Greeting Hellions. This update has taken a little longer than originally thought but it's for a good reason. We done A LOT. Enemy and weapon balance, UI improvements, optimisations along side the usual host of small bug fixes and level tweaks, we've got it all baby. So let's get to it and share what we've been up to.


We have now implemented our mutator system. These are set of optional gameplay changes that increase the challenge in interesting ways. Tired of only you getting upgrades? Well now your foes will updgrade with you. Need more risk in your diet? Now enemies can spawn with explode on death. The hordes of hell aren't hordey enough? Additional fodder will spawn and they are faster and tougher.
The other benefit of this system is now technically Dawnbreaker mode is a mutator which means you can use difficulty selection with Dawnbreaker including the dreaded Tormented setting.

The menu has had some visual and interface improvements as well as extra options. The new game sequence now prompts you to choose 2 "paths". Atonement (normal continuous mode) and Dawnbreaker (hammer mode) are your current choices for the demo and then you can select your desired difficulty and mutators. For the full game we will be adding in pistol start mode and potentially some others.
Menu items now have a tooltip description to help with functionality and we finally have fixed proper HUD scaling. HUD size is no longer tied to resolution and can be adjusted separately. We are still using the default load/save menu (the last vestige of gzdoom's garbage menu) but that will be replaced hopefully in the next update.

While not completely finalised, we have now done proper testing with controllers. The issue with dash not being bound has been fixed and we've added in aim assist for people who want it. The speed and strength of the aim assist can be adjusted. We're keen to hear more feedback on this so we can further improve the experience for controller players.
Steam Deck has not yet been fully tested in house (need a Steam Deck for that lol), but that will change in the future. Our plan is to get Age of Hell verified for the Deck.

We've made a host of little changes to the sound which should make for a much more pleasant experience. Sounds that were spiking too hard (notably gibs, hollows and the minigun) have been flattened out and we've lowered them sound fx volume overall to better balance with the voice lines. A dipper has also been added for when voice lines play so they come across cleanly.
Voice line frequency should now be lower by default and as always, you can adjust that (or turn them off) as desired. There are now 100ish voice lines in the game adding a lot more variety. We still have more to add in but for the demo there now should be enough to prevent specific ones repeating too often.

Two important changes have been made to improve the performance of AoH. First is now roughly half of the gib actors spawn as particles which perform a lot better that pure actors. Particle based gibs are less versatile so both are used, but you should no longer get experience the heavy slow down if you gib a bunch of enemies at once (the worst culprits were the flaming gibs).
The second thing we've done is set up some tricks to precache more assets during the title map, chiefly the shaders. Internal testing has shown markedly less loading stutter in new areas to the point where it's almost eliminated. We'll be looking for feedback from other players on this one to see how consistent this improvement is, but we've even on lower end cards this has made a big difference.

That's not even close to everything so here is the full list of changes that we've made for the 1.1 demo update

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Changes v1.01:

Game / Balance / Skill Levels:
------------------------------
* WoG & Tormented skill monster damage to 1.125x from 1.25x (aggression and speed is enough, we dont need to TOTALLY murder everyone)
* Tormented skill health pickup multiplier to 2x (requested to "keep the hectic nature but offer brief respite")
* Tormented skill various enemy tweaks (to aggression and movement ie. caco not moving due to firing rate)
* NoCheats removed from WoG and Tormented
* Dawnbreaker mode monsters health back to 100% from 90%
* Dawnbreaker moved out of skill menu to 'path' menu
* Dawnbreaker no longer adjusts health pickup levels, but instead removes or replaces health pickups with lesser variants

Game / Balance / Game Mechanics:
--------------------------------
* Dawnbreaker is now a mutator which makes it possible to play Dawnbreaker with selected difficulties as well as the new mutators below

* Added 8 mutators selectable from the skill menu
Mark of Cain
- Causes player health to rot to 50, no map health pickups, enemies drop health pickups
- Health pickups are limited to a max of random(up to 25)+(5*(7-skilllevel)) to a max cap of 40 health per any enemy, higher health enemies are more likely to drop more.
- Only a 1/3 chance of any given enemy dropping health
- Only a 1/6th chance in Dawnbreaker, with reduced spawns

Unrelenting Horde
- All non-fodder enemies spawn fodder enemy seeds, all fodder enemies are 1.5x as fast and 2x as resilient. Fodder enemies in this case is Hollows, Tech Hollows, Dreads and Dread Soldiers.

