Oh, it is almost summer already — for the June release, here is a package of something hot and new for your Mechwarrior 5: Custom Arenas!
You, for sure, have played arena battles in the various industrial hubs. And I am quite sure you have encountered the one (yes, 1) arena level in the game. This is changed now. Over the last month, I was finally successfully injecting custom hand-crafted arena levels into the game for being spawned as battlegrounds instead of the ever-repeating one arena (and the procedural landscapes in between), quite a step forward!
DOWNLOAD 1:
VonMissions Arena Special Edition
https://www.patreon.com/posts/arenas-arenas-5-130556445
The new version of vonMissions does bring you already seven (yes, 7!) new arenas, with different layouts and themes. The Arenas include:
- A MW4 Colliseum-style one
- The Pool with underwater combat, modelled after original Battletech Maps
- The Mountain, a rocky place also modelled after original Battletech Maps
- The Indoor Dome with moving barriers and fire traps
- The Gran Indoor Arena with stationary barriers
- Volcano Arena, a fire hot pit
and finally:
- The Maze — can you identify the layout of it? It is a special place!;) and there are also random graffities around.
The Custom Arenas have now a 50% Chance to appear in a spawned industrial hub mission, the other 50% are the regular procedural terrain ones, so the new system is not removing something from the game but adding to it.
Patreon Supporter Content Opportunity: Various Arenas feature the custom-made Holo-Ads - and we can still add your own! Please send me a Message on Discord, or an eMail to
Requirement: as before, vonMissions need to have vonBiomes active in your mod list - otherwise there would be content missing, or vonMissions will blow up unnecessarily and long-term maintenance of assets would get impossible. And in general, needless to say: this arena mission addon is all new — if there are hiccups, please let me know, for sure some parts might still need more polishing after feedback. Thank you! :)
And more - vonBiomes Update 23.5
Secondly, there is a quality of life update on vonBiomes available as download here.
Reports have come in that the ground smoke and fire particles, I built for e.g. No Man's Land, are now staying into the next mission. This is strange, since that particular (pun intended) issue has been solved already years ago in vonBiomes. But something, probably by another mod, has changed, and my solution got broken. It is unclear to me why or by what, but after an exchange with Coyote, I have implemented an alternative approach for killing the particle emitters on end of mission,
DOWNLOAD 2
vonBiomes 23.5:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/arenas-arenas-5-130556445
I hope the new particle killer solves it for those of you who encountered the problem! If not: you can still go to the vonBiomes Mod Options and disable ground smoke manually. This removes the FX totally, and hence should be a valid workaround.
I also have started to build a more sophisticated system for particle effects in biomes. This did not make it in the release here yet, but something to look out for in later versions of vonBiomes, stay tuned! As usual, I keep all supporters, who have access to the VIP channel on my vonMods Discord, in the loop with screenshots and progress reports!
If you are not yet part of the community, join here https://discord.gg/e5JNDpjT5y and as mentioned above, please leave me a brief comment in the Bar, that you come from Patreon — thank you!
Furthermore, for vonBiomes, I have finetuned lighting and texture brightness levels to counteract ice worlds being quite bright on close orbits to the sun. They are still places with high albedo (as they should be) but that impact should be reduced now. Thanks for everyone reporting and sharing screenshots on Discord!
Moreover, underwater visuals are updated a long side the work on the underwater arena in vonMissions - it all goes hand in hand:)
Here is a full change log:
vonBiomes:
- Adjustments: Fog light influence and further finetuning of dynamic parameters in the vonBiomes lighting and weather system
- Adjustment: Sun disc visibility versus glow
- Adjustment: vanilla snow texture brightness
- Update: underwater visuals (Rivers, lakes),
- Bamboo forest: implemented foliage colour system (sun class-based plant colours),
- Alternative particle killers for end of mission due to unknown cause of having them stay
- New stop all sounds implementations after mission (thanks to Coyote)
vonMissions:
- Development and integration of a new system for arenas being injected in industrial hub missions
- Design, creation, and making of 7 additional arenas as custom levels for release
- New Underwater visuals (the pool arena)
- New stop all sounds implementations after mission (thanks to Coyote)
I will also release the vonBiomes Version 23.5 right on Nexus and Steam a little later (Steam probably tomorrow, since I am still at real life work and not at my workstation at home;)
So - I hope you do enjoy the new arenas, building the custom levels and crafting the assets and content has been a ton of fun! Thank you very much for the possibility to work on these things, and may your battles be full of mech on mech action and fire! Cheers!
- Jonathan