In 0.5.1 we've added our first iteration of player-controlled gamemode settings. We've removed `cv competitive` and replaced it with `cv rules NAME`. Valid rulesets are `default, comp, 2v2, 1v1`

• Comp: Default competitive 4v4 you know and (probably) love.
  
• 2v2: 5 minute halfs, shorter rounds.
  
• 1v1: 3 minute halfs, short rounds.

`cv shuffle` now scrambles teams randomly, and leaves spectators alone unlike the old method.

`cv bench NAME` forces a player to spectate. Useful for any pesky AFK NA players.


This option fills in any outlined object by tinting the interior with the outline color, it lowers contrast but may help some people with visibility.

https://imgsli.com/MzI5ODUw


https://imgsli.com/MzI5ODQ5


A experimental color blindness mode was also added, alongside a much-request darker concussion effect to stop you from being blinded while sitting in your dark gamer dungeon.

We also made a myriad of balance changes, I'll summarize some highlights below.

• Conc-Bombs now have a shorter wind-up.
  
• Conc-Bombs now have a slightly longer throw range.
  
• Sniper no-scope inaccuracy was increased from 12 -> 14.
  
• Round timelimit decreased from 110s -> 105s
  
• Super items can now spawn between 50s - 30s instead of a fixed spawn time at 35s

This patch includes a ton of bug fixes to food and super items. We've also enhanced the blockbuster/super items indicators to make them less visually intrusive.

This is a big one! We've had a couple more core gameplay mechanics to implement, and it so happens that they landed at the same time. Check out the deets below!

Meet CarrierBot!
Max Mega has "recruited" these automatons to deliver high ordinance if he starts itching for more action. If there is a 1v1 or a 1v2 in the final 30 seconds of the round, CarrierBot will spawn and deliver one from a pool of Power Items! Currently, the pool contains the following:

Using the Food slot, activate these glasses to peer through the materium and flush out your opponents! 5 1-second charges are available, so use it both strategically and tactically.

Now you too can be ninja! This A-Slot Gear masks your footsteps, and when not moving, will even cloak you in shadows (or at least a neat dithering effect). Note that you're allowed to shoot from cloak as well, so get evil with it!

The Itano Circus is finally in town! A volley of four semi-guided-semi-intelligent-semi-volatile rockets will burst out of this launcher, immolating everyone vaguely in the direction you're pointed!

When exploring a shattered New York, you may come across soggy pizza in a dumpster or an irradiated burger in the sewers. What should you do? Snarf it down, naturally! Food is our form of activated powerups - currently you'll be able to find Pizza, Burgers, and Chicken scattered around the maps, and in future updates you'll also find Calcium Shots that will act as a shield to fall damage, and Beer bottles that will double as a throwing weapon! Dig in!

We'd never recommend doing anything like this at home, but video games are fine! Give your enemies a real whizz bang with this soda-and-dry-ice combo. Affected enemies (and friends!) will be flashed, given inverted controls, and fire randomly during the duration of the effect. Very handy when flushing out campers, or sending you straight to the ER!

The Conc Bomb can also be equipped as a B-Slot Gear, replacing the Radio for the time being.

Harlem has been with us for a while, and a lot of lessons have been learned about our intended art direction, color balance, and theming. There's a lot more work to be done on Harlem, but this is a start that will lend some aids to visibility. Oh and also, the route to the Warehouse Roof got a little trickier. ;)

• Sniper Rifle has been given a slight spread when unscoped, even when stationary. Use the laser to mitigate this!
  
• The Carbine's "Small Caliber" damage flag has been tweaked to bring helmet, torso, and leg damage scaling more in line with other weapons.

For 0.4.1, Reki added a new mechanic which is triggered when severe blunt-force or head trauma is inflicted. Your vision closes in for a moment and your crosshair position wobbles. This will most commonly be seen when getting headshot by a high damage weapon while wearing a helmet, activating a tourniquet, or when getting hit with a Lead Pipe. The Stabilizing Frustum B-Slot Item prevents all concussion from damage by virtue of its luxurious padding.

