Psychophrenesis Build 2.5.4 Optimizing the graphics and gameplay loop
April 22nd, 2024
Reworked Minimap: The previous minimap used a Scene Capture Component to render the minimap, causing a small hit to performance. This has now been swapped for a texture/picture, which should greatly improve performance
Reworked Mental Health System: The mental health system has been reworked to be greatly improved, and more balanced. To avoid spoilers and keep suspense, I will not go into how the new version works
Made improvements to the island selection UI, as well as some general improvements across all UI and ability to go back in the Main Menu
Implemented player dodging, as a temporary slide tackle animation that will change later on. Can be used to dodge soldier grabs and tackle attempts, and also as a mechanism to dodge darts and get into cover quickly
Added new gamemode - Extraction
-Inspired by Lethal Company, this gamemode is very similar to the base game mode, but instead of trying to find all boat parts on an island in one go, players will get multiple attempts (3) to meet the boat part requirement. Because of this leniency, and because it is technically considered a 'challenge' mode. players will lose all their island progress if they fail to build the boat.
Added new Map: CrashSite
Small oval island featuring a central secret cliff hideout spot. With it's very narrow bridges but lots of parts, players will need to keep their balance and make sure they don't fall off.
The saving system has now been completed and proved robust enough to be included in game builds. You can now keep all your world progress when you quit!
The military continues to recive more balancing, as we keep playtesting and figuring out the optimal difficulty:
-Sight for all units has been decreased by 1000uu
-Starting Patient walk speed has been decreased from 600 cm/s to 500 cm/s
-Starting Patient run speed has been increased from 800 cm/s to 900 cm/s
-Officer Patrol Speed has been decreased from 700 cm/s -> 500 cm/s
-Player Jump height has been increased a tad to allow hopping off bridges
-Initial Officer spawning has increased
-lvl 4-6 soldiers now use tackling more often when the player is being arrested
When players fail a puzzle, a noise now plays, alerting nearby officers
A countdown timer now exists for defense puzzles and buildables, like the boats
The game over screen now properly identifies the name of the object that killed the last patient without "_C" suffix
Added cover bushes, which players can use to hide from the officers
Swapped out some 8K sand textures for more game friendly 2k versions, as they were costing lots of memory and performance problems.
Fixed bug causing players to crash if they were too far away from each other when a cutscene occured
Fixed bug causing a mine not to explode on TropicalSmall map
Fixed bug causing officers to not be able to predict the player's future position correctly when the players would be at too large of a height difference
March 31st, 2024
Psychophrenesis Build 2.5.3
Bridges have now been added to the following Islands: Small, Tropical, and Alice, allowing you to travel to different parts of the island without having to swim!
Reworked mental health system:
-Mental Health sometimes will suddenly drop at random
-The Presense of Finished Phrenesis Hallucinations now affects mental health
Added new Item: Binnoculars
- allows the players to see long distances and spot officers
Added Drug Chest
- contains drugs, what more could you ask for?
Pursuit Arresting Physics
The physics interactions and movement for officers have been readjusted to perform more accurately and smoothly, including the following
-Officers now use acceleration for path finding instead of velocities, which fixed an issue causing them to suddenly lose all acceleration when trying to perform an arrest on a moving player
-Physics Asset: Officers no longer have a shoe physics bodies, and now have shrunken hand physics bodies, which allows them to run up to a survior ragdoll and grab the hands without accidentally kicking or throwing them, which was happening in previous builds
Added Player Sliding/Dodging, to avoid officers
Resized Physical Inventory to be at a further location
Significantly refactored the tool base class to be seperate fromt he weapon class removed multiple uneeded components which should help for optimization
Fixed bug causing officers to inaccurately perceive locations of gunshots
Fixed bug causing gameplay notifications to not appear
Fixed bug causing Energy Drinks and Coffee to repeatedly buff the player past the inital desired buff
Fixed bug causing Risperidone to not be able to be consumed
Fixed bug causing close range tranquilizer shots to not properly fire
February 29th, 2024
Psychophrenesis Build 2.5.2: The Pursuit AI Buff
Fixed bug causing the 3rd player to not spawn on Alice Island
Fixed bug causing Linked Teleporters to teleport to wrong locations (was not using world space cordinates)
Part Finder now always spawns as an item on the player, and is not mission based
The arrest system has been reciving continual updates and now includes the following:
-The arrest state now has the players actually handcuffed with a model, and their hands are locked
-officers can now use GAS (Gameplay Ability System) to arrest, which will hopefully result in a better multiplayer experience
-when arresting, each officer now slows the player a little
-fixed issue with chaos physics engine incorrectly breaking physics constraints and werid movement when going from ragdoll state to physical animation state
-when players are in an arresting or handcuffed state, they can no longer use or switch to other items
(a lot of these features were in the previous versions of the game, but I forgot to include them)
Added New Unit: Mine
Will Explode if stepped on, dealing damage and ragdolling the survivor and any other survivors in the vicinity
In the first mission, players now start in the handcuff state, and will need to visit danya to unhandcuff
Gameplay Balance Changes
Officers have recived slight buffs, including the following
Speed for lower level officers has again been increased
Lower level officers will no longer abort an arrest under ALL circumstances, even if a survivor stops resisting
Fixed Bug causing Officers to lose their momentum when getting in close range of a survivor
Added Island UI notification
Saving and Loading worlds now have initial support, but not fully avalible yet
The Message notification window has now been redesigned to allow for multiple messages to be displayed
Redesigned the name tag UI components, which also fixed a bug with Players not reciving the right name (edited)
Multiple Small Optimizations and changes in neatness to the game's code base. Most of this work included conversion of blueprint references and functions to C++ versions
This should result in a small performance increase.
Optimized animation BP to be less bloated, which should also improve performance. Metahumans and crouching are currently broken as a result of these changes, but they will be back in the next build.
Also refactored inventory system to have locks (on interdigetic version), which fixes a bug associated with the physicalized inventory breaking when players would try and do too many actions at once. Also fixes bug associated with survivors not equipping items properly
Also again changed collisions to reallow players to be tripped by other characters