Rajada thanks you for not bringing suit...

So far in this up and coming update:

-Added the botmatch menu pictured. There is a lot of room leftover that I’m still not sure what to do with.

-Added a difficulty selector to the set up server menu. This should make games more accessible to differently skilled players. Also note that 25 HP healers become 50 HP healers on lower difficulty settings.

-Added the blasters stay toggle switch to the gameplay options menu. Sometimes playing on a server with this value different than yours will cause your value to be overwritten. This provides an easy way to fix this, or even practice or play singleplayer with this setting on for a change of pace.

-The mutator string text field will now save the last used mutator string. The game must successfully launch the server or match, and it will not save a blank string. This will eventually be replaced by a selection menu, rather than the string input field.

-Finished the last character bios.

In order to fully utilize some of the features of this update, I have also included a patching executable that will add the necessary lines to your Nerf.ini file and any previous ini updates should you need it.

At this point I just want to see if there are any easy map fixes before I ship out the update.

This is a picture of the working tab selector that allows you to access the botmatch setup menu. Right now, all the options are based on the set up server menu, so a few of them will be stripped out for the final release (such as dedicated/participate, which is not needed for single player).

I know this doesn’t look much different from the currently released version of NAB, but what you are looking at here is actually two different menus. The first serves as a parent container to hold the buttons that will be used to navigate the child menus.This is a huge milestone for me as setting this up was about 80% of the work, and the most difficult part of the code. The rest is fairly easy as it is based off code that runs in two other menus in the game.

The position and style of the ‘Start Botmatch’ button is completely beta and is only there for testing purposes. I will most likely be switching it over to the ‘three ovals serving as tabs’ method as seen on the options menu. One will of course be the ‘stats’ tab as pictured here, the second ‘botmatch’ and the third is still up for grabs… possibly a place to access the yet to be built global stats website, but that’s a completely different story and would not be for a while anyway.

However, there is still much work to be done. Once I modify the menu to have the aforementioned tabs, I will still need to code the botmatch menu. Luckily, most of the code work there involves taking the setup server menu code and stripping/replacing bits of it. Regardless, this means I’ll be able to accelerate my work and get another update out soon.

Which brings me to my next point, the mutator selection window. This addition will not come out this next update. I will likely work on it after I finish the botmatch menu so I can plug the mutator selection window into both the botmatch and server menus at the same time. This feature might take quite a lot of time and effort to implement, but please be patient; after all I am only one man and I can only code so fast. However, I think once both of these items are complete, I will have solved two of the major inconveniences of NAB. One of the biggest reasons why people don’t set up more servers or play more maps in singleplayer is because of the need to type long and foreign console commands. A regular user should never have to access a console in order to get to the main content of any game. Accessibility is key to playability.