New Level: Diamond
Introducing a brand new level called "Diamond". It's a very large level with a giant glowing suspended diamond in the center, surrounded by elevated walkways, an inner pit with mini jumps, and an outer ledge. Tons of opportunities for trick shots and long distance hits.
New Mode: Tank Battle
This new mode is unique in that each player starts with a health bar that must be whittled down by scoring trick shots on them. Once the health bar is depleted, that player is eliminated! Also all players have fireballs and stronger shots. The lack of catching means you must use level geometry to your tactical advantage and avoid being caught out in the open.
New Mode: Lightning Round
This is a hyperactive Deathmatch mode where you must go all out in order to win! You get points for KOs, but rounds only last 30 seconds (first to 5 round victories will win the match). So every kill makes a huge difference, and there's no time to waste.
Reporting & muting Tools
The Dodgeball community is generally very friendly. But every now and then you might run into a player not living up to this standard. So there's some helpful tools now:
- Muting a player now persists across games and play sessions. They get added to your permanent 'individual mute' list (until if/when you choose to unmute them)
- Mods can now mute a player for all players in a room. This isn't a permanent mute, but serves as a 'time out' for players that need one.
- Players repeatedly abusing the chat function can be globally muted in all games, all rooms.
- The Players panel now has a 'Report' option that prints out the chat log into a format that can be mailed to the developer. This provides useful context and can be used to make a permanent mute as described above.
Bot Improvements
- Lowered AI bot acceleration to give them more human-like movement and responsiveness
- Decreased cooldown period after bots throw a ball before they find a new target
- Lowered bot rotation speed, so they don't rapidly swivel and hit you with a superhuman shot
- Adjusted bot aim slightly higher if target is elevated, as they were previously bad at hitting targets above them
- Bots will stop crowding the capture point, looking for a pass, if the friendly cube carrier gets within reasonable distance of capture
Game Mode Rebalances
- Collecting the Power Cube will result in a 3 second window where you can not throw it. This is done to prevent extremely spammy passing strategies.
- Collecting the Super Ball will activate a very short temporary shield
Features
- Added "Motion Blur" option in video settings
- Custom game modes now save in Steam cloud
- Added "Default" score limit option, to ensure the ideal score limit is always picked (based on num players & teams) when manually choosing game mode types.
- New custom rule: Ball Collect Shield, that applies a shield to a player after they pick up a ball. The shield does not reactivate if they quickly pick up the same ball.
- New custom rule: Cube Throw Delay: prevents player from throwing for a specified time range after collecting the Power Cube
- New custom rule: Player Health. Grants players a health value that is decreased based on the score value of hits against them. Players are only
- KO'd once their health is depleted.
- Added "Sudden Death" announcer clip for time limit modes when the score is tied at the end of the time limit
Improvements / Adjustments
- Increased color saturation of held dodgeballs
- Decreased fog brightness for Glow In The Dark modifier (wasn't dark enough!)
- Moved ‘Show Clan Decals’ to misc preferences, from video preferences
- Lowered default mouse sensitivity
Leaderboard is always shown when in Challenge mode (used to hide while playing)
- If the score value for a hoop or capture is worth more than 1 point (based on game rules), then the point value is displayed on the score alert
- Added more clear popup text message when joining room fails, instead of just updating small label on Find Match panel
- Match Settings now hides main Game state HUD
Fixes
- Fixed announcer not working in main lobby menu
- Satellite ball now correctly uses the Rare exchange (3x AP) not the Uncommon exchange (2x AP)
- Fixed errors / hangs that might occur if switching into 1st person spectator mode onto a KO’d bot
- Fixed bots getting stuck in place due to improperly prioritizing top-ranked vs. closest players in non-objective modes
Added protection against round survival bonuses being awarded more than once
- Fixed XP gain bar not animating additional XP gain after gaining a level
- Fixed time display in time trials mode
- Fixed jump height upgrade not working
- Mod ability to chagne a player’s team now works as expected
- Fixed bug where multi-round FFA matches with scoring would not select the correct round score leader (was using roundVictories instead)
- Fixed changes to custom mode title / description getting discarded if you added a rule before you saved
- Fixed label hovering over your head if doing 1st person spectating
- Fixed 'Speedy Bots' Arcade waves not using correct speed value
