Tower Unite update for 17 April 2019

Easter events are here!

This is our first Easter themed event, so we hope you enjoy these little games. This update also includes a Plane War minigame which will run in normal non-event rotation from now on.

Tower Unite, now with PAK

We have more news with the release of this update. We've conducted some research into the PAK format which Unreal Engine allows us to package our game in. In conducting this research, we've found that PAK files can significantly reduce the loading times of the game, with some drawbacks we’ll detail below.

We tested how long it takes to load into the Plaza from the Main Menu. The test was conducted on a Intel Core i7-5820K, with a Intel 750 Series 400GB PCI-E SSD and a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 7200 RPM HDD. Of course, keep in mind that your results may vary from our tests.

• Hard Drive with PAK File: 24 seconds to load into the plaza.
• Hard Drive without PAK File: 2 minutes 45 seconds to load into the plaza.
• SSD with PAK File: 7 seconds to load into the plaza.
• SSD without PAK File: 43 seconds to load into the plaza.

There are some drawbacks to using the PAK file however, which is why this will be available via an opt-in process.

• Due to how the PAK file is generated, any change to the game will require a full re-download of Tower Unite.So for example, if we push out a small patch that only changes 25MB, the non-PAK users will only have to download the 25 MB that changed, while the PAK file users will have to download 9.8 GB.
• The PAK file is compressed, which helps reduce the amount of data that is required to be loaded, but comes with a small CPU overhead, which we weren't able to measure, but it could be an issue if the computer is lower powered.
• As the build times are slightly longer, when an update is released, there might be a small delay in when the PAK version of the game will be pushed out.

If this sounds fine to you, here's how you can participate. In your library, right click Tower Unite, and click Properties. Then, click the BETAS tab and select defaultpak. This will start downloading the PAK version of Tower Unite.

Changes

• Added new Easter themed items (available in the easter egg hunt event): Bunny Ears, Catsack Bunny, Plush Rabbit, Basket, Throwable Eggs
• New Easter Egg Hunt event
• New minigame: Easter Egg Fall
• New minigame: Plane War
• Improved Fruit Frenzy minigame
• Removed trampoline from Fruit Frenzy and instead added increased jump height for all players in the minigame
• Fruit Frenzy now gives all players an air dash item that allows players to dash through the air
• Minigame HUD now shows who killed you last
• Minigame HUD now has kill feed

Bug Fixes

• Fixed workshop player models sometimes not loading in!!!
• Fixed Adrenaline milestone not working after first use

You can follow our current developments on our Trello:
https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

UPCOMING UPDATES

You can follow our weekly developer logs here:
http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

You can report bugs on our forums:
http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report

Or you may also report bugs on our Steam community, but please expect slow response time.