Hello everyone!
It’s time to start sneak peeking at the next update in earnest. While some of you may have already guessed what the main course is going to be (more about that next time), this release has much else besides – such as various improvements to alien ruins, and three new kinds of husk enemies. Let’s take a look.
More to explore in alien ruins
We’ve added a number of new ruin modules to make exploring alien ruins more varied and interesting, and to make it look like the ancients didn’t just live in square boxes but had other pursuits in life as well. We’ve also made a long list of fixes and improvements to the existing ruin modules to bring them up to standard, and multiple visual improvements and additions, like pillars, sculptures and new background textures.
We’re also adding new puzzles and traps in the ruins, for example the new “current generator” module, where an area is flooded with strong currents which you’ll need to shut down in order to proceed. Perhaps more importantly, we’ve reworked the existing puzzles: doors locked and unlocked using a terminal will now only stay open as long as the item required to operate the terminal is in place. This means you will need to think a bit more about how to traverse a ruin, as you only have so many trinkets and curios to go around. However, most traps are also destructible, so you shouldn’t get stuck inside.
Besides improvements to the ruins themselves, we’re adding new events related to the ruins. These will spur you on in your ruin exploration as well as give you more insight into the beings that originally built these structures.
Now that the ruins are hopefully more exciting to explore, even for players who have been with us for a long time, we’re making it a little less straightforward to take shortcuts within them – most walls and doors inside alien ruins have been made stronger, so you can’t cut through as easily, and various obstacles have been made harder to simply walk past. However, there will be weak points in the walls as well to allow for alternate access to some parts of the ruins.
Rebalanced gene system and new dementonite items
As well as improving the ruin exploration experience, we wanted to add to the rewards you get from venturing into them. For one thing, we’ve rebalanced and improved the gene splicing system to give you more and more worthwhile uses for all those genetic materials you can find in ruins.
Secondly, we’ve added a number of new uses for dementonite, the mysterious “higher-dimensional material” you can acquire by deconstructing psychosis artifacts. As we’re dealing with a rather esoteric substance, it stands to reason you might be able to create some powerful tools with it – such as an item to reset talent points with, railgun shells with gravity-altering effects, or a “second sight” power that allows you to spot enemies nearby without using goggles.
New and improved husks
While exploring alien ruins, and other parts of Europa, you can now come across three new breeds of husks. These new husk variants bring some novelty to your husk encounters with their special looks and tricks.
The Husk Prowler moves faster than you’d like it to and employs leaping attacks. Generally the best way to avoid husk infections is to keep your distance, but with this one, that might be difficult.
The Husk Chimera should tickle your body horror sensitivities with its multiple twisted limbs. Despite its size, it moves and kills quickly, so it won’t be one of the first husks you encounter in a campaign (for many submariners, it might be their last).
The Exosuit Husk, as the name suggests, wears an exosuit instead of a normal diving suit. This makes it slow and lumbering… and tanky, so prepare to hit harder than usual to make sure it stays down.
And speaking of staying down, we’ve taught all humanoid husks how to play dead. Next time you see a fallen diver’s body, approach with caution.
Finally, we’re making several bugfixes and improvements to husks as well as other monsters in this update.
Are we there yet?
The update is about a month away now, so the Unstable version already has a lot of the update contents in it, if you are looking for a hands-on preview. Stay tuned and let us know what you think!
Zaakaroose
I’m really glad ruins are getting an update!! There wasn’t much reasons to explore them except for some “decent” loot and oxygenite
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
FIX NETWORKING AND MUILTI CORE REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Regalis
We’re planning on dedicating the update after this one to just bugfixes and improvements (finally), and networking fixes + optimization are high up on the priority list.
However, multithreading in particular is a complex subject, it’s just not something that can be conclusively “fixed”: some things can be effectively split between multiple threads for much better performance, but in many cases that’s not feasible, and in some cases the overhead of managing the work between threads can even result in worse performance.
There’s certainly a lot of room for improvement in the way Barotrauma utilizes multiple cores, and there will be improvements to it in future updates (as there have been in many past updates), but I hope you’re not assuming it would be feasible, or even useful, to make the game utilize an arbitrary number of cores evenly and effectively. What I can say though is that we will be doing optimizations to the game in future updates – some of those might involve multithreading, some might not. 🙂