Hello there,

August is usually a slow month at FrozenSand, but this year the bad weather might have helped spark some unusually high summer activity! I've included lots of screenshots and videos of the team's WIPs and experimentations.

Last month I talked about adding a new grenade - the Ice Grenade - to the game. X-dcx-x and JohnnyEnglish have created a model for this grenade that I implemented into the game, and this month JohnnyEnglish has put his hands on creating a decal material for it. The idea is to have a good amount of ice spreading all around the grenade impact point, affecting the nearby players. The way it will affect the players and the gameplay hasn't been decided quite yet, so more on that in the next news! However, the decal looks quite good now (screenshots and videos included). The issue we're having right now is that the decal doesn't work well when spawned on multiple planes, for example when the ice needs to spread both on the floor and one or multiple walls. Once we figure out how to fix this issue, I'll focus on finishing its implementation in terms of how it will affect the gameplay.

This month I also worked on the main menu, which was kind of empty until now. It's now displaying the latest website news from an API, and I'm working on also displaying the list of connected Steam friends so one can quickly invite their friends to join them. More on that later!
Talking about Steam, the Mac OSX build is now published on Steam, giving access to the OSX version of the game to the private alpha testers. I'm getting some very decent in-game performances when playing on my MacBook Pro. I can't wait to get some feedback from the QA players.

As a public alpha is getting closer, we need to work on the small bits that need to be done or fixed before going public. In that matter Neon has become our serial bug fixer lately, working very hard on fixing some small but nasty issues reported by the private alpha testers. He's also implemented a small feature that really adds to the feeling of shooting the weapons: some camera shake based on the weapon recoil. At first it was overpowered and even active when slashing the knife :D (videos included), but I then tweaked the values for all weapons. The more powerful the weapon is, the bigger camera shake it produces. I think it looks very cool!

We've released a new QA build this month, and for the first time in over a year we've added a dozen of new testers to the private alpha. We now feel confident to progressively add more people to better stress test the servers. It's also always refreshing to get some new, "outsider" opinion on the state of the game. The new testers have also found several bugs that went unnoticed for many months!

I've included several screenshots of Thingley on which Lizart keeps on doing an impressive work. It's getting more and more textures and the map really is coming alive with models and textures 100% done by the team. Speaking of Lizart, he's also done some examples of customization to the AK47 model. We intend to add customization features to the weapon and player models in the future, this is an example of what it could look like. We're not ready yet though, as there's lots of things to implement in order to deal with customization, but it should happen someday.

See you next month!

--Barbatos

Hey everyone!

I hope your summer is going great with some holidays and sun. As for me, as a French, I can't really say that I've seen the sun too much lately, huh. :D We hadn't seen that much rain during a July in 20 years!

Anyway, in the last few weeks I've made progress on the Fragmentation Grenade that I mentioned in early May. For those who joined the tippers since then (thank you!), my goal is to implement a new grenade into the game that does less radial damage than the HE Grenade to the nearby players when exploding, but throws fragments all around itself that make players bleed when hit by them.
I've included some videos with and without the debugging stuff, where you can easily see the line traces of the fragments. My goal is to throw a random amount of fragments (with a minimum and a maximum amount) but all around the grenade so any player close to the grenade (and possibly above or under it) can be hit. The fragments currently get scattered up to 7 meters away from the grenade. When hit by a fragment, a player instantly bleeds and takes 5% of damage (per fragment).
We'll probably do some tweaking once the QA testers have a look into these new grenades, but I'm fairly happy with them right now! The third video was recorded tonight with the game running on a MacBook pro M2 btw (the first semi-public OSX video of UrT5!). :)

As I'm kind of into grenades lately, I've asked Johnny and x-dcx-x to design two new grenades, which they've done in no time. I've included some screenshots of the future Smoke Grenade and the Ice Grenade. The models themselves are now almost finished and implemented in-game. I need to work on their code and visual effects now. We'll also need to create some animations for the Ice Grenade, which will have to be armed before being thrown. It'll then spread ice around itself right when hitting the floor, slowing down players, etc. More on that soon!

Lizart is on a roll lately, and makes some great progress on Thingley with the help of Markinho among others. The map is truly starting to come alive now that it is starting to be textured. Those walls, windows and doors look really nice IMO.
JohnnyEnglish made walkthrough of two other maps that look very nice: SkyLines and Uptown.

Neon spent some time on the player selection menu (screenshot included). He created thumbnails for each player model to better visualize which player model is selected. The goal is to create a simple but effective menu for the public alpha version of the game, and improve it later (like many other things!).

Enjoy your summer!

- Barbatos