Is It a Crane? (Update 1.21.1)

Roses are red, Violets are violet, Is It a Crane? It is a Crane! It has been ten full years of cartoon violence since the Gang Beasts 0.0.0 pre-alpha builds were published on Valentines Day 2014. For ten years the foaming masses of Beef City have slowly coagulated into gelatinous agglomerations of hostility, spreading through the grim streets of the Meatropolis.

We're profoundly thankful to have an audience and community for Boneloaf's games and toys and for the miscellaneous scenes of silliness and callous brutality demonstrated in Gang Beasts over the last decade. A glut of technical debt have made it increasingly frustrating and difficult to release frequent fixes and content in the last 2-3 years.

We've been working with Rocket Science and Unity to pass/remove these limitations for some time and expect to build to a more stable release cadence from this year.

Posts

This post gives information on the 1.21.1 stability build (released with this post) and the other builds we expect to release in the coming months. A series of posts with more explicit information on what is being made for Gang Beasts are currently being written for gangbeasts.game. If there are subjects you want information on please send suggestions to Boneloaf on social media or to posts@boneloaf.co.

1.21.1 (stability)

1.21.1 stability build is the second stability release since Rocket Science took on support for a glut of important systems (builds, online, UI, and others) in February last year. The 1.21.1 build addresses a number of stability and performance issues and also has some small cosmetic modifications and standardisations, see the key modifications and fixes section at the end of the post for information.

Other Builds

The 1.21.1 build is the first of 4 builds expected to release in the first 3-6 months of 2024.

The next build to follow the 1.21.1 build is the Addressables Asset System build, addressables support has been implemented to optimise the testing and distribution of game content. Followed by an interactables build introducing a modified interactables system needed for the crane stage. Finishing with the crane stage which will release with some miscellaneous costumes.

Crane

The crane stage is a ginormous shipping container crane from the mouldering Beef City Docks with cabin controls for operating the crane, and some truculent and aggressive birds.

Crane includes the first version of new dynamic AI navigation system, this system will facilitate some planned modification to character and escalation AI and potentially support escalations that minimise some stage and game mode exploits, don't upset the birds! Be warned!

Crane also introduces the first version of a new “drivable” system, this system supports players to get into the driver's seat of the crane cab and control the crane mechanism.

Stay safe, wear a hard hat!

The key modifications and fixes in patch 1.21.1 are:

• fixed an issue that made the cephalopod tentacles fail to pass the surface of the water on aquarium
• fixed an issue with the sand text on the fish helmet costume part
• fixed an issue with game cameras not blurring when pause menus are invoked
• fixed some issues that stall loading for some online game modes
• fixed an issue that stalls loading for online game modes if moving to a second account on hardware with multiple account support
• fixed an issue that stalls loading for online game modes if an internet connection is not available
• fixed an issue that triggers duplicates of the "2124-3001 Account error" message in some contexts
• fixed an issue that made loading a second stage longer in some game modes
• fixed an error that compromised the remapping of the x/y axis on game controllers
• fixed an error that conflated the pooling systems for the gang and football online game modes
• fixed an issue that made the default game menu fail to show in some contexts
• fixed an issue that made particle systems render erroneously on towers
• fixed some issues that compromise frame rate in some contexts
• added Rocket Science ident to the splash sequence
• removed the Coatsink ident from the splash sequence
• standardised water shaders on trawler
• optimised matchmaking scheme to stabilise online game modes