Six Days in Fallujah News

Six Days in Fallujah arrives in Early Access on June 22 on Steam. Based on true stories from one of the world’s toughest modern battles, Six Days drops you and your team into real-world scenarios that require real-life tactics to overcome.

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Welcome to the second entry in our Developer Log series. These short-form updates are designed to provide context on what we’re currently working on in between our larger SITREP diaries. Performance continues to be an ongoing priority for the team, and we’ll be providing some more updates in this area today.

Please remember that all assets shown are currently a work-in-progress.

We want to start off by thanking the community for their recent questions around performance and optimization. This is an extremely relevant conversation around the industry as we’re seeing the largest of studios struggle to meet performance goals as games become more and more complex to develop. We are very mindful of this, and our goal continues to be a smooth experience regardless of where you play Six Days.

Frankly, every developer is struggling right now with a convergence of contradictions. While it was acceptable ten years ago for shooters to play at 30fps, every player now expects at least 60fps. Players also want these games to display 4x more pixels, much more sophisticated lighting, more post-processing and special effects, and much smarter AI and physics—all while needing to perform at twice the speed.

This actually wouldn't be a problem if we could just build all our games for processors that can handle 4K graphics and sophisticated AI. But, the range of capabilities within PCs currently marketed as "gaming PCs" is very, very wide.

The only way to accomplish performance in a sophisticated game is through "multi-threading." Earlier game software would tell game hardware what to do through a single series of instructions that were sent sequentially to the computer's processors, one after the other. In contrast, multi-threading divides these instructions into separate threads that the processor handles simultaneously. For example, the game's AI might be on one thread, the game's rendering on another thread, the game's physics on a third thread, and the game's audio on a fourth thread.

The real challenge with multi-threading is that all these threads must stay in sync with each other. This isn't just so the audio from a weapon plays at the same time the AI has fired said weapon, for example. It's that all these instructions and data are flying around independently in all these different threads, and the whole game will crash if any of these threads gets a nano-second out of sync.

Performance can be examined under two different lenses—CPU and GPU—and we want to provide an update in each area, along with some charts our engineers use to help optimize performance.

Let’s start with an update on CPU. While Six Days is currently running at an acceptable “steady state” on average, we’ve also identified intermittent hitching that is represented by the pattern of spikes in the graph below. These hitches, albeit brief, cause slowdowns that impact player performance. After identifying when the game spikes, our engineers then investigate ways for the game to more efficiently handle the process that was causing each spike. A few months ago, we had more than three dozen separate factors driving these spikes. Today, we have just half a dozen.


We have a similar graph for our latest pass on GPU performance, and you’ll notice intermittent spikes in this area as well. Like our CPU spikes, we've eliminated the vast majority of GPU spikes during the last few months. For example, we found that some of our graphics systems were calculating certain processes during gameplay and throwing them away, rather than pre-calculating them and then caching them for future use. As you can see, there are still a few spikes left to fix.



Let’s round this entry out with a discussion on networking—more specifically player connectivity and matchmaking. For context, players can find others to play with in two ways. The first is through our automated matchmaking systems, which try to optimize which players to join together based on their internet connectivity. The second is through invites sent directly to their friends or to those they've played with recently.

We recently hosted a studio-wide playtest to test our matchmaking feature and identified a bug that would sometimes cause lobbies to form with only 2-3 players, even if there were 4 players available to play. This has already been fixed, and players can now matchmake reliably into full fireteams of four players based on our testing so far.

As far as game invitations go: we’re tweaking our in-game notification system to allow for a number of special use-cases when players invite their friends to play. Currently, when invites expire, notifications are dismissed for both the sender and receiver of the invite. This isn’t super helpful when a player receives a Steam invite before launching the game, for example. Improvements we’re making to the UI can better communicate where invites are sent and how long they remain valid.

Of course, with a team of more than 55 people currently working on the game, these items are just a sampling of the work we've done during the past few weeks on Six Days.

