Diabotical Dev Tracker

Gameplay

• There is now a mode called Aim Arena Classic which has the same rules as Aim Arena but with 200 armor instead of 100 and only one life per round. It is available for community matches and in pickups.
• TDM no longer has friendly fire (TDM Classic continues to have it).
• Fixed a delay that happened while having the instant weapon switch option selected in the custom lobby.
• There is now a lifesteal option in More Settings in the custom lobby.
• Hits when lifesteal is not zero are now always guaranteed to heal for at least 1 HP.

HUD

• In Freeze Tag, frozen teammates are now indicated on the minimap with a frozen symbol.
• Fixed a centering issue with the MacGuffin and Flag icons relative to the player carrying them on the minimap.
• Fixed an issue causing minimap item icons to not be accurately positioned.

Visuals...

Gameplay

• In Time Trials, fixed an issue where reset inventory triggers would only work a single time.
• In Freeze Tag, frozen players now drop their currently held weapon and are only able to select the melee.

Statistics

• In Freeze Tag, hits on frozen players no longer count as a hit towards the accuracy percentages.
• In Freeze Tag, freezing a player is now counted as a frag on the scoreboard.

Visuals

• Fixed an issue preventing muzzle particles from being displayed correctly.

Interface

• The Map selection in the custom lobby has been revamped to fit all maps in the same visual context.
• Fixed community map thumbnails not being visible in the the Profile-Matches list and in Match details.
• Fixed an issue where the match details of some community matches weren’t being displaye...

Content service

• Fixed issue where community map thumbnails were not shown in the Play menu and server list.
• Fixed issue where it was not possible to create maps for TDM Classic and Duel Classic in the Content Creation menu.
• Fixed an issue that caused the map author names to not show up in the community maps list.
• Improved the readability of community map names on the list in the custom lobby.

Gameplay

• In Freeze Tag weapon pickups now only bring your ammo up to the spawning amount, ammo pickups work as they used to.
• There is now an instant weapon switch option in Lobby’s more settings. Selecting Race and Vintage physics automatically selects that option (can be deselected after if desired).
• TDM’s mercy limit has been reduced from 50 frags of difference to 35.

Visual changes

• In Freeze Tag, frozen players...

Gameplay

• In Freeze Tag, when a player is frozen the Dodge has been changed to have 60% of its regular power.
• In Freeze Tag, the friction has been increased so that frozen players slide 65% of what they used to.
• In Freeze Tag, when a player is thawed by a hazard the respawn time will be 5 seconds.
• In Freeze Tag, liquids that do damage now thaw frozen players.
• In Freeze Tag, when a player with a powerup is frozen the powerup now drops next to the player.
• In Freeze Tag, there is now a frozen icon waypoint on top of frozen teammates which is visible through the environment.
• In Freeze Tag, there is now a frozen icon on the avatar of a frozen player in the Ally players and Enemy players HUD elements.
• TDM Classic’s mercy limit has been reduced from 40 frags of difference to 35.

Content service/Editor

• Saving a map in the editor will no...

Performance

• Optimizations related to the rendering of particle effects.

Masterserver and matches

• Fixed an issue with backfilling not working.
• When the Daily Playlist modes rotate they will now be unselected by default.

Interface

• Team Deathmatch has been renamed to TDM, Team Deathmatch Classic has been renamed to TDM Classic, Capture the Flag Classic has been renamed to CTF, Free For All has been renamed to FFA.
• Updated translations in Spanish from Spain, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian.

Gameplay

• The mercy limit in TDM Classic has been decreased from 50 frags of difference to 40.

Maps

• Monolith has been updated with some art changes including the new volumetric entities, some sand decals, and with some collision fixe...

Interface

• The notification that you have been commended no longer covers the leave match button on the game report screen anymore.
• Improved the 5:4 aspect ratio support of the new Play menu.
• Fixed the maximum party size number chosen being displayed incorrectly in the Pickup match details. Thank you to pecka for the report.
• The maximum number of player slots of Community Match is now better represented
• Fixed an issue that would cause parties to not leave pickups when a Daily Playlist queue match was found.
• Fixed an issue that would cause Instagib settings to appear repeated multiple times in the match details of a Community Match.
• Improved the indication that players are part of the same party in the list of players that have joined a Pickup.
• Updated the translations in Spanish from Spain, Latin American Spanish, French, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian.

