Mycopunk news & patch notes

Grassy Grass

Hello again!

This week I have been working with a LOT of grass (for no particular reason), and so I thought it would be fun to go through some of the details with how we make the Myco-foliage.

Much like the terrain, the grass is built with Modifier Objects. Each of these Objects has an array of Modifier layers that all stack on top of each other to create the final look.

These layers are incredibly multi-faceted, but all of it boils down to is changing the grass’s height, color, and texture based around some procedural noise maps. These noise maps don’t look especially natural on their own, which necessitates a lot of supplementary math to poke and prod it into something that eventually begins to look like a flower patch. The full available options for each layer look like this:

All this for one single layer? Doesn’t this get a bit overwhelming?

Haha yesh :3

The majority of these features were added in order to achieve a specific idea I had while I was working on the grass for the World Update. Height Masking in particular was added for the large pillars and canyons that generate in the Desert so that I could have different types of grass at high elevations.

I don’t want to go into all of these options with incredible depth, but I’ll write a bit about them to give you all a better idea of how they come together into the finished product:

Configuration

Mixing - The two override modes dictate what the modifier actually effects when it comes to the height and the color. Usually these are both set to ‘Mix’ which will do its best to blend them together, but they also have options for multiplying, overriding, and adding onto what’s already there. Effect Empty means it will also apply to spots without any grass, and Artistic Mix is a later addition which uses a different color mixing algorithm that works a bit more like mixing paints as opposed to computer mixed colors.

Noise - This is the most important part of a layer as it’s what will actually create the basic patterns that the grass will grow in. We currently use 4 different types of noise:

Increasing the Octaves means that the noise is sampled multiple times (adjusted by Lacunarity and Persistence, which change the size of the noise on subsequent passes, and how opaque the passes are). Power, Clip, and Remap are used to cut the noise off, and make it have a harder edge. So a layer with very high Clip and very low Power/Remap will create smaller patches with very hard edges and low Clip with high Power/Remap will make large soft sections.

Mask Interaction - One of the later additions were the masks, which define regions that other layers can access. So for example, I can make patches of grass that will set a mask which is then used by a bunch of flowers so that they’ll only grow inside those patches. Layers can also choose to only spawn outside of the mask, as well as create variants of existing maps by multiplying them, adding to them, or subtracting from them.

Height / Color - Yeah.

Type - Probably should’ve just called it ‘Texture.’

Warp - Used for applying some distortion to the original noise sample by using a noise sample of its own. This is incredibly useful for breaking up the patterns and making them look a tad less ‘mathy’ by giving them rougher edges and smearing them around. Here’s some Perlin noise warped by Cellular noise:

Height Masking - Cuts off the layer based on its height in the world, very useful for cliffs and canyons. The cool thing about this is that it can be combined with the other Masking options to create a single Mask that other layers can use to get the same results without my having to copy/paste all the Height Mask options.

Falloff - These options are used to customize how the grass behaves when I need it to be confined to a smaller area. As you may have noticed, a healthy amount of things that spawn in levels have their own types of grass that grow around them (especially the different mushrooms). These props have individual parameters for dictating the size, softness, and warping of the falloff field. This, in turn, necessitates some override options on the layers in order to give me some wiggle room.

Falloff fields are set up like this:

This object is unique since it has two whole modifiers on it, a smaller inner one for the glowing flecks around its base, and a larger one that creates an irradiated sub-biome in the area. The big blue/green indicators are used for gauging how large the areas are, as well as how soft they’ll be, which is set using the ‘Ratio’ slider. As you can see the larger one is set to 0.75, which means the smoothing starts 75% of the way to the edge, while the smaller one starts at 42.5%.

For those who might be curious: the largest single grass modifier is for the Tundra, which has different grass at high altitude, as well as two different biome variants at both altitudes. With a grand total of 44 layers, I present Tundra Moldy Fields:

Apparently I became rather spent towards the end of working on this one, but I am quite happy with the results…

The Dark Ages

To close this off, I should mention that this whole system was completely rebuilt for the new procedural terrain. This new grass runs entirely on the GPU, while the old version was built for the CPU and generates a pre-set file (over the course of several, very slow minutes) that it saves to the game files. Trying to generate these on the fly would’ve made the procedural levels simply not work.

Each of the layers in the old version had multiple noise layers that get mixed together, which was replaced by the Masking system to make it easier to work with. Another point of ease-of-use comes from the UI, as you can see here, I can only see a small area of it at a time which is not so fun. I would personally rather be overwhelmed than underwhelmed by my software, so I am incredibly happy with the improved version.

-Noah

A Moon of a Moon

I’ve been working on X11-B, a new region coming with 1.0 and a moon of New Atlas. Of course, New Atlas is itself a moon, so what do you call a moon’s moon? A moon, apparently. But we’ll call it a moonlet because that sounds better.

Moon shenanigans aside, X11-B is high difficulty area meant for your best builds. Enemies are tankier and deal more damage, and electromagnetic radiation storms periodically sweep across the moonlet, fizzling your abilities.

-Liam

• Fixed Pummeler’s fire rate stat being reversed

• Fixed Adaptive Stabilizer’s stats being reversed

• Controller: Movement deadzones apply to cursor movement

• Fixed an issue that prevented the voice chat push-to-talk binding from being changed on controller

• Opening the Ouroboros upgrade popup is now bound to 4/d-pad-left by default so it doesn’t interfere with other interactions. You can switch it back to the interact key in the gameplay settings.

• Fixed an issue where Constellation gun vfx was invisible when joining another player’s lobby

• Fixed an issue where hovering over a mission modifier in the lobby list wouldn’t show the modifier’s description

• Removed the text when rolling a barrel that says you can hold sprint to roll straight (this was changed a while back to always roll straight)

• Modding - Added a ModResources class that you can access with ModResources.Instance and has references to common UI element prefabs

Countering Projection Warping

This little writeup is gonna be pretty technical, but I think it’s cool so too bad.

Let’s say, hypothetically, New Atlas has a moon. We’ll call it a moonlet and toss it into orbit. Just one problem - perspective cameras warp geometry as it approaches the edge of the screen, and an oblong moonlet looks dumb as hell.

We could make the camera 2D, but then the mission select skybox (an inverted sphere) covers everything. So how do we get a perspective camera to render an object without warping it?

