We’ve been busy tweaking and adjusting and fixing things for this release. Batteries not included.

Gameplay

The battery pack has been discharged and sent for recycling, and weapon magazine sizes have been adjusted to compensate. The radar item now uses the backpack slot (which means that, once again, it conflicts with the battlesuit – you can’t have both). The jetpack can be activated when falling after a jump. Also, the ignition cost is halved. Turrets will prefer targets which require less turning time for aiming. Deconstruction of buildings has been streamlined. Telenodes no longer require power.

Dretch and mantis health are reduced to 30hp and 75hp respectively, and mantises must wait longer between pounces. The booster now emits a spore cloud when healing aliens.

Vsays are now local (map area) by default.

HUD changes

Kill assists by players are now shown for kills by players or buildings, so long as the assistant did enough damage. Team indicators are also shown. (Right now, these are inconsistent: we still use [H] and [A] elsewhere.)

●King Slayer was blasted by ●ultran00b; ●Dr Fail assisted

You can use a style which uses icons representing the kill method (well, mostly – we need some extra icons) with /set cg_emoticonsInMessages 1 or go back to the verbose style with /set cg_emoticonsInMessages 1. (You may also notice that the text is a little smaller.)

The scores display now uses the advanced alien class icons, matching the momentum bar usage.

Builders now see, on the building status indicators, a mark indicating the amount of power required by that building.

Rendering and graphics

We have improved textures for the dretch, trapper and acid tube, and improved textures and model for the drill.

Leaf surface merging (map render optimisation) and VBO vertex deformation are now enabled by default. These result in, respectively, more efficient rendering and more efficient handling of animated models. Also, IQM culling is improved a little and trilinear filtering is enabled by default.

There are some lighting improvements: the light grid interpolation has been adjusted a bit, and there are also some changes to avoid darkening of buildings and player models near walls. Smooth alpha blending and light vector scaling now work properly.

Bug fixes

We’ve found and fixed the cause of the ‘stuck key’ bug: press and release a key, to which some command such as+leftwas bound, with the space of one local frame and the release would be mis-handled. Also fixed are some bugs related to loading of maps, re-initialisation, executable pathname(!) and TTY console input. modcase console variable interpolation is re-enabled, and map and devmap command completion (layout name lookup) is fixed.