ALPHA [0.0.65] - WE'RE BACK! Tooltips, auto aim switch, FPS fixes & QoL

LONG TIME NO OOG

Heya everyone!

Last thing we posted here was the rollback in June last year. Since then we've been back in the code, moved the game to a newer Unity under the hood and worked through a long list of stuff. Today it goes live for everyone. If you're on the Ooglian Crash Commandos beta branch you can switch back to None now.

oh and one more thing: the Factory and Resources update from September 2023 went out with that rollback, and it's not in this patch either. no promises on if or when it comes back

Remember the KNOWN ISSUES from 0.0.18? Too hard, performance horrible, too confusing. This patch goes after all three, mostly the last two.

Thanks a ton to everyone who played the beta branch.

KNOWN ISSUES

• All the new text (tooltips, hints, crate labels) is English only for now, whatever language you play in
• Late rounds with a huge base still get heavy. A lot better than before, see below, but not done
• Controller hasn't been tested with any of this. if something broke there, tell us

⬇ Click here to join the discord! ⬇

this is where you can learn about the game and impact the development!

PATCH NOTES for 0.0.65

(everything since 0.0.27, so it's a long one)

• NEW STUFF
• Tooltips! - hover anything with the hand and a panel in the bottom left tells you what it is and what it does. finally
• Reward crates say what's in them - no more guessing from the picture. hover a crate and you get a line on each part too
• Hints for your first run! - one hint at a time at the top of the screen, from plugging in the first cable to moving your first tower. each one goes away when you do the thing. The "Hints" switch in the pause menu turns them off, or plays them all again
• Core health - the main generator shows its health as ten dashes, other cores show theirs when they take damage. Cores have always healed fully after every wave btw, now you can watch it happen
• Aim line - grab a turret handle and a dashed line shows where it's pointing
• Auto Aim is back, as a switch - pause menu, next to Auto Crank. OFF by default, so nothing changes unless you flip it. With it on, turrets turn toward an ooglian in range on their own, grabbing a handle always wins. There's also an AUTO/FIXED tag on each tower, press it and that tower keeps the aim you gave it. (yes, autoaim has gone back and forth a few times. this time it's your call)
• TRASH - a red square on the floor, left of the crates. carry a module, core, wall or cable there and let go, and it's gone. the main generator refuses
• REWARDS square - orange square right of the crates. picked rewards land in there now instead of on top of your wired towers
• Fullscreen and resolution - in the pause menu. pick something your screen hates and it reverts by itself after 10 seconds

QoL

• Move whole towers. grab the ring around the base and the guns and cables come with it, no more unmounting everything first
• Rotate walls. grab a wall near one end and it swings around the other end in 15 degree steps, hold shift for free rotation
• The game now tells you when something is wrong: no power, cable in the wrong socket, locked during a wave, core destroyed (its modules survive, drag them onto another core)
• Nothing on the field can be grabbed while you pick your crates. it says so if you try
• The SHIFT and CTRL signs in the tutorial say what the keys do, and light up while you hold them
• The start button after the tutorial cables reacts on the first press now
• Pause menu is no longer cut off on 16:10 screens
• Boxing glove only punches ooglians now, not your cables and cores, and punched ooglians can't get stuck inside walls anymore. It also used to hit twice per punch, so it pushes half as far. the old distance was the bug

BALANCE

• Big Ooglian has less health (30, was 50)
• Every second reward round guarantees either a turret base or cables, whichever you've gone longest without. fewer "fifteen rounds without a core" runs
• When only a few small ooglians are left in a wave the game speeds up a bit (up to 110%), and while everyone left is still far away from your generator it goes 130%. less waiting for that one last sackooglian
• Ooglians spawn closer to the edge of the map, so they come into view sooner at late waves

FIXES / PERFORMANCE

• Blood splats are capped and the old ones get cleaned up after a few waves. early game looks the same, late game stops drowning in it
• Cables that aren't moving stop eating CPU
• Outlines and drop shadows are drawn a lot cheaper. they look the same
• All in all, on our test machine round 60 between waves went from 108 to 177 fps over the beta builds, and the worst frame drops during waves are about half as bad. your mileage will vary, tell us
• The game moved to a newer Unity. You shouldn't notice. if you do, tell us

That's all we can remember. More is coming, what exactly we'll see, that's what the discord is for.

Thanks a ton for your patience, and we look forward to seeing you on the flat, gray fields of battle. oogliboogli,

The Ooglian Development Team