A long requested feature, we finally got around to adding an Input overlay for spectators or streamers to show their inputs on screen. Currently residing in the bottom right hand side of the UI, eventually it will become movable to different parts of the HUD similarly to the Hit Indicators

The STG-44 has been one of our last remaining placeholder models for quite some time, and for this patch it finally gets a facelift. Lovingly modeled by Grimm, textured by Jehar, and animated by Reki, this has been the first model passed through this workflow and will hopefully be the first of many.

There is a new visual effect representing when players are invulnerable, with a hologram effect surrounding the player. The hologram is colored based on the gang (and palette) of the player who is protected.

After Turf Wars, we decided some balance tweaks were in order.
Highlights include:
Hockey-Sticks and Pipes will now break legs if inflicting over 50 damage
M4 long-range damage lowered from 35% to 30%
Pistol long-range damage increased from 25% to 35%
Graph of the current weapon damage curves[www.desmos.com]

Turf Wars concluded last weekend, with Boot-Sector coming out on top! Congratulations to ckap and his team for putting on an impressive display and mounting a comeback in the final week. 0.4.1 includes the Desert Eagle | Turf Wars as a congratulatory skin for the winning team.




It's a bit early for us to do a proper big announcement, but Classy and Jehar have been hard at work bringing a more casual gamemode to the Midnight Guns roster. Blockbuster is a variant of Capture the Flag, featuring a single "flag" in the form of a VHS tape that must be stolen from one Bot and delivered to another.

Jehar has continued to tweak TooUrban, and 0.4.0 came with an overhaul of much of the map. "Derzie"/King Construction has seen a significant layout change, and Classio has seen continued reworking.

Grimm cooked up a new Pistol model to replace our old M1911 placeholder, with jehar doing the rigging and texturing.

Grimm and Jehar brought a few new skins to the game, including a Desert Eagle magnum skin and a new Spas-12 variant, among others!

Last month Jehar got to work porting a beloved AQ2 map: urban2. It's currently not fully arted, but it's ready for a fresh coat of blood to put it through its paces.

It's urban, alsoReki and Classy have spent the last several months overhauling and replacing the existing UI framework with a new, more flexible solution. Alongside this Jehar has been making new designs and assets for a more polished look.

Ooo, aaah, shinyYou get a nice shiny UI! Which makes way for upcoming important game mechanics. Woohoo. The downside of ripping out and replacing a large chunk of the existing game's code means a lot of older legacy gamemodes no-longer work properly. Currently we are only officially supporting Action and Jump, but after QuakeCon we will be working diligently to restore and revamp the rest of the gamemode roster.


This update features new skins and revamped existing skins/models. This nearly concludes our replacement of fully-placeholder weapon models in the game. While not all of these assets represent our final vision for the art direction, they at least are a large step in the right direction. Grimm was hard at work last month making a new MP5 mesh, and Jehar textured and animated it to replace our existing placeholder.

Our new lovely blue MP5A4Additionally this update includes our celebratory "Generations" skins, which were available to patrons purchasing swag packs at QuakeCon 2024. This set features the debut of the iconic CAR-15 replacement for the Assault Rifle, for all you nostalgic M4ers out there.

You snooze, you lose

oooo, nice pipe

Last patch we introduced a new roof on Strato, and there's been some feedback about how powerful that position could be, and how difficult it is to contest it from the outside spawn. These new changes include an extension of the vent, to now serve as a new main lane in the map, and relatively easy access to the roof from outside spawn.

totally tubular

Continuing our fight to replace all of our long-standing placeholders, the grenade pistol has received its own unique model. This baby was cooked up by Grimm, and textured/animated by Jehar. Along with these new animations is an extension of the auto-drop timer, so make sure you remember to chuck it manually if you need to swap quick.

Magnum, PI

As previously mentioned, Grimm has been cooking up a new Magnum to fit our new five-shot capacity, and here it is. It comes loaded with five rounds of .400 Nitro Express, ready to blow grapefruit sized holes in anything you point it at.

Last patch wallkicks got a little funky. We've continued our iteration and bug-fixing, and have removed the triple wallkick bug (sorry folks). We have however slightly increased the base vertical boost to account for the removal of downward view angle boosting. This should be more user-friendly since staring at the floor now gives no benefit, which overall aids consistency and removes confusing behavior.

Over the last week Reki and Classy have begun work on a new UI system, which will be the first of several enhancements to the overall modularity and moddability of the base game. This system is planned to allow modders to create entirely new huds and menus without requiring modification of the base game code.

