1st Nov 2014
We are close to finishing the transition from Unity 4.6 to Unity 5 and the new Unity PhysX 3.3 implementation, but we still have a small number of issues to solve, the key issue still left to fix involves approximating the break force values used in the previous Unity 4.x builds (which is important for grabbing, lifting, pulling, and climbing), we have contacted members of the Unity technical staff for advice and expect to have a solution in the next few weeks.
To give everyone that has supported the development of Gang Beasts through Early Access some new content to play with for the Halloween weekend we have taken some content planned for the full Unity 5 release and added it to the last Unity 4.5 build (build 0.1.4), this build (build 0.1.5) is a minor update that includes the following modifications and additions:
a new stage with two shipping containers suspended from cranes 5 seasonal head customisations a debug function for arbitrarily spawning enemy AI and a small number of other objects in scenes improvements to the hazardousness of the hazards in the 'Grind' stage
Please note the 0.1.5 build does not have the significant performance improvements that will come with the Unity 5 build (as it is built with Unity 4.5).
Optimisations / Unity 5
We fully understand that waiting for Gang Beasts to be ported to Unity 5 / PhysX 3.3 is frustrating, especially for players with lower specification CPU’s but we need to prioritise porting to Unity 5 over making new content to exploit the significantly improved physics performance[blogs.unity3d.com] and avoid having to modify additional content made for Unity 4.5 to work with Unity 5. When the Unity 5 build of Gang Beasts is finished the minimum specifications for the game will be demonstrably lower than previous builds, to test the performance improvements we have added a debug function for spawning enemy AI and other objects in game (press the number keys 6, 7, 8 ,9, or 0 to spawn an object or enemy at the current cursor position), see this[vine.co] for an example of the debug spawning function and this[vine.co] for a Unity 5 test scene that uses close to 3000 balls (for a planned ball pit stage).
GUI
We have rebuilt the current GUI using the new Unity’s new uGUI tools, this makes the process of adding and / or modifying menu items, menus screen, and other UI objects (for game modes and custom characters etc.) significantly less complex.
Custom Input
We are implementing a solution that supports per player input customisation (including support for multiple players on the same keyboard), the solution also fixes the input device indexing issue that can occur with some controller configurations, we currently expect to release the custom input solution with the Unity 5 build.
Company
There have been numerous exciting developments that we can’t currently make public, including a second artist working on music and audio for the game (together with the current sound designer and musician Robert Larder), additional developers contributing assets and other game content, productive conversations with console platforms, and potential merchandising partnerships.
Support
We are currently in the process of adding more resources to help with support queries, if you have support issues with an Early Access build, please email support@boneloafery.com, this helps us to prioritise support for specific issues. If you have graphical or performance issues please include information about the operating system, manufacturer, and system specification in the email.