Welcome to our 5th Development Blog and last blog for the month of May!
We continue in our journey to creating the best Half-Life 2 Roleplay experience that we can envision through development updates and roleplay improvements. We have been going through a period of stagnation for a short while, but that has not stopped or discouraged us from making progress!
Water Coolers
We now have functional water cooler entities that can be filled up with water and used to fill empty cans up with ordinary union water. This is mainly meant for office spaces and the like, but they may also be purchased by the ordinary citizenry for any reason seen fit.
Ration Animations
Rations can now be physically ‘carried’ around. This is an optional feature mainly for cosmetic/immersive purposes that does not restrict the amount of rations you can carry, but dropping them will cause your character to obviously also stop displaying that particular animation. The animation is also discretionary, allowing you to simply switch back to your hands if you do not want to show others what you are carrying.
Copy Machines
An idea originally surfaced on the first iteration of the server, now finally coming to fruition – functional copy machines. Similar to the water coolers, this is not a huge update on the grand scheme of things, but will definitely be a big help in mass-producing papers and the like, as opposed to manually copy-pasting their contents to other items every time. Again, mainly meant for office areas, but citizens may also purchase them if so desired.
New Weapons
We are now using a brand new weapon base, and in turn, a few new weapons were added. Although we plan to continue sticking to ‘default HL2’ weapons, we are open to new additions that remain faithful to the original style and design of the weapons introduced by Half-Life 2. Therefore, we now have, in addition to the default HL2 weapons, the Rebel-Modified SMG, the Rebel-Modified AR2, and the Civil Protection MP5k. The first two can even be crafted through the Crafting Menu (if you have their original unmodified variants, and the right tools & resources) and provide an increased fire rate over their stock variants. The MP5k is an upgrade available for high-ranking Civil Protection units that slightly increases fire rate in exchange for accuracy.
New Animations
The Civil Protection faction now has a couple new animations at their disposal, including three sitting ones, a standing one, a panting one, and looped versions of two existing ‘idle threat’ ones. More custom animations may be added in the future, as seen fit and as suggested, be it for CPs, citizens, or other factions/models.
Conclusion
We continue slowly working through our massive backlog of to-do’s, and are working on processing all feedback received in order to improve wherever we can.
For those of you unaware, we will be hosting a community meeting on Saturday, 3rd of June, at 19:00 UTC, on our Discord server. While long annoying surveys and private staff meetings are great, there is no better way to improve the server than to directly listen to you, the players (which is one of our core aims from when Lancer was originally founded). We encourage all who are interested in the community to join and share their thoughts, suggestions, and concerns so that we can have a productive discussion and receive invaluable feedback from you.