[Upcoming] JKGalaxies 1.3.0

[eezstreet]

New Features

• Consumable items have been added. You can equip them to the ACI, and by pressing the number they are equipped to will use them. A small blue number on the ACI indicates how many you have left. Consumable items are hooked up to Lua scripts that can be customized by the server owner.
• Shield items have been added. You can equip them to the ACI, and they will need to wait to charge. After the charge period has started, the shield will begin regenerating. After your shield has been depleted, you will need to wait for them to charge again. Some shields recharge faster, regenerate shields faster, and hold more shield capacity than others.
  • Having a shield active will now block stuns from taking effect.
• Jetpack items have been added. When equipped to the ACI, the jetpack will appear on your player model and you can begin jetting around by pressing USE while jumping. (Pressing USE again will turn the jetpack off) Different jetpacks have different stats, such as fuel regeneration, fuel depletion, movement modifiers, and visuals.
  • Jetpacks in JKG use different physics and animations than base JKA.
  • Hold SPRINT (default: shift) to shift your weight and jet forward at a high rate of speed.
• Armor items have been added again. Instead of being purely cosmetic items, they reduce the damage you receive from most sources (except falling damage) and can alter movement speed and maximum health.
• Special damage types have been added. You can see what damage types a weapon uses in the inventory, but it's pretty obvious usually what types there are: ACP, Blaster, Slugthrower, Pulse, etc. These different damage types have different properties. For instance, slugthrowers completely ignore all shields, while pulse weaponry ignores all armor. Some damage types interact with shield and armor for reduced effect. (See this thread for more information)
  • Different damage types show up as differently colored damage plums.
  • Slugthrowers now deal a bleed damage over time (DoT) effect.
  • Poison grenades have been added which inflict a new Poison damage over time (DoT) effect.
  • Added bacta grenades that can heal you, and medicinal slugthrower rounds.
• Special ammo types have been added. You can purchase special ammo in "pack items" which disappear from the inventory on purchase and are put into your Ammo Bandolier. Some examples of special ammo include incendiary slugthrower rounds.
  • You can bind a new key to Ammo Type Cycle. It defaults to N.
• The shop and inventory menus can be scrolled through with the mouse wheel.
• The shop now has an Examine button, which hides your inventory on the display and shows a detailed description of the item selected.
• Shop purchases can now be broadcast on the whole server, or on the same team (or disabled). Configurable by the server with new cvars.
• g_teamsLocked : (default 0), if set to 1 will lock the teams so players cannot switch teams after 20% of the match timelimit has passed (new players have 3 minutes to pick a team).
• g_teamSwitchTime : (default 5), how many seconds players must wait before switching teams
• Added loading screen tips.
• Added EE-3 Carbine and EE-3 Pistol
• Added cheat command to give yourself a buff, and to print the list of buffs.
• Added "perf" cvar. When enabled, you can monitor frametimes of specific sections of the game's code and have a graph view.
• Re-added the JKA "You killed X" messages.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that allowed the player to kick other people while they were in knockdown.
• Fixed some glitchy behavior with moving in water
• Fixed console spam in the inventory and shop menus
• Fixed the "Assign to ACI" menu not disappearing
• Talking to a vendor no longer brings up the shop menu while in a demo.
• Fixed bug where using a treasure class with an invalid item could cause a crash
• Scoped weapons now correctly show walking animations while scoped.
• Jetpack activation is now lag-free
• Fixed third person animations for the Stouker Concussion Rifle
• Fixed crash that occurred when a client without the correct map tried to connect

Balance

• Grenades are now purchased one-at-a-time, and have had their cost drastically reduced. You don't get grenades any more upon respawning, and you can use them instantly after purchasing them. The ACI will show how many grenades you have left, similar to consumable items.
• Ammo is not given upon respawn. Instead you must purchase ammo. All weapons start with at least one clip (or 25% of the total ammo size, whichever is smaller).
• Nerfed stun firemodes slightly
• Some weapons can now overheat.
• Shots that are fired at you while you are rolling can now sometimes be "dodged."
• Passive credit gain ("salary") has been added.
  • jkg_passiveCreditsAmount, defaults to 15 credits; how much to be paid each iteration
  • jkg_passiveCreditsRate, defaults to 30000 milliseconds; how often to pay
  • jkg_passiveCreditsWait, defaults to 60000 milliseconds; how long to wait till player's receive payments
  • jkg_passiveUnderdogBonus, defaults 1, disabled if set to 0. If enabled gives 20% increased credits to the losing team's players when passive credits are awarded. Setting jkg_passiveCreditsAmount to 0 will disable this system on the server.
• Added credits rewarded to players based on how far they join into a game.
  • jkg_underdogBonus defaults to 1, disabled if set to 0. If enabled, gives player's who join late additional starting credits
• Whenever your teammates get a kill, you receive credits as well. Use jkg_teamKillBonus to set the amount to reward, if set to 0 Team Kill Bonuses are disabled. Player's who's rank (kill count) doubled is less than their death are rewarded double.

Internal / Modding

• Jetpacks are now configurable in .jet items.
• Armor is now configurable in .arm files.
• Ammo is now configurable in .json files
• Loading screen tips are added in the ext_data/tables/loadingTips.json file.
• Buffs are now configurable in buffs.json
• The location based damage modifiers are now able to be specified in constants.json
• Dozens of changes across the board to .wpn and .itm files
• Dozens of changes to the Lua API
• Stripped out almost all of the base JKA vehicle code. .veh and .vwp no longer get loaded. This improves FPS slightly, and RAM usage significantly.

Edited April 7, 2019 by eezstreet

[eezstreet]

Just an update, this patch is set to release sometime in January. These patch notes are slightly outdated and don't reflect everything that's in 1.3.0, they will be updated when we're a bit closer in.

 

There's one more patch to the game that's coming in early December, 1.2.2. You can find more information on that here:

https://jkhub.org/topic/8602-upcoming-jkgalaxies-patch-122/

 

The development time isn't split between these two versions, the priority is on 1.3.0, but immediate fixes and major bugs go towards 1.2.x. Balance is not a priority as 1.3.0 will significantly alter the gameplay.

[eezstreet]

Updated the changelog.

I had some real life issues and also have been working on my other projects which have consumed a lot of my time. I am talking with the rest of the team to see where things are and when we can get a release.

[Smoo]

We should maybe do another match like this time last year too, test out new updates

[Noodle]

We should maybe do another match like this time last year too, test out new updates

 

Everytime I can I will try to participate on those matches and will call friend to test it too. 

[eezstreet]

Minor updates to the changelog. We have conducted an internal playtest and identified some issues. We will be going ahead with the public playtest soon, after the remainder of the bugs are fixed. After the public playtest, we will be taking people's opinions about how it plays and iterating again, as well as finishing some last minute content, like the special ammo types menu.

[Futuza]

Just an update for everyone.  We've been working on a ton of stuff lately and fixed a bunch of bugs and added some new features too.  We're getting very close to a release now and should have more news soonish.  Looking forward to the scrimmage match with everyone!

[eezstreet]

As it stands, there are two major-ish bugs with this version. However the trouble is we cannot replicate the bugs reliably enough to fix them. They are:

• Chat sometimes does not show up in the chatbox (still visible in the console)
• Server sometimes crashes on Linux

We have a choice here: either fix the bugs and delay putting out 1.3.0 while we try to debug this, or release now and opt to fix them later. After all, this is sort of like an Early Access game and such things are commonplace, but I have a penchant for perfection.

 

Regardless of the above, there's still some issues we need to fix, specifically:

• Balance related stuff
• More special ammo types (we are going to add the ability for ammo types to add buffs, which would allow us to do incendiary rounds, cryogen/toxic/carbonite tanks for the CR-25, and poison/incendiary canisters for the LS-180/AA-35)

There is probably going to be a 1.3.1 patch after 1.3.0 which adds more interesting stuff. Silverfang and I discussed adding new charging effects like making the bowcaster shoot more shots when charged, as an example.

 

For 1.4.0 we need to probably go back to the drawing board and strip out a lot of the JKA and JKG stuff, because in our move to OpenJK we managed to break the solid blocking system we had before. Additionally it's totally worthless to send hilts in the userinfo since that's controlled entirely by the variation now. Lastly, I think I'm going to try and implement dual wielding blasters as part of 1.4.0 since the concept of dual wielding a saber is going to use related code I think. By adding dual wielding, it will probably fix the longstanding issue where blasters appear to shoot from the face.

 

Let me hear your guys' opinions about this.

