The game has a new name
Quick bit of news first: the working title, Leopard, is gone. The game is now Helion Rift. Helion is the power source the whole story fights over, and the rift is the crack that runs through that fight. Your rank is still Leopard Commander, because that name earned its place in the story. The old title was too close to a name someone else already owns, and changing it now is far cheaper than changing it after a store page exists.
A new name needs a new logo, and the logo has a crack running through the R. Here are three versions of it. My favorite is Logo B, but I would like to know what you think: what does each one say when you glance at it for a second, and which one do you like most? Tell me on Discord.
The night my monitor left
While all that was going on, I was trying to answer a bigger question: is DirectX 12 any good for this game? To find out, I leave a test running overnight, alone. A recorded match plays back by itself while I sleep, and in the morning I read the numbers.
The first nights did not count. One was spoiled by a leftover search command from my own tooling. It used one thread of my 24 thread CPU for the whole session, which is 4.0 percent of the machine, and that was enough to fail the quiet machine check. The next night went worse. At 00:37 my monitor dropped off its cable and never came back. The game kept happily rendering into a screen that was not there, so every run of that night is void. I still do not know why the monitor left.
So now there is a check that the display is present before a run starts, and a stop if it disappears. On Saturday it refused to start, because the monitor read as absent again. I am choosing to call that a success.
What DirectX 12 means for you
There is a new setting in Video: Graphics API. Today DirectX 11 is still the default. I have a change ready that makes DirectX 12 the default in the next test build, but it is not in any build yet. If DirectX 12 cannot start on your PC, or closes the game early in a session, the game drops back to DirectX 11 on its own and tells you. I have not yet watched that happen for every kind of failure, so those checks are still on my list. I make no speed claim. It may run the same as DirectX 11, or slower.
Who owns what
Meanwhile, I zoomed in on something that has bothered me for a while: the player color. My exact words after looking at it were that it looks smashed on like a toddler making a painting. The shader is fine. The problem is which parts of a model count as the player's paint, because those areas were generated from whole chunks of texture instead of being chosen part by part. The fix is to redraw them panel by panel, so a team color sits where a person would paint it. Nothing is in a build yet.
The three factions are also getting a HUD of their own. The layout and the information stay the same, so you can switch factions without relearning anything. Only the look changes.
Dust, fog and a walker that does not walk
The three skirmish maps have a new dust look: the fog ends further out, and the sun has a warmer tint. The sun is not any stronger. I may still fiddle with it.
The ECA Kolos, the big walker, is getting a redesign. It is at design stage and nothing is built into the game yet. The current Kolos has no walking animation, which is a fair problem for something called a walker. I have no date and will not invent one.
Also
- Aircraft production is now limited by parking slots on the buildings that launch them. I still owe it a check in a real match.
- A muzzle streak visual bug is fixed.
- You can now mute players in lobby chat, and the Settings screen has a list of whoever you muted.
What is next
- A valid benchmark night, and then I read the result before I say anything about DirectX 12.
- The seat color fix and the faction HUDs.
- Steam has given me 25 playtest keys. They go to my dedicated playtesters when the build is ready. No date yet.
- No public Steam page yet.
See you next time. I will be the one checking whether my monitor is still plugged in.
TokkeBe