Path Notes, Sunday - April 27th

[Squeeky]

Sunday, April 27th

1) Autorepair now (properly) consumes NTUs. As long as there are NTUs in the Silo, autorepair will function. If no NTUs are available, autorepair will cease to function. (The rates of consumption will probably be tweaked over the next couple of days.)

2) Experience is now awarded properly for squads. This fixes the "didn't get xp" bug that was in yesterday's build.

3) Zoom scopes should show up properly in various screen resolutions now.

4) Turrets will no longer completely miss vehicles when they shoot at them...instead, they actually hit them. Imagine that.

5) TRMAXs got adjustments because the change from the other day (swapping Dual-Cycler and Pounder roles) didn't seem to get all the data required to complete the change. Here are the recent revisions: Dual-Cycler is slightly more effective against armored targets, while slightly weaker against infantry. Additionally, the Pounder is now more effective against infantry.

6) About the supposed "stealth nerf" of the Phoenix. There are two issues that combined to make it feel particularly nerfed. The first is that mouse sensitivity can no longer be cranked up to get better turning radius on the Phoenix. That was considered an exploit and is now fixed. The second is that we added acceleration to the projectile so that it ramped up to speed instead of being fast right off the bat. This created an issue where the Phoenix would accelerate a little bit each frame, but on the vector it originally had been heading. This made it seem that the Phoenix was pulling back to its original heading all the time, which made it seem very hard to control (and thus, the unintentional "stealth nerf" occurred). This has been removed and the Phoenix should "feel" better again.

7) After all the stuff described above was resolved, we ended up reducing the Phoenix turning rate somewhat. This is an intentional and planned change that we're doing now because we had the Phoenix properties open already anyway.

8) A major server optimization on the way equipment transmits damage state should improve server CPU state quite a bit. This gives more CPU capacity to the zone servers, which allows them to more comfortably hold more players.

9) In order to "loosen up" the continental lattice constraints a bit, an extra link has been added from each warpgate to a second facility on each continent. EXCEPTION: All warpgates connecting to Searhus have only a single facility connected to them. Searhus is an "advanced" continent and is intentionally harder to crack. This is by design.

Some Know Issues Remaining:

a) We have crash to desktop issues. We'll be focusing on these all next week.

b) We have server stability issues (zones going down). These are also the highest priority next week.

c) VoiceIP is on the way...but still not ready yet.

d) We'll be examining lag states to see what can change in our code to compensate for some of the spikes we're seeing.