After a few weeks of teasing, its time to release 0.38 on to the unsuspecting public. Some of the major features to check out once your download bar hits 100%:

- A ton of new gothic themed meshes, many of which are showcased in the newly included map Ruin (PRDM3) by PromEUs.
- The long awaited mouse acceleration, with unmatched control over the acceleration curve. There's a ton of settings in the menu to give you the feel you want.
- Some minor gameplay tweaks with a slightly buffed Ion Cannon and a significant improvements to the player respawn system.
- The usual squashed bugs and tech cleanups (such as getting maps ready for workshop integration, fixing bloom, etc)

Primarily though, this update brings a major refresh of our menu system, in preparation for features like workshop integration for maps and HUDs, matchmaking, XP, friends lists, etc -- all the Steamworks features that players have been not-so-patiently waiting for. As the very first step, we've integrated one of the features in surprisingly high demand: cosmetics. We know a small number of players (burned by other games) are a little uncomfortable with the idea, so we'd like to address some of these concerns here (rather than in angry forum posts).

First up, some players feel that it's in poor taste to release cosmetics before the core game is considered complete and historically we've agreed with them. But for this update, we felt the time was right. On the code side, adding this support was pretty trivial, taking only a couple of days. Art of course took longer but with shooter busy on UI, they were a good candidate to be developed in parallel.

During the development of these cosmetics we have also honed our art style to give a much improved look for weapons and we are eager to start applying this direction to the core weapon set. Being able to spend a couple of weeks developing our look like this has been hugely valuable and we've barely scratched the surface.

The cosmetics also give players a way to support the project without us begging for money. We've never been huge fans of taking pure donations and things like Kickstarter or Patreon eat a surprisingly large amount of development time (easily more time than we spent on cosmetics). This is also the idea behind the more expensive, gold, "supporter" editions of some melee weapons -- they're a way for players to throw a bit of extra cash our way to keep us developing while getting some kind of tangible reward.

And of course, any microtransactions in Reflex will *always* be purely cosmetic. We will never have items with different stats because we feel that goes against one of the core values of an Arena FPS -- all players spawn equal. This includes ensuring that no cosmetics ever provide a subtle gameplay advantage (such as reducing your visibility to other players). We will also never use them as a way to paywall off things like modes or maps. If you own Reflex, you'll always be able to play any map or mode in it with anyone else who also owns Reflex.

If at any point in the future we break any of these promises, you are encouraged to track me down and punch me in the face.


General

- Added a bunch of stuff and then took it out again. You'll have to wait until next year.

Tech

- Upgraded to Steamworks 1.35
- Fixed a flicking/shiny bug occurring with newer NVIDIA drivers, only occurred when HBAO/SSAO was enabled.
- Added underlying inventory and economy systems
- Added mouse acceleration and custom curves (special thanks to povohat and kovaak)
- Added cl_input_subframe again
- Defaults to off for now, since there's definitely still bugs with it
- Find them and tell us about it
- Fixed a bunch of keyboard focus issues between raw input & normal input when lua widgets had focus on subframe input
- Fixed melee decal projection direction
- Added PAK file support
- This should dramatically decrease initial loading times for anyone not on a SSD
If you're one of those players who likes pawing through all our assets, pak files are just zips.
- Savemap is now clientside in preparation for publishing maps to workshop
- Savemap is also when .light files are written, so remember to savemap after building light.
- Moved directories: maps, screenshots, replays
- If you're a server admin using various scripts to update, you'll want to adjust them for the new paths
- If you've got custom and work in progress maps, you'll have to move them
- Updated r_bloom (more updates to come, but so far it looks better and runs faster)
- Removed r_bloom 2/3
- Reflex will no longer load invalid files.
- If you've got custom assets, they'll probably fail with an error. Just delete them, they're broken anyway.
- If you're getting lots of failed to load asset errors, delete your reflex folder (using explorer, not Steam) and redownload.

Game

- Fixed melee on back to be hidden while using melee
- Added cvar bindResetToDefaults for when you've broken everything horribly
- Fixed last player in game getting treated as the loser and dropped back into the queue
- Added worldspawn properties: author, name, min/max players, modes
- Invalid lightmap message now only shows while you're in edit mode
- Added fat trace for melees (rather than infinitely thin noodle ray)
- IC now does 6 damage (up from 5)
- Spawn system has been fixed/rewritten
- The way the spawn biasing works has been improved
- Bias is now correctly based on your killers location
- Closest spawn is always eliminated

UI

- Re-write of most game menus and structure
- Added video links to LEARN section (thanks Kovaak and entik! credits section soooon)
- Added sign() function to reflexcore.lua
- We now provide inventory instances & definitions to Lua
- Lua function bindReverseLookup now takes bindState

Audio

- Added new melee swing and impact sounds
- Added some menu interactivity sounds

Effects

- Added bloodmaps for melees (the more people you whack, the more bloody things get)

Maps

- Added/updated prdm3, prdm1-ashur and ctf-monolith (by PromEUs)
- Updated dp4, dp5, dp8 (by def and fht)
- Updated thcdm13 (by tehace)
- Fixed CPM3 jumppads


Art

- Added new cosmetic 6 melees (crescent wrench, crowbar, hatchet, machete, pipe wrench, pipe, supporter hatchet, supporter machete. Go get em!)
- Added additional LoD meshes for performance increases
- Updated fire effects
- Updated several material intensities for bloom (more still to do)
- Removed a bunch of unused micro textures (free'd up lots of vram for computers from a decade ago)


New assets:

- Gothic (Stone Archways, Barrel, Brick Wall, Dungeon Door, Gargoyle, Angel tatue, Gothic Fence, Gothic Gate, Brazier, Skeletons, Pillars, Tombstones, Cobblestone, Gothic Window)
- Common (Individual Planks)
- Industrial (Jail Door, Jail Bars, Grates)
- Ancient Japan (Stone Wall, Raked Sand)
- Veg (Grass, Flowers)

Known issues:

- Cancelling a chat message with escape will also bring up the menu if subframe input is enabled
- Apparently disabling sun also disables showing your player on the profile screen.