Devblog #7 June

Previous devblogs:  ​January    -  February  -  March    - April  - May

Hey guys! We have another  batch of updates for you and also some information about the second upcoming alpha test. Some of you have told us you're having withdrawals so we'll get right to it!

Delay of customization

When customization came around we had planned to get started as soon as possible with our current animator, but he was working on larger projects and wouldn't be able to keep up the pace we needed. We decided to leave him just with first person weapon animations, and we've brought a new character animator on to the team, Craig Eickhoff.

We spent some time getting Craig up to speed, and we're just now making our way into the new rigs/animations. We've also been building an animation test project to speed him up so he can quickly preview how the animations will act and blend ingame. This puts us way too close to when we hoped the next alpha would be out, so we've decided to push customization into next month with melee. We have made many gameplay changes, so we will still be doing alpha2 without customization.

Note that these animations won't be in game for alpha 2

Changes to the game

During the first alpha not only did we keep an eye out for feedback but we also both played and watched live streams  quite a bit. We saw a lot of imbalances among other things that we've addressed.
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General

• New team select menu
• Voip stutter should be fixed (new compression method)
• Proper notification for failed authentication, bad version, bans, and disconnects as they were often mistaken as crashes before we allowed you to return to the main menu
• An error causing us to not receive most emailed bug reports has been fixed - please use the bug report menu (F1) to report basic bugs, especially if you are able to recreate them!
• Can now swap teams/factions mid match
• When voip volume is lowest it should now be silent, not just quiet
• More information about how a match was won/lost
• Crew is notified when their captain is killed
• Votekick added to player options. First is a kick, the rest  include progressively worse time bans
• When a player has given you rum/tea to heal the icon will blink, many of you missed it
• If no one nominates themselves to be captain it will now choose a random person instead of the same player every time.
• You now accumulate score for loading cannons, repairing, hull hits, kills, sail hits, and pumping
• Captain receives increased score for crew hits from broadsides
• You lose score for teamkilling and  missing cannon shots (some of you don't take time to aim)
• Hoy capacity reduced to 8 from 10
• Mute will ignore text chat too
• When bringing   up the match HUD with Q the ship health UI will be hidden so it doesn't block the timer
• Controls added to startup screen
• Tickets have been removed entirely from TDM , a team should be able to recover and win after a bad captain etc.
• Spectating when dead 
• Dead players have a skull next to their name in the scoreboard
• Text in chatbox will now wrap
• Voip keys have changed, V is now crew, F is now proximity, and B is now faction. G is still global.
• Music has been changed to alternate between war beat tension tracks and orchestral tracks. No more awkward silence.
• Some sound effects have been given a lower priority to see if it fixes the music cutting out
• Performance should now be faster when the match is full of players. Note that we  are always  looking for ways to improve performance. Our goal is to have the game playable at or near ultra on a GTX 770 1080p which should be a mid ranged card by time we release. We are not targeting high end cards exclusively.

Weapons

• Anti-personnel  swivels should be more deadly
• Placeholder sword damage doubled
• Grenades and tomahawks  should now work on land
• Grapeshots have been buffed, and will continue to be buffed until you don't get laughed at for loading them

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Ships

• Ignition sticks are now equipped from the cannon like ramrods, and have been removed from the deck
• Colliders on items have been sized up to make them easier to grab
• Victim ship during a ram will lose all of its velocity on impact and will need to accelerate again, giving the attacking ship more time to hop onboard
• Ships can no longer sink while grappled, and cannonballs will not make new holes. Both ships will be lifted fully until the grapples are detached. This was important to keep boarding viable.
• Crates added between front and rear cannons to stop players from accidentally getting stuck after the cannons rolled back
• When pumps are active with holes   the UI the text will be yellow so players know the ship can still sink
• Ships will now slow to a stop the lower they are in the water from damage (no more submarines :D)
  
• When the captain says load grapples they will remain available for 1 minute even if the command changes or expires
  
• Captain can now cancel the command wheel instead of  accidentally setting random commands
• Captain can  resign
• Players can now vote for mutiny - runner up will be chosen
• Respawn time during grappling is now a universal two minutes, this should be long enough to eliminate the enemy team and win.
• Galleon nets should be easier   to hop onto
• More  colliders added for railings etc on galleon
• Can now hold down rmb to look around while aiming down a cannon (only the camera, not the barrel). Letting go will snap the camera back to the direction the cannon will fire. Should make it much easier to see where the enemy ship is.
• Fire spread speed increased 4x, and can now spread  40% further
• Bucket water effect won't instantly blow away when tossed 
• Should be easier to put out fires

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Beta testing branch

About  5 days before the next test we'll make an announcement about a 'beta' (not an actual beta though) branch that you can opt into on Steam. This will help catch any  major bugs before we launch the next alpha weekend shortly after.

Expect the worst with this branch, we'd suggest not even bothering trying to stream it and just wait a few days. The pretest on the Steam beta branch for alpha 2 will only last about ~12 hours and will be a single server. If all is good we'll launch alpha 2 later that same week.

Music

We've shifted our music design a small bit since alpha 1. Originally a full epic track would play and then there would be 3 minutes of silence before another, but this sudden stop in music  gave even us a hollow feeling while playing.

We've since moved to an alternating track list where the game will play an epic song and then a low tension but still suspenseful track that isn't as attention grabbing. This will keep the music flowing without breaks and also prevent over playing of the handful of epic tracks we have finished right now.

Here are a few more from Garrett:

Characters

We have a few new outfits  to show along with two more head variants. Keep in mind only some outfits will be available with the first introduction of customization, and we'll be adding more as they're rigged and added to the game.

Hair is still  a work in progress

Alpha 1 videos

Some great videos were uploaded during the first alpha, here were some of our favorites:

Next month

Next month we will have all new animations for the players and you will have a few options to customize your character (more will be added in further tests). Along with this we will be introducing our true melee combat to replace our current placeholder hammer-sword. You can also look forward to the possibility of two new weapons!

The pace will begin to pickup in July, as that's a wrap for some of our most demanding core features. After that point we will begin flooding the game with more content each test. New gamemodes, weapons, music, and outfits. The frequency of tests will begin to increase as well.

​-Tyler & Dakota