For Update 7 we’ve continued working on the Heist game mode.

Bomb

One of the new elements for the Heist game is a bomb. The bomb is a throwable item that counts down before it explodes.

Like everything we’re making, we designed the artwork for the bomb to be “universal”. The goal is to have a distinctive look, but allow the model to be re-used for other purposes; our bomb has an explosive payload, but you can re-use it in your own game modes in new ways.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6G3-PKm-GQ

Damage Types

To support some things we have planned for the robot on the Heist mode, we’ve upgraded our damage code to include multiple types. Now when a player takes damage, you’ll hear a different sound depending the source of the damage.…

One of the annoyances when writing software for multiple platforms is the differences in case sensitivity of the files systems. If you’re not familiar with the term “case sensitive” it simply means that the capitalization in the file name is important. On Windows the capitalization is not important, but Linux and Mac are both case sensitive.

When we ported Natural Selection 2 to Linux we ran into the case sensitivity issue. Knowing this would be an issue, we were reasonably careful during development to keep the case of file names consistent, but there were a few instances where assets used the wrong case to refer to another file. We decided the best option was to make our Linux version work the same as Windows since there were already a number of popular mods and we didn’t want to break them by enforcing case sensitivity on any platforms.…

We’re back after our holiday break with a new Future Perfect update. We’ve switched to releasing updates to the main Steam build on Monday, but you can get daily updates by switching to the beta branch.

Heist Game

We’re continuing work on the Heist game mode that we started a few weeks ago during our game jam. The core of the game is about manipulating electronic systems, so we’ve been working on expanding the set of building blocks for making interesting levels.

Some of the new pieces are a “security cage” which can be used to prevent sockets from being hacked and a lock which requires a specific key to activate. We’ve also implemented a timer component which you can see here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfEh6ZL4uo…