[Ramikad]

• Chat sometimes does not show up in the chatbox (still visible in the console)

 

There's a pattern, apparently: with some testing it appears that every 12th message is lost in the chatbox. Hope that helps.

[Futuza]

As it stands, there are two major-ish bugs with this version. However the trouble is we cannot replicate the bugs reliably enough to fix them. They are:

• Chat sometimes does not show up in the chatbox (still visible in the console)
• Server sometimes crashes on Linux

These are glaringly bad problems that need fixing in my opinion.  If you can't even hold a match without the server crashing 3/4ths of the way through it we need to fix that.  The chat bug is also critical since there is no other means of communication in game.  However, I too have no idea how to fix them yet so...hmmm...any of the other JACoders have a chance they could look at it?  Maybe a new set of eyes could fix the chat issue.

 

Other stuff I'm good with.  Additional special ammo can probably wait for subsequent patches.  Balance issues should be addressed though for 1.3.0 release.  We also probably want to do a bit of advertising for the 1.3 release so its okay to delay a little, I'd like to put out a film montage of some of the changes + some scrimmage footage, to go with the announcement.

[eezstreet]

These are glaringly bad problems that need fixing in my opinion.  If you can't even hold a match without the server crashing 3/4ths of the way through it we need to fix that.  The chat bug is also critical since there is no other means of communication in game.  However, I too have no idea how to fix them yet so...hmmm...any of the other JACoders have a chance they could look at it?  Maybe a new set of eyes could fix the chat issue.

 

Other stuff I'm good with.  Additional special ammo can probably wait for subsequent patches.  Balance issues should be addressed though for 1.3.0 release.  We also probably want to do a bit of advertising for the 1.3 release so its okay to delay a little, I'd like to put out a film montage of some of the changes + some scrimmage footage, to go with the announcement.

If we can get Smoo to run the server in gdb and/or fix the compiler warnings on Linux (and there are a lot of them...) I think that would help us find the server crash. I'm pretty sure it's a linux specific issue but we can run a Windows machine to be sure.

 

If Ramikad is right and every 12th message is lost, that's helpful.

[eezstreet]

Small update: I've fixed the chat bug. We just need to fix the crashing and we should be okay I think code-wise.

[Futuza]

There's a pattern, apparently: with some testing it appears that every 12th message is lost in the chatbox. Hope that helps.

So very helpful.  So glad someone figured it out.  Thanks!

[eezstreet]

So what are we going to do about the crash? Are we going to organize another test and run on @'s server or are we going to try and run it on my (bad ping) machine?

[eezstreet]

Small update. I programmed in a crash catcher/stack trace printer, so all we need to do is host another scrimmage match and have Smoo compile it on Debug.

[Futuza]

Hey everybody, in case you haven't been on the discord, or paid attention to the screenshot thread, I've been working on improving v1.3 and we're now on iteration 1.3.18.  I haven't done an official release yet, as I still need to do more testing with misc linux issues and I'm debating on whether to add a few more features now or release and add the features later. eezstreet is currently busy with RL, so I've mostly been working slowly on my own at the moment, but I hope to get a new version out soon.  Happy 4th of July!

 

Here's a summary of changes so far:

Changes included in v1.3.18

 

New Features

New Cvars

• g_teamsLocked : (default 0), if set to 1 will lock the teams so
  players cannot switch teams after 20% of the match timelimit has passed
  (new players have 3 minutes to pick a team).
• g_teamSwitchTime : (default 5), how many seconds players must wait
  before switching teams

Bug Fixes and Balance Changes

• fixed blank name on bacta grenades
• client data now keeps track of how much a player has spent
• fixed jkg_buyAnnounce so that it can be disabled, set to announce to your team, or to both teams
• exploit fix with pay
• selling back starter guns now shows correct price (1) in shop menu
• starting weapon ammo is now free of charge
• ammo for the losing team is half off normal retail price (note: this does not yet display correctly in shop, but it will charge the correct amount). Also jkg_passiveUnderdogBonus must be enabled for this to be allowed
• compiler fixes
• don't reward our own team teamkillbonuses for suicides or team kills!
• don't reward the teamkillbonuses if someone switches teams!
• increased default spawn invulnerability time to 4 seconds from 3.

Changes included in v1.3.17

 

New Features

 

New Vendors

There are now several new types of vendors and treasure class sets, vendors can also use specific fail/buy/interaction sounds if present. You can use these in game by spawning an npc vendor with the command npc spawn vendor npc_name vendorclass eg:/npc spawn vendor vendor_medic medicalvendor

 

Healing Buffs

There are now healing buffs, presently no shop weapons actually use them, but we will soon have a number of items put in to make use of these such as bacta grenades. There are two test items currently that use healing buffs including the grenade_bacta_antidote-e grenade and the medicinal slugthrower ammo.

 

New Efx For Poison

On body hit effects for poison are now here.

 

Bug Fixes and Balance Changes

• Healing plums work again!
• Weapons can do negative damage (healing).
• Price adjustments to some weapons and slight balance changes
• CTF Credit bonus fixes.
• jkg_allowDebuffKills 1 will now use debuff settings to determine whether the debuff can do a last hit and finish someone off
• Reorganization of some code modules for cleaner code and improved performance
• Reorganization of some file structures for zz_jkg_asset5.pk3 and glua/server files
• Added "percentage" (boolean) to debuff data, will interpret damage as a % of current health to inflict rather than a hard number (eg: 25 would do 25% of the target's current health).
• Ammo price adjustments
• Nerfed costs for some of the more expensive weapons to make them more likely to be purchased and used.
• Shield prices have been reevaluated based on their usefulness from play testing
• Healing Plums now work for items that use lua scripts (such as bacta).

 

Changes included in v1.3.15

 

New Features

 

Passive Credit System

Configurable via cvars, player's will gain a small amount of credits when employeed by a team every thirty seconds. Those who join late will be paid what they would have received had the been on a team from the beginning of the match. Three cvars control variables for this system:

• jkg_passiveCreditsAmount, defaults to 15 credits; how much to be paid each iteration
• jkg_passiveCreditsRate, defaults to 30000 milliseconds; how often to pay
• jkg_passiveCreditsWait, defaults to 60000 milliseconds; how long to wait till player's receive payments
• jkg_passiveUnderdogBonus, defaults 1, disabled if set to 0. If enabled gives 20% increased credits to the losing team's players when passive credits are awarded.
  Setting jkg_passiveCreditsAmount to 0 will disable this system on the server.

Underdog Reward System

For late joins introduced. Intended to help player's who join the game's losing team catch up more quickly and keep up with the opposition.

• jkg_underdogBonus defaults to 1, disabled if set to 0. If enabled, gives player's who join late additional starting credits depending on when they join the game consult the following table

   

  less than 30% match complete = +10% credits
  30-44% match complete = +25% credits
  45-59% match complete = +40% credits
  60-64% match complete = +70% credits
  65-69% match complete = +80% credits
  70-79% match complete = +100% credits
  80-100% match complete = +125% credits

  Additionally if the winning team is only ahead by 2 or less points, the credit reward is halfed.

   

   

Team Kill Bonus System

Configurable via cvar, all player's on a team will be given a bonus amount of credits anytime any player on their team gets a kill (the killer is excluded from this reward). Use jkg_teamKillBonus to set the amount to reward, if set to 0 Team Kill Bonuses are disabled. Player's who's rank (kill count) doubled is less than their death are rewarded double.

 

Improved Bounty System

A new cvar, jkg_MaxKillStreakBounty will limit the maximum amount of credits one can receive from claiming a bounty by limiting the multiplier used to determine credit rewards when claiming a bounty. The default is 7. For example: Suppose Jill kills Jack 8 times and has a killstreak of 8. Jack kills Jill but will only receive the max reward (as if Jill had a killstreak of 7). This will help better balance bounties so they don't tip the scales too drastically. Additionally whenever a bounty holder dies from natural causes (falling off a cliff, suicide, etc) the opposing team will receive the bounty divided up by the number of players on that team.

Bug Fixes and Balance Changes

• Disabled jkg_safeTreasureClasses by default until that system can be fixed
• MAX_PLACEABLE_CONSUME_WPNS increased to 20 (you can now have up to 20 detonators/trip mines on the field at once).
• Fixed a minor problem with safeTreasureClasses attempting to read memory out of bounds
• Other miscellaneous bug fixes, code refactors, and optimizations.
• Various item price adjustments and slight damage changes for better balance.
• Refactored some code

[eezstreet]

Updated the changelog with more information.