New build! This is a relatively quick update since the last one, but with one fairly small change with potentially large consequences on the Veranda map:

I’ll write more about this change later, but the impetus for doubling up the statues at the front of Veranda was a series of player-designed and requested game modes. First, people have been playing “Known 3 Soft Tells” on Ballroom lately. The Spy always chooses Contact Double Agent,1 Inspect Statues, and Seduce Target. The Sniper knows these are the three missions, which is usually a camping deathtrap, but you can’t really camp “soft tell missions”, and so the mode is fairly balanced, and has a great feel, still well within the aesthetics of the game, but with a distinctly different flavor. Of course, this led to more experimentation, and the question became whether it was possible on Veranda, the map that’s really hard for the Sniper. Well, after adding “Known 3” as an available game mode, it turns out “Known 3 Hard Tells” works on Veranda, since it’s such a big and busy map, but the soft tells version didn’t work because all the statues were far apart, so you had to inspect them one at a time, and NPCs rarely visit the status three times on Veranda. The soft tells version was harder than the hard tells version on the easiest map for Spies?! Game design is confusing. Anyway, I doubled up the statues and we’ll see how that changes the balance of the map. It’s one of the least-played maps, mostly because it’s such a big time and attention investment, and so I think this will breathe some life into it, for a while, at least.

I also managed to stream the release of this build, which I’m going to try to make a regular thing. I went through the bug fixes, and then played the always-awesome kate for a bunch of games of “k3 soft” and “k3 hard” on the new Veranda, and had a blast and a pretty big audience considering it was 2am PDT. I’ve uploaded the video to the SpyParty YouTube Channel, and here it is (the games start at 18:23):

There are a few things I’ll fix next time I do this, and please post a comment below if you have additional things you think I should do:

• mic farther from mouth!
• don’t bother going through the old build’s bugs, it’s not incredibly interesting, it takes forever, and OBS does a horrible epilepsy inducing flicker (at 14:40) during restart
• get TeamSpeak and whatnot set up before I start streaming :/

Here are the official release notes:

• double up front statues in veranda, yikes!
• push modal message background farther back in the hopes of making text visible
• try to fix more lobby list scroll bugs by clearing selected client
• finally (?) fix the lobby state sort
• don’t set last keyboard time on repeats, so now menus work with keys down for teamspeak
• mask spy/normal keys for HL/LL if typing chat string
• flirt % in seduction HUD
• display number of required inspects in mission name
• added –nosound command line for debugging directsound issues…better to use –mute if you just don’t want sounds
• true up lobby details and /who so awayis last (for easy /who -> ctrl-c action)

1. aka. “Banana Bread” [↩]