Introduction
Over the past several weeks, Sparrow Corp has been hard at work updating much of the backend of our forts to ensure consistency, and with this have introduced many new features. These include updates to our gun animations & gun models, an overhaul of our gun skin system (with the ability to add skins to your heirloom guns!), and the use of TextChatService to make use of the ability to better customize in-game chat tags!
Read more below:
Gun Animations
Thanks to Sparrow Admiral Bu_wls, each gun (including all of the heirloom variants) have their own brand new gun animations. Below is a short showcase of what some of these look like, as you’ll notice many of the parts of the guns are now animated:
As showcased briefly above, we’ve also added a few extra keybinds to the guns. They’re as follows:
- B: Idle animation (note that currently not all guns have distinct idle animations)
- V: Slide
What’s more, we’ve heard feedback regarding the frustration around the crouch animation resetting itself when switching between guns. Now, switching guns will no longer reset your crouch!
Remastered Gun Skin System
All along, gun skins have been made available mostly for the Maelstrom gun, with very few skins being made for any of the other guns. Now, every skin is available for every gun model!
We are also very excited to announce updates to the Heirloom gun skin system. As many of you know, completing certain special tasks across our places can potentially grant you very rare gun skins, known as “heirloom” gun skins, which are re-modeled variations of the base gun models. Going forward, you can now attach gun skins to your heirloom guns!
Moreover, each division now has its own brand new distinct gun skin! Make sure to check them out in-game to see which one is your favorite!
Below is a summary of the changes made to the gun skins UI, available at all of our places:
- For certain guns (currently, the Maelstrom, Icarus, and Medigun), you can now toggle between the Heirloom variant or the base variant of these gun models, equipping skins for either/or
- You can now filter by different relevant tags, such as “Group”, “Halloween”, “Event”, and “Holiday”
- The viewport will now show your character holding the gun in your hands while previewing gun skins
- Owned skins will now show up first in the list, making it easier to find skins that you have unlocked
With these changes, you can expect to see many more gun skins being made available for sale and/or given away through events in the future. Stay tuned!
Miscellaneous Gun Nerfs, Buffs, & Changes
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Epiphany (Sniper):
- Shooting a target’s head will now deal 100 headshot damage
- Spread has increased for the Epiphany while not zoomed in (Q); while zoomed in, the Epiphany will have 0 spread/perfect accuracy
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Reverb (SMG):
- Fall-off damage has been added; the max damage done by reverb at close range is 8, with the minimum damage being 2
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Zooming in using the Q keybind now only works with the following guns:
- Maelstrom (AR)
- Epiphany (Sniper)
- Tempest (LMG)
Updated Chat Tags/TextChatService
Using Roblox’s new TextChatService, we’ve made some improvements to our Chat Tags system, which allows you to select up to 2 tags at once to show infront of your messages! Chat tags are mostly made available depending primarily on which divisions you’re in.
Here are a few of the updates we’ve made:
- Tags will now show up in different colors in-front of your username, as opposed to showing up in a single color
- If you leave and rejoin the game, your selected chat tags should save (note: unlike with gun skins, the datastores for these chat tags are place-specific and do not carry over across our places)
- Using TextChatService, you can also type with emojis using autocomplete!
Bugs
We are aware of a rare issue pertaining to animations sometimes not loading properly right away, and are looking for the cause of this so that we can fix this. If you experience this, or any bugs at all, please do the following:
- Take a video and/or prepare a description of how the bug was produced
- Press F9 and take a screenshot of any logs
- Submit both of these in our #bugs discord channel
While we appreciate any and all feedback pertaining to bugs in our games, please be aware that simply saying “anims broke” does very little to help solve any issues, so please be as descriptive as possible when making your report!
Conclusion
This is one of the larger updates we’ve made to our places in quite some time, which is why I want to shout out to Sparrow Admiral Bu_wls and Sparrow Admiral hisokachan who helped me to make this a reality. We hope you enjoy!