[ Optional ambient background music to listen to while reading. ]
Hello again!
Welcome to the 3rd Monthly Devblog; the train of progress chugs along, and we're getting ever-closer to the special day we're all waiting for. No, no release date yet, I'm afraid.
[ A couple examples of some items with the new item disassembling system. ]
Lancer 2's item Disassembling System has made its way to Crowlite for Lancer 3. Acting as a loose extension to the Crafting System, the Disassembling System lives inside the main inventory panel, and is used by right-clicking an item and selecting the respective disassemble option, or, with Crowlite's inventory system, by drag-and-dropping the tool required for the disassembly onto the item in question.
This allows nearly all items to be disassembled in some way, without bloating the main crafting menu, while also introducing an element of research, requiring you to figure out which tool you actually need to get the job done, rather than being told directly.
While on the topic of items, their option buttons have been upgraded to feature a special tooltip that will show up and explain why you cannot execute a specific item action, rather than making the action disappear completely.
This introduces additional user feedback and helps keep you informed when it comes to item actions without introducing any weird confusion.
While a rather small and minute change, Crowlite category panels can now be collapsed at will to make looking through certain menus an easier and less cumbersome experience. This applies to the scoreboard menu, the settings menu, and any other Crowlite menu that uses categories of that type.
In Lancer 2, when a CP character died, their uniform item was replaced by a broken variant, which could not be interacted with besides being broken down and salvaged for resources and armor. In Lancer 3, broken CP uniforms can actually be equipped freely, and will give the character wearing them a special skin where the lenses are 'off'.
This allows anyone to wear the broken uniform and conceal their identity, get a vocoder effect in their chat messages, and special CP footsteps, without getting any actual Combine powers.
Speaking of CPs, though...
A small detail that not many servers consider with these sorts of Civil Protection uniforms are the visors. For Lancer 3, the 'off' variant of the CP uniform mentioned above will be automatically applied to characters on death, making for a more dramatic and immersive death sequence.
[ Three of the restored City 8-styled citizen clothing textures. ]
While on the topic of model textures, this month I spent a significant amount of time restoring the old, TnB-era textures of certain citizen clothes, which were specifically made for their City 8 campaign.
These textures were modified in a vast majority of successor model packs to make the textures city-agnostic and allow them to be used in maps other than City 8 without issue, but considering Lancer is City 8-based, I figured it'd be nice to see these textures make a return.
Speaking of citizen textures though...
[ All the face skin customization options available for the male citizen models. ]
Our citizen models have received a big update when it comes to face skin selection, most of them now featuring up to 9 unique face skins per model. These face skins were originally used in a previous pack for Lancer 1, which were unfortunately lost on Lancer 2, and now they are back!
Additional skin options and general customization will be introduced in the future.
[ All the new television skins available in-game - old skins not shown. ]
Lancer 2's televisions join our ambitious ambiance module, featuring new sound effects and a large assortment of new textures that cycle randomly over time.
For now, they can be used passively to improve the atmosphere, but in the future there are plans to make them properly functional, with custom channels, shows, and live broadcasts.
[ The current state of the info menu. ]
The action menu (F1) has been slightly reworked, with added support for icons in the actual action buttons, as well as some slightly shuffled textures, and a new date display.
The keen-eyed (keen-eared?) of you might have noticed unique item move sounds in some of the previous development showcase videos. All items in Crowlite have been edited to feature a unique move sound that plays when they are moved from one inventory to another.
This sound is audible to players around you and serves to add to the general immersion that we are trying to achieve with this iteration of the server.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this, and welcome to the community if you are new. We've been getting a few newcomers lately, which is always very nice to see.As always, progress is continuing - albeit a bit slower as of late due to some unfortunate real life circumstances that demanded my attention. Rest assured, development speed should return to normal soon.
I’ll take this moment to remind once again that our staff applications are open; Media Team, Event Team, Faction Management Team, Administration Team, and even Management Team. This is a big, ambitious project, and it cannot be successful without a strong team of people behind it. If you are interested, consult this link: https://apply.lancer-hl2rp.net/staff.
See you again soon.
