There's a new patch out in the main branch
Over time, I've received a bunch of requests from the community, most often related to the quality of life and game breaking issues, along with a lot of useful feedback. I'll be focusing on addressing these, in the coming weeks.I'm releasing the first (of a number of) quality-improvements-only patch today, containing a collection of assorted fixes.
Pathfinding
I've decided to replace the pathfinding system the game originally shipped with (which is the one built into the game engine), because it never let me optimize it enough, or expand it for all the special cases I needed.In this patch, all units are now using the new system. It should fix a bunch of the problems the old one had, at one:
* actors should no longer try to walk into each other
* actors will no longer wait a couple of seconds before reacting to your "move" orders (the old system was too slow to calculate their path, and was forcing the unit to wait for the calculation to complete, first)
* actors will no longer be walking into parked cars
Traffic
* following the feedback I got from some of you, I've decided to disable all unnecessary collisions between vehicles and parts of the environment. The cars will still try to avoid their surroundings, but in case they fail - they'll just be able to pass through any decorations on the map, freely. This might sometimes look silly, but at least allows for smoother gameplay. As a bonus - it's faster on the CPU, because that's fewer layers to test collisions on.* cars will now be able to turn more aggressively, letting them avoid more obstacles in narrow areas
* cars will now take more direct paths to their destinations
UI
* added the "Order of Battle" window (can be toggled with the TAB key or a button in the top left corner of the screen), showing you the entire roster of the units in your possession. You can see which units are on the map, ordered by their distance from the current camera position, as well as some basic status of each soldier (wounded, in combat, in transport, etc.).* added the Minimap - the minimap will show you the locations of all your units on the map, as well as the locations of all _already identified_ enemies. You can zoom it in (using the small button with the magnifying glass icon).
* more fixes to be added in the next patch...

Fixes
Along with dozens of assorted fixes in the UI and the behavior of all the units, we have:* fixed the stupid behavior of enemy soldiers trying to run right in front of your riflemen, when looking for a house to hide in.
* fixed the "Possible IED Location" markers. Previously it was sometimes impossible to remove them with your EOD unit, once placed.
* pathfinding now runs on multiple threads, and supports calculations for many more agents at once
* optimizations to physics

Changed files in this update