Play menu

• The Quickplay, Ranked and Custom Games menus have been replaced by a new unified screen.
• The “Daily Playlist” features 4 modes, currently with 2 rotating modes and with Wipeout and Duel being always available.
• “Community matches” features 12 community matches, with the “Server List” button showing all other matches in your selected datacenters, along with the “Create Lobby” button, and the “Lobby Key” button.
• “Pickups” lists pickup matches that players can create using the default team mode settings and their desired join restrictions, concerning team size, parties, skill rating difference, number of matches played, and datacenter. Players can join up to 3 pickups at one time.
• The skill ratings for each mode are calculated from both Daily Playlist and Pickup matches.
• The matchmaking penalties previously applied to the Ranked queue are now applied to Pickup matches only.
• Daily...

Netcode

• Fixed an issue causing players to sometimes receive delayed damage after spawning.
• Fixed an issue causing players to sometimes incorrectly receive damage from the previous position after teleporting.

Gameplay

• The mode Team Deathmatch available in Custom Games has been modified: the weapon respawn time has been reduced from 15 seconds to 10; the mode now has friendly fire; the mercy limit has increased from 30 frags of difference to 50; the default time limit has been reduced from 12 minutes to 10; there is no longer a score limit when the time limit is reached, now the match will end if one team is in the lead, and the match will go into 2 minutes of overtime if tied.
• A new mode called Team Deathmatch Classic is available in Custom Games. TDM Classic has the same rules as TDM but with weapon respawn times of 30 seconds, and with a time limit of 15 minutes.
• A new ...

Gameplay

• The Shaft beam’s position in third person now more accurately represents its location.

Content service - Maps can now be renamed and/or set to a different game mode, through the Content Creation menu’s Update button. Changing a map’s name will require its new name to be reviewed.

Spectating

• Fixed an issue that would cause the zoom action to be stuck when spectating while the player was not zooming.
• It is now possible to disable the ability to spectate when a player’s zoom action in Settings-More settings-Spectating-Spectate player zoom.

Editor

• Fixed an issue that would cause the Editpad screen to not be visible when looking towards billboards and volumetric entities.
• Added the missing color picker for liquid entities.
• Liquids now support different levels of transparency, and the alpha chann...

Content service

• The Content Creation menu now displays the date of a map’s last publication.
• The Content Creation menu now displays a tag when a map hasn’t been published and a tag when a map hasn’t been saved.
• The Community maps list now shows when a map was last updated and displays a version number.

Editor

• A “taper” attribute has been added to volumetric lights. The default value of 0 results in straight beams, the maximum value of 1 results in maximum taper where the beams converge into a point.
• Tweaked the volumetric light implementation to improve its appearance.
• The color property of volumetric lights now has a transparency slider that can be used to tweak the intensity of the light beams.
• Fixed the “Row segments” parameter of volumetric lights which wasn’t working correctly.
• The beams in a volumetric light are now centered correct...

Editor

• Implemented volumetric light objects into the editor. The new implementation is fairly light on performance. Volumetric objects can be set to type “rectangular grid” to create hexahedral beams of lights in a grid configuration. The parameters “Segments”, “Vertical segments”, “Gap” and “Vertical Gap” can tweak the appearance of the grid. This performs better than creating multiple objects for each beam, so this option should be used whenever appropriate. Volumetric objects can also be set to type “radial” to create radial configurations, in this case the “Segments” parameter determines the number of arc segments. Further options to tweak volumetric lights and general improvements to their appearance will come in future patches.
• Billboards, when selected, now have a “Backface” setting in the Editpad Properties section to make them display on both sides of the billboard.
• The editor now shows the technical name of the keyword...

Netcode

• Projectile netcode has been tweaked to better represent the position of enemy projectiles. This change may appear to buff projectiles but no functional change has been enacted, projectiles are simply represented more accurately than before. Further incremental netcode improvements will follow soon.

Spectating

• Spectators can now see when spectated players are zooming.
• Fixed an issue causing the Controls element to not update immediately when switching the player that’s being spectated.

Editor

• A “Vertical scale” property has been added to the terrain entity properties that applies a vertical scaling factor to the terrain. This can be used to achieve higher terrains (currently requires the map to be saved and loaded again to see its effects).
• The “Vertical offset” property is now accessible in the terrain entity properties screen...

HUD

• The new “Controls” HUD element shows your direction keypresses (forward, backward, left, right, crouch, jump) as well as those of the player being spectated.

Masterserver and matches

• Fixed an issue that affected transitions from the warmup mode to the map vote screen when a match was found (fixed earlier today).
• Fixed an issue causing the placement number of top ranked players to sometimes be incorrect.
• The inactivity detection now won’t trigger while replaying a demo.
• The inactivity detection now won’t trigger while editing a map.

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue that would cause the MacGuffin to immediately return to the hand after being thrown.

Netcode

• Fixed issue potentially exacerbating congestion in connections with some package loss.

Audio

• Fixed issue causing players to not emit some sounds if their audio subsystem is uninitialized due to a missing audio device.
• Audio system micro-optimizations affecting heavy combat situations with a high frequency of sound creation.

