Headhunter Update

Hello all,

It has been a while since the last update, but we have been busy in the meantime! Enjoy headhunting in this update with much more intuitive hitboxes, improved hit detection with faster response time and way less bugs, increased headshot multiplier in Mob-Arena, balance changes to reward precision weapons like revolvers, and so much more! Also on the menu is a significant Mine-Spades rework that increases block health across the board and allows knife to harvest blocks among the usual cocktail of content additions, bugfixes, and minor improvements.

NEW WEAPON

We have added a new Hardcore weapon: the Matchlock Musket! With a very slow reload and low bullet velocity, this hundreds-of-years-old weapon really shows its age. However, it is a one shot kill to the chest at any range and is the cheapest “sniper rifle”, so it might have some practical use. This weapon has a 2.5x XP multiplier.

Deals greatly increased damage in Mob-Arena, but not enough to make it actually viable. At least you spawn with a nuke like with the Nylon 66.

HARDCORE KILL FEED

When you defeat an enemy with a Hardcore weapon, your weapon icon will now be specially highlighted!

RESPONSIVE GUNPLAY

In a previous update, we have upgraded the shooting system to run at a 120 TPS tickrate, reducing the delay between mouse click and shooting to the bare minimum possible in Minecraft. Today we are following up on this change by making player movement and rotation much more responsive as well.

• Weapon firing now uses more up-to-date player position information – a latency reduction of 50ms
• Weapon firing now uses more up-to-date player rotation information – a latency reduction of ~40ms on average
  • The in-game difference is very noticeable – you should legitimately feel like you have 40ms less ping when aiming at challenging, moving targets!
• Added an additional 1-tick (50ms) interpolation to the player position when shooting on the move
  • This might have a side effect of making peeker’s advantage/prefiring more powerful than intended, so it might be revised in the future
• Player rotation information now updates at a higher-than-20TPS rate, which is unprecedented for Minecraft gun servers. This means that multiple bullets will now be properly spread out if you shoot fast-firing weapons like the AN-94, G11, and Minigun while moving your mouse.

PROJECTILE SYSTEM REWRITE

Did you know that much of our projectile code was over 3 years old? We have finally rewritten the code to give it brand-new modern quality and performance. In addition to much cleaner code, there are multiple tangible benefits.

• Significantly improved hit registration performance by limiting a projectile’s fetching of world entity list to once per 10 ticks rather than once per tick
  • This does mean that entities that have just spawned after the bullet was fired might not be hit, but this should be irrelevant in PVP, and rare enough in MA for the performance gain to be more important factor
  • Mainly improves performance of long ranged bullets
• Reduced the number of entity hitbox checks performed when the bullet hits enough enemies to stop checking further ones
  • Mainly improves performance of closer range combat against large hordes of enemies in Mob-Arena
• Fixed numerous bugs (detailed in Bug Fixes section)

MOB-ARENA DAMAGE IMPROVEMENTS

All Mob-Arena damage values have received a huge rebalance!

• Weapons now do less base damage
  • You will have to do an equivalent of 200 damage in PVP to kill a regular 20 health mob in Mob-Arena
  • Bolt snipers temporarily have a 1.4x damage multiplier to keep them viable (1.2 on the NTW-20). This will be removed when other mechanics that reward their use are added to the game
• Weapons now have the same headshot multiplier as in PVP
  • This means that for most weapons, headshot damage is higher than before even though the base damage is reduced
  • It was planned to remove the Headshot Penetration mechanic in this update. However, it is kept for now to avoid increasing the difficulty of Mob-Arena too much, and will be removed in a later update when another way to increase the strength of weapons is added.
  • Due to the headshot hitbox changes below, you can now headshot many more types of mobs. Watch out for Slimes though, as they still don’t have a head hitbox and will now be much tougher to deal with!
• Added back the damage holograms feature to show how much damage you are dealing to a mob!
  • This was a cool feature from 2015-2016 and it’s finally back and improved in modern GunColony
  • The holograms use packets this time, so there won’t be any performance drawbacks

HITBOX IMPROVEMENTS

The hitboxes were significantly improved as part of the projectile rewrite.

