I’ll be bringing an early multiplayer build of Scraps to PAX Australia in Melbourne, and it’ll be the only place to play multiplayer for a while. I’ve made a thread on the forum, and if you’re coming to PAX and you post your vehicle file in this thread before October 24th, I’ll take it along with me. So if you’re building stuff now, I can have it there for you to battle with on the day. More details over in the thread.

To facilitate that, and since the game’s in a fairly stable place right now, I’ve also updated the Builder Demo. Obviously it’s been a while since last time. Changes include damage with damage effects, wreckage, and some new block parts.

Changelog for 0.2.11.0:

– Damage and damage effects

– Area effect + visible shockwave for projectile weapons

– Wreckage (collectable)

– Added undo (Ctrl-Z) on the Build screen

– Added new half-block and slope block parts

– Available weapon rotation range updates automatically when parts are destroyed in-game

– Vehicles now have a size limit of 20m in any direction from the centre of the chassis (so max 40m wide etc). This is a safety measure to ensure that vehicles won’t overlap each other, for example when spawning at different spawn points. Existing vehicles that are larger will be truncated when loaded.

– Lowpass filter on the music while using some sub-screens

– Unified object pooling system for improved performance. Things like explosions are now pooled and re-used instead of always instantiated

– Tweaked some part stats

– More sound effects

– Updated part drop effect on the Build screen

– Entries in the language list are now always in that language

Bug Fixes:

– Fixed another aiming bug

– Various other fixes

There’s a sort-of-bug where the chassis options on the build screen can take a while to appear the first time the game’s run. This has been happening since I upgraded Unity (the game’s base engine) past 4.2, and I absolutely can’t work out what’s causing the delay. Unity reports that everything is loaded and fine, but it seems to just really feel like hiding it for a while. Anyway, it’s not a big deal so I’ll look at it again in the future.

Over the last fortnight I’ve mainly been working on various components of multiplayer, but I also cleaned up the vehicle testing mode so that it works well with the new damage systems. I was hoping to get the respawning system working but ended up having to fix up a bunch of other stuff, plus one of my hard drives died – the one with Scraps on it – and that lost me about a day of work coming back from the last backup. So that was a bit annoying, but I’m still basically on-track with where I want to be for PAX.

This week I also want to share a little thing I wrote up that represents where I’d like Scraps to go eventually. This is somewhat representative of the vision I have (and have always had) in my head. One thing I like about Scraps is that it can be as much based around clever choice of different functional parts all working together as it can be about creative designs. I hope this sort of gives an idea of that too:

The Glass Cannon (a hypothetical Scraps combat scenario)

The “glass cannon” is a small and fast wheeled vehicle with an oversized energy weapon. To keep its speed up and cost down, it doesn’t have enough power to use its weapon more than once or twice in a row before needing to wait and recharge. It has little traditional armour but maintains a small energy shield. For power, it uses a cheap reactor core that can be pushed above 100% – if the user’s vehicle can keep it cool. The GC (glass cannon) only has a small heatsink, so it can’t really do this. It mostly keeps the reactor on around 80% power.

The GC’s driver wants to take out a large, powerful and slow target. If the large target gets a good shot in, it might be able to take out the GC in one hit – especially if the GC’s shields are down.

The GC’s driver flanks the target, hidden behind some hills. Moments before cresting the hill to meet the target, the driver shuts off the shields and pushes the reactor to maximum, now rapidly dumping excess energy into the capacitors. The heatsink is now glowing red hot and overheat warnings are starting to appear on-screen.

One shot, and the large target’s shields are down. With its own shields off and the reactor on maximum, the GC’s energy store is rapidly filling up again, almost ready for another shot. Meanwhile the large target is swivelling its cannons around to meet this small and vulnerable target, and the GC’s reactor is overheating. But the GC’s weapon is powerful, and it’ll only take one more successful shot to bring this one down…