4/21 Update – Maps and Fixes

The update was planned for yesterday but… we must’ve forgotten somehow.

Jokes aside, the team has been hard at work polishing old content and hashing things out behind the scenes to make things work smoothly. Our joint effort includes weeding through old code to bring some much needed bug fixes and blazing through old maps to bring them back better than ever.

Maps!

bg_winterisle

A 5v5 classic, winterisle has been rebuilt from the ground up with competitive gameplay in mind. Featuring new textures and models, better bot pathing and some terrain changes, winterisle is looking to be the new favorite competitive skirmish map.

lb_princeton

Brought in from BG2, princeton has had an extensive reworking that will add some experimental new concepts to the linebattle format. The roads have been widened and raised. Be careful! The ice on the river now breaks when 7 or more players are standing on it. With this in mind, two bridges have been added to allow larger groups of players to cross quickly. For those desperate last stands, a second floor has been added to the house.

bg_bomberman

Due to the lack of officially supported custom maps, and the overabundance of glasswars, we thought it fitting to include a “custom” style map in our bundle as well. This explosive retro styled map features 4 random pickups (rotating knives, shield, speed boost, health) and most importantly of all, as many grenades as you can throw. Died without using your powerups? No worries! Dead players become ghosts, and spectating your allies bestows upon them your powerups. Recommended for up to 15 players. This map is not in the default rotation, but is available for server admins to switch to.

Prioritized Spawnpoints and Class-specific Spawnpoints

These are new features we are rolling out for mappers.

Mappers can now set specific spawnpoints (in the ‘flag’s tab) to be a higher priority than other spawns; spawns with higher priority will be chosen before lower priority ones, which can be used for making spawning more consistent for competitive matches.

Too, mappers can now specify spawns to work with only certain classes. This could be done for example to make french grenadiers spawn only in a different corner of the map, etc. We look forward to seeing what ideas the community can come up with here.

Currently only bg_winterisle has the priority spawns. Old maps don’t need recompilation; maps with the old spawns will still work.

Performance Improvements

Several inefficiencies have been identified and fixed, the result will be much better performance for those who are running lower end PCs:

• Muskets now have LOD models, reducing their poly count by 90% at longer distances
• Several textures were re-exported to reduce video memory usage significantly

More bug fixes!!!!

Awesome has been hard at work shoveling through piles of code to bring our valued (and listened to) community much demanded bug fixes.

For those who participate in the Sunday multi clan linebattle event: Rejoice!!! Player counts in linebattle mode have been fixed. This should also fix bad player counts in the teammenu, making it easier to join a team.

The deathcam no longer shows another player’s weapon.

We also thought it was a fitting opportunity to take a look at the grass: The tall grass model is no longer shorter in medium or low model quality settings. Some clans were intentionally setting their model quality to medium to obtain a competitive advantage; we are trying to remove this advantage.

Balance Changes

Players felt that the increased stamina drain on the long pattern was a bit too much. In response, we have lowered the long pattern stamina drain per stab. It is still higher than other muskets, just not as high as before.