• The player head hitbox has been increased from 0.4 to 0.5 blocks in dimensions to match the Minecraft player model
• Both player and mob hitboxes now use two AABB bounding boxes to approximate a regular octagon for both body and head hitbox
  • This was previously only applied to the player head hitbox
  • It should no longer be significantly easier to hit a mob or player from a diagonal direction than a cardinal direction
  • The overall hitbox size of players has been slightly increased to make up for thi

• Mob head hitboxes have been massively improved
  • The hitbox width/height has been reduced from 0.6 to 0.5 blocks for normal mobs to be consistent with players
    
  • Different mobs now have different head hitbox sizes
  • For disguised mobs, the head hitbox now uses that of the disguise, instead of the original mob’s hitbox
  • Head hitbox heights are now more accurate for certain mobs like Creepers, Blazes, and Husks
  • Added head hitboxes to many new mobs: Spiders, Withers, Silverfish, and most animals, just to name a few
• Added “chest” hitboxes to mobs
  • The chest hitbox deals the same multiplier as in PVP
  • This hitbox is usually just a larger area around the head for most mobs (even areas above the head count within this hitbox)
  • Even mobs without a head, like Slimes, still have a chest hitbox
  • This change also affects the Shooting Range
• Properly applied the AABB inverse ray caching optimization to mob hitboxes, leading to a large performance speedup when checking hitboxes in Mob-Arena

MINE-SPADES IMPROVEMENTS

• Completely redid the bullet penetration resistance values of all the blocks in the game. You may notice minor differences to how well bullets can penetrate a block after this update.
• Block health has been significantly increased in Mine-Spades
  • In return you now spawn with 32 cobblestone instead of 64
• Some blocks now turn into others when damaged in Mine-Spades
• Most blocks no longer drop cobblestone when destroyed in Mine-Spades. This prevents things like glass and tiny fixtures from dropping stone which was super jarring.
  • Cobblestone now has a 100% chance to drop itself
  • Most stone blocks turn into cobblestone when damaged, therefore allowing them to drop cobblestone as well
  • Certain blocks like wood logs and iron blocks will drop random amounts of items
• Added all custom block values (penetration resistance, HP, bullet impact sounds, etc.) to all blocks in Minecraft 1.13-1.16. This helps prepare us for the eventual upgrade to newer versions of Minecraft.
• Knife can now harvest any block that it mines like an iron pickaxe
• Significantly increased the rate at which Knife mines blocks
• Made the central objective in Docks harder to dig down by adding some obsidian below the objective

BALANCE CHANGES

Weapon Balance Changes:

These balance changes might seem very nerf-heavy, but bear in mind that every weapon in the game actually got buffed because of the headshot hitbox increase in PVP.

• All SMGs with stock: jumping inaccuracy increased by 100%
• All SMGs with no stock: hipfire spread increased to be similar to counterparts with a stock; jumping inaccuracy increased by 50%
• All shotguns: increased random deviation of each pellet; damage range increased between 5-15% depending on the shotgun, except for Double Barrel (see Refined Barrel nerf below); headshot multiplier increased to 2.0x (from 1.8x) to reward aiming with the spread pattern instead of just spamming shots down range
• All assault rifles: can sprint again after firing after 0.2s (down from 0.3s)
• All LMGs: can sprint again after firing after 0.2s for magazine-fed LMGs, and 0.3s for belt-fed LMGs (down from 0.4s)
• All sniper rifles: can sprint again after firing after 0.3s, except ZH-29 which is 0.35s (down from 0.4s)
• 9mm Parabellum: Very slightly reduced minimum damage at range. Requires more chest shots mixed in to get a 7 shot kill at range with SMGs and auto pistols.
• 7.62x51mm NATO: Slightly reduced minimum damage at range. No longer possible to get a 3 shot kill against armored opponents at range using fully-automatic battle rifles.
• .357 Magnum: Increased damage range
• .45 Colt: Slightly increased damage but damage dropoff starts sooner. Guarantees a 2 shot kill against armored opponents up close with the Colt SAA.

Individual weapon changes:

