A few weeks ago I found an exploit with the game - the player could swap weapons instantly, without his hands going down first, so this allowed him to have one weapon recharging on his belt, then switch it into his hands, and thus keep up continuous fire.
I made two changes to correct this - for one, the hand now goes down before any switches or item drops are made from something in the hand, then the switch or drop is made. This adds a bit of a penalty for switching, and then there is a bit of time before the hand comes back up to shoot. Next I added a weapon readiness penalty so you can't fire as soon as the gun comes up.
This week I will most likely implement some new interesting weapons. One will fire a dart that creates a mind-link the enemy hit - allowing you to temporarily take control of them to perform some task, start a fight, or just jump off a cliff. I had to make some code changes to make this work, like for instance, the other creatures won't know that you are controlling one of them unless you start shooting them. At that point, you are a traitor and fair game for any other creature of that type.
Another weapon will fire out a mounting camera that will let you see around corners, etc. The force field gun is still in there as well for a temporary defense vs enemy fire.
Don't want to give them all away, but the idea is to have a dozen or so tactically interesting weapon choices that you might want to use in a particular scenario.
I also cleaned up the interface. Before you had to hit 2 keys to switch weapons, like '3','1' to swap what's in slot 3 with slot 1 ( left hand ). This is still possible, but instead you can left click for the left hand or right click for the right hand.
The in-game manipulation is much better as well. If you are near an inventory item or a corpse with stuff, a little non-modal menu box appears with the stuff name - just hit space to take the highlighted item. arrows, [] or mouse wheel selects which item. Walking up to a door or manipulatable object will give you a little on-line context menu, like 'Open Door', or tell you what key it needs. Much cleaner and simpler than the old system...
Also made another entity lighting fix - the ambient occlusion raycast distance now matches the distance used by the static geometry for the level, which varies from level to level.
Had a nice computer meltdown a couple days ago - my old video card died, so I got a 7600gt until I get my g80 over here...