[h3]“You’re entering through a fatal funnel. And you don't know what's waiting on you. They are in there just waiting on you to make the wrong move—which is to come through the door.” — Cpl Dane Thompson[/h3]

Welcome to the seventh entry in our SITREP developer diary series. Until now, we have demonstrated very direct fireteam entry into houses and larger buildings. Kicking down the front door certainly is an option, but it’s not the only option in Six Days. Today, we want to expand on the entry methods and tactics available to players.

Please remember that all assets shown are currently a work-in-progress.

Since Six Days in Fallujah’s inception, we’ve spoken with more than 100 Marines and Soldiers who have shared their very specific and unique experiences in urban combat. No two combat scenarios have been the same. However, there is one constant among every story that’s been shared with our development team—the fatal funnel is urban combat’s worst nightmare.

DEVELOPER COMMENT
The fatal funnel is not only a narrow entrance that leaves little room for maneuverability. It’s also easily defended by the enemy inside. Attackers are tasked with forcing an entry that’s not only tight, but offers little to no visibility inside. Enemy opposition, on the other hand, have all the cards at their disposal—they have complete visibility on infiltrators, and their degree of coverage is miniscule compared to that of the attacking force. The odds for those entering the fatal funnel are very bad.

[h3]“The problem is that if you walk out there, the moment your head breaks the doorway, he can shoot you in the head. It's just combat geometry.“ — 1st Lt. Jesse Grapes[/h3]

Fallujah’s rough, urban environment included thousands of fatal funnels, and Marines had to take the first steps into the unknown with every single building they cleared. The biggest question for these Marines often became, “How do we break this geometry?” The fatal funnel is inevitable when house-clearing, but there are specific tactics employed by Marines and Soldiers designed to mitigate as much risk as possible.

DEVELOPER COMMENT
A theme we heard from many Marines and Soldiers was avoiding the fatal funnel by finding alternate ways into houses. So, based on specific stories, we created specific methods in the game for players to climb to rooftops, as well as enter through windows, both of which we heard examples of happening repeatedly during the battle.

We’ve also touched briefly on the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop in a previous entry, and we want to remind everyone again of the methodology that applies when house-clearing: before breaching a building or compound in Fallujah, it's essential to take a moment to pause, listen, and observe across the entire fireteam. How many windows does the building have? Are Insurgents visible from the outside of the compound? What material is the front door made of? Can you hear anyone inside?

For today’s diary, players observe a two-story building that has two valid entry points to the front, with alternate entries at the rear. The fireteam orients itself and decides that the best course of action is not to funnel four members of the fireteam into a single door, but instead to split the team for a simultaneous entry. Dividing the fireteam into two groups of two, the teams assault the building with overwhelming speed and precision at the very same time.

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Here, the fatal funnel becomes less fatal as it’s now split between two entries instead of one. Enemy Insurgents, while intelligent with the home-base advantage, aren’t expecting an attack on two fronts. The keywords here are distraction and disorientation. Enemies that are disoriented are more easily defeated, and Six Days' AI system will cause enemies to become disoriented when exposed to multiple threats. While this isn’t always a guarantee for success, split-entry certainly pushes the needle back in the direction of the Marines.

While this is just one example of clearing a building in Six Days, Procedural Architecture offers a variety of possibilities that will fundamentally change the way players approach house-clearing. You may find yourself without a door and a window and instead, there may be two doors. Alternatively, an entry from the rear could pose a viable distraction. While a full-frontal assault led by two Marines breaks out in the front-yard, the remaining two Marines may lead a precise takedown from the backyard. Split-entry still applies here, but the means in which it’s employed varies. And, it’s entirely up to the player to decide.

Let’s consider another scenario: players assess that the fatal funnel on the front doorway isn’t a viable option. The backyard is too heavily defended or doesn’t present enough cover. All of the windows are barricaded and offer no entry options. How do you proceed?