New Atlas doesn’t have any visible warping because it’s right in the center of the camera’s view. Can we just render the moonlet in the center and then offset it back to its original position on the screen? As it turns out, yes we can!

The planet’s vertex shader runs once for each vertex on the sphere and outputs that point’s position relative to the sphere’s center. We basically want to ‘swing’ the sphere over to the camera so let’s start by transforming the vertex and center into view space (in view space all positions are relative to the camera, which lies at (0, 0, 0)). Trigger warning for some shader code:

Then we calculate the angle needed to rotate the moonlet’s vertex from its current position to the camera’s origin. Sorry for the math.

Now we do some dark magic to calculate a matrix that will rotate the vertex over to the camera’s center. This is Rodrigues' rotation formula. I don’t know how it works. Matrices scare me.

At this point, the planet tries to render in the center of the camera’s view no matter where it’s placed, but we want to move it back toward its original position. We can calculate how much we have offset it and use that to offset it back to where it ‘should’ be in clip space.

And now it works! Right? That doesn’t look right. It turns out that since we use its object position to map textures onto the planet and we’ve applied an ungodly warp to the planet’s position, the texture mapping doesn’t work anymore. Not to worry, we just need to use our original object position to map the textures.

Now it really works! It still has a tiny bit of warping, but that’s because we curve all the UI toward the edge of the screen after rendering.

And with that, X11-B renders correctly in the mission select screen. It’ll be open to visitors at 1.0.

-Liam

Explosions and Blood

There are a LOT of explosions in the game, which I feel like is a recurring problem when it comes to improving visibility in the game. These same issues also exist with the enemy death and limb destruction effects as well, which are very flashy and satisfying but can really get in the way — especially when using the Carver where they’ll be splashing in your face almost constantly.

I had previously solved this problem with first person versions of the explosions that won’t render in the center of your screen while you’re inside of them, but those are less performant, and more immersion breaking as it’s very obvious that they’re rendering weirdly for the purpose of a better view.

So what’s the solution?

Time manipulation :]

The method is rather straightforward: when an effect spawns too close to you, some parts of it will begin playing part of the way through, instead of playing from the very beginning. This is more prominent the closer an effect is to the camera so that (for example) at 4 meters away the effect will start 20% of the way through, and when it’s right on top of you it’ll start 40% of the way.

The end result looks like this:

For comparison, here’s what it used to look like (ft. Terry):

Pretty cool right? It’s a very small (and very easy) change that has a lot of payoff without looking super unnatural.

-Noah

• Fixed an issue where the Shocklance’s Storm’s Eye upgrade was displaying the wrong number for the stacking penalty on its damage stat

• Fixed an issue where the blue pipe in Moldy Tundra wouldn’t think all players were present in multiplayer

• Fixed an issue where firing a bunch of missiles at the same time with the Gunship Cannon made really loud explosion sounds

• Improved how terrain is carved out for priority objectives so you won’t encounter things like the Prized Possession laser spawning in the ground

• Fixed a bug that let upgrades of different weapons be infused together if you selected both upgrades in the pattern infuser and then changed the bottom upgrade

• Fixed a bug that would make the pattern infuser show a different weapon each time you selected an upgrade to infuse into a ‘shared’ upgrade like Grenade Belt

• Fixed the binding for boosting with the Blitseg clipping through the boost bar on the HUD when using a controller

• Fixed a couple spots in Incursion where number readouts or levers could spawn inside fungus

• Fixed an issue where Shocklance’s Killing Field and Subway upgrades were displaying incorrect stat values for damage/speed and size

Feeling Fulfilled

I started working on Fulfillments, our in-game achievement system coming with 1.0! Many Fulfillments will reward a new type of cosmetic… HATS.

We’ve only just begun experimenting with hats, but here’s Scrapper wearing a Scrapper hat:

As it turns out, hats are (basically) just gun crabs on a player model. So that’s cool. I also extended our skin modifier system to work with hats. You can’t tell from the still picture, but I’m wearing a spectral scrapper hat which makes me feel important.

And we have a WIP look at the Fulfillment UI:

Vehicle Delivery

You know how you have to wait like three seconds for your Blitseg to land after calling it in? It feels like an eternity. An eternity of misery, hunger, and dread. With the next major update we’re making the Blitseg summon instantly. It’s even got a cool new warp-in effect.

List Recycling

If you have a LOT of upgrades you might have noticed some lag when entering a weapon’s upgrade screen or dismantling upgrades. That’s because the game creates a UI element for every upgrade you have for a given weapon, even if they aren’t visible in the scroll view. Why, you ask? Because it’s easier. And recycling UI elements is boring. But it had to be done, and now your many upgrades will perform better in the next big update!

-Liam

Some new… Ambiance…

I recently decided to upgrade the ambient effects in the game to work in a much cleaner, and more performant way. I had been meaning to add more tailored ambient VFX to the different regions for a while, and that ultimately made an overhaul of the system feel like the best idea. Visual effects are — in large part — about building up the solidity of the game world, making the fake things that happen feel like they are obeying some kind of physical laws. Bullets spark off metal, things still light on fire, rain still falls, etc. As you may have noticed though, prior to this change you could outrun said rain, so clearly I had to do something.

(yes this gif is horribly compressed. but we're limited to 5mb so deal with it)

This new system maintains a static number of particles that always exist exactly where the player is, instead of falling down around the player. Once a particle gets too far, it reappears in a different position at the other side. I wish I could prattle on about optimization and clean design a little more, but the truth is that usually your first idea (even if it’s quite clever) isn’t the best one, and that was the case here.

-Noah

• Fungus sometimes grows in Incursion rooms

• Fixed an invisible error when using Phantom Limb

• Plate Launcher - Reversed how Simple Inertia’s range stats are displayed since its min stat is better. This also means that boosted versions of this upgrade boost the stats in the correct direction now.

• Fixed an error that could occur if you entered the Codex window before discovering any data logs

• Fixed the DMLR sometimes spawning a bunch of lightning strikes at the same time when Arc Lightning and Concussive Blast were both equipped, which made it sound quite loud.

• Fixed Oxythane Breach Escalation not appearing in the mission select screen after you’ve completed it. Now it shows up in the Gravity Farm region.

