Road to 1.0: Two New Arenas

Somewhere New to Fight

Washoi alpha 9 is out, and it brings two new maps. washoi_dm14, Reflected, joins the Duel and Free-for-All pools. washoi_dm7 joins Free-for-All.

Both come from the Warfork map sources, compiled from Jal's BSPs with 2048 × 2048 lightmaps. Bringing them over meant more than copying files: shaders that were never quite right, a texture that had gone missing and rocks that drew without their rock.

Alongside the maps, bots learn to aim down sights, and spectating a live player finally shows what that player is seeing.

washoi_dm14: Reflected

Warfork's wfdm14 is now washoi_dm14. It ships as map_washoi_dm14.pk3 with its own tex_washoi_dm14.pk3 texture bank, and it is in both the Duel and FFA map pools.

Its bots arrive prepared. They know 47 movement routes, learned from the dm14basics training demo.

Getting the map to look right took a few repairs. Its scrolling beam columns use an additive shader that never declared itself transparent, so the map compiler treated the beams as solid walls and removed the faces behind them. The columns came out see-through. The shader now says surfaceparm trans at compile time and in the game.

One grate texture had neither a shader nor an image in the media set and drew as an untextured panel. It is now the HazelH grate, drawn as an alpha-blended material.

The scrolling pillars and pulsing trims had a problem of their own, which turned out to be general. A shader whose material stage named its own glow image dropped every additive layer after it, because the material has one glow slot and it was already taken. The pillars lost their stripes and the trims lost their pulse and scroll. Additive layers that do not fit the glow slot now draw as their own passes, in script order. No other shipped shader changes.

The 66 textures DM14 introduces are merged into the game's texture master, so its texture banks can be rebuilt from the game's own data. The game manual's map table, which still listed retired maps, now shows the actual pools.

washoi_dm7

Warfork's wfdm7 is now washoi_dm7, and it joins the FFA map pool. Its new textures, including the grid and grate materials, come from Warfork's current media.

Look up and there is an autumn forest. The skybox is "FREE - SkyBox Autumn Forest" by Paul, licensed CC BY 4.0, and is now part of the texture master.

DM7 also exposed a gap in the terrain textures. Two rock shaders named 1024 × 1024 images the media set did not have, so their surfaces drew with no texture at all. Those images are now in the texture master, which fixes the rocks on DM7 and on Concrete Strike.

Bots Aim Down Sights

Bots used to raise their sights only with weapons that cannot fire from the hip. Everything else they sprayed with its full hip spread: the Machinegun, Voltaic, Plasma Gun and Riotgun, and the Electrobolt with 20° of scatter.

Bots now aim down sights whenever it tightens the shot. With the Electrobolt, Rocket Launcher and Grenade Launcher, whose aim takes time to settle, they hold fire until the shot counts as aimed.

A Better Seat for Spectators

Watching a player through their eyes on a live server now shows their sights and zoom when they aim down sights. Before, only demos did. Each snapshot now carries it; older recordings never set it.

The Voltaic beam of the player you are watching now leaves their gun on screen. Its start was placed before the spectator camera moved each frame, so it trailed the barrel and jumped around with the view.

Choosing spectator from the Escape menu could put you straight back into play. Snapshots sent before the server took the request still held your player, and the client read that as a confirmed join.

Escape also opens the match menu while you watch a player. Watching someone frees the mouse, and the menu used to open only when Escape released a captured mouse, so you could not reach it until you flew free again. For the same reason, a click did not move on to the next player. A click on the game view now does.