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Diabotical is 1 year old today!
Happy August 34th! Diabotical officially turns 1 today, and we figure it’s as good a time as any to throw a birthday party. Game updates, events, free stuff! This is our way of saying thanks for being a part of our first year.
Free Stuff
Some brand new birthday themed loot is in the store, and it’s all free! Grab yourself a new birthday candle melee weapon, a celebratory shell, and a brand new birthday themed spray. Get it now before it's gone forever!
Ranked Updates
We’re well aware that the duel community has been looking for a new set of maps for competitive play. There are a ton of amazing new duel maps out there, so we’ve decided to shuffle up the ranked maplist and throw some of the best new community maps into the mix. As of today, the new maplist for duel is:
- Amberfall
- Bioplant
- Pavilion X by pav
- Raya
- Restless by febreeze
- Sanctum by egzot1k
- Skybreak
Wipeout will also be receiving a maplist update in the next few weeks. Our goal is to have the Wipeout ranked maplist line up with the Diabotical Wipeout League’s official list, so once their mapping contest is concluded in a few weeks, we’ll be adding all the winners to the pool of ranked maps (pending author approval).
Speaking of mapping contests…
Diabotical Birthday Mapping Contest
We’re happy to announce the Diabotical Birthday Mapping Contest! $20,000 is up for grabs in 4 different categories:
- Duel ($2,500)
- Wipeout ($5,000)
- Time Trials ($2,500)
- Best of Year 1 ($10,000)
The Best of Year 1 category is for all maps, in any game mode, that have been created in the last year. Up to 20 different maps will split the prize pool honoring the best of the first year of mapping. Only maps that have already been completed are eligible for this category. It’s our way of rewarding all the awesome mappers who kept on creating amazing maps throughout the year.
Be sure to check out the rules and regulations, and head on over to the BuilderBots United Discord if you have any questions.
Diabotical Birthday Series
You may have seen the announcement earlier this month about the $5,000 prize pool for Season 2 of the Diabotical Wipeout League (signups still open, by the way). Well, we’ve also got a new set of duel tournaments to get excited about! $10,000 worth of events are coming your way over the next 3 months. Check out the schedule below and click the links to sign up!
- September 11: Europe Duel #1
- September 18: North America Duel #1
- September 25: South America Duel #1
- October 2: APAC Duel #1
- October 2: North America Duel #2
- October 9: Europe Duel #2
- October 16: North America Duel #3
- October 23: Europe Duel #3
- October 23: South America Duel #2
- October 30: APAC Duel #2
- October 30: North America Duel #4
- November 6: Europe Duel #4
- November 13: North America Duel #5
- November 20: Europe Duel #5
- November 20: South America Duel #3
- November 27: APAC Duel #3
- November 27: North America Duel #6
- December 4: Europe Duel #6
Be sure to read the rules for a more detailed schedule, prize breakdown, and all the other fun stuff that comes from reading rules. And head on over to the Esports Discord if you have any questions!
And Time Trials fans, we see you. We appreciate you. Your enthusiasm for going really really fast is unmatched. The amount of awesome things your community has created, from the Egg Cups to the Tim Trials League, to the incredible community leaderboards by Danmer that handle the hundreds and hundreds of amazing maps you made in the map maker.
$5,000 will be going towards Time Trials events, be sure to watch the finale of the Time Trials League tomorrow at 2pm EDT/8pm CEST for a special announcement 👀
Survival Mode Updates
Last but not least, we’ve got some new content for survival mode which you can read about, in detail, in the patch notes at the end of this post.
That’s all for now. Thanks again to the community for making year 1 so great. We’ve got a lot of great things in the works and can’t wait to share more when the time is right. Bye!
Patch Notes
Survival
- A Survival version of Strife has been added.
- Fixed the issues where most bot types would not do damage if server-side netcode was selected.
- At the start of a match players can now open the buy menu to select a weeball, players will have that weeball for the rest of the match, which will go on cooldown after being used. A maximum of 2 players can select the same type of weeball.
The Weeball choices are:
Amplifier Weeball - creates an area of effect that amplifies the damage of players within it by 30%.
Vulnerability Weeball - creates an area of effect that increases the damage taken by bots within it by 30%.