• Fixed an error when trying to display popup text in the mission select screen in certain languages

• Voice chat is disabled when you’re typing in text chat if push-to-talk is enabled

Plate Launcher

• When Vector Interdiction is equipped, Painter’s Attachment can start triggering acid puddles on a plate that has already been fired if you become corroded.

• Fixed an issue where the locked bunker would only carve out terrain for the host player

• Fixed that same issue when spawning Scorched Transponder buildings in the Gravity Farm :p

• Fixed laptop screens in the main menu sometimes missing their texture

• The sound for regenerating health stops playing when you pause time by opening your inventory in singleplayer. No more BWWWRRRRR while you sit in your inventory.

• In the lobby list, the button to reset your lobby name only appears if you’re hosting the lobby

• The mission select screen is SUPPOSED to make sure that at least one of each mission is spawned on New Atlas, but it was bugged!! Now it’s not bugged.

• The Backlog task to kill enemies in Ouroboros now correctly progresses from kills in Ouroboros Blitz

• Fixed an issue where fired plates would stay in the world forever if you opened and closed your inventory

• The HUD element for DMLR’s Autocycler now has correct timing when Coronal Ejection is also equipped

• Fixed an issue where dying inside the Prized Possession facility could respawn you outside the playable area

• Battery Barry no longer flashbangs you with a massive blue icon when someone picks him up

Plate Launcher - Vector Interdiction had some unintended interactions with upgrades that made it deal way more damage than intended while bypassing those upgrades’ downsides. We’re making a few small changes to how it combines with other upgrades. It might still be too good but that’s ok for now.

• Vector Interdiction plates don’t bounce

• Nice Catch deals reduced damage to you when you redirect a plate

• Your accuracy of redirecting plates is affected by the Plate Launcher’s spread

• Improvised Explosives doesn’t continue to reduce the plate’s damage if it triggers more than once

Previous patch notes from 1.9.3 that I forgot to post:

Ouroboros Blitz

• Blitz is now available after you play normal Ouroboros once (previously you had to complete an Ouroboros run to unlock it)

• Fixed an issue where the final boss would drop contraband upgrades even though the mission had ended

• Fixed a bug that could allow Blitz to continue after killing the Amalgamation

• Since Blitz is meant to be a streamlined version of Ouroboros, we’re trying out a change where Contraband Scrap and shops are removed from Blitz. Let us know what you think!

• Fixed an bug that wouldn’t let you continue normal Ouroboros runs after killing the amalgamation

• Paid Time Off correctly spawns in every region again

• Fixed bosses not moving in Ouroboros

• Region-specific resources correctly appear when hovering over a mission on New Atlas

• Fixed enemy sniper charge-up sounds not playing in the right position

• Fixed an issue where trying to change a player’s voice chat volume when they weren’t on your friends list would open their steam profile

• Fixed an issue where pattern infusion would sometimes eat your Antimass Substrate and not infuse your upgrade. If you lost some Antimass from this… sorry… because all data is stored locally we don’t have a way to track what was lost, but we can give everyone who has unlocked infusion and opens the game 30 Antimass.

• Increased the amount of Antimass Substrate from the first Overtime Assignment completion each week, and increased the change of getting Antimass from subsequent completions

• Fixed an issue where procedural objects could spawn inside the Prized Possession facility if the facility was at a high altitude

• Fixed one of Roachard’s random voicelines in the HUB that played the wrong audio

• Fixed an error when attempting to play one of the photon disc toss animations

Hey gang, Roachard here.

Those fungal freaks are infecting more machines on New Atlas, and I do NOT want to die to a toilet, so y'all better get killin'.

Saxon operatives also discovered a buncha facilities hidden beneath the moon's surface, and they want us to check 'em out. Get to it!

>> END TRANSMISSION

Enemy Redesign

• We’ve redesigned almost every enemy! The New Atlas fungus infects machines, so it’s about time it used those machines to attack you. With these new designs we’ve also put more thought into how enemies are fractured into their different shell pieces.

• Enemy bodies bob around as they move

• Added soft limits for how many Brutes and Abominations can be alive at the same time

• Added sounds when you damage cores or shells that change depending on how much health the part has left

• Outlines on dangerous enemy parts are red

• Fixed gun arms jittering when you get too close

• Improved the behavior of the laser arm - it’s more consistent and the laser won’t get glued to you when you run away

• Fixed enemies laser sometimes firing at you forever if the enemy’s sightline to you was blocked

• Amalgamation

  • Amalgamations that spawn randomly now have less health in lobbies of 1-2 players

  • Reduced the tracking speed of the Amalgamation’s liquid flamethrower :)

• Added the Abomination Lacerator, a melee-only abomination

• Added the Antigrav Drone

• Slightly lowered the health of Optical Jammers

  • And made the outside shader look neat

  • And made the text sync to other players B)

• Added new death VFX for cores

New Exotic Upgrades

• Added new exotic upgrades to the following weapons!

  • Swarm Launcher - Guidance Array

  • Lead Flinger - Phantom Limb

  • Carver - Lockdown

  • DMLR - Concussive Wave

  • //ERROR_INFORMATION_UNAVAILABLE//

New Mission - Incursion

• Saxon has discovered unknown facilities descending into the depths of New Atlas. Fight through as many floors as you can before time runs out. The further you progress, the more Antimass Substrate you gain. This new resource is used for…

Pattern Infusion

• Once you hit player level 13, you unlock Incursion and can start gaining Antimass Substrate (which also drops from other high-threat missions).

• Antimass can be spent at the Pattern Infuser in the HUB to infuse one upgrade’s pattern into another. The more cells you remove, the more Antimass this process requires.

Prized Possession Redux

• Barrel rolling is out, Barry is in.

• Instead of rolling the power unit back to the drop pod, you now rescue Battery Barry. While holding Barry, your weapons fire faster but you move a bit slower.

Bruiser Voice

• We weren’t happy with Bruiser’s original voice, so we re-recorded all of their voicelines.

Voice Chat

• Added voice chat! We use the Discord social SDK as our voice backend, but you do not need to have a Discord account to use voice chat, and it does not need to be installed.

• Added options in the audio settings for voice volume and push-to-talk. Voice mode defaults to push-to-talk and can be changed to open-mic in the audio settings.

Upgraded Mission Select

• Mission select now encompasses the entirety of New Atlas. It’s easier to navigate, but more importantly, it’s cool.

• New Atlas also has a new shader and looks better.