Ark of the Covenant
- Every second upgrade chest you pick, enemies get a random stat upgraded too.
- Stats are speed, health, aggression (minmissilechance) and 'intelligence'
- All monsters states adjusted to account for 'intelligence'
- Intelligence has varying results, but all enemies will try to avoid being under your cursor, gain +AVOIDMELEE and try to avoid going near your thrown hammer

Achilles heel
- Monsters have high damage resistance until hit with an elemental attack
- This includes fire, ice, lightning and holy water
- To compensate for the lack of initially available attacks, player is given flaming throw for hammer by default
- Enemies under the effect of resistance are tinted purple

Curse of Sloth
- Player movement is reduced to 75% for 1 second if hit
- Mostly a flex at this point

Smitten
- Everything dies in one hit, including you
Barrels Of Fun
- Some enemies spawn as explosive variants, tinted red

* TemplarChest cards now targettable with a wider FOV (24 up from 16) and from further away (90 up from 61)
- Adjusted behaviour to ensure you can never pick up 'both' cards by lining them up
* TemplarBell now does a more accurate z height check to prevent being able to smack it from ground level
* Player jumpZ increased from 8.0 (36 map units) to 8.5 (40.375 map units). The main reason for this was to make it feel more obvious that you can jump over some enemies. You could before but it wasn't super clear.
* Player view height raised slightly from 41.0 to 44.0
- Enemies scaled up roughly 0.04 on average to account for this
- Some enemies scaled up more than that to represent their girthiness/health better
* Dash cooldown reduced to 40 (1.14 seconds) from 45 (1.285)
* Slightly rebalanced the amount of altcharge provided on kills to balance for new mutators and skill levels working in tandem with dawnbreaker mode
* Hammer has new visuals to show when charge has reached 50% and 100% (specifically in Dawnbreaker mode)
* Hammer whirlwind now has +CANBOUNCEWATER
* Hammer whirlwind throw defaults to electric/stun type (no extra damage, just visually/damagetype)
* Hammer attacks attack-chaining window widened about as far as possible before it starts interrupting animations too much. This will make it easier to do combos.
* Hammer leap slam loop can be interrupted with parry
* Silent removal of the 'press both attack buttons to activate rage' mechanic
* Parry actor radius reduced to 40 from 56
* Parry actor now warps in front of the player as he moves
* Hammer leap slam now triggered by pressing attack while holding jump (used to be while moving up)
* Fodder enemies have had their heights increased by 4 to be more targettable (crouching still at 32)
* Soulbringers scale increased a bit to make their silhouette more distinctive against cacovores
* Hellwarden can no longer become invisible when painstated during teleport
* Hellwarden starts his second phase properly at half his health, rather than a flat 9000hp
* Hellwarden takes 2x damage from direct hammer hits
* Hellwarden is limited to taking 500 damage per tic (so should not be able to be one shot in hammer mode)

* Girth strider now 2x more aggressive with its attacks, and move 2mu per chase call faster
* Girth strider painchance down to 16 from 80
* Girth strider 3 attack spread volley down to 2 attacks
* Girth strider 2 artillery in a row up from 1
* Brutish has +MISSILEMORE and increased aggression
* Rage souls no longer +FRIGHTENING (why did I do this again?)
* Tormented souls are now parryable
- In order for this to work without killing them immediately, they have increased resistance to hammer attacks - they still die in one hit of a normal swing though
* Player movement adjusted so that it is less slippery

Game / Balance / Weapon Skills:
-------------------------------
* Glass Cannon upgrade down to +50% damage taken from +100% (buff)
* Tornado Shield upgrade projectile blocking actor now 80mu diameter (buff)
* Vampiric (heal to 50% on hit) now gives twice as much per hit (buff)
* Templar Training to 10% damage boost from 5% (buff)
* War Cry renders you invulnerable for 2 seconds (buff)

* Fatal Attraction (whirlwind suck) range reduced to 176 from 224 (nerf)
- suck power reduced from -512 to -384 (nerf)
* Thermal Inversion (sanctifier) now affects regular shots properly (fix)
- chance for elemental bullet halved (from 10% to 5% per) (nerf)

* Enemies on fire reduced damage from 4/4tics to rand(3,4)/8tics (nerf)

* Holy Smite (whirlwind lightning bolt) replaced with Trick Shot (turn thrown to whirlwind)
* New skills:
- Hammer
- Avarice - Grants armor bonuses when enraged hits land
- Sentience - Thrown hammer homes in on targets
- Trick shot - Thrown hammer becomes a whirlwind if you press parry
- Weightless - Thrown hammer windup does not slow player down

