Hello all,
In today’s update we have added over 20 new mutators in a grand exquisite limited-time PVP event that is just pure foolish fun! We are also announcing our new upcoming Fortnite game!
GUNCOLONY COMES TO FORTNITE!
[Edit 5/16: The joke was that it’s not a joke…]
In the last few years we have always been asked the question: why is GunColony restricted to Minecraft? Of course, the answer is that it doesn’t have to be. Last year we have announced that we have begun the development of a GunColony standalone game. Today, we are officially also announcing the development of GunCraft for Fortnite!
Powered by the new Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) platform, GunCraft for Fortnite will aim to bring about the ultimate voxel shooter experience available in Fortnite. With a curated selection of maps from GunColony and innovative game modes, you will be able to fight in an immersive block world with realistic Unreal Engine 5 graphics and destroy opposing 12-year-olds using amazing Fortnite weapons and mechanics, not to mention you will be able to use Fortnite dances to show superiority over your opponents! We also plan on the addition of GunColony weapons to the game when support for custom weapons is added, and all of this will be automated through the Place engine using a unified content system to let us keep the Fortnite experience up-to-date with other platforms in the future. Like the rest of Fortnite, you will be able to play GunCraft for Fortnite on PC, console, and ROG Ally gaming handheld.
GunCraft for Fortnite will have a completely player-friendly business model. Unlike other business-run games which apparently really want to make money, we have always treated monetization as a factor secondary to player experience. We have chosen the Fortnite platform due to its friendliness to completely free games. As it recommends games to players by quality and engagement rather than paid advertising, we hope that building on top of Fortnite gives gives games like ours a greater opportunity to succeed compared to on heavily ad-based platforms such as Minecraft, Roblox, or mobile.
Why the name GunCraft? Well, it is similar to the name GunColony and tells people immediately that it’s a block game with guns, and the name is not used by any other active (non-defunct) company. What’s not to like?
GunCraft for Fortnite currently has no set release date. The homepage for this game will contain more information about the project closer to launch: https://guncraft.io/fortnite
NEW AMAZING FANTASTIC EVENT
Since today is the most fantastic day of the most amazing month of the year we have added a cool new event to pvp consisting of over 20 custom mutators that I all wrote in a single day yes thanks i am really good at programming and i am so proud of myself.
- Vampire: Dealing damage to other players steals health
- No Fall Damage: You take no fall damage
- Headshot Only: Gun damage outside of headshots will be ignored; explosive and melee damage are normal
- Infinite Ammo: Weapons have infinite backup ammo
- Creepy: Players spawn charged creepers on death
- Enemy Detector: Every player will have an automatic detector pulse that briefly highlights enemies in front of them every 5 seconds
- Chicken: Players spawn chickens on death, and when respawning, players will spawn on a random chicken if there is one on the map, replacing it
- Death Blast: Players explode with a frag grenade explosion instantly on death that does damage to both teams
- Alchemy: Players gain random positive effect on kill which stack up over the course of the whole match
- Soul Share: When someone on a team dies from a melee attack, their entire team dies. Has no effect in FFA
- Chopper: Juggernauts gain the ability to fly
- Master Builder: Players spawn a random sphere of blocks when they die, unless they died too close to spawn
- Jetpack: Sneaking gives you the levitation potion effect
- Bullet Sponge: Decreases all incoming damage by 80%
- Buffet: Get a random stack of food on kill
- Pearl: Get a stack of ender pearls when spawning
- Bomb Trail: All players passively drop explosive slimeballs every second, do not stand still!
- Knockback Trail: Similar to Bomb Trail, but knockback grenades are dropped instead of explosive slimeballs
- Village: Villagers fall randomly from the sky in large numbers
- Outbreak: Zombies fall randomly from the sky in large numbers
- Ghastly: Ghasts randomly spawn in the sky in large numbers
- Compromised: Players drop Tactical Awareness Grenades on death, one from both teams will be dropped in team gamemodes
- Reincarnation: Players respawn at their death location, unless killed by environmental sources
- Teleport: Killing another player teleports you to them
- Shuffle: All player positions are shuffled randomly every 10 seconds
Note that most of the new mutators can be picked as additional mutators by players with donor ranks, but a few cannot be added by players because they are actually way too spicy.
More screenshots:
NEW AMAZING FANTASTIC PLAYLIST
We have added a new system to modify regular playlists with new mutators. That’s why we now have 285 pages of playlists during our new Amazing Fantastic PVP Event! (Thanks ShibaShib for the image)
These playlist now includes every single new mutator as well as some existing mutators combined with all appropriate gamemodes. In addition, 30 custom combination modes are available that contain anywhere from 2 to 20-ish mutators.