World Generation

• New Moldy Tundra variant - the Sunken Highlands

New POI - Locked Bunker

• Abandoned Saxon bunkers can appear in uncharted levels. They evidently weren’t very useful to the colonists of New Atlas, but perhaps they’ll be worth cracking open.

Gif Rescue

• Switched our gif backend since Tenor is closing its public API. Using /gif in chat will now use KLIPY instead! As part of KLIPY’s free API terms, gifs now have a watermark on them.

New Player Experience

• You can click on your player level in the inventory screen to see what gets unlocked at each level

• Until you’ve unlocked all normal weapons, leveling up now provides an Armament License, which can be used to unlock weapons in any order

• Changed level-up rewards for weapons, providing better rewards sooner. Added skins to level-up rewards.

• Added Boundary Incursion to each weapon’s level 32 reward. You’ll be able to claim this even if you already got all of the level-up rewards.

Ouroboros

• Added Ouroboros Blitz, a shorter variant of Ouroboros that lasts only 13 rooms, drops double upgrades, and automatically equips any upgrades you pick up. Blitz is available after you play Ouroboros once.

• Failed Ouroboros runs correctly count as failed if you aren’t the host

• Cleansed Ouroboros upgrades now count toward your total number of collected upgrades

• Fixed a couple spots in the glass tower where enemies could clip through the floor instead of being stuck on their level

• Abomination bosses no longer jump up and down in the ledge room

Turbocharges

• Added new turbocharges for:

  • Mitosis (Swarm Gun)

  • Miniaturized Warp Core (Accelerator)

Misc

• Incoming enemy spawns are marked on the minimap

• Added special sounds when damaging & killing shells and cores

• Damage numbers pulse larger when they first appear and then get smaller

• Red crosshair damage lines are more opaque

• Fixed an issue that was messing up lighting on procedural terrain

• Fixed an issue that allowed abominations to take partial explosive damage to their unexposed cores

• Reduced health of the Devastator’s high-gravity ring

• The Blitseg’s VFX now orient to surfaces and make ripples along water

• Lingering Shocklance coils shot by other players are now faded to reduce clutter

• Lingering Shocklance coils are less tightly wound to reduce clutter

• Permeable sides of shields will now fade out at close distances so you can better see what you’re killing

• Fixed an issue where a back arrow would appear on cleanup detail gunk health bars

• Fixed enemies jittering when they pull in new parts

• Fixed an issue where eye trails from Wrangler’s Eyes Up Here upgrade would sometimes snap to a previous eye’s position

• Fixed incorrect visuals when highlighting a personal shield generator enemy part

• Fixed a bug where certain bullets would phase through an enemy’s leg if it was ragdolled

• Fixed a bug that caused the Swarm Launcher to cause huge framerate drops when it was equipped under certain circumstances

• Broken Frame modules can no longer be scrapped

• In-game friends who are playing on a different version of the game are no longer shown in the main menu

• Overhauled the skin equip UI. Hovering over a skin previews it.

• Added an experimental launch option to force DX12, which may provide better performance.

• Fixed data upload side objective sometimes spawning underwater

• Fixed the position an unobtainable bear collectable in the Ice Floes

• Fixed an issue with Combustive Rounds for the Accelerator where if you held R during a reload it would consume your grenade and then delete your explosive rounds

• Fixed a bug that rewarded a bunch of xp if you joined a mission right as it was aborted

• Au-Si Jackrabbit riccochet lines are disabled by default and can be re-enabled in the gameplay options

• Upgraded ambient particles for each region

• Fixed an issue where Cycler plasma bullets looked incorrect in low light

Shocklance

Micro Detonators

• Reduced the chance for Micro Detonator explosions to trigger more explosions

• Elemental explosions have no impact damage and now only deal damage from their over-time elemental effects

• Increased impact damage on non-elemental explosions:

  • Min: 12 → 40

  • Max: 18 → 44

• Micro Detonators has been insanely powerful for a long time, and we want to bring it back a bit without torching the upgrade - to keep it feeling cool we’re trying to balance it without lowering its explosion chance. We’re giving extra impact damage to non-elemental Micro Detonator explosions to make them a little more useful.

Splintered Lance

• Reduces damage by ~50%

• Splintered Lance was essentially providing a 3x damage boost, especially when combined with Notched Breakpoint for reduced spread. We tried just making it so that multiple coils can’t damage the same target in a single shot, but it ended up feeling better to give a flat damage reduction instead so that it still gives a bit of a damage boost.

Half Cocked

• Reduced max coil size:

  • Min: +110% → +57%

  • Max: +160% → +66%

• Much of the Shocklance’s superiority comes from its ability to get massive AOE sizes. Half Cocked already does a lot, so we’re lowering the coil size increase it gives from a fully charged shot.

Gearshift

• Increased post-auger charge speed by 30%

• Increased duration by 25%

• Gearshift is currently the least-used Shocklance epic so we’re increasing its stats a bit. We want the charge speed boost to feel more impactful when combined with upgrades that increase your charge time.

Ready and Waiting

• Increased passive charge rate when the Shocklance is unequipped by 560%

• Added a UI indicator that shows the Shocklance’s current charge when its unequipped

• Our goal with this change is for Ready and Waiting to allow you to fire off a shot, switch weapons, and then switch back without needing to charge it yourself. This upgrade previously had an unnecessarily slow charge speed when the Shocklance was unequipped.

Fisticuffs

• Damage boost stat is now labeled as ‘damage’ (previously was incorrectly labeled as ‘speed’)

• Increased damage boost:

  • Min: 9 → 19

  • Max: 11 → 28

Plate Launcher

Plasma Blades

• Plasma blades now deal reduced damage compared to direct hits with a plate

• Plasma Blades my beloved. The blades look too cool to reduce their size, so we’re instead making them deal less damage than direct plate hits. They’re still really good, but not quite so insane.

Damage Arc

• Damage Arc can’t be triggered by shooting your plate with another plate

• The core idea of Damage Arc is to encourage you to swap to your other weapon to shoot your plate, but the best way to use this upgrade was to throw on a bunch of plates and shoot them into each other - we hope to bring it back to that core identity by disallowing plate-on-plate damage. We’re also working on a new Plate Launcher upgrade that encourages single-plate builds :)

Nice Catch

• Reduced the damage you take when catching a plate by 50%

• The damage you take is further reduced for each extra bullet in your magazine capacity

• Increased move speed when holding your Plate Launcher by 100%

• An upgrade that damages you is always gonna be tough to fit into a build, but we’re hoping that decreasing self-damage for larger mag sizes will make it a bit more useful.