Knockback Weeball - knocks back bots and players.
Heal Bomb Weeball - heals players instantly by 50 hp and an additional 50hp over time with ticks of 5hp every 0.5s during the 5 seconds after the heal bomb goes off.
Slowfield Weeball - slows down bots and players.
- The Slowfield Weeball has been removed from the end of the round shop options.
Queue changes
- The Ranked duel map list has been updated, Kasbah, Monolith, Overgrowth have been removed, and Pavilion_X, Restless, and Sanctum have been added.
- In the Quickplay playlist 5v5 Brawl has been replaced by Survival (4 players against bots).
Masterserver and matches
- Fixed continuous matches sometimes showing incorrect ranks for consecutive matches.
- Fixed random picking from the user presented map vote options instead of the whole pool when no player voted for a map.
- Removed an incorrect max clients option that was limiting lobbies to 20 clients.
- Fixed a potential timezone issue showing incorrect remaining penalty times.
Performance
- Fixed some micro-stutters related to audio playback.
- Improved the accuracy of the in-game frame limiter.
- Fixed memory leak related to replay playback.
- Fixed small memory leak related to the lagometer.
- Significant GPU optimization related to rendering of levels.
- CPU optimizations related to the rendering of levels.
- CPU optimizations related to hitscan weapon intersection detection in large maps.
- GPU optimization related to shadow rendering.
- CPU micro-optimizations related to gameplay.
- CPU optimizations related to collision detection of dynamic props.
- Fixed performance issue related to accumulation of shaft decal segments.
- Fixed some microstutters related to font rendering.
- Significant smoothness improvements related to the ingame HUD by creating native implementations of some remaining hud elements that were still HTML-Driven.
- Implemented a better performing console.
- Micro-optimizations related to weapon rendering.
- Latency improvement in flip mode. (More latency improvements that are currently being tested coming in future patches.)
- Fixed occasional micro-stutters happening when clicking or releasing mouse buttons.
- Several multithreaded-input-related micro-optimizations.
Rendering fixes
- Fixed issue in the antialias implementation causing almost-vertical lines to not be fully antialiased.
- Fixed an issue causing the minimap to be a blurry glitch in spectator mode if the user didn’t have a minimap setup in the main hud.
- Fixed an issue causing the crosshair to show when dead (fixed previously in an unannounced hotfix)
- Fixed issue causing the game to not engage true exclusive full-screen mode in some systems until alt+tabbing out and back again into the game. (There are remaining circumstances in which a true exclusive state can be lost that we are still investigating.)
Antialias before and after comparison
Audio
- A preferred audio output device can now be selected
- [Fixed regression] Changes in the default audio device (like when unplugging headphones) are detected correctly again.
- [Fixed regression] The audio restart button works again.
Input fixes
- Fixed issue causing a gameplay button to get stuck when going into chat while having it pressed.
Interface
- Various smaller menu performance improvements when hovering over matches in the play screen, using scrollbars or moving elements in the hud editor
- Some audio and video options now have descriptions and select list previews on the side.
- Up to 10 crosshair presets can now be saved for quick selection.
- Fixed issue causing the map loading screen to only appear after a delay.
Editor
- The editing /find command now accepts a wildcard in the property value parameter, for example, “/find prop* model *wood*” finds all props with models that contain the word “wood” in the name.
- The new “Horizon shade” property in the Map section of the editpad sets the intensity of shadows towards the horizon from 0 to 1.
- The new “Fade Distance Min” and “Fade Distance Max” properties of billboards and volumetric objects set threshold distances where the object starts fading out due as you get close or as you get away from it.
- Typing “/editor_auto_save 1” enables auto saving. A copy of the map will be saved as “autosave_” + name of map periodically.
Community maps
- Option to give other users access rights to publishing/updating and deleting your own maps. Note that local changes are not synced and that others can only retrieve published versions of the maps. Also maps that already exist in the local directory are not overwritten by published version which may be newer. Unpublished work in progress versions of maps would have to be shared manually between users.
- Fixed various UI issues in the create menu
- Fixed an issue where players were unable to join a match with a community map which received a new version after the match started
- Map author names of community maps are now displayed during the match intro view.