* Hammer parry window reduced by 4 tics (nerf)
- it was extending well past the animation to the point of being goofy
- shouldn't be a noticeable change to usage

Game / Base:
* ZSCRIPT updated to version 4.5
- Playsounds replaced with Startsound
* MAPINFO map defaults now include NoCrouch and AllowJump/AllowFreelook
* MAPINFO fixed missing NormSideMove values to cancel walking (strafe was still toggleable...)
* DEFCVARS fixed mistyped snd_sfxvolume default
* Removed the cave skybox mesh shader and reduced the image to 2048x
* Removed extraneous unused actors
* Removed extraneous TEXTURES definitions for non-demo assets
* Removed an 8K!!!! texture from the shader inputs
* Fixed a major behavioural bug where you could attack when TOTALLYFROZEN
* Re-added the stat book as 'open book' in controls
* Textboxes now additionally push their contents to the console
* BaseMonsters now have a routine to check if they are stuck over several tics
- after 5 tics of the same position, they will momentarily become THRUACTORS and warp to the floor
- after another 5 tics, if they are still stuck, they will be thrust forward
* Gamepad dash fixed (didnt work at all due to logic)
* All button INPUT_ checks changed to MODINPUT_
* RicardoLuis' AimAssist mod implemented with options in the Controls menu
* Heavier performance-tanking fx moved to A_SpawnParticleEx calls
- burning gibs
- blood splatter
- any time gibs are spawned, half will be particles
- sanctifier shots (left altfires as they are animated)
- water splashes
- on fire/holywater effects
* Statusbar rewritten to work with scaling properly
* Added hud scaling to the details menu
* Gibs now track count from PostBeginPlay and OnDestroy
* Additional precaching of shaders and some other assets set up in the title map. This should reduce loading stutter when you enter new areas

Game/ Level Design:
-------------
Major
* The path to the secret fight is one way now. You can still go back to the main map before you enter the actual fight, but you can't accidentally go back the way you came
* Fixed the lift leading to the Soulbringer fight that would break if you pressed the button again too quickly.
* Fixed several potential softlocks around the alternative path to the secret fight entrance
* Added in ambient sounds to several areas. So far these are waterfalls, fire crackles and blowing wind. More will be added in the future, and we will be adding in footstep sounds.

Minor
* Fixed a soft lock in Map01A near the dash tutorial
* Brightened jump pad particles
* Removed missing texture references
* Fixed various texture misalignments
* Templar sphere secret is now triggerable (floor was lower too far before)
* Removed incorrectly tagged secret sector
* Fixed potential bugs with the kill bar indicators in the secret fight
* Added in "nukes" to kill straggler monsters in the secret and final arenas
* You can no longer be damaged during the Hellwarden's intro
* Fixed several node builder voids (no guarantee I've found them all)
* Added in a couple of Dreads to indicate the path to the holy hand grenade
* Lower staircase on the secret arena path now moves a bit quicker
* Added in a hammer mode specific armour for the secret under the Juggernaut statue (there wouldn't be anything in there on hammer mode before)

Game / Audio:
-------------

* Set limit globally to 3 within 256mu
* Rebalanced all sound effect volumes
* Added a 'dipper' system to lower the volume of unimportant or overly loud actor sounds while voice quips are playing
* Removed playing of looped fire crackle sounds on lots of actors that get spawned
- they were getting spawned as fx actors during fights and chewing up sound channels
* Voice quips will now cut off on death
* Added 82 new voice lines for varying scenarios
- Gib taunts, ice taunts
- Incidental quips
- Hellwarden seen and death
- Map introductions
- Low health / missed attack retorts
- pickups for judicator & trinity
- grenade / batted grenade initiate & hit
- rage quotes
* Added in some rudimentary ambient sounds
* Added fire crackle sounds to torches

Game / Menu:
------------

* Fixed an oversight where weaponbob and movebob were both affecting movebob
* Fixed the order of commands in ui/menu event handling to correctly set values (instead of a step behind)
* Fixed ToggleButtons to have an "X" on active buttons instead of using their click texture
* Localized all strings
* Added tooltips to video & detail settings
* Ingame menu now shows map name, skill name, and list of active mutators
* New game now leads to 'path menu' where you choose regular or dawnbreaker play
- Dawnbreaker is now technically a mutator instead of a skill and shows up on the active mutators list

