Development Status #80

[h2]Dear Tankers![/h2]
Welcome to our 80th Development Status.

[h3]Movable stairs[/h3]

We have added movable stairs to each of the cranes at the repair station to make it easier to access the turret or roof of the tank. No more tricky jumps needed! You can interact with the stairs to move them around, and then interact with them again to put them down in place if they are marked with green material.

[h3]Steam friends invite / lobby[/h3]

We have also added in-game support for creating and hosting lobbies. This means that we can now send play-together invitations directly from within the game. Our friends will receive a notification or message about the invitation. If they accept, they will join our lobby, where their avatar will appear in the player list in the top right corner.

We plan to expand the lobby's functionality by adding a 'separate scene' in which players will be visible as avatars. For example, characters could stand next to a tank. In such a lobby, players will be able to customise their tanks by adding paint jobs, side numbers and other details. These settings could be saved and then applied to tanks during the campaign or made public.

[h3]New campaign at Ponyri[/h3]
As you may know from our previous dev status update (#79), we have started working on a new environment and game modes. We are also going to create a campaign based on events that took place in Ponyri in 1943.

The campaign will be implemented in the new mode mentioned in Dev Status #79, featuring sectors and operational gameplay.

We are going to prepare standard scenario missions for a few sectors. Once a scenario has been completed and a sector has been captured, the sector can be attacked by the enemy AI Commander, after which a procedural battle will be played out in that sector.

We will provide further details about our design and approach in future status updates, along with additional screenshots and videos, so stay tuned!

[h3]Procedural Missions[/h3]
We also want to add an option to generate single missions or campaigns from specially prepared maps, in order to support procedural gameplay, endless mode, etc. To showcase this, we will prepare a special menu where players can select factions, force pools, map pools, and so on. This could also potentially be a starting point for other game modes, such as career mode or rogue-like mode.

[h3]Ferdinand Sd.Kfz. 184[/h3]

Work has slowly begun on adding new vehicles to the game, including the Ferdinand tank. Work is progressing at a slower pace for now, as we want to finish work on the remaining aspects of the roadmap first. Currently, we have a vehicle that can drive and shoot in the game. Work on the actual model will begin in November and continue throughout the month.

[h3]Optimisation: the unit spotting process has been redesigned to be multi-threaded[/h3]

We have promised that at some point we’ll return to heavier optimization issues connected with single-core/main thread running. The time has come and as first thing we’ve taken on the spotting mechanic for AI.

As part of preparing our game for a bigger scale battle for the next campaign we’ve started from designing how many units we need on that new campaign - and from that what needs to be optimized.

The amount of AI units and their requests to spot enemy units on map was unbearable for the scale we needed so we have replaced the old single core system to multicore/threaded system.

It gave noticeable boost for bigger battles - but still other parts of AI behaviour or multiplayer code that synchronizes every soldier is a big performance drainer that needs to be taken care for.

The orange part is physics that handles checking the visibility between AI units and it’s being processed by the Job system on other threads.

[h3]Known issues[/h3]
We have likely found the reason for the blurry screen. It turned out that the Rendering Scale setting was not working in the game. It is possible that, for some players, this setting was set very low, causing the game to appear at a low resolution.

[h2]When we can expect new patch 1.1.3?[/h2]
New plan to release new update on monday 29.10 around 18:00 CEST.

new textures, better quality on C1M1 and C1M2 missions
Steam lobby/invite party in-game
movable stairs on repair scene
unit spotting process has been redesigned to be multi-threaded
Pak40 and 8,8 cm Flak 36 have destroyed models variants
UI bug fixes, over layered text and icons over some panels
Soviet (AI enemy) tanks now shoot while driving (new feature)
Germany and Soviet infantry indicators when spotted will be visible only below 100m in distance
Infantry compass indicators doesn’t show distance label (turning this off increased game performance)
Subtitles to repair scene voice overs
Added correct soldier covers and colliders for trenches on Pokrovka map
Fixed switching between artillery and direct shooting on static guns
Optimization for AI spotting mechanic (more fps on big battles)

Thank you and have a good weekend!
DeGenerals