available for admins right now.
It allows mappers to enable or disable lighting effects and also making invisible things, such as random loot and player spawners, visible again.
This tool lets you move objects around, can you believe this wasn't a thing before? With this tool moving stuff is as simple as click and then click again on the desired destination.
Last but not least, this tool will simple let you spawn rotatable objects with the desired facing. They will be created facing the way you drag the mouse when spawning them in.
Unitystation has become more spiritual, as MaxIsJoe is expanding upon the very basic Faith system they introduced some months ago, deepening it and making it more involved in the game loop.
Some radical changes have been introduced in the system, that no longers require believers to work. All faiths are active at once, all the time. This means their faith score is always tracked and your action/inaction can make them trigger their events, effectively being a part of the round.
With the intention of testing the grounds, a new property has been added to the Faiths system, germaphobe. The germaphobe faith property always keeps track of the station's filth score, and starts inviting the pesky wild life at specific score values.
At 150 filth objects, space ants will start visiting the station to feed on all the garbage and reagents left spilled on the ground.
Space ants are generally harmless at first, but will gradually become an active nuisance (and even a health hazard!) the more they feed on garbage and nearby food.
Ants also come in three variants, Space Ants, Fire Ants and Killer ants.
Fire ants evolve from space ants that spread over to nearby garbage, there is a low chance for them to evolve; but antagonists can spend their time farming/breeding ants by collecting the station's garbage and offering them as tribute.
Fire ants expose a lot of heat to nearby tiles, which is perfect if you want to trigger a Gibbtonite/plasma flood or burn unsuspecting victims.
Killer ants will never be evolved naturally, and are admin spawned only for the time being. Why? Because those small killers crawl inside your body and eat all your organs within seconds.
At 300 points, mold will start growing on bread; and will cause the bread to mutate into green monsters attempting to eat crewmembers near the kitchen.
While ants only existed to be annoying, bread monsters are there to hammer the point that the station's hygine is so bad; that germs are starting to mutate food inside the station now!
And lastly, at 550 points. Spores.
Station so stinky, it is causing a level 2 biohazard before there is even a blob around to spawn them.
Please let us know any feedback you have about these changes, experiment with them and tell us what you think on Discord!
Updating to Unity 2023.2.5f might not seem like a big deal from a player's perspective, but for our developers, it's a significant upgrade. Moving to Unity Editor version 2023.2.5f has led to noticeable performance enhancements on the development side and has also unlocked the ability to integrate new packages into the project that specifically require this version. A big shoutout to MaxIsJoe for making this happen
MaxIsJoe has done some very nice jetpack improvements. Among these upgrades is the addition of a trail effect, creating a visual flair that follows you as you navigate through space. Additionally, turning jetpacks on or off has been simplified to a mere interaction with the device on your backpack. Maneuverability has seen significant improvements as well; now, you can easily change direction of movement by clicking in the desired direction, among other intuitive changes you should experience yourself!
Simple yet effective addition by Bod9001. Items will now feature a vague description indicating the potential damage they could inflict when hitting. This should give you an idea of the damage without entering in the powergaming territory, so you can make more informed decisions without breaking the immersion.
In Unitystation terms, when we speak about a "matrix" we mean a game object composed by tiles, like the station, asteroids, shuttles or even space itself. All of these are matrices, and honestly the matrix code has always been a bit overly complicated to work with, and collisions weren't satisfying on client side so Bod9001 has some plans to improve all of it and we wanted to give you a sneap peak on what might come!
Albeit still in discussion, the idea is reworking matrix movement so that it is simpler in terms of implementation, similar to how player movement was reworked some time ago. Matrix movement would be more physics based, so you can experience cool things such as momentum and overturns at very high speed, with spectacular collisions and fun navigation.
Mind that this demonstration is still missing optimizations and as such is somewhat laggy, but that doesn't represent the final vision.
That wraps up our update for now, but there's plenty more on the horizon. We're gearing up for a lot of improvements, all in preparation for our upcoming release on Steam. So, keep an eye out for our next, not-so-weekly blog post!
As always, we want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has made this project possible: our Patrons, players, coders, and friends. Your support means the world to us, and we're truly grateful for each and every one of you!
