Wheel Fixes Now Live! Preview of First Test Flight
We’ve released a new update which comes with some big fixes and optimisations! We also have a tease for something that is just around the corner!
Wheel Fixes & Mass
Thanks to some great people in the RC2 community we managed to track down a few major and tricky physics bugs in wheels. Well, we’ve fixed these bugs as part of this update! Something you should know is that these fixes will trigger some fairly radical changes in the way wheels feel, particularly with very heavy robots.
Some background:
One of our key goals in RC2 is that “weight should matter a great deal”
Heavy should be a synonym for tanky and tough with big fire power
Light should be a synonym for agile but fragile
Tank Tracks should be the only way to move efficiently a super heavy robot, and there should be weapons that are so powerful and have such a kick back that they are only practical to use on a super heavy robot
For us, the weight classes are as follows:
Lightweight vehicle is < 600 units (in Unity mass units)
Medium weight vehicle is 600-2000 units
Heavy weight vehicle is 2000+ units
NB: These are not Kg, but what we see in Unity when we’re developing
NB: We do plan to show mass stats in Build Mode when you’re editing
Some super heavy vehicles managed to exploit a bug and travel as fast, or even faster than medium weight vehicles, for example:
The Pyramid weighed in around 7800 units
Thanos Tricycle weighed in around 9400 units
So, we’ve fixed the wheel bugs and now you will find that:
Light robots accelerate fast
Medium robots accelerate medium amounts
Heavy robots accelerate slowly
Super Heavy robots really suck in acceleration and are pretty unviable (when Tank Tracks are released they will become viable)
Here’s a comparison video showing off the dynamic between light, medium & heavy robots after the changes.
NOTE: There are no special hacks in the game mechanics to make heavier vehicles slower. The same torque and gearing in the engine is provided to all robot weights. So all of this is just pure physics simulation.
The also includes a fix for the mass of the Standard Wheel. These are now 100Kg, as stated in the Inventory. This was previously 200Kg.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Sadly these fixes also stopped wheel exploit flying robots from being able to fly. It wasn’t our intention to address this exploit before official means of flight existed, but the exploit and the bug fixes were intrinsically linked and fixing one also stopped the other.
The good news is that we can show you this teaser for what is just around the corner:
Client Optimizations
If you’ve been following our roadmap updates you would likely have seen that we’ve been focusing on RAM optimisations lately.
We’ve managed to track down a number of memory leaks which would lead to inflated RAM usage and eventually performance issues and crashes. We’ve managed to resolve a lot of these, which should really improve stability overall.
We’ve also cleaned up memory usage in general so there should be improvements all around.
Server Optimizations & Multiplayer Test
During our previous multiplayer session we ran some tests on our cloud servers. This highlighted some performance issues which we’ve been able to diagnose and improve on. We’re at a point where we’re pleased with the server performance during our in-house tests so we’ll be running some more multiplayer sessions over the coming weeks!
With the wheel fixes, client & server optimisations all in place we’ll be running our next multiplayer session at the following times:
The next planned tests will be:
EU Test: 17th March 16:00 - 18:00 GMT
NA Test: 19th March - 1:00 - 03:00 GMT
These tests will include some switching between our bare metal & Cloud servers again.
Codes
We’ll also be giving away more Founders skins on Friday! There will be another rerun of the Founders & Golden Founders Cray skins, with more than 100 codes this time. We’ll announce these codes around 15:00 GMT on Friday 17th of March.