Hey everyone, it's been a while since our post last Christmas and we have a lot to share!

We are planning to relaunch the game next month with an 'Open Beta' event and a new trailer. In the meantime we want to invite you all to participate in the Closed Beta.

To switch to the beta branch, enter the code september24beta in the Betas tab:



We play each day at 12AM and 8PM UTC and would love to hear your thoughts on the new update!

Now, time to tell you everything we've been working on. Don't like reading? I made an accompanying video!

Destruction System

Falling blocks now damage the map and players, where the damage dealt is based on the weight and velocity of the blocks.

Attachment System

Customise your weapons further with different ammo types, payloads, cores, magazines, grips, stocks, triggers and more.

Raytraced Audio and Proximity Voice Chat

You can now yell at your teammates! Raytraced audio runs on another thread and does not require an RTX card.

Hear echo in tunnels, muffled explosions on the other side of a wall, and directional ambient sounds.

New UI

New brighter design, replaced bitmaps with vectors for high-quality icons at any resolution. Improved settings UI with search functionality:

Crosshair Customisation

Customise your crosshair with the inbuilt crosshair designer. Display your ammo, blocks and health around the crosshair.

HUD Customisation

Resize and position the ammo, minimap, team score, match time, killfeed and chat HUD.

New Animations

First-person and external animations have been redesigned, with new animations for swimming, falling, jumping and sliding.

Engine Optimisations

Nearly every performance-critical aspect of the game has been rewritten, featuring a new multi-threading system, new particle engine, faster voxel storage and operations, faster map meshing, faster floating voxel checks, reduced initial startup time, faster shadow rendering, reduced networking bandwidth and more.

Animation updates, UI redraws, audio raytracing, meshing, particle updates and texture loading are performed on another thread to ensure stable frame rates when the game gets chaotic.

Lenient Input System

RSI was destroying my hands, so you can now hold keys to continually perform actions, such as throwing grenades and stabbing enemies. You can also hold left click to continually shoot semi-automatic weapons.



Also watch out for a player named Blade. He will stab you.

Soltrium Handling Licence

Each player now has a Soltrium Handling Licence, which is displayed to enemies on the killcam and on the podium at the end of the match. You can display your active Allegiance, a title, three statistics, and customise text/background colours.

New Stat Tracking

All stats are now tracked per-weapon and per-attachment and can be browsed in-game. Display up to three stats on your Soltrium Handling Licence!

New Maps

Wasteland now has buildings, and the super old Reactor map has been brought back as two separate maps: Subway and Reactor.

There are also 5 community maps currently in rotation:
- Crossing and Quarry, created by Blade
- Cold Harbour, created by TotallyPorff,
- Laser Tag, created by Realkill_1111,
- The Serene Cottages, created by Tilitaliboss

Ice Station has been extended out into a longer Control Shift map, leaving the old camp-heavy Salvage mode behind.

Scope Rendering

No more blurred backgrounds when using 2X and 4X scopes thanks to single-pass multi-perspective rendering!

Underscoring

23 new Punch Deck tracks (and counting) will play in the background, heating up as the match goes on.

Responsive Networking

Entities are now simulated on the client, improving responsiveness when throwing grenades or firing projectile weapons in high ping.

TTK, Projectiles, Recoil and Balancing

We've shifted from a slow-TTK / hitscan / high recoil system to a fast-TTK / projectile / low recoil system for two reasons:
- Slow TTK required tracking targets for a long time, which was exhausting over time and frustrating for new players. Moleing was an additional problem, with players digging down when taking damage.
- We appreciate the skill of leading shots more than the skill of controlling massive recoil. We've increased the damage floor from 30% to 60% to reward landing shots at long ranges

TTK is now displayed on the weapon stats sidebar:

Loadout Changes

The old 3-level armour modification system has been changed to a 2-level system, so you get more benefit for less points.

Utilities can also be equipped in your primary and secondary slot.

Reliable Blocks

The old game felt too paper-thin, with players not having cover they can rely on. The strength of all blocks is increased, leaving explosives as the best choice for destroying enemy cover.

Each block type has its own health value, with sand being the weakest and metal the strongest:

No Loading Screens and Faster Server Connection Times

Once the game finishes starting up, you will never be locked into a loading screen again!

The client also stores copies of maps locally, which greatly reduces loading times when joining high-ping servers. For me in Australia, this reduced Frankfurt joining times from 1 minute down to 5 seconds.

Smoke Grenades

Disappear in a cloud of smoke! Especially powerful when paired with a Scanner.

Lenient Movement

Now that TTK is faster we've lifted a few of the movement constraints. You can scope in quicker after jumping, jump out of a slide and jump into a slide. You can also slide up one block as in most cases you'll be sliding over rough terrain

Paired with the new lenient input system, you can hold shift and control to automatically start sliding again when your last slide finishes.

Improved Server List + Custom Lobbies

Filters and sorts will now be applied instantly. You can also claim and manage custom lobbies through a new dedicated UI panel.

Customisation

Rotate and zoom into your gun while editing skins, with additional options for scale + animation speed.

Improved Respawning

Left click to create a cluster spawn, press space to spawn near where you died last, or press control to join a teammate's cluster spawn.

You can also click and drag to move the camera around, and scroll to look underground.

New Map Making Features

Textures can now be recoloured with hue/saturation/lightness shifts. Maps and metadata are automatically reloaded when you make changes.



You can also set up particle spawners to bring maps to life.

Full Changelog

The entire changelog is way too big to send here, but it's available on our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/sectors

As a reminder, we play on the beta branch every day at 12AM and 8PM UTC. We hope to see you in-game soon!