Replays

• The command /annotation adds a mark to a currently recording replay associated to the current time. /annotation followed by text attaches a text comment. /annotation -list can be used to list current annotations while recording or reproducing a replay. /annotation -seek X can be used to go to the time of that annotation, where X is the ID of the annotation shown by /annotation -list. An annotation can be added to point some time in the past with /annotation -back X where is the number of seconds to go back in time. A UI interface for replays, including access to this feature, will be added soon.

Content service

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Content service

• It’s now possible to search maps in the Community map list.
• It’s now possible to order maps in the Community map list according to the most recently published, earliest published, highest rated, and alphabetical order.
• Fixed an issue in Custom Games where a community map would stay selected when changing mode.

Gameplay

• Default weapon respawn times in Time Trials are now 1 second instead of 9 seconds. In order to prevent spawn delays and prevent issues when playing a map in multiplayer, especially since pickups don’t work for each player separately yet.

Replays

• Fixed an issue causing client-side replays recorded with multithreaded input enabled to become corrupt.
• Client-side replays are now only committed to disk after the game is over to avoid stutters. Note: Client-side replays are currently only usable thr...

Content service

• It’s now possible to rate community maps in the game report/final scoreboard screen. The average rating of each map is displayed in the community map list.
• Content service stability improvements.

Visual changes

• Removed a small accidental delay in the PnCR beam animation.

Editor

• Save, Undo and Redo buttons have been added to the Editpad interface.
• New buttons to set the type of block have been added to the Editpad’s Properties section when a block is selected: “Set empty”, “Set solid”, “Set diagonal”, “Set invisible, player collides, fire passes (player clip)”, “Set invisible, fire collides, player passes (weapon clip)” and “Set invisible, player collides, fire collides (full clip)”.
• The layout of the block properties section has been tweaked.
• A new command /modifylist has been added t...

Gameplay

• Item respawns are now precise relative to the exact time of when they were picked up instead of rounding down to the nearest second.
• The MacGuffin item now spawns correctly with the instagib modifier turned on in Custom Games, allowing Instagib MacGuffin to be played.

Content service

• Author names are now displayed in the Community map list and clicking on them takes you to the mapper’s profile.
• Fixed issue causing some game servers to sometimes timeout prematurely while trying to fetch a community map for a game.
• Publishing a map without terrain no longer warns about an error concerning missing terrain files.

Editor

• Fixed issue causing the color of the current object to be copied into the next object selected if the color picker was still open.
• When a prop is selected, color fields in Editpad’s Propertie...

Masterserver and matches

• Masterserver stability fixes. Stability
• Tentative fix provided by Coherent happening in Gameface (HTML UI engine that we use in the menu) to a crash that can happen when loading a map or finishing a game.

Content service

• Fixed issue causing community maps to be downloaded twice.
• The map download screen now shows total download progress.

Gameplay

• Inventory reset actions (as in some Race maps) now affect the relevant players instead of affecting everyone on a server.
• When there is an inventory reset the current weapon is now automatically switched to Melee.
• The position of moving objects like lifts, doors and other moving props is now reset when a game or round starts.

Maps

• Collision fix to Icefall regarding an issue affecting the lift jump.
...

Gameplay

• The lift jump behavior is no longer negatively affected by low or very high framerate conditions.
• Fixed an issue causing a slippery feeling when walking along the top-facing surface of a moving prop due to the player erroneously being determined as airborne in that situation. As a result of this, wall-clipping is no longer triggered at the top of lifts just by pushing against the ledge. Players should still be able to reach locations previously reachable due to the unintended wall-clipping effect thanks to the fixes above which make it easier to control a jump’s direction and to circle-jump off lifts.

Survival

• Fixed an issue in Survival causing the base cost of items to be charged instead of the full amount when buying items repeatedly.

Editor

• Fixed an issue causing the Editpad interface to sometimes ignore UI actions.

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Editor

• An “Analyze lighting” function is now available for binding in “Settings-Controls-Analyze lighting”. Using this function toggles a heatmap of lighting calculations. In the visualization, values closer to red indicate that a pixel is affected by more lights. The cost of the lighting pass broadly scales with the amount of pixels lit per light. Mappers interested in optimizing lighting should attempt to not let maps get too hot in this visualization in any view inside the map. This can be accomplished by trying to rely on fewer lights or on smaller lights with harder falloffs to achieve similar effects. Well-performing maps can be loaded in the editor and referenced to check what are acceptable levels. We recommend that before deciding to invest time in optimizing lighting on a map, the mapper deletes all lights while looking at a hot part of the map (/del light*) and note the framerate change to see what’s the performance gain ceiling that could...