Slap Job

• Reduced spread

  • Min: 10 → 9

  • Max: 20 → 10.5

• Slap Job was like laughably unusable so we’re reducing its spread by about half.

Bouncy Plates

• Reduced upgrade size from 5 to 3 cells

Swarm Launcher

Munition Siphon

• Reduced upgrade size from 8 to 5 cells

• Increased grenade charge rate by ~40%

• Munition Siphon didn’t feel as potent as it should have so we’ve made it recharge your grenade faster and made it easier to fit into your Swarm Launcher builds.

Remote Control

• Reduced upgrade size from 4 to 3 cells

Over Extend

• Doesn’t reduce magazine size as much

  • Min → -40% → -10%

  • Max → -30% → -4%

High Caliber Pellets

• Pellets no longer automatically dive

Hey there! This week we’re putting the finishing touches on the upcoming enemy update. It’s coming Soon. This devlog is a bit bulkier as we’re going over a set of balance changes and new enemy designs… Ok let’s go:

Balance Changes

We’ve got some big balance changes coming with the enemy update. We’re focusing on the Shocklance, Plate Launcher, and Swarm Launcher, and yes, Micro Detonators is getting a small nerf.

Before we get into the details, some background on our balancing philosophy: While it’s tempting to lean into the “don’t nerf, only buff” mindset we don’t want to feed the powercreep too hard. Over time the game gets easier, so enemies need to get harder, and it turns into a cycle of boringness. Which is boring. While we’re happy to let overpowered upgrades stay overpowered for a while (they fun), eventually we do want to bring them in line with their peers. That said, we have a couple rules we like to follow when balancing:

Equipping Skins

The UI for equipping skins got a small overhaul, making it more straightforward to equip different types of skins. With this new UI it’ll be easier for us to add new types of skins in the future, which we have a few ideas for…

Prized Possession Redux

Barrel rolling was one of our early experiments with co-op mechanics near the start of development. As the game became more fast-paced, players became more agile, and enemies grew more numerous, barrel rolling felt less connected with the core gameplay. Mycopunk is about shooting things, not moving balls. AND SO, we’re replacing the barrel rolling section of Prized Possession.

We still like the structure of Prized Possession. It’s nice to have a shorter mission where you find a thing, steal it, and return to the Drop Pod. So what’s the barrel rolling getting replaced with? Battery Barry:

Battery Barry is an old power cell model imbued with sentience, thanks to a Saxon executive’s attempts to “reinvent” the power cell market. The units underperformed expectations, the executive was stabbed by her assistant, and the Barry program was shut down. But there are a few still units kicking on New Atlas, and each Barry is worth a few billion Gats in parts alone, so Saxon wants any surviving Barry units rescued and returned to them.

You’ll be collecting Battery Barry from the facility and bringing him back to the Drop Pod. One player carries Barry back to the Drop Pod where he helps to power it up. While hosting him, Barry impedes your movement a bit but also supercharges you, increasing the fire rate of all your weapons.

Enemies

We’ve started texturing the redesigned enemies! Here’s the infected microwave. Do not put food in him.

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading :)

Rainbow Skins

• Added a rainbow skin for each employee! Once you start the game after reaching player level 3 you'll find one of each new skin waiting for you in the lost loot terminal. They also drop randomly with modifiers!

The Debug Menu Returns

• Re-enabled the debug tab in settings. As some people are still crashing during grass generation, we've added a temporary option to disable grass in procedural levels.

Hello! It’s almost June, which means we’re approaching the worst season of the year. But that has nothing to do with Mycopunk, so let’s move on to what we’ve been working on this week!

Incursion

We’ve been prototyping a new mission (currently called Incursion) for the next update. Incursion rewards you for each floor of an underground facility your progress through.

I made a simple system for creating a random set of rooms for this mission. It basically goes:

• Choose a random room from the list that has a doorway that fits the current room’s exit

• If it overlaps any already-placed room, discard and try another

• If we’ve tried all possible rooms and they all overlap, delete the previous room and pick another one

• Repeat until all rooms are placed

It’s about as dumb as you can get but it works perfectly for this mission.

Enemies

Our enemy redesign continues! This week we finished updating all of the brutes. The copter brutes were in particular need of an update. The acid pisser didn’t even have a real model for its blades before:

Now the copter brutes have large turbines that look cool. But more importantly, they’re easier to hit. Their core has more health than usual, but it’s exposed at the bottom so can damage it directly.

I also made some changes to how enemy arms & lasers behave to fix that annoying issue where they would start jittering around if you got too close. Lasers in particular will be more consistent and won’t occasionally lock onto you with perfect accuracy. Yay.

-Liam

Elemental Sounds

In an ongoing effort to make upgrades in the game feel more unique and interesting, we’ve been introducing alternate firing sounds for guns depending on their element. Starting with the Cycler, 4 new firing sounds were created, with future support for any of the other element types in case the Cycler ever gets Bees or Water.

The goal for these new sounds is to eventually allow players in game to audibly hear their upgrades interacting with one another. For example, using an elemental upgrade on the Cycler, combined with the plasma bullet upgrade ‘Condensed Ejection’, would play unique firing sounds that are different from the standard plasma fire, or standard SMG element fire.

With so many upgrade combinations in the game, the goal is to create new audio for as many unique interactions as possible, starting with the most obvious ones first like the elemental firing sounds.

-Nick

Ouroboros

• In-progress Ouroboros lobbies can always be joined! Joining a lobby that’s past room 5 will give you some upgrades to help catch you up.

• Added a minimap to the default Ouroboros level

Misc

• Fixed an incorrect description for the Heavy Nuke’s Packed Payload upgrade

hi happy friday...

New Exotics

I’ve been working on a few new exotic upgrades coming in the next major update! Let’s take a peak at the new exotic for the Lead Flinger:

Phantom Limb

On reload, a phantom Lead Flinger materializes and fires a copy of every bullet you fired prior to reloading.

