MAJOR ASTROKILL update for 5 January 2022

This update marks a fundamental shift in how the game works under the hood. There are a slew of improvements that increase performance, improve joystick & controller support, optimize HUD space, and future-proof the game. Besides a beefed up architecture, the HUD has been redesigned to improve the 3rd person experience and minimize on-screen clutter. I did a visual polish on all the environments to depict a harsher, brighter atmosphere. A new fixed turret-system is now present in several missions. I'm very happy with the visual style of this new asset and want it to carry over into a new, playable faction.

HUD

• Thinned out many reticles and gauges to reduce visual clutter & obstructions
• Rearranged gauges so that no gauge is obscured in 3rd person
• Implemented an animated leading crosshair to emphasize the location to aim at
• Added a flashing dot that is placed on the origin of the selected target
• Fixed the orientation of holograms displayed for the selected target
• Fixed an issue with target-reticles becoming gimbal-locked

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Graphics

• Increased the brightness of star-light in all levels to better match a real space-environment
• Added a post-processing effect to over-expose highlights
• Optimized how skyboxes are drawn
• Fixed an issue with tracers being far too oversized at long distances
• Modeled and textured the new Phalanx turret-system
• Overhauled the "3D asset studio" accessible from the Graphics menu (assets are now only loaded one at a time and camera-controls are more intuitive)

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Gameplay

• Replaced many static turrets with a new "Phalanx" turret that is mounted on a floating platform (older turrets were mounted on broken debris)
• Moved the 3rd person camera back significantly on all fighters to reduce the screen space taken by the player's ship
• Reduced the difficulty of some particularly hard levels
• Overhauled the objective-system to make level-scripting much more streamlined

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Joysticks

• Overhauled the entire system that feeds joystick-input to the player's ship
• Mapping-presets are now read-only, while the "custom" mapping is always writable
• Replaced the "bypass" option with a "none" option in the mapping-dropdown
• Added a mapping for the Thrustermaster Airbus Sidestick
• Fixed an issue with some fields not being writable
• Offsets are now zero in most cases and multipliers are usually 1 or -1 (inverted)

IO

• Added a mouse-sensitivity slider to control the speed of the menu-cursor without affecting gameplay
• Wrote a new axis-input system to manage simultaneous input from multiple controllers (may have PTSD from this one)
• Eliminated a slight lag from all controllers (keyboard, mice, joysticks, gamepads)
• Rewrote/simplified internal timers responsible for mouse-movement and processing input in general (game should "feel" the same even at 500 fps!)
• Tested VR with the Oculus Rift S (rather glorious)
• Tested the Logitech F310 gamepad and the Thrustmaster Hotas X joystick

Core

• Upgraded to UE4.22 (still behind, but I can get it caught up to 4.27 quickly)
• Replaced many, many Blueprints with C++
• Faster overall load-times (both running the game and opening levels)
• Internal objects are now initialized in the correct order and destroyed when no longer needed
• Level-bounds can now be defined as any combination of spheres, boxes, and cylinders
• Added support for altering level-bounds as gameplay-conditions change
• Added support for prohibited zones within valid level-bounds (a restricted area)

UI

• Menus are now placed in front of the camera in a much more reliable & accurate way
• Improved accuracy of cursor-alignment with buttons & dropdowns