As we move towards a finalized layout for Strato, we decided to make some changes to add some connectivity to the map. New windows have been carved in banana, and a rooftop in upper mid. You'll have to find some clever ways to get to mid-roof from the outside spawn, get boostin!

view of mid-roof from top lifts

view of banana and catwalk, with the new broken railings to promote jumping through windows

view of mid-roof and banana windows from outside

AR with action mag and suppressorReplacing our 3 (three!) year old M4 model is a new M16A1 inspired AR. We wanted to give it more of a prototype look to nod towards its inaccurate bullet-hose gameplay style. This is the first official model by our new modeler Grimm, who has offered to do some modeling work for the team.

no! poor Stuart :(

Everybody say goodbye to Twinkie Rat™, and say hello to Stuart! He has some fun additional features. Be warned, he's pretty slippery so hold on to your weapons if someone happens to throw him at you!

jazz hands!

There is now first and third person bandaging animations, along with a sound. Beware, this means enemies can now see and hear (at very close range) when you are bandaging. This is a large change behind the scenes in how we handle bandaging, which paves the way for our upcoming consumable slot. Consumables will be found in the world, and allow healing and other special effects.


Over the last month, our small team got a little less-small. As alluded to in the AR section, we gained a part-time modeler in Grimm[x.com]. Additionally, Classy[x.com] has joined our team as a volunteer programmer helping Reki clean up some of the particularly egregious crusty old code which has remained from the earliest prototype stages of the game.

Magnum got some range buffs, with falloff having a more graceful curve. It also now has 5 bullets per clip-a-cylinder-zine instead of 4. Grimm has been working a wonderful new revolver-style model for our Magnum based on the menu art, which will act as the new default skin, but it didn't quite make it in for this update.

Midnight Revolution got some fancy new grass, which is our first testing into tessellation shaders. This may misbehave on pre-OpenGL 4.2 graphics cards, so feedback and bug reports would be greatly appreciated especially with older hardware. Additionally the map got a facelift with some new textures and an addition of a clock on what the community has started to call *Clock* Tower.

After what some would perhaps call a "nerfing into the ground" the Sniper is back. Despite still enjoying viability on most maps, we felt the aim-punch was a bit too punishing and felt cheap when getting hit with only a couple bullets. This patch drastically reduces aim-punch, tho it is still present.

originally omitted, added June 10th
Wallkicks have been changed to be more forgiving on vertical view angles, while also not allowing downward wallkicks. Additionally the vertical portion of the kick boost has been lowered when falling at speed, to discourage last second saves from extreme falls. This will be an ongoing process and wallkicking will continue to be tweaked over future updates.

Classy has been hard at work refactoring the old entities to use OOP, and generally cleaning up QuakeC jank. In conjunction with this we've added a new entity "func_wall" which can be toggled on/off by targeting it, an entity which as become ubiquitous in Quake mods. Additionally a whole host of Work In Progress "logic_*" entities have been added, which can act as a low-fi virtual machine for you to do more advanced entity scripting with.

Technically added last update, maps are now allowed to load their own QuakeC .dat files. Much like Gamemode scripting this allows maps to add their own entities and behavior to the game without requiring a separate mod or constant maintenance to keep it up to date with the main game.

As always if you need help with modding/mapping, feel free to join our Discord[discord.midnightguns.com] and drop a message in the #mapping-modding channel.