My goal with this upgrade was to give more of a reason to use the Lead Flinger without Big Fat Doobie. Of course, Phantom Limb + Doobie + Lucky Bastard will still be a good combo, but hopefully not as good as if you build into mag size! Also stacking this upgrade in Ouroboros spawns multiple phantom Lead Flingers which looks cool.

Here’s a video. The phantom shader is a placeholder (: No sound because windows game overlay is possible the worst thing ever made.

The Pattern Infuser

I also started adding the Pattern Infuser. This machine in the HUB will let you spend a new resource obtained from normal missions to infuse one upgrade’s pattern into another. We’ve seen the requests for a way to swap patterns outside of Ouroboros, so this will do exactly that!

Enemies

It kinda sucks when you have to fight two Devastators or, god forbid, multiple Missileheads, at once. I added soft caps for how many large enemies can be alive at once. With our current tuning, the game limits the number of living Brutes to ~5 (and more dangerous enemies like Missileheads count as 2).

-Liam

Drop Pod Redesign

Going into the redesign, the team wanted the new drop pod to look brutalist and more Saxon-like. So I took some inspiration from brutalist structures/objects with bold shapes and brought that into sketches that had a drop pod form.

The final concept was a mix of sketches 2 and 10. Various adjustments were made. Sketch 2 was too tall, and if the wings on the side continued too far down, it might have been difficult for players to run around the outside of the pod. The pod’s front, back, and sides are made clear through shape and color. This allows players to know exactly where the front is when they are making a mad dash to escape. And lots of pipes, we love pipes.

-Nicholas

New Employee

We’ve begun work on the 5th playable employee! The \ is slated for 1.0 and we’re starting to toy around with her abilities. For now we’ll share a peek at her concept art:

Enemy Improvements

Our focus for the next major update is the big enemy overhaul. The fungus on New Atlas infects machines, so you should really be fighting machines and not metal soccer balls. We’ll be replacing most of the existing enemy models with appliances & such. Here’s what a couple of the new (untextured) enemies look like in action:

I also added some dynamic bobbing to the enemies as they move. They move up and down based on how many legs are currently touching the ground, and rotate left and right based on their balance of moving legs. Most of the enemies also lean forward when they run at you.

-Liam

(New) New Atlas Shader

New Atlas is going to be getting a facelift soon. Both in the mission select and outside of the HUB, the planet will now be driven by a (very large) shader that will make the place something more to look at. With how we’re planning on changing up mission select, we want the planet to feel more alive and tangible instead of keeping it a big textured sphere (which, admittedly, is noticeably low rez :p).

My testing version of the planet shader

The new shader handles many different customizable landmasses, letting us freely paint continents and islands onto the planet that each have their own texture mapping and coloring. This took a lot of time, and required a good deal of research. Most HD planets in games are much too heavy for what we need (NMS), or only have one biome (Helldivers), so I had to come up with something a little different. The system works by converting what we paint onto the model into customized UV data (normally what maps the textures). The biome textures are mapped on using projection mapping, letting us use the UVs as individual biome data that the shader uses to draw the different types of landmasses, even allowing them to be layered on top of each other if need be.

You may be asking, Ms. Michael Punk, why did you make a whole modular system for handling tons of different biomes when there’s only five of them?

And to that I say… Why do you think?

-Noah

Optimizing The Planet Mesh

Mesh UVs are usually stored in sets of 2 4-byte numbers per vertex. Say we have 8 biomes - that is 32 extra bytes per vertex, and it adds up quickly. Could the game handle this just fine? Yeah… but it’s fun to optimize.

I made a custom import script for our planet mesh that turns each UV channel into 4 UNorm8 values. A UNorm8 is a small 1-byte number that can only go between 0 and 1. With this I can fit the same amount of biome data into 8 bytes instead of 32. Cool.

-Liam

That’s all for this week! Roachard’s throwing a fit over in the kitchen so I have to go tend to him. (He spilled another bag of Saxitos.)

Ouroboros

• Ouroboros lobbies can be joined in-progress before you complete room 5

Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused enemy limbs to gain extra health when they were picked up by a new enemy

• Fixed an issue where you could get stuck with no ammo if your Plate Launcher ran out of battery while you still had plates in the magazine

Voice Chat

I spent a few days this week working on voice chat! We actually tried to implement voice chat prior to our early access launch but it didn’t really work out… there are very few vc plugins that work for both Unity and Wwise (our sound engine), and the one we tried broke the entire game. So that sucked. But we had much better luck this time around.

Discord has a new(ish) SDK for games that want to integrate text & voice chat through the Discord backend. The best part is you don’t even need a Discord account to use it. If you don’t connect your account, the game connects you to Discord with a provisional token (basically creating a temporary account that gets deleted when you close them game). Whenever 1.9 rolls around, you’ll be able to voice chat with other players in your lobby!

Upgraded Mission Select

The mission select is getting an aura upgrade. Now once you zoom in on New Atlas you can orbit around the entire moon. Missions are scattered all over it. It’s cool. Hovering over a mission shows more info in the popup so you don’t have to click all the way into it.

As part of this change, we also want to put all missions in the same place - so Ouroboros will be part of the main mission terminal and can be found with the other special missions like the Overtime Assignment.

Starrunner

I spent a weekend making this little arcade game for the HUB. It’s singleplayer but fully networked so you can watch other people play it and take over if they pause.

A Look Inside Skins

Ever wondered how we set up skins? Here’s a peek at the editor for adding skin modifiers after the textures are made. Each modifier enables its effects on the gear shader if a random value derived from the skin’s seed is less than the modifier’s chance.

-Liam

Sit Emotes

More character animations are on their way! I’ve been working on new sit emotes. Each character will have a unique flair animation that goes into an idle loop. My goal is to really bring out their personalities - Scrapper’s sitting animation is goofy and carefree, while Glider’s is more graceful and demure.

-Seungmi

Saxonite Transport

• You are no longer slowed while carrying a barrel

• Waypoints are colored to help differentiate them from side objectives

Bullet Hell

• Lowered the maximum number of autocannons this modifier can give to a single enemy from 4 to 2

• Slightly lowered the chance for this modifier to add autocannons to an enemy

Misc

• Fixed Prized Possession door not breaking

• Fixed a bug where enemy hit vfx weren’t playing unless you were looking toward the world origin

• Yellow pine mushrooms are slightly more dense in the procedural Ice Floes

• Platforms spawn more commonly in the procedural Ice Floes

• Fixed an issue that caused objects to still be partially lit when in fully shadowed areas like the Prized Possession facilities

• Upgrade icons will no longer overflow outside of a weapon preview when you have a bunch equipped

• Fixed an issue that truncated text chat messages between 64 and 256 characters

• Added a background to the text chat

• Added a slider in the gameplay settings to change the scale of your text chat. Text chat is smaller by default.