Game / Incidental/Minor:
------------------------

* Exiting a map now TOTALLYFROZEN's the player, entering/returning either clears immediately or after the text introduction
* Any special 128 actor hits floor (ThrustThingZ) will now automatically play "fx/jumppad" sound on activation (this currently uses a placeholder sound)
* Footstep actors now have a radius slightly smaller than the player (was undefined) to avoid splashes appearing when you hover over a surface. They also exist for a shorter time, so you don't get splashes while jumping or otherwise above liquids

* Hollow 'dirt' actors given +DONTSPLASH as they were dropping frames in watery areas
* Scavenger radius increased to make them more +useable
* Scavenger step height increased to 32, saw too many of them running against walls trying to reach a corpse
* ScavengerSpawners now check to see if there are active monsters as well as corpses
* Voice quips delay to 250 from 350, 25% chance from 33%, monster check method changed - more checks, less quips (balanced by quip frequency)
* Voice quips now check if you are alive
* Voice quips now have a condition to never play in the first 10 tics of pressing either fire button (holding makes it wait)
* Delinked pickup announcer sounds, pushed them to their own items so they don't get cutoff by pickups
* Gib sounds now have pitch randomization
* Dash shader tweaked (to not blur the central focus of the screen)
- has directional blur masks depending on input
* Water splashes now only have a 33% chance to play a splash sound
* Hammer contextual help now clarifies extra attacks better (whirlwind, jump slam)
* Contextual help font changed
* Fixed a visual bug where certain weapons would adjust FOV when switched to
* Fixed a visual bug where quickly firing after a switchparry would result in the gun offsets being pulled off to the left until reset
* Fixed a visual bug where the pistol vertical offset was too high, allowing you to roll it to see the lower cutoff
* Fixed a minor behavioural bug where parry could be activated when you're a corpse
* Fixed a minor bug where hammer slam sounds were not playing if the player landed on an enemy or otherwise finished the slam routine too early
* Increased the size of the upgrade card preview text window to prevent text spillover
* Pickups are now always bright
* Thrown hammer & whirlwind now FORCEXYBILLBOARD so you can see them better at low/high pitches
* Deft Evasion effect on hud weapon no longer shadows, but makes the sprite 33% translucent
* Instated custom healthbonus pickup item instead of relying on vanilla behaviour with replaced sprites


System:
* Localization - most text strings converted to LANGUAGE keys
- implemented into statusbar contextual help and menus
- implemented into MAP01A & MAP01B
- pickup strings done
- all monster obituaries done
- korean translation provided by Ospaggi (Hellforge member)


==========================
TODO/WIP (*) = done
==========================

add generic crosshair toggle to Details menu
add Tonemaps to Video settings menu
- make EGA tonemap?
add load/save menu if ready?

(*) confirm sound & voice balance
(*) first bell on MAP01B with power gem tutorial is triggered by monsters/projectiles?
(*) get bridge to transfer over my script changes to localization for tutorials
(*) add weapon camera roll effects cvar toggle to Details settings menu
- maybe affects quakes as well?
(*) check Ark of Covenant balance (maybe hard cap?)
- upgrades only happen every 2 chests now
- upgrades can never repeat the same type in a row
(*) Add Legendary mutator or replace with something simpler
- replaced for now
(*) fix voice frequency to have an overarching cooldown value
(*) make entering a map reset the gvar gib count
(*) Add Autosave toggle to start game menu
(*) fix duplicate hammer on trick shot
(*) fix final frame issue on hammer Altfire3 state

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We will put up a separate news post soon covering off what we've got planned for the demo with the next update (horde mode), and the game itself. But that's enough words for now c:

Cheers,

BB

Greetings Hellions,

It is with great pleasure that we bring to you the new demo for Age of Hell. More than a year in the making, it is finally here. Literally 1000s of hours of work from multiple people, this is the TRUE Age of Hell experience.

There's not much point listing all of the changes from the original demo because it's ... well, pretty much everything. The previous news post had the major ones so go back and have a read of that if you want to know more. Otherwise the best way to learn is by doing! So pick up thy hammer and lay waste to the hordes of hell.

There will be a full credits list added in the next update, but this wouldn't be possible without the help of many people. Age of Hell is 100% a team effort and there is a tremendous amount under the hood here. Endless appreciation for everyone who has helped bring this to (hellish) life.

Cheers,


BB