Finding a Path to Fix Collisions

Hey Warlocks!

Welcome to the first Project Warlock patch of 2024! After the initial bugfixes of Chapter 2, we wanted to go back to the drawing board and take on major issues that players encountered every once in a while. We want to share what we learned, and shed some light on the whole process of preparing this patch.

Our main focus were issues related to collision detection and monsters’ pathfinding. We’ve been receiving reports of players falling through the map out of nowhere, or have no collision with some of the objects at all. On the surface it seemed like an easy issue to eliminate, however it proved to be quite a nuisance. First of all, the collision issues were hard to reproduce, and here’s where all the reports from players come in. They proved to be invaluable to our dev and QA teams.

It took days upon days to find a solution which wouldn’t produce any issues and after extensive internal testing. We learned that the game was basically overloaded with all the physics calculations. By reducing the usage of physics, we managed to eliminate both issues at the same time. If you notice something still acting up, make sure to let us know.

Apart from the bugfixes we’ve also increased the item collection distance by 50%, reworked item physics to reduce CPU overhead, so it should improve the overall performance of the game. We’ve also buffed SMG and Pump Shotgun base rate of fire in Chapter 2, as we’ve noticed that you felt that those two weapons were a bit underpowered without any upgrades.

Here are the full patch notes:

• Fixed world geometry collision detection
• Fixed issues where player would fall out of the world geometry for no reason
• Fixed issues where player would have no collisions with various objects
• Fixed monster hitbox collision detection and hitbox registration issues
• Fixed an issue where hitscan weapons would not hit monsters in some cases
• Fixed an issue where spawned monsters would appear with broken animations
• Fixed an issue where monsters would not detect the player due to pathfinding queuing issue
• Fixed an issue with monster pathfinding breaking in some cases
• Fixed an issue where monsters would not path correctly to the player
• Fixed an issue where the monsters would appear dead when alive
• Fixed Turboknight’s animation freeze
• Fixed Cacobot’s and Demonface’s death animations freeze
• Fixed Cacobot’s attack direction
• Fixed an issue where monsters would not drop from ceilings and cliffs. They may take a while but they do jump down especially if they lose player from sight.
• Fixed Demoness’ attack rotation when flying
• Fixed Wraith issue when landing after jumping down from cliffs and heights
• Fixed gate collider being too small in E1M5, allowing exploit
• Fixed an issue where double loading would occur and freeze the game on the loading screen.

• Increased item collection distance from 1m to 1.5m
• Improved blood and bullet hole decal placement
• Reworked item physics to reduce cpu overhead
• Reworked monster physics to reduce cpu overhead
• Items now only have physics when they are being dropped
• Improved monster AI to adjust it’s path based on other monsters
  Pathing priority is decided based on the distance to the player, so that monsters are less likely to push themselves around.
• Improved monster player detection. Monsters are less likely to detect player too early
• Improved optimization of monster pathfinding, queuing, prioritizing the path generation based on various things like distance to player or nearby monsters
• Removed press any button to continue on Buckshot Software Logo screen. Game will automatically jump to the main menu.

• Temporarily simplified Human AI until further planned rework is complete
• Buffed SMG base rate of fire in Episode 2
• Buffed Pump Shotgun rate of fire in Episode 2

We appreciate that you’re part of our Early Access and help us make Project Warlock II a better game with your constant feedback on Discord and in the comments.

Also, be sure to leave a review if you like the game. Steam gets our game in front of more people this way.

Follow Project Warlock on Twitter
Follow Retrovibe on Twitter
Visit Retrovibe Publisher Page