[h3]“The logic behind it is that you don't want to create a trapped rat. When you clear from the bottom up, enemies have nowhere else to go, so they’re more inclined to stay and fight to the death. Then, if you’re going top down, and they have the opportunity to either fight you, or, when they feared they were gonna die, just run and leave, then you can still take over the building.” — Sgt. Adam Banotai[/h3]

Enemies almost always prepared their defenses against door entries on the first floor. Very frequently, they created makeshift barricades out of rubble, furniture, and anything else they could find. Then, they laid in wait with their weapon trained on the front door.

Clearing from the top down allows players to defeat enemy defenses that are oriented towards doors on the main floor. It can also catch Insurgents inside by surprise. As Sgt. Banotai suggests, if you clear from the top down, Six Days' AI system can even push insurgents into the streets (depending on the situation), where they might get engaged by a nearby AAV or other vehicles.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
There are many ways in Six Days to access the top floor of buildings from the outside. In some cases, there will be planks connecting rooftops between buildings. In others, there are staircases available. Additionally, Marines and Soldiers were able to either climb or hoist each other up a floor, and we’re including this third method for rooftop entry by indicating vaultable walls with green vinery. These provide access to second and third-floor levels, but it’s important to remember your character is vulnerable to incoming fire while you complete the vaulting animation.

These are just some of the many ways players can tackle house-clearing. With Procedural Architecture presenting a variety of geographical obstacles and fireteam tactics left up to player choice, no two entries are going to be the exact same in Six Days. Just like actual combat, players will never know what to expect.

Welcome to the first entry in a series of Developer Logs we’d like to share with our community. These shorter-form updates are meant to provide context on things the team is currently working on in between our larger SITREP update diaries. A big thanks to our community for suggesting this format!
Please remember that all assets shown are currently a work-in-progress.

Outdoor Graphics Update:

As we described in an earlier SITREP, while nearly every other game “bakes” its lighting into static “light-maps” that cannot change, Six Days is one of the first games to adopt “global illumination” that can light the game world dynamically. This allows us to make lighting and visibility much more important to combat, it creates variety because missions play much differently depending on the location and angle of the sun, and it feels more realistic.



However, today’s graphics cards are just beginning to become powerful enough to light entire worlds dynamically in a realistic way. The challenge is that light bounces all over the place, and the scene can look very unrealistic when rendering engines don’t account for this. This is why Nvidia and AMD have begun introducing ray tracing capabilities within their graphics cards. But the installed base of cards capable of ray-tracing entire worlds dynamically is still much too small to make this a minimum requirement for a video game.

Recently, some games have begun experimenting with a technology called “Screen Space Global Illumination,” but we found this can lead to sudden, disturbing changes in color and shading.
We developed our own Global Dynamic Lighting system a few years ago, and have modified it three times since then. But one of the problems with our earlier implementations is that they caused areas in shadow to become unnaturally dark. Besides not looking as real as we’d like, this also created unrealistic gameplay because characters could position themselves in areas where they would be seen in real life, but not in the game.



Enclosed are screenshots that show our new outdoor lighting. Although we’ve improved dozens of smaller things to make the scene look more realistic, please notice how much softer our shadows look now. This is particularly noticeable in ruined buildings. In the past, for example, areas in shadow would go to black very quickly. Your visibility here is much more realistic now.

And, of course, with our Procedural Architecture, all the geometry—and lighting—in this scene will change the next time the game is played!



Audio:

We’re very focused on continuously improving our audio design in Six Days, and we want to thank everyone for all the kind words on the system so far.

• Recorded and implemented 5,000 new mission dialog lines.
  
• Improved audio CPU performance.
  
• Added audio mix settings for music, gameplay and voice.
  
• Next steps—in-game cinematics, more systemic combat dialog, bug fixes, and overall game mix.
  

Performance:

• Hit our target of 4K resolution at 60 fps on high-end machines.
  
• Reduced memory footprint by 50% so we can now run smoothly on machines with 8GB RAM.
  
• Next steps—continue improving performance across low-end and mid-range CPUs and GPUs. This is a core area of focus for the team. Unfortunately, this also causes new kinds of instability and odd bugs that need to be squashed each day. We're anxious to get through this phase!
  

Tutorials:

• Implemented the first pass of our contextual tutorial system.