ETJump 3.7.0 released

After nearly 3 months of development, ETJump 3.7.0 is finally here! There’s a lot of new and exciting stuff in this release - read on for the main highlights.

pmove_fixed, fixed

The day is finally here. pmove_fixed 1 has tortured us with choppy visuals since the beginning of time due to locking the client’s rendering rate to 125 FPS. With this release, we’re introducing a new cvar called etj_lerpPmove. When enabled, this cvar applies interpolation between physics frames on the client side, smoothing out the rendering: every frame now gets updated view angles, position, velocity and so on, rather than displaying the previous physics frame results until a new one is calculated. This was previously applied to view angles only with etj_smoothAngles, but it was never the full answer as movement still remained choppy. With the addition of etj_lerpPmove, we’re now deprecating etj_smoothAngles, and it will be removed in a future release.

This is an opt-in feature for now: once it has gotten some wider testing and is deemed stable, we plan to enable it by default.

Functional error handling on Windows

This has been another long-standing issue: ever since ETJump moved from C to C++ back in 2.2.0, the error handling on Windows has not worked properly. Every time the game tried to display an error to you and drop you back to the main menu, the game would instead crash to desktop. Without going too much into technical details, this was due to a fundamental incompatibility with how the game engine does errors, and how C++ code expects the mod DLLs to be unloaded. This issue should finally be resolved in this release, and you should now see errors properly on Windows too. And if something is still broken - please let us know. Massive thanks to suburb for the work he did on this!

Timerun system updates

We’ve got a few new and exciting timerun features in this release: record history, best segment tracking and a “native” way to remove timerun records from the leaderboards.

Record history

The timerun system now tracks and records every single improvement players make on a run. This allows players to track their historical progression on a run - you can view every single improvement you’ve made over time, and how they were ranked at the time of recording.

Note that there is no history available prior to ETJump 3.7.0 - the progression can only be tracked starting from this release.

Best segment tracking

Those who watch speedrunning content on other games are likely familiar with concepts such as “gold split” or “sum of best segments”. With this release, we’re introducing these features to ETJump as well. The timerun system now tracks each player’s best “segments” on a run - every checkpoint and end segment of a run (last checkpoint to run end) is stored in the database, and players can view the absolute best times for each section of a timerun. The checkpoint timer can also visualize “gold splits” with etj_checkpointsShowGold - this colors the checkpoint timer gold when you beat the best time on a segment. You can view the best segments for each run with the best-segments command - either your personal bests, or global bests. Similar to records, the historical improvements are also tracked and can be viewed with the best-segments-history command.

Record & segment removal

This may seem like an odd thing to have, but over the years there have been numerous times where players have asked for their runs to be removed from the leaderboards. Prior to this, it meant manually executing SQL on the timerun database, which was always a bit scary and a hassle, especially without taking the server down momentarily. We now have a native way in the mod to do this: remove-record command (and remove-segment for the new segment feature).

Any player is allowed to remove their own records/segments, should they want a “fresh” start on a run. Server admins with the T admin flag (timerun management) are allowed to remove records and segments from other players as well. This is to make it easy for admins to remove any cheated records from the leaderboards, or “stale” times (e.g. a user who has lost their GUID and plays under a new identity, and wants their old records gone from the leaderboards). Any record/segment removed with these commands gets archived in the timerun database - nothing is permanently deleted. The removed times can be viewed with list-removed-records and list-removed-segments commands.

Should you or an admin ever need to restore a record or a segment, it can be done with restore-record and restore-segment commands. You’re only allowed to restore records/segments deleted by yourself, unless you have the T admin flag.

Per-team worldspawn key overrides

Another highly requested feature is finally here: per-team worldspawn key overrides. With the target_wskey_overrides entity, mappers can now apply per-team or timerun-specific conditions to nonoclip, noprone and nosave worldspawn keys. In practice, maps can now have these features enabled/disabled on one team only. Additionally, to properly support noclip/prone/save zones, new values are accepted on these worldspawn keys: always allow (2) and never allow (3). This enables, for example, save zones to be applied to only one team, while the other can freely save anywhere.

Client-side spawned portals

Portalgun has gotten a major gameplay upgrade in this release with client-side spawned portals. Spawning a portalgun portal is now predicted on the client side, meaning ping is no longer a factor for spawning portals - any time you fire a portal, you should immediately see it spawn on your client, without having to wait for the server to confirm it. This requires the g_portalPredict server cvar, or the portalpredict worldspawn key to be set on the map. Big thanks to vld for implementing this feature!

Other minor features

There are a few more smaller additions and changes in this release:

• etj_drawYaw can be enabled to indicate when you are turning left or right.
• etj_drawFallDamageDetector displays fall damage the player would take when landing on a surface.
• Menu sliders can now be adjusted with left/right arrow keys and the mouse wheel.
• editentity script action allows editing an entity via mapscript that does not have a scriptname set.
• Bundled mapscripts for dreamwork and the_biome_expedition to fix some issues with their original releases.
• Adjusted default values for tons of client side cvars to improve the out-of-box experience.

Bug fixes

There’s also a healthy amount of minor bug fixes in this release, some of the more important ones are listed here:

• Autoload slots were not correctly invalidated on timerun start, allowing players to potentially load into them after a timerun was started.
• Fireteam chat could be visible to player who were not part of the sender’s fireteam.
• A few crash fixes on timeruns related to season deletion and other season management commands.
• Timerun start or target_init could sometimes give players a nonexistent weapon.
• Rankings were calculated with different tie-break rules compared to the records leaderboards.
• HUD calculations were broken inside noprone brushes, when cheats were enabled.

Full changelog

As always, you can read the full changelog over on GitHub, or in the in-game menus.

Head over to the downloads page to grab the release!