Development update - August 10, 2026 (Patreon)

Made shadowstep railgun (mimics Plazma Burst 2 old netcode) and machine gun version of drainlight. Made it so repair tool can overheal vehicles as well as turn player-made drones and turrets back into gadgets for later reuse.

Some quality of life gameplay changes, such as drones no longer squish players whenever they fall, guns no longer colliding with walls (which used to make aiming quite unreliable way too often, guns are still being pulled back whenever they are near walls so it still looks nice).

More progress towards developing a tool that is able to bake lightmap and diffuse/glow textures into a single texture for scenes I'd like to use in story missions of Plazma Burst 3 - was able to render a usable result out of it and started to work on a story-related Map that should use it. This also introduces some of Level Editor-related changes that are meant to optimize workflow for creation of Maps like this in closed beta (optimizations, support for larger scale Maps, options to alter Map brightness, reflection quality), although I most likely won't be publishing lightmap baking tools in clsoed beta as they are not that polished and do have story-related spoilers all over them.

Level Editor

- A lot of optimizations, improvements, fixes and features to lightmap texture render tool. Added support for smoothed normals, better edge case detection, improved consistency of wider range sample gathering, fixed extra sample creation prevention across moving camera if samples appear too close on a screen, more options for quick and high quality rendering presets, optimized texture drawing, implemented adaptive substeps near shadow contrasts;

- Improved appearance of script execution error messages in console;

- Made it possible to override default voice pitch formula in Level Editor, exposed voice pitch property to scripting;

- Added sync for altered voice pitch to work both upon creation of ragdoll and be able to change dynamically;

- Made it so game modes can force voice line volume normalization;

- Exposed kick, grenade throw and grappling hook activation methods for characters via scripting as well as a way to get access to body that is being held with arms;

- Made it less easy to cause pb2HeroInfoBar to crash client's game instances if non-string title was provided;

- Fixed a bug that could cause owner-less virus grenades to crash the game;

- Fixed a crash on attempt to draw fire of removed type in Level Editor;

- Made it possible to use custom relative game brightness in specific Maps;

- Made it possible to adjust polygonal shadow opacity on per-Map basis;

- Fixed a bug that was causing opaque liquids to not being drawn in correct order;

- Added option to prefer higher quality reflections on specific visuals-based Maps, as long as reflections are at least at 50% of quality (default);

- Added option to disallow decal generation for surfaces (can speed-up loading if Map uses complex models as replacement for game-generated surfaces);

- Optimized complex 3D model hash recalculation whenever previewing a Map with 3D models that were loaded before;

- Fixed an issue that was causing Level Editor objects to appear with changed brightness if Map uses custom brightness;

- Fixed 3D model decompression rounding bug that used to lead to vertices to be placed at incorrect positions after model was loaded;

- Made it possible to use different geometry points density for liquid kinds;

- Made it possible to zoom-out further;

- Made it so liquid kinds automatically decrease geometry points density whenever way too big liquid pools are being made.

Skin Editor

- Added option to automatically normalize custom voice lines volume in Skin Editor.

Interfaces

- Added notification about new game default config save success, moved notifications temporary to the left when notifications are created during new game start pop-up;

- Added chat support for missing Turkish characters;

- Made it so game tries to re-request files a few times in case of connection error;

- Fixed crash on interface trying to process key down event when no UI element was focused;

- Added more debug information for one of cases when game was crashing upon start in some rare case;

- Added more debug information for case of rare leaderboard draw crashes;

- Fixed a crash on attempt to change URL while game was loading;

- Made it so Map-specific brightness affects crosshair and incoming damage report layer properly.

Gameplay

- Made it so guns that were thrown and picked up aren't considered thrown after new owner dies (to prevent guns from dealing random damage to other players too easily);

- Made it so deactivated/destroyed drones have less mass and thus can't squish characters that easily, made it so destroyed drones can be broken more easily but will stay for longer otherwise;

- Made it so walking backwards into walls does not cause characters to pull weapons backwards;

- Removed held weapon collisions with walls and vehicles, leaving essentially just grenade collisions and gun pulling back logic for now;

- Made shadowstep version of lite railgun;

- Made it so shadowstep gadget can be destroyed to prevent railgun shot;

- Made it so nailgun reloads 35% slower;

- Updated drainlight firing logic so it can match crosshair accuracy;

- Made machine gun version of drainlight;

- Fixed a bug that was causing drainlight-cast rays to occasionally pass through characters and deal no damage to them;

- Fixed some guns being not considered as designed for vehicles and thus spawned in Beta DM gamemode;

- Made it possible for repair gun to disassemble built turrets and drones;

- Made it possible for repair gun to overheal turrets and drones;

- Fixed a bug that was causing drainlight attacks to damage teammates when friendly fire was disabled;

- Fixed an issue that was causing turrets with limited ammo to flood magazines;

- Made it so built-in robot skins have metal surface and walk sounds;

- Fixed crash on hit test for removed non-rectangular movables;

- Fixed server crash on attempt to play fire deny sound by a gun held by turret that has no ragdoll associated with it;

- Added fallback for case when browser/device can't use too much memory when processing environment generation;

- Fixed a crash on attempt to place turret while player is inside of an entity (like frozen ice);

- Added ring-like waves in addition to splashes for liquids;

- Made it so rings-like waves are only visible on reflecting surfaces (primarily to fight render order issues);

- Removed water rings spawning for rain particles for now;

- Fixed a bug that was preventing rain particles from spawning water collision effect at far depths;

- Updated shadowstep railgun design to look less green (so it doesn't look like it is a toxic/radioactive railgun, especially since PB2 fanart update weapons will be added eventually);

- Added limit to maximum number of water rings for now;

- Fixed weird liquid stretching that would happen due to recent changes;

- Made it so water splash rings are not made per each nearby geometry points but made once per explosion instead;

- Adjusted splash intensity for vehicles.

Multiplayer

- Adjusted sync logic for shadowstep gadget so it look more correct;

- Fixed trusted player positions bug that would let players fly indefinitely while Esc menu is open;

- Fixed a bug that would cause cache unavailability when hosting matches in Multiplayer;

- Fixed a bug that would occasionally make servers think they have crashed;

- Fixed a bug that could make it so Creations loaded into Match would become unavailable after 24 hours even while still being used;

- Fixed a bug that could cause resource delivery hash calculation to happen multiple times per same resource in Multiplayer;

- Replaced resource hashing algorithm with a faster one;

- Moved some of compression/decompression logic to a separate thread for skins in Multiplayer mode;

- Fixed a bug that was causing Skins from private folders to be not accessible when joining Multiplayer Matches hosted by Users who had no access to these Skins;

- Made it so newly spawned guns are instantly given to players in Beta DM gamemode (prevents characters from prioritizing laying around non-reloaded guns);

- Fixed a bug that was causing dynamic light to cast shadows from non-predicted invisible version of movables in Multiplayer;

- Fixed crash that would happen when virus grenades were held by ownerless ropes on client-side;

- Added more debug information collection for one of crash fixes in multiplayer;

- Increased number of maximum stacked reliable events until player gets disconnected for now (mostly to prevent custom game mode lags from disconnecting players).

Sounds

- Made sounds for shadowstep railgun (3 sounds);

- Made sounds for machine gun version of drainlight (3 sounds);

- Made sound for story mode-related Map (1 sound).