Our latest update is all about raising the quality bar of our game. Though there’s plenty new toys to play with, we wanted to focus on improving both the visuals and audio of the VOX experience. Have a look at what you can expect next time you boot up our brand of stompy bot action:
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Scattershot is Reborn
Scattershot is like a whole new beast to behold. It now features a powerful punch, with dangerous heat buildup, a narrower spread, as well as faster-moving pellets. There’s all-new special effects and sounds to go along with it too, to help accentuate its presence. Now it’s truly the boom stick it was always meant to be.
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Audio Remaster
Our crack audio team has been hard at work holistically improving the audio experience in Vox Machinae. It starts with a full Remaster and Rebalance, dedicated sub channel, as well as rebalancing of spatial audio. There’s a tonne of new sounds for Scattershot, Railgun, Minigun, Hammer, and Skyjacker. Various gameplay cue audio has now been added, such as weapon swaps, match win/loss, jumpjet velocity rattles, game start sound, and fun secret stuff too. Grinders have seen a vast audio improvement to help complement their mass with various creaks, scrapes, jostles and thuds. It’s truly a feast for the ears, and we hope you like it.
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Hopper Downscale
We've taken our industrial-strength shrink ray to Hopper and shaved 20% off his total dimensions. Why did we do this? Hopper was always meant to be our small and scrappy scout unit, so we wanted to go the extra mile to emphasize this. Now he’s leaner, meaner and harder to hit.
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Improved Habitat Lighting
Our hangar lighting presentation has been dramatically improved, with both grinders and pilots receiving/casting dynamic shadows. Additionally, new direct lights in the hangar will add a more convincing sheen to surfaces. We didn’t stop there either, now both hangar and cockpit scenes feature improved reflection and specularity, which allow our more metallic surfaces to really… shine.
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2X More Icons
We know every pilot wants to be unique, and while our initial selection of pilot icons was a valiant effort, there's always more that could be done. So we did just that, two times more icons to be exact. Now there's even more ways to help pilots express their style in tiny icon form.
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Cable Tech 2.0
Not satisfied with the way our cables tended to glitch out, we forged a new tech to end the madness and usher in a new era of well-behaved cables. Cables can now squash and stretch, bend without malice, and better simulate weight, all while being obscenely efficient to render. This has also meant many more cables in the cockpit can now be simulated, adding to the immersion factor.
Honorable Mentions
In the spirit of cramming as much goodies into our updates as humanly possible, here’s some more notable highlights in this release:
- Menu system UI has been reworked, it’s now snappier, doesn’t lag in the cockpit, doesn’t show jaggies around screens, and intersects properly with things around it.
- There’s now a snazzy new slip vector guage that shows how fast you’re going in any direction.
- Your avatar’s virtual nose now changes skin tone based on the pilot you selected.
- Replaced Grinder level-of-detail models with much better hand-crafted ones.
- Changed how terrain textures update to take the same amount of time regardless of headset or monitor frame rate.
- Terrain once again casts shadows into the cockpit
- Fixed various bugs relating to the cursor on the scope screen
- Drill’s mass has been re-distributed to better reflect volume of components. Leg weight reduced by 50%, torso increased by 33%. Overall mass unchanged.
- Bots have improved aim, will fire at targets of opportunity when their main target is out of view, and can engage at longer distances than before
- Player-controlled dedicated servers are now available under the Join/Host menu, and no longer show on the server browser (until someone controls them).