• Fixed an issue that wouldn’t let you damage enemy parts that existed prior to you joining the lobby

• Enemy leg parts now have the correct model when joining an in-progress game

• Fixed an issue that allowed the upload data side objective to spawn below water

• Added extra checks when spawning the railgun console in Planetary Defense to make sure it doesn’t clip through a wall

• Updated the Shock Mesh to have proper VFX that will turn off when not attached to an enemy

• Properly oriented elemental & death particles in world space

Prized Possession

• Due to issues with rolling the battery on steep terrain, Prized Possession has been temporarily disabled in procedural levels. This week’s Overtime Assignment is now in the Gravity Farm - Shipping Lane. In the future we plan to rework Prized Possession’s battery objective for procedural levels.

Misc

• Disabled the debug menu since our last patch successfully fixed the vfx crash

• Elemental particles can now appear on other players

• The HUB TV toggle button now persists between games

Literally fixed the same thing as the last hotfix because we accidentally undid our bug fix (: no more blackscreens

Hello!

In the past we’ve mostly been secretive about updates until they launch, but like what’s the point of that? So we’re going to try being more open about what we’re working on with weekly (I hope) devlogs. Or maybe we’ll do two of these and then forget to post any more…

Proc Gen

Let’s start with something that didn’t happen this week, because I’m excited to talk about proc gen. Our procedural levels are generated using a grid of voxels (sorta like Minecraft). Then we use a cool algorithm called marching cubes to turn those voxels into a smooth surface. If you’re interested in marching cubes, there are a lot of cool youtube videos on the topic, but basically it’s a massive table of surface shapes to choose from for every possible combination of neighboring voxels.

All of our terrain code runs in compute shaders on the GPU, which makes it go really really fast (yes, the levels still take a while to generate - I’ll be optimizing load times as we go AND the 1.8.2 patch today should improve loading times a bit!)

Terrain is split into layers. Every layer runs a function for each voxel (of which there are 21,233,664) that returns that voxel’s distance to the nearest surface. Say we want to plop a big ball into the center of the level - we just calculate:

ball_radius - length(current_pos - ball_center)

The resulting value is negative in the air outside the ball and positive in the ground inside the ball.

When we aren’t making balls, we can do a lot of cool things with simple math. For example, the arches you sometimes see in the Desert or Ice Floes are made by calculating the distance from each voxel to a curve like this one. I then offset the distance with some random noise and we get our rocky arches.

As a bonus, here’s a weird terrain layer I accidentally made using voronoi noise.

-Liam

Crashing Out

We’ve been dealing with a fun new crash that seems to be caused by particle systems reading from mesh data. These sorts of crashes are always fun because they only happen on a few computers, and NONE OF THEM ARE OURS! :D We added a debug option that seems to be mostly working as a temporary fix but I’m working on a long-term solution to replace mesh data in particle systems, which should also help performance when a bunch of them are going off at the same time.

The current theory is that the crash is connected to a different bug where status effect particles were occasionally appearing with corrupted values, making them 3000 times the size they are supposed to be. This began happening when we updated to Unity 6, and we’re not really sure why…

With the world update coming out so soon, and very few leads, so I put in a temporary fix:

This solved the problem visually, but since the insane numbers are still being set, I suspect that certain cards run into a crash when trying to process them.

So what’s the solution? No more meshes. Instead of reading the exact model data (slow), I reconfigured the system to use generic shapes that will fit around the models (fast). This should free up a bit of VRAM, and the game likely won’t hitch as much when you use a Globbler build that applies acid to everything on the map in a single frame.

This change comes as part of a larger goal for 1.0 to increase the performance of VFX, while also making them a little less visually overbearing on the whole. You guys like to blow stuff up, so I wanna try and help you not go blind while doing it.

-Noah

NEW ENEMY MODELS!!!!!!

Your workplace will be ruined by furniture and appliances soon (well, soonish). Fridge, toilet, laptop, microwave, fan, etc. These cruel chaotic BEAUTIFUL machines want you dead. Kill them or they will butcher you.

Modeling and texturing was done by a old Saxon faculty who is obviously unwell but with great work ethic fortunately. (That’s me) Every enemy core looks different to fit the body type, and the new shells are carefully designed to be insanely infected. They will look a lot nicer than the old ones because of my crazy texturing technique improvement normal maps, it will bring more detail and depth to the enemy surface and fungal flesh. The models must look good because I am going to UV them one by one like why would I make it bad.

Concept art for one of the new grunt models

Just the model - wait for them magical textures

Saxon doesn't care about you but we do, enjoy!!

-Lily

Also update 1.8.2 is out now! Patch notes here.

Performance

• The navigation mesh generates faster when dropping into a procedural level

• Optimized ‘Building Surfaces’ to make it a bit faster

• Optimized particle systems that stick to meshes (like when enemies are set on fire or killed). This improved performance a bit and hopefully fixes the new crash that some people have been experiencing.

Audio Limiting

• Fixed an issue with audio volume limiting that wasn’t lowering some sounds as much as it should when your master volume was lower than default

Misc

• Fixed a bug where the Swarm Launcher’s reload audio and VFX wouldn’t stop playing when the reload was canceled under certain circumstances

• Fixed a typo in Soul Reaper’s description

• Fixed an issue where Miniaturized Warp Core could warp you across the map after being teleporting or after loading into a new level

• Fixed a bug that showed employees in the Codex had more undiscovered skins than they actually did

• Fixed an issue that allowed Heavy Weapon beacons to spawn under the water

• Added a button on the side of the HUB television to toggle it off and on

• Fixed a few buildings in the City Outskirts that were missing their bottoms

Temporarily disabled Spatial-Temporal upscaling while we look into a fix for it breaking the rendering

Performance

• Added a new upscaling option, Spatial-Temporal, which should provide cleaner upscaling results than FidelityFX or Linear