In addition, we have enabled some amazing returning maps such as Treehouse, Inferwhy, and CRMTnewSpawn (which has been slightly tweaked).
This playlist will be 100% of the maps available during the next day, then will appear rarely alongside regular maps for the rest of the month.
HUNTERS MODE CHANGES
The Hunters mutator has now been reworked to no longer spawn mobs by itself.
Instead, it will only add the functionality to count mob kills as kills for the win condition as well as grant XP for killing mobs. This means that other mutators that spawn mobs can now be used with Hunters mode to create interesting special gamemodes.
BLOCK DAMAGE IMPROVEMENTS
We have improved the block damage of explosive weapons significantly. Note that this change is long-term and not related to the limited-time playlist.
- Fixed multiple bugs in block damage calculations for explosions (detailed in the bug fixes section)
- Removed hardcoded 0.5x multiplier to explosive damage to blocks
- Rebalanced all explosive weapons’ block damage
- HE Grenade: now creates a small hole but deals high damage to blocks
- Grenade: now has a large radius but deals low damage to blocks
- Molotov: now gradually break blocks in a large area
- Incendiary: now quickly breaks blocks in a small area
- Rocket Launchers (e.g. RPG-7): deals very high damage to blocks in a relatively small radius; tends to instantly destroy the block it directly impacts
- Grenade Launchers (HK69A1): deals lower damage to blocks in a larger radius; very effective against weak blocks such as dirt
- Mortar Strike & Cluster Strike: now behave like the HE Grenade, with a tendency to create holes in the ground that are useful as cover to players
- A-10 Airstrike: significantly nerfed the block damage caused by this airstrike, but it is still the most effective in terms of destructive potential to blocks
- Mini-Nuke: now deals much more damage to blocks in a slightly smaller radius
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
To properly handle the the highly explosive nature of some special scenarios, we have further improved the performance of block breaking in Mine-Spades!
- Block degrade effects are no longer sent for block damage if a block is entirely surrounded by occluding blocks on all six sides
- To improve player FPS, only the nearest 200 block degrade effects will be shown per player
- When there are more than 200 block degrade effects near the player, the furthest effects will automatically be hidden
- This should only affect very intense gameplay scenarios and prevent massive FPS lag in these cases
- This feature is powered by the Place engine and its ability to keep track of block degrade effects per-player in a detailed way
OTHER CHANGES
- Applied fixes to prevent anti-cheat dragbacks related to certain items such as the Swiss Airforce Knife
- Added the ability for playlists to inherit other playlists while adding mutators and scenarios
BUG FIXES
- Fixed a bug where block degrades were being sent even when a new block damage is too minor to change the visible block damage state, contributing to major server lag in Mine-Spades
- Fixed a bug where block degrade updates were not properly being recorded, causing multiple block degrade reset timers to exist for a single block when a block was damaged multiple times
- Fixed block damage from explosions not respecting the block damage multiplier configuration value
- Fixed block damage from explosions not respecting the distance between the explosion epicenter and the block (this should more or less counteract the removal of the 0.5x hardcoded multiplier
- Fixed a bug where some types of leaves incorrectly had the block stats of wood planks
- This was due to Kotlin serialization not preserving order for JSON keys, and was fixed by making suffixes (like “leaves”) always apply before prefixes (like “birch”)
DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS UPDATE
This month has been a relatively slow month for Place, but we have still made a considerable amount of progress. Mainly, we have been implementing a system for Sounds and Particles in the Place engine.
The sound system is much more flexible than Minecraft’s, supporting multiple sound classes with different attenuation behavior, and supporting playing sounds with any maximum volume and in-world range, as well as an optional sound travel delay feature to mimic the real-life speed of sound. Place sound events map appropriately to Minecraft sound events for good support for Minecraft players, and once we begin work on the Place engine, these sound classes will be implemented natively for perfect compatibility.
The particle system is designed to be similar to Minecraft particles, in order to maintain good compatibility with Minecraft client. However, it natively supports some quirks of the Minecraft particle format, and is built for future compatibility with a Place standalone client that will aim for wider particle features than Minecraft. Currently, the system can display single particles, but more complex effects will be supported in the future.
These two additional features bring us closer to being able to develop more sophisticated gameplay logic inside the Place engine in the future.