• FAMAS: reduced damage ranges
• Groza: reduced damage ranges
• Vector: full auto rate of fire 1200 -> 1100; increased movement penalty, hipfire spread, and idle sway; fixed Burst rate of fire being higher than intended
• FMG-9: rate of fire 1100 -> 1050; significantly decreased overall damage range
• PPSh-41: rate of fire 1000 -> 960; increased hipfire spread; damage dropoff starts much sooner
• PPD-40: increased hipfire spread
• Tavor X95-R: damage dropoff starts much sooner
• AKS-74U: damage dropoff starts slightly sooner
• Mac-10: significantly decreased damage range; increased spread/sway from shooting
• P90: slightly increased spread/sway from shooting
• MP5K A4: damage dropoff starts sooner
• MP9: added significantly more horizontal recoil in the recoil pattern; jumping inaccuracy further increased
• Spectre M4: significantly decreased overall damage range
• Thompson: slightly increased hipfire spread
• Sterling, M3 Grease Gun: did not receive the jump inaccuracy nerf of other SMGs
• MP 40, MP 18: received less jump inaccuracy nerf than other SMGs
• BAR: rate of fire modifier in Fast mode decreased from 1.5x to 1.4x
• M60, M1919A4, MG 34, MG3, Negev: reduced ADS speed
• Mossberg OU, Double Barrel: added 0.1 seconds delay before firing in the Burst mode to account for pulling two triggers at once
• QBU-88, G98: fixed a bug where they did not have the correct ADS movement speed
• USP-S: increased hipfire spread; fixed taking off the suppressor improving rapid fire accuracy
• Thunder .50 BMG: now deals double the normal damage in Mob-Arena to be borderline useful
• Minigun (Juggernauts): added 0.3 seconds delay before shooting; reduced hipfire accuracy when firing rapidly
• Fire Launcher: now has the same headshot multiplier as regular weapons, meaning that one pellet to the head is enough to score an instant-kill in PVP
• High Voltage Gloves: now does a small amount of knockback in Mob-Arena (previously it barely slowed down mobs)
• R8 Revolver: increased damage by 10% to provide 2-hit-kill potential at range
• Charger 22: added the Bipod attachment at level 20
• Knife:
  • Left click attack damage increased to 30 from 25. Backstab damage stays at 60.
  • Adjusted damage multipliers in Mob-Arena

Modification Balance Changes:

• Rear Grip category: removed on Rifles, SMGs, and LMGs
• Trigger category: removed on fully-automatic weapons
• Muzzle Boost: removed on non-fully-automatic weapons
• Granulated Grip Tape: removed unintentional ADS speed increase
• M249 200-Round Box: reload time increased from 1.5x to 1.6x of normal
• Refined Barrel (SMG): range benefit reduced from 12 blocks to 10 blocks
• Refined Barrel (Shotgun): range benefit reduced from 22% to 10%
• Heavy Spring: increased benefits by 50%
• Lightened Spring: now only increases rate of fire by 2% with no downsides
• Lightened Bolt: reduced rate of fire improvement to 5%; replaced accuracy and recoil stabilization downsides with bullet velocity downside
• Heavy Bolt: increased bullet velocity benefit while slightly decreasing damage range benefit
• Muzzle Boost: increased bullet velocity downside while slightly decreasing damage range downside
• Wireframe Stock, No Stock: removed aim walking speed bonus (the regular movement speed bonus remains)

Mob-Arena Balance Changes:

• RPG-7: reduced hipfire accuracy; added a bit of visual recoil; now has 5 ammo and significantly improved damage radius; 2x rarer to reduce FPS lag when multiple are dropped
• M202: reduced hipfire accuracy; added a bit of visual recoil; significantly improved damage radius; 2x rarer to reduce FPS lag when multiple are dropped

MAP FOR PLAYTESTING

Added a new unfinished map for playtesting: Villa by MontanaMob.

This map is designed for King of the Hill, but the playtest is also rarely available in Domination.

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS

• When using a shotgun, the crosshair size now accounts for the size of the shotgun spread pattern
• Removed some old console debugging/spam from the database code
• In Mob-Arena, the wave progress bar now counts smoothly rather than every second
• Restored the death animation of mobs when killed by a non-melee weapon. Melee weapons and vanilla damage sources still remove mobs immediately to prevent dead mobs from blocking hits
• Added the proper icons for Rear Grip and Muzzle categories instead of using duplicate icons

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a major bug where receiving new Weapon XP tokens while already owning tokens of the same type would result in only 1 Weapon XP token being added
• Fixed a bug where a specific custom command could be executed without the intended permissions
• Fixed a long-time bug where players that join the arena as soon as it starts did not spawn in until wave 1 begins
• Fixed a bug where players disguised as certain mobs could have potentially received the mob headshot damage multiplier instead of the player headshot damage multiplier
  • This was not reflected in any existing gamemodes, though, as zombies in Zombie Siege had used the player hitbox
• Fixed a long-time bug where one particular projectile-related particle is unintentionally displayed multiple times to the same player
• Fixed a long-time bug where a bullet might count itself as penetrating the same block twice, losing more damage than it should be
• Fixed a long-time bug where the bullet tracers appeared too low on the screen in ADS mode
• Fixed a long-time bug where the player leg hitbox was slightly smaller than intended
• Limited the impact of various Mob-Arena “arena-breaking” bugs by preventing the arena spawning thread from terminating itself upon running into errors
• Fixed a bug where the Mob-Arena winning message was unintentionally in gray color and was missing a space after the arena name
• Edited the arena region of Safehouse to hopefully fix the bug where some buildings made in Mine-Spades are not removed at the end of a round