• Added a couple debug options to the settings screen to help us track down the cause of a crash. If you experience crashing in a level please try turning on the temporary option to disable elemental particles on targets.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a missing icon for the Ice Floes region

• Fixed a bug that caused upgrades attached to enemies to float in the wrong position

• Heavy Weapon crates now despawn faster for you if they’re owned by another player

• Fixed a bug that was stopping Paid Time Off from ever appearing in a Permanent Location (authored level)

• Updated the icon for side objective Backlog Tasks to match the new side objective icon

• Fixed an issue that wouldn’t show a minimap if you joined an in-progress mission

• Fixed an issue that allowed enemies to dig to players in Abomination Assault and through Bruiser’s Hard-Light Prison

• Slightly increased the hitbox of the Prized Possession door seals

• Fixed an issue that could cause terrain to block the door of the Prized Possession dome facility

• Fixed a lag spike that could occur in the HUB when the TV switches videos

• Reduced the amount of screen shake on Cluster Bomb explosions

Hey gang, Roachard here.

The fungus ain’t slowin down, so Saxon’s openin up the whole planet for us. That’s a lotta ground to cover, so grab your buddies and let’s get to work!

>> END TRANSMISSION

Procedural Levels

• We’ve been working for months on a procedural generation system for new levels! All five regions now contain random maps for you to explore and cleanse. The older levels are still available.

New Side Objectives & POIs

• Added a slew of new side objectives. Many of these utilize our procedural terrain system and only spawn in new levels, but a few can also spawn in older maps.

• A handful of these will spawn in every mission

Blitseg Hover Bike

• The Blitseg is your new default vehicle, perfect for driving through New Atlas’ wilderness. It comes with boost capabilities and you can press X to switch between first and third person.

Minimap

• Added a minimap to mission levels! Hold M to enlarge it.

Heavy Weapons

• Added a smaller set of upgrades to all four Heavy Weapons

• Calling in a Heavy Weapon now provides you with a crate that allows you to select a weapon

• You no longer drop your Heavy Weapon when you die

• Multiple Heavy Weapon beacons now spawn in every mission and are marked on your map

• The ammo cart in the HUB now refills Heavy Weapon ammo

• Fixed an issue where Heavy Pockets wasn’t generating ammo for your equipped Heavy Laser Cannon

• Added Heavy Weapons to the Codex

Movement Changes

• You can walk up steeper slopes

• You lose momentum a bit faster

Saxonite Transport

• CR4T3R and B0X3R stole Hunk’s fuel and Saxonite barrels. No more rolling barrels down hills - kill the thieves and commandeer the barrels.

• Turrets on the rocket launch pad provide damage resistance

Abomination Assault

• A new rare mission that occasionally appears in your mission select

Enemies

• Enemies will now dig to you instead of teleporting when they can’t reach you

New Employee Skins

• Added a new skin for each employee. These don’t drop from the world pool.

Performance

• Added a Render Distance option to the graphics settings that allows you disable rendering of far away chunks in procedural levels. Lowering your render distance has a sizeable impact on performance in these new levels. Defaults to infinite.

• Added texture streaming and a graphics option for the texture streaming budget (how many MB of texture data can be loaded into video RAM at once) that defaults to 2048MB.

Ouroboros

• Fixed an area in Titan City where Ouroboros rooms could spawn outside the level barrier

• Continuing an Ouroboros mission in an outdoor level will now randomize your room position so you don’t lose your run if your last room somehow spawned in an unreachable spot

Wrangler

• Using your Rocket Lasso while holding a physics object will now actually lasso you forward instead of grabbing the held object

Bruiser

• Springboard Is now stackable

Misc Upgrades

Blink

• Fixed a bug that caused you to gain an insane amount of speed when blinking into an incline

• Blink now keeps your previous momentum, instantly changing its direction to the direction you blink in

Other

• Explosions scorch the grass in procedural levels. This can be toggled in the graphics settings.

• Fixed ammo getting reset to full when exiting your inventory in a mission

• Skin drops now look different from normal upgrades

• Escalation mode in Paid Time Off defaults to off

• Fixed an issue where your position could stop syncing to other players if a vehicle you’re driving was despawned

• Improved behavior for riding Satellite Salvage cables up walls so you’re less likely to hit the wall and fall off

• Mortar and missile enemies won’t fire at you if you’re too far above them

• In the mission select screen, hovering over a modifier under a mission now displays its description

• Added cool new icons for every skin

• Added a skin icon in the employee upgrade preview box

• Skin drops now look different from normal upgrades

• Fixed an area in the Moldy Tundra where abominations could spawn inside a wall

• Fixed a bug that caused the Planetary Defense objective in Paid Time Off to become incompletable if it spawned on a railgun spot that had been previously used by the same objective

• Fixed a bug that caused subsequent Planetary Defense objectives in Paid Time Off to all use the same ship name

• Fixed a bug that could cause the DMLR to not deal any damage to shells when Shredder was equipped

• Added wind ambience at high altitudes

• Updated engine to Unity 6

• Updated discord integration and added an option in the main menu to connect to discord. It doesn’t do anything new yet. But it will.

• Stack icons for Killing Field and Laying Cable now appear correctly when these stacks are applied to you from another employee’s Shocklance

• Updated upgrade icons for Doublestack Cartridge, Fire Gel, and Chemical Symbiosis

• Fixed an issue where you wouldn’t reequip your primary weapon if your Heavy Weapon was despawned

• A text chat message is now displayed when you use an auth code at Roachard’s computer after already discovering its upgrade

• Fixed an issue where sound for Cranius spewing out explosives stopped playing

• Added special firing sounds for Lone Cannoneer (Trident), Railshot (Shocklance), Double Barrel (Jackrabbit), and Explosive Pellets (Swarm Launcher)

• Added an audio filter when you’re inside an optical jammer’s radius

• Shortened the countdown when launching the drop pod from the HUB

• Added an employee quip that sometimes plays when building power lines

• Grenade bindings no longer show \ when using a controller

• Fixed an issue that caused door seals in Prized Possession to be immune to the breaching laser if you had an upgrade that changed your outgoing damage type

Known Issues

• You’ll experience 1-2 larger freezes the first time you load into a procedural level as shaders are compiled. These freezes should disappear after the first time, even after restarting the game.

• Roachard gets really excited when you kill eyeballs in procedural levels and he starts yapping a lot.