Alpha 23 – with added grangers!

New granger model, improved sound, turrets, and more…

New granger model!

hhhhhh – stare into my beady eyes!

We’ve also made a few cosmetic adjustments to the human armour.

Audio system rewrite!

We’re using OpenAL everywhere now (QAL’s gone), so we can now start making good use of various effects; as of this release, we have doppler and reverb. There’s a /testReverb command, intended to help mappers choose a suitable preset; we have reverb effects much like we already have colour grading – and Parpax has been updated to use this.

Gameplay changes

R.I.P. Defence Computer

The defence computer farms have repaired their last. The last few were shut down just a few hours ago, and we held a 10-second silence in honour of the truly magnificent repair ability of one million DCs in and around the human base. Flags were at half-mast. Grangers briefly stopped building. Dragoons held back on their pouncing. Humans camped for a moment as the last defence computer was ceremonially destroyed, along with a team-mate who’d set up camp too close, by a defending lucisuit.

Instead, the human team’s buildings now have self-repair capabilities, and the construction kit repair rate is reduced to compensate for this. Reactor zap is extended but weakened, and it gets the defence computer bonus by default.

Danger! Improved turrets!

Turrets now lock onto aliens much more quickly; there is no delay before they start shooting. They’re now much more like those of Tremulous 1.1 than 1.2 – in particular, they’re much more effective against smaller aliens but less so against tyrants. We’ve also fixed the firing effect.

Mining

When placing a drill or a leech, the mining efficiency gain (or loss) is now shown. This is much more useful than the percentage efficiency for the building in question since you’ll immediately know if you’d lose mining efficiency instead of having to wait until the building is complete.

Miscellaneous

Hives have more sting – their choice of target is improved.

The build time for leeches and drills is halved.

When you receive damage, if you have a jetpack then, instead of it being temporarily disabled, some fuel is lost.

IQM support

We now have support for the IQM format for models and animations, and we’ll start making use of this over the next few releases.

Other changes

Snowstation is now known as Chasm.

You can now switch renderers without exiting. Set cl_renderer as needed then /vid_restart. There are also a few small renderer fixes. /modcase now recognises the ‘compose’ and ‘menu’ modifier keys. default.cfg is client-only now, and client and server use different history files.

We’ve done quite a few small clean-ups and fixes since Alpha 22. /delay (with the value given in frames) works again. /gametimelimit is no more, having been merged into /time. Latched variables have been fixed and some server command output formatting has been fixed up.

Various admin commands don’t make sense during intermissions, so we’ve disabled them at those times. One fun one was to have the last egg or telenode in a location visible from the default spectator camera then to revert its destruction just after the game is won by the other team: an egg visible there despite humans having won!

We’ve moved a little closer to getting rid of QVM code: the game code is now compilable as either C or C++.