Development Status #34

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 34th Development Status. You can see on what we were working the last two weeks.

[h3]Canisters[/h3]
Canisters and fuel cans have been used to store liquids such as fuel, oil, or water.
We’ve made 20l canisters for water and fuel.

Kraftstoff - fuel.
Wasser - water.

Those canisters have a white cross painted on them to avoid confusion. Pouring water into a tank engine or a soldier taking a sip of fuel thinking its water is rather unpleasant.

Oil has been stored in smaller triangular cans which came in 10l, 15l, and 20l sizes. Tiger’s engine needed up to 26l of oil. We’ve decided to use in game only 10l cans.

[h3]Engine hoist[/h3]
Engine hoist will be used in Tank Squad to repair the tank’s engine separately.

[h3]QA Testing[/h3]
We're hard at work as QA here. Our recent focus has been on the multiplayer features to make sure that everything is ironed out and ready for you when the game is finally available. We worked to make sure synchronization works properly and have recently closed more than 50 issues. As one example, we thoroughly tested the task system to ensure that players could properly be assigned tasks by the game host. We're happy with the progress being made.
We saw that on the Repair scene walking between different points of interest was a bit annoying since the distance between them was really long.
With the developers, we were able to optimize many things regarding this, and now walking between various places feels much smoother.
We've expanded our numbers in the QA department so you can rest assured we're serious about this. In just one month, we quadrupled the number of testers in the company, and having these new eyes is clearly helping the development.
There are some examples of bugs that we have encountered, and we are working at:

[h3]Optimization[/h3]
We’ve done a performance test and analysis of the repair station scene. We’ve found some bottlenecks that were a great burden to the game’s performance:

Textures resolution was too high
Vehicles that were not interactive were too complex
Vegetation had to polygons
There were some unnecessary objects and game components that were not used

We’ve optimized those and a result we have:

Lowered amount of batches from 10 000 to 4 500.
Lowered the number of triangles from 100 million to 17 million.
Gained an additional 15 FPS.
Lowered RAM use from 21GB to 12GB.

That has been one of the stages of optimization. Now we are going to test and optimize performance once a week to make sure the game runs smoothly.

Thank you and have a good one!
DeGenerals