Project Status:

Over the last month, we released the hotfix for Beta 4, resolved many bugs, and completed most of the new Overgrowth campaign.

We're now working on an internal gameplay test pass. This is the "over the shoulder" kind of testing, where we find a lucky person who either hasn't played Overgrowth, or has only played the arenas, and watch them play the game while they narrate their experience. This process has revealed many things for us to improve, but so far there's been nothing too unexpected.

We've been making gameplay tweaks and fixing bugs in response to this feedback. The game is nearly "feature complete" for the new campaign, and we’re getting close to being able to leave the early access phase.

Gameplay:

Added explicit config presets for difficulty levels

Made wolves no longer dodge weapon attacks (to make them more vulnerable to weapons, again)

Made thrown knives that aren't caught have a chance to do more damage

Made enemies who are unaware of you unable to use their weapon to block attacks

Added tutorial for not being able to enter a dialogue while you're in combat

Added "press any key to continue" after level is loaded, in case you're still reading the loading screen text (also supports mouse click)

Added weapon sheathing while you have an enemy in a choke hold with your weapon out

Added the new Overgrowth campaign to the "mods" menu, hoping more people will see it, but wanting it still on the down-low since it is still not quite done yet

Now starts program with zero gain so audio more gradually starts

Made debug text display only show up while in editor mode to make it so you have to switch it off less often for screenshots

Player no longer targets or notices characters marked "static" (enemies in later checkpoints/goals)

Worked on loading screen visuals

Much work on new Overgrowth campaign, listed separately

Modding/editor enhancements:

Moved many editor menu options to "Selected" menu, since "Edit" was getting crowded/overloaded

Added configurable LoadingScreen image path config value to level.xml, and added field to scene graph level properties

Added ability to control who gets killed and who lives in kill hotspot

Fixed holes and other weird visual problems in hex crete corner object

Added "Stick To Nav Mesh" parameter for characters, so enemies can be made less likely to suicide off cliffs, etc (and then fixed some bugs in it)

Added ability to tweak NPC hearing ability in script parameters

Added rebinding support for "frame selected" and "teleport to selected" actions, and added then to "selected" menu

Improved mod downloading display to make it less confusing that mods are downloading, especially when progress has stalled or is paused

Improved error messages and error detection on mod uploads

Fixed some issues with collision when the nav mesh baking has been turned off to modded level loads

Added debug "disable fog" option, to make it easier to edit in foggy levels without having to memorize and temporarily change fog parameters

Added debug config toggle to skip nav mesh generation for faster loads while working on levels

Added debug config toggle to skip texture conversion for faster loads while working on levels

Added ability to turn off live update in config (during window refocus check)

Added absolute and relative level path getter functions in angelscript

Added Object::IsExcludedFromSave to angelscript so mods can better detect temporary items

Fixed crash when failing to load hotspot script

Made camera object script load failures explicit instead of silently failing in weird ways

Added is_player property to MovementObject

Added ability to change connect-to filter for placeholder objects in angelscript (now can point to other placeholders, hotspots, or whatever you need them to connect to in your mods)

Added ability to cast from Object@ to Hotspot@ in angelscript (should check that it is the correct object type first, of course)

Fixed depth test for debug line rendering

Fixed bug in rendering of collision painting meshes

Started work on new save file format that better protects mods from trodding on each other

Performance changes:

Added toggle so players with lower end GPUs can turn off the GPU particle field

Added toggle so players with lower end GPUs can turn off custom level shaders

Trimmed down shaders when "no reflection capture" is enabled (may reduce errors and improve performance, especially on GPUs with the bare minimum 16 TUs, where reflection capture is automatically disabled)

Added ability to see asset manager references in performance debug window

Added logging for loaded assets (including those loaded during level) to performance debug window

Added ability to list all loaded assets in performance debug window

Added a lot of assets to the preload.xml file for the new Overgrowth campaign

Added possible performance improvement for water splashes

General improvements and bug fixes:

Fixed Lugaru campaign saving bug on Mac (added to B4 hotfix)

Fixed partially black sky (and possibly fix extra dark shadow) on some Intel GPUs (added to B4 hotfix)

(Fixed previously and now deployed in B4 hotfix: Plant and waterfall rendering on nVidia, and added ledge grab toggle to settings)

Made game stay paused when you exit the escape menu (if the game was paused before opening the menu)

Added explicit sound mixer limiting code, which seems to have eliminated crackling when crossfading music

Worked on making sure assets correctly unload when they're no longer being used, especially textures

Renamed nav mesh extension so they are less likely to be confused for other XML files

Improvements to nav mesh loading and saving behavior

might fix bug with nav meshes sometimes being regenerated every time

Made navmesh connections (jump nodes) no longer able to connect to non-navmesh connection objects, and automatically remove existing incorrect connections

More logging when SDL fails to create the game's window

Possibly fixed one of the physics bugs that caused characters to fall through the world

Fixed bug with rain/thunder hotspot being visible in level

Fixed some problems with newer dialogue background display

Fixed overbright problems when displaying billboard textures and debug text

Fixed bug where shadows would look weird after changing any setting

Fixed a bug around progress with checking defeated enemy state

Fixed bugs in visual transition from ragdoll to dialogue

Fixed menu display on super wide aspect ratio screens

Fixed water rendering in split screen (by disabling screen space reflections in that case)

Made sure tutorial overlay text doesn't show during dialogues

Made enemies notice you when you bump into them

Made dialogue tutorial not appear unless you actually can activate it

Fixed a bug where dialogue tutorial wasn't getting activated/cleared properly

Made it so that only the player can trigger an on-defeat slow motion event when pulling a weapon out of a body

Various bugfixes in new audio mixer code

Worked on stress test script to help stress test loading and memory allocation

Added Crunch texture compression and texture read code path

Fixed multiplayer single viewport camera so it should no longer flip upside down

Removed some "ID -1 not found" spurious log warnings when objects are intentionally (re)assigned IDs (e.g. prefab or object load)

Removed some "ID -1 not found" spurious log warnings when checking if an object exists

Fixed a source of (rare, though less rare on build machine) random crashes and incorrect results in checksum generation

Made static characters no longer (sometimes) float off into sky on reset/spawn

Fixed some bugs with camera depth of field support

Fixed a decal that was cut off in first level of Lugaru campaign

New Overgrowth campaign: