Road to 1.0: A Closer Look at the Guns

Look at What You Are Holding

Washoi alpha 8 is out. Alpha 7 was about the frame. Alpha 8 is about the thing in the bottom corner of it: your weapon.

Several guns had parts that were in the model all along and never shown, or shown wrongly. The Plasma Gun's chambers glow, the Voltaic's barrel has its energy tube back, and the Machinegun's bolt finally moves. Grenades fly faster and farther. The Electrobolt waits for its sights instead of throwing a shot from the hip.

There is also something for players who are new to all this: hints that suggest the next thing to learn, and a console command that gives anyone a practice server of their own.

Parts That Were There All Along

The Plasma Gun's chambers now glow green. Their plasma core, halo and glass were drawn as opaque painted surfaces, so the dark glass hid the core behind it. The chambers also turn slowly while idle, spin up while firing, and wind down over 1.5 seconds after the last shot, rather than turning at one speed.

The Voltaic's barrel channel shows its teal energy tube again. The tube, its glow and an emit strip had no bone weights in the model, so the game drew them collapsed to a single point and the channel looked empty and black. They are now bound to the gun like its other parts.

The Machinegun's bolt cycles back with each shot and is racked once during the reload. That bolt shipped with the gun but was never shown.

The Grenade Launcher's drum turns through the whole 800 ms between shots, a full revolution and one chamber, instead of snapping one chamber in 0.16 seconds.

Other players' guns get their parts too. Only the main model was loaded for a gun in someone else's hand, including the winner showcase, so their Plasma Gun had no chambers and their launcher had no drum. Now the gun pointed at you is the whole gun.

A New Sight and a Real Glow

The Electrobolt now carries the sleeker angled sight shared by the Lasergun, Plasma Gun and Rocket Launcher, instead of the Machinegun's boxy one. Its holo pane, LED strip and ammo counter sit on the new sight.

Its teal barrel glow also changes. It used to draw as a solid teal slab, traced by the weapon outline. It now shines out of the gun as a gradient, as in Warsow: glow gradients add their light over the gun, and the outline leaves them out. Pickups, dropped weapons and other players' guns draw the glow the same way, where they showed its black as a black slab.

The new Electrobolt model and the Voltaic fix arrive in an updated washoi_weapons.pk3.

Grenades With More Reach

Grenades fly 20% faster: 1080 instead of 900. Gravity on grenades is now about 930 u/s² instead of 840, and the fuse lasts 1.625 seconds instead of 1.5. Together, an aimed lob reaches 30% farther.

Shots That Go Where You Meant

Holding Mouse 2 with the Electrobolt never hipfires. Fire pressed with aim held, or while the sights are still coming up, now waits until aiming down sights is complete and then shoots straight.

Before, a shot during the raise left from the hip with its 20° scatter. So pressing both buttons at once, the natural way to snipe, usually missed. Fire on its own is still instant hipfire.

Your Electrobolt's rail also starts at your barrel and stays where you fired it while you move on. It used to start from a point by your eye, which showed as a second beam opening off the gun.

The Voltaic's beam now shows the moment you fire from the hip. It used to appear only after a 0.25 second delay, while its shots were already hitting.

A Dropped Gun Lands Where It Is

A dropped weapon now flies and lands where the server has it. The client used to throw it with its own physics. It could come to rest in one place, then slide to the server's spot a moment later, and on some floors, such as beside the Voltaic on washoi_dm11, it fell through.

The client now replays the server's own throw over the same map collision. A dropped weapon bounces a few times, spinning less with each bounce, and comes to rest on its side.

Something to Learn Next

Washoi has a lot of movement and weapon technique to pick up. Alpha 8 adds hints for new players: a bar above your weapons, styled like the warmup ready bar, suggests the next thing to learn when it fits what you are doing.

The hints cover crouchsliding, bunny hopping and strafing in the air, walljumps and ledge climbing, landing crouched, aiming down sights, switching weapons, the blade's charged blast, rocket jumps and bouncing grenades. They also cover reloading early, finding health and armor, surfacing for air, the underwater shock of the Voltaic and Electrobolt, the scoreboard, and arming and defusing the bomb.

Each hint names your own keys. The same hint appears at most once a minute, throughout warmup and for the first two minutes of a live match. Settings → Gameplay → Hints, or cl_hints 0, turns them off.

The weapon pickup prompt now matches the hint bar, with a gold Weapon cell before your pickup key and the weapon on the ground.

A Practice Server of Your Own

The console's map <name> command now works for every player, not only with developer 1. On washoi.net it starts a practice server of your own: one of the lobby's maps, with no bots, nobody else and nothing rated.

Before, the console refused the command, and the lobby only accepted the request from its own machine. Each player can run one practice server at a time, and start at most three a minute.

Smaller Fixes

Fall damage plays only your pain sound. It also used to play the hit sound meant for damage you deal to others.

When a match cannot go on, because the connection was lost or a map failed to load, the dialog now uses the lobby's gold card and a game-styled "Back to lobby" button. It used to be unstyled browser text and a plain button.