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Seven languages, a stone abbey and a darker bunker

· Version 0.0.21

Saint-Roch's abbey from above, its two carved spires over the village roofs.

A big day for No Man's Village. Version 0.0.21 is out on itch.io, and the itch app updates the game by itself. Here's what's in it.

The game speaks your language

The game is now in English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese. Pick one under Settings, or let the game follow your system. The words are the ones shooters in each language use, so German says Feuermodus and Hinlegen, Russian Наклон, and Chinese 战局 for a raid. Every text in the game has every language, and the fonts now draw Cyrillic and Chinese.

If something reads oddly in your language, tell me on the Discord. Translations get better with players.

A briefing on your first start

The first briefing over headquarters: soldiers, loadout and orders, with a Next button.

The first time you play, four short cards over headquarters explain what it's for, how a raid goes and what falling costs, the keys that matter on a first raid, and where to go next: the firing range or your first raid. You can skip it, and it only shows once.

Settings that fit on a laptop

The settings on their Graphics tab, beside the Game and Controls tabs.

The settings menu didn't fit a 13-inch MacBook's window. It now has three tabs (Game, Controls and Graphics) and stays the same size from tab to tab.

New graphics options

A rainy street at night, without reflections above and with them below: the lit windows show in the wet cobbles.

  • Wet reflections. Rain-wet cobbles, puddles and rivers now reflect the lamps, lit windows, fires and houses, not just the sky. There's a new Reflections box to turn it off.
  • HDR. If your screen has HDR, turn it on under Graphics: lamps, fires, muzzle flashes and star shells get brighter than white while the rest looks as before. It needs Direct3D 12 on Windows and Wayland on Linux, and it takes effect on the next start.
  • SMAA and new upscalers. SMAA joins the edge smoothing options. Nearest keeps pixels square at a lower render scale for free, and on a Mac you get Apple's MetalFX upscalers.
  • Softer light from windows. At night on high quality, the lit windows nearest you throw a soft, window-shaped pool of light onto the street (Godot 4.7's area lights). The soldier in headquarters is lit by a softbox now too.
  • Faster first start. Shaders come baked into the Windows and Linux builds, so the first start after an update doesn't stop to compile them.

A lit window at night, before and after: the light now falls from the pane onto the street.

Saint-Roch's abbey, rebuilt in stone

The abbey's west front: buttresses, a deep carved portal and the rose window above it.

The abbey used to look like a grey box. It's warm limestone now, with carved spires on both towers, a west front with a deep portal, a gallery of kings and a rose window, buttresses and tall glazed windows down the nave, and a spire over the crossing.

Inside the cloister there are flagged floors, ribbed vaults and a refectory fireplace. The chapter room is now the garrison's billet, with camp beds, a stove and a rifle rack. The courtyards are gardens with gravel walks and a well.

The nave, looking east down the pews to the altar.

A darker bunker, with a post on the roof

The command bunker's hall, lit only by its dim lamps.

The command bunker is properly dark now. No daylight reaches it, six lamps are smashed, and the rest are dim and amber and dip when the generator sags. Water seeps down the walls, there's mud from both doors, and the corridor where the door was fought over has bullet marks and a grenade's scorch.

A new stair climbs from the north corridor to a concrete observation post on the roof, with slits looking toward the abbey, the village and the road, a scissors telescope and a machine gun at the long south slit.

Inside the observation post, the stair coming up through the roof.

Houses that were lived in

Every furnished room now looks like somebody left it in a hurry. There are curtains and family photos, a table laid for a meal nobody finished, shoes and a half-packed suitcase. About a third of the houses had soldiers billeted in them, with straw beds, kit and a map on the wall, and where the fighting reached a house there's broken glass and smashed crockery. None of it gets in your way: doors, windows and loot are where they were.

Out in the country, houses built against each other no longer flicker where their walls met, and every two-storey house now has a stair to its upper floor.

Servers you can count on

  • You keep your kit when a server fails. If a server crashes or restarts, everyone still in a raid gets their kit back. Before, a crash could hold your kit and keep headquarters closed for up to two hours.
  • Restart warnings. Before a planned restart, everyone in a raid sees a countdown to get out, with reminders at 2 and 1 minutes, 30 and 10 seconds. No new raids start during it.
  • Tougher lobby. Squad codes can't be found by guessing any more, and a single misbehaving connection can't fill up the server.
  • More CPU for every game server.

Report a problem from the game

There's a Report a problem button in headquarters and the pause menu. Write a note, keep or leave out the screenshot it takes, and it reaches me with what I need to find the bug. It's the quickest way to tell me something broke.

A new website

This website is rebuilt: shorter and calmer, with one gallery, and in all seven languages. It has this blog now too, and a feed if you'd like new posts in your reader.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who's played the alpha so far and sent feedback. Keep it coming, in the game with Report a problem or on the Discord.

See you in Saint-Roch.

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