Development Status #66

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 66th Development Status.

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[h3]Proving Grounds[/h3]



As promised in our previous dev status, we are sharing the results of our work on the shooting range map. The mission is accessible from the main menu after entering Bootcamp, where there is access to tutorials and the mission itself.





The proving ground range is a testing ground. A place where you will be able to test any tank in the game at will, check ballistics penetration etc. When we will add the X-Ray system it will be an excellent diagnostic place in the game.





[h3]Notebook update[/h3]



Notebook received updates. Mainly due to problems reported by players as well as our QA testing. There was a problem with reading information. Notebook itself reacted differently to lighting conditions. At the moment, the main reported issues have been fixed.



[h3]Vehicle status on repair station[/h3]



We have added a panel to the UI with an short status of the tank e.g. its modules whether they are repaired. Whether the vehicle has fuel and ammunition and whether the tank itself is combat ready or not. This panel will appear when you approach a tank at an appropriate distance. This is similar to what we did in Tank Mechanic Simulator. For more details, of course, you need to go into the notebook.

[h3]C1M1 update[/h3]



In the meantime, we took a look at the first missions from the campaign. We added the performance improvements we added in the missions we worked on last time. By the way, we did another visual iteration including changes to the post processes.



[h3]VFX update[/h3]



This time we present to you a new way of rendering particle effects - VFX Graph. The main difference between graph and the Shuriken we were using previously is that Shuriken uses CPU to generate and simulate particles, which today is not an optimal solution. VFX Graph, on the other hand, takes full advantage of the GPU’s capabilities, so we can have more polished and overall nicer effects while working more efficiently than our previous solution.



Thanks to this change, we also gained greater control over the spawning effects, thanks to which we hope to present with higher accuracy what is happening to vehicles at given moment. However, the transition from one system to another requires work, so as for today we only show you its first effects.


[h3]Further performance improvements[/h3]

We have reduced the RAM usage from roughly 13-16 GB to around 10-11 but still after a few playthroughs it rises up to 12-13 and is unacceptable. Our internal tests prove that the game just crashes on 16-GB RAM operation systems and is critical to get this even lower.

Also we’re working on loading times of missions smoother for HDD and we finally did it, now instead 3-4 minutes to load the main menu it takes 15 seconds, when bigger maps also take around 1 minute.

The focus now is to get as much CPU as possible from AI and game physics. Right now when a bigger engagement happens the game just drops the FPS too much and we know what causes it. It just needs to be addressed.

[h3]Localization[/h3]



We are working on the localisation of the game. We are adding keys everywhere for every label or text displayed in the game. Initially, there will be over a dozen languages to choose from in the game, just like in Tank Mechanic Simulator: English, Polish, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian and Turkish. The Tank Squad community is also helping us with the translations :)




Thank you and have a good one!
DeGenerals