First things first, how are you? Good? Good.
Now, I know it's been a hot minute since I've updated WASTED, but after some light prodding from some of our community members (notably from king bore haha, creator of the extremely excellent WASTED: Binge Edition, and Big Boon, of the WASTED Wikia), I decided to jump back in with a few light changes to warm up.
One of the biggest reasons I was resisting putting together a new update for the game was that newer versions of the Unity engine straight-up broke the rendering for the game. The first person weapon models, which were already dependent on very intricate rendering tricks to get looking right, were showing up completely see through and many of the game elements were showing weird SSAO artifacts.
Still, I persisted and after a few days of work, I managed to get things looking normal (or at least, normal-ish) under the new Unity engine!
As such, I'm expecting some things to break slightly, and others to break in horrifying ways. I'll be monitoring the discussion boards ravenously to try to catch any major issues as they arise. Additionally, because many of the game's shaders ended up having to be swapped out, modified, or replaced, you may notice some slight visual differences between previous builds and the new one.
This update also includes a feature I'm finally giving in to. Players who start a new game will now be presented the option to play the original game or to play a new "Relaxed Mode" which disables the entire S.O.B. Purifier mechanic. Previous versions of the game included a mod file that did the same thing, but browsing through recent Steam reviews, it was clear people hadn't figured out how to enable it, so I've decided to include it as an ingame option. Playing the game on Relaxed Mode won't have any effect on your ability to unlock achievements (besides the ones that involve the Purifier in some way), but once Relaxed Mode has been engaged, you won't be able to re-enable the S.O.B. Purifier without starting a new game.
Besides that, there are plenty of other bug-fixes, big and small, including a major fix to the level generator that will (hopefully??) fix the long-standing "doorway to nowhere" bug that I've been flagged hundreds of times on... Please, PLEASE, let that be fixed...
Lastly, thanks everyone for your support over the years! This update truly would not have happened without the support of the community, and I'm deeply moved by the feedback I continue to get on the game. I hope, in the coming months, to be able to pay you all back with some new features I've been tossing around in my head, but as with all things WASTED, this could just be the booze talking!
Ker-Blam!
- Arthur "Mr. Podunkian" Lee
Changelog for build 995:
- Upgraded the game to the latest version of the Unity engine, in addition to updating the pathfinding backend.
- Migrated some post processing effects to Unity's new post process stack, which means some visuals may not match previous versions of the game. The upshot of this is that anti-aliasing should actually work now!
- Fixed an issue with level generation that sometimes allowed doors that weren't physically close to one another to be connected, causing the infamous "doorway to nowhere" bug and breaking the space time continuum.
- Vulture Val now sells Cassettes in New Game+ if you've unlocked the Jukebox in a previous playthrough. Wherehouse, eat your heart out!
- Fixed an issue where knockback wasn't properly being reduced by 5% per level of HIT due to some misplaced parenthesis in the algorithm.
- Added an ingame option to toggle the S.O.B. Purifier timer. Another option to disable the S.O.B. Purifier's positional display on the minimap will be added in a future version for those of you who really, really want to play the hardest version of this game possible.
- The player's first person weapon now visually tracks ahead rather than behind. You probably won't notice this, so I don't know why I changed it!
- Fixed a null reference error that was caused by the second boss's rockets, causing them to deal no damage.
- Armor damage reduction can no longer be negative, granting a damage increase rather than reducing the amount of damage received.
- Touched up the background art on the loading screen, so you have something nicer to look at while the game loads... and loads... and loads...
Update (build 997):
There was an issue where the game would lose cursor lock after alt-tabbing away from the game that's caused by an issue with the Unity Engine. The only known workaround for this issue is to allow the game to run in the background, but changing that is something I think would annoy a lot of players, so what I've done is allowed the game to run in the background, but implemented logic on the scripting end to pause game logic and to mute audio when the game is not focused (effectively pausing the game when it's not in focus). I'll undo this hack once Unity fixes it on the engine side.
Beside that, there's a fix for a weird particle "swirl" I noticed with thrown Ger-nades.
