Chokepoint Community,
There have been requests for an update on the development of WWII ONLINE: CHOKEPOINT. Below is an excerpt from the recently announced 2024 Roadmap by CRS.
You can review the entire article via the link below which includes videos and screenshots of the ongoing development of Chokepoint.
https://www.wwiionline.com/post/2024-roadmap
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WWII ONLINE: CHOKEPOINT ROADMAPAs we announced in mid-2023, we had to completely rebuild our Chokepoint team. Given all of the other moving parts of our organization here at CRS, and the high demand to press updates for 1.0 and 2.0, things were a bit slower than desired to get things going. So we appreciate your grace as we’ve had to navigate the recruitment and training of personnel and pick the project up from the original development team. By no means, is that a simple thing to do.
Our commitment to Chokepoint remains because it is acting as a training tool for our Production team and as we’ve described all along, it is being sought out to replace the current infantry system for WWII Online 1.0 for many reasons.
UPGRADE TO UNREAL ENGINE 5.3Chokepoint is currently running within UE 5.1, we need to pursue the latest and greatest capabilities and stay on top of our game (pardon the pun). As much as we can help it, we do not want to fall behind. Initial conversion steps from 5.1 → 5.3 are underway.
REBUILDING INVENTORY SYSTEMThis has been identified as a key hurdle we need to get past. UE4 utilized a custom-built inventory system which has been totally deprecated as part of the conversion over to UE5. We plan to leverage UE5’s new inventory system called, “Lyra.” Efforts were made to see what could be transferred over from UE4 → UE5 but have mostly fallen flat. This is part of the exploration process of our new team picking up the pieces and recognizing that we need to build anew.
The inventory system manages character inventory, which weapons are assigned to whom, load-outs, etc. Rebuilding it gives us native compatibility with UE5 which in turn makes it better long-term for support not just in Chokepoint, but anything WWII Online 2.0 intends to use from these systems. It also means that the general knowledge of how this works will be better documented (as it is provided by Epic Games itself) and our new team will be more capable of sustaining it.
To do this, we intend to strip out the current system entirely and start small by adding a single weapon to be shared across all classes and building from there.
Fortunately, we have lots of data still intact and weapons, animations, sounds, etc which should make that process start to pick up speed once we get base functionality working. We’ll keep you posted on progress, this a very difficult task and touches many areas of the code/blueprints.
CODE CLEAN UPWe’re at a much better point now to isolate deprecated elements of our code base and blueprint(s) post-conversion. So things that are hanging around from UE4 will be jettisoned that are no longer in use by our programming team, to reduce technical debt and ensure optimal workflows going forward.
CLEANING UP EXISTING MAPS & MODELSOur environment artists have been steadily repairing Carentan & La Fiere, and have made some strong progress. Our next goal is to unlock a technical issue preventing artists from being able to work on Eglise (the nighttime map), so we can get that game ready as well.
Several models have received UVs, textures, placement adjustments, and so on. These were mostly post-conversion issues that demanded attention.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
CARENTAN UNREAL ENGINE 5 PROGRESS (CONTINUED)Here are some additional photos demonstrating post-conversion cleanup activities on Carentan.
Advancing Chokepoint: Carentan's town hall is receiving finishing touches
Advancing Chokepoint: Carentan buildings being cleaned up
Advancing Chokepoint: Carentan railyard
LA FIERE UNREAL ENGINE 5 PROGRESS (CONTINUED)Here are some additional photos demonstrating post-conversion cleanup activities on the map of La Fiere.
Advancing Chokepoint: An all-new La Fiere Bridge
Advancing Chokepoint: Road to La Fire is being cleaned up
CLEANING UP ANIMATIONSThere are several animations requiring attention, and our animator has already been addressing the more obvious animations in the third person. As soon as the inventory system is online, we’ll be able to do more thorough first-person animation improvements as well, as we can properly test results.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
BUILDING, DEPLOYMENT & PLAYTESTSOnce we have our inventory system functioning again, our next step is to clean up our application building process for PC and work on deploying those binaries to our dedicated host. This will effectively get us back into the routine development swing of things.
Then we can get updates deployed via Steam and all key holders of Chokepoint will be able to dive back into playtests and get the ball rolling. Then it will all be about players reporting issues, our team prioritizing them, cleaning things up and deploying new builds, and so on. This will be the ultimate sign that we’re on the right path and we can be more certain about release timelines.
TRANSPARENCY & EXPECTATIONSThis stuff isn’t easy. We’re a mostly volunteer team with three major projects going on simultaneously. We’ve laid out what’s happened, our commitment to rebuild and get things back online, and that we’re staying the course as best we can to get Chokepoint to be operational. But it’s got some challenges that we’re currently navigating through.
Keep your expectations reasonable and know that until otherwise stated, we’re continuing to move forward on all fronts.
https://www.wwiionline.com/post/2024-roadmap
