Yeah, sorry to keep you guys waiting, but it's looks like the release will be at the end of this month (so about three weeks to go). There's still some programming and sound work to be done on the new SCPs additions, and on top of that, I recently got some new SCP models from Mirocaine and I definitely want to include them in the update as well. :) The promo video by Lotims Productions should also be ready by the end of this month, and it would make sense to release both at same time.
I've spent the past week doing some optimization and it's given the game a major performance boost. The game used to run at around ~35-40 FPS on my PC, now it's stable at 50 FPS. There's also a lot less random FPS drops, mostly thanks to some major changes in the MTF pathfinding AI (I've done some major improvements to rest of the AI as well, not just the pathfinding).
- The rooms behind the player (outside the camera view) are now hidden, which cut down the time it takes to render the world for about 30%. Rendering was the largest single cause for the performance issues, so the effect is quite significant.
- The previous MTF pathfinding tried to find the complete path all the way to the target room, which obviously wasn't good for performance. Now it just finds the the path to the closest room that is closer to the target room than their current position. Also, the actual pathfinding algorithm is only used if the MTF are close enough to the player, otherwise they're just teleported to the next room.
- Linepicks/entitypicks are used much more sparingly (as they're pretty expensive). There was some really retarded stuff involving entitypicks especially in the NPC code, such as doing a pick to determine if an NPC can see the player, and then doing the exact same pick in the Shoot()-function to determine whether the shot hit the player or not.
- I replaced most of the "create a pivot, position it at NPC's coordinates, point it towards something and do an entitypick/get the angle" -parts with much faster vector calculations
Speaking of the MTF, Mirocaine finished Night's MTF model and it's now added. I also decided to use the same model for the guards, although I changed the head and did some texture changes.
The guards
The textures still need some tweaking: the vest looks distorted, the knee pads look horrible and the E-11 (Epsilon-11) tag is a leftover from the MTF texture.
The MTF
Still need to add normal maps. I think I'll also try some kind of glow effect for the lenses.