### 🚀 Features
- *(wallkick)* Added viewangle sweeping to make kicks more consistent on slopes
- *(wallkick)* Reduced vertical boost when z velocity is negative
- *(wallkick)* Added minimum release delay to prevent scripting
- *(wallkick)* Clamp downward pitch, to prevent kicking floor trims
- *(wallkick)* Increase the minimum delay timer a bit
- *(strato)* Updated layout
- *(strato)* Added new truck model and regenerated cubemaps
- *(strato)* Layout update pt.2
- *(strato)* Replaced van with new model
- *(strato)* Adjusted outside spawn door's entity fields
- *(strato)* Adjusted storage room door geometry, yellow roof geometry, outside large door geometry
- *(upstate)* Updated compile with new pal mapping
- *(revolution)* Testing wavy grass on revolution
- *(maps)* Art pass on all maps
- *(shader)* Added scanline effect to animmap
- *(shader)* Added tessellation to defaultwall_wavy
- *(shader)* Flipped wind direction to match wave pattern
- *(shader)* Added lod for defaultwall_wavy
- *(shader)* Adjusted wind speed and lighting intensity on grass
- *(model)* Initial rat 2.0 ent model and wmodel
- *(model)* Initial bandage anim for first-person hands
- *(model)* More Dead Rats
- *(model)* New m4 base model
- *(model)* Additional rat models/anims
- *(model)* Bandage junk model
- *(sfx)* Initial bandage sfx
- *(entity scripting)* Added `logic_store` and `logic_if*`
- Added PALSAMPLER directive to defaultwall.glsl
- Updated glass shader to nolonger use env map
- Throwable dead rat initial
- Updated dead rat throwable code for new model
- Updated strato .loc
- Added bandage animation, junk item, weapon slot
- Made medals only earnable during a match, not warmup
- Impressive 3 -> 10 kills without dying
- Moved killstreak chat message counter to be persistent between rounds
- Added map_entity_c::DefaultSpawnFields
- Added .priority field for running use_targets in reliable order
- Made item_* weapon_* ents spawnable with targetname
- Func_penetrate activate targets upon destruction
- Force draw anim when hit with a dead rat

### 🐛 Bug Fixes
- *(map)* Strato visibility fix
- Made Boh's Bullies graffiti a bit less luminescent
- Fixed up "kick" and "throw" macros, now known as +melee_kick and +melee_throw
- Sniper remaining scoped when bandaging
- Fixed func_wall not having reset func
- Updated some fence shaders to fix lightstyle issues
- Updated defaultwall_wet to use PALSAMPLER
- *(shader)* Uninitialized variable causing issues on nvidia
- *(netcode)* Disabled relative player position networking for non-local players
- Prediction not updating .my_input_* fields
- Fixed being unable to drop weapon when holding melee
- One More Time
- Removed MyGirl hand scaling
- Base field redefinition in func_crushable
- *(model)* Removed loop from bandage anim
- *(shader)* Animmap outline buffer fix
- *(viewmodel)* Fixed lasersight geomset and sideattach not being mutually exclusive
- Out of order shader write in animmap_ext.glsl
- Precached bandage junk model

### 🚜 Refactor
- *(spawnfuncs)* Added fullspawndata parser, lift door train and plat converted to classes. Added map entity base class.
- *(spawnfuncs)* Added guarded constructor to control state leaking between classes
- *(spawnfunc)* Func_crushable2 converted to func_crushable class
- Cleaned up rogue backslash causing problems compiling with Unix line endings
- Class-ified func_wall, added `state_default` spawn field
- *(spawnfuncs)* Converted speakers.qc to use classes
- *(spawnfunc)* Func_penetrate converted to class
- *(spawnfunc)* Spawnfunc_path_corner and spawnfunc_func_illusionary converted to classes
- *(spawnfunc)* Spawnfunc_trigger_hurt => trigger_hurt class

### ⚙️ Miscellaneous Tasks
- Converted phys.qc to tabs instead of spaces
- Allow `setpos` with sv_cheats
- Remove _c from train, lift, door
- Remove spawnfunc macro from plats.h
- Added includedir shared to csprogs and ssprogs
- Added midnightguns.fgd to utilities folder
- Fixed warning in mgp_files.qc
- Csqc map entities call DefaultSpawnFields instead of HandleSpawnFields
- *(shader)* Shader defs for rat/m4

### Balance
- Magnum falloff start range 768u -> 1024u
- Magnum falloff end range 3000u -> 3400u
- Magnum magazine capacity 4 -> 5
- Sniper significantly reduced scope aim punch

Greetings!

MIDNIGHT GUNS has been a passion project with a select few for a while now, and we're dedicated to polishing and expanding for general public consumption. There's a lot on the roadmap, but in the short term you can expect:

• High-performance tactical shootins. This means high framerates and low latency.
  
• A solid map pool for competitive and casual play, along with tools for content creation.
  
• An expanding list of weapons to chuck at each other.

Visual overhauls are on the way, but game pace and feel are already just right. Check out this gameplay session from OldHickory for a preview!