Development Status #77

[h2]Dear Tankers![/h2]

Welcome to our 77th Development Status.

[h2]Tutorial work progress[/h2]
This should be here on premiere - but we did not manage to finish it on time. Right now we’re working on it for two weeks and still it needs more cooking.

As the game progresses in development we might revamp the tutorial and it’s content or add new one, but for now the tutorial is going to be divided into 3 separate parts:

Battle Basics
Multi Crew handling
Repair Section

The topics we cover in the tutorial are mostly taken from your questions and suggestions - how to spawn in your own squad, how to change camera controls or aiming controls etc.

There won’t be a next patch without finishing this part of the game. In future, when we add, for example, loader gameplay we will need to add this new part to multi crew tutorial. Or a new tutorial part totally, when we extend commanding our forces through formations, aggressiveness control, waypoints, control through map etc.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Game optimization stages[/h2]

We divide the optimization into a few stages - from issues that can be fixed very fast and have big impact to total overhauls of certain parts of the game.

[h3]Stage 1[/h3]
Our current Stage 1 of optimization is focused around:

clearing the stutter when the units spawn in or when the game spawns explosions. We have already noticed big and unnecessary loading of assets when player is already spawned and has control over his camera
reducing memory usage (players with lower VRAM report very big issues because of this)

[h3]Examples[/h3]

First infantrymen that had unique weapons or inventory loaded all of the textures, materials and animations when he was spawned onto map - we have added pooling system for inventory as well as few other fixes and this big stutter is gone
First explosion on any terrain caused big calculations on that terrain to instantiate a copy of terrain data to work on - this also was a big stutter
Destruction of few wooden houses caused the game to recalculate navmesh - which wasn’t really necessary
Sandbags, wooden fences, debris - all of this has been loaded by the main thread, synchronously - also caused stutters when a big explosion happened near a trench or fortified position. (we still need to add some limiter to how many physical objects we allow at the same time. We have noticed even after this fix that having hundreds of physical wooden planks and sandbags that fly around is bad. We have an idea how to replace it or optimize it but that must wait for next stage of optimization)
Tanks when spawning in used very unoptimized method that searched around the scene for various stuff - causing very big stutter upon spawning
Tank crewmen spawned with their equipment with them, which also prolonged the spawning process - we switched to giving them the inventory when they left the tank.
When player spawned in his infantry or AI tank squad all of them spawned in the same frame, causing massive lag - now it’s divided into few seconds per one tank and one second per soldier

There is more, and more to come - we are building the game almost every day and check if - after spawning in - the game stutters at any moment. Then we deal with the issue and test it again and again. The main goal is to get rid of what we can without very big changes - but we already see that we are reaching a point where only changing to the newest multiplayer system can help - as some of the optimization issues come from the core of that system which we are not able to change at all. From what we understand, the new version has some of this solved - but changing to that version is a total overhaul that can take a few weeks at least.

[h2]When we can expect new patch 1.1.2?[/h2]
Besides tutorial and optimization Stage 1:

big changes to how game handles knockout of a vehicle
- should be harder to kill the player and easier to kill enemy AI
- enemy AI now correctly decreases their morale that can lead to panic and evacuation of the tank
- if tank wants to retreat and still can move and has smoke grenades it’s going to launch it
AI shooting dispersion fix - we found out that AI always hit where they wanted to, our dispersion logic was not working and in the end the game allowed them to have 100% accuracy
player vehicle camera and vehicle movement issues - added interpolation and a way to overcome the physics issues when interpolation is on

First, we need to finalise the tutorials, and then we can plan the release of the next patch.

Thank you and have a good weekend!
DeGenerals