Dagger Directive News

[h2]Drones[/h2]

As I so subtly hinted at in last month's blog, drones are here! You’ll have the choice between reconnaissance to search for and observe targets, and explosive drones to attack and disrupt the enemy. As this is a game there will be a few unrealistic restrictions on their usage. Their range is limited to 500m with an altitude limit of 200m. This still leaves you with plenty of room to effectively employ them.

Here you can see the recon drone being deployed from the attic of a blown out building. An enemy patrol is seen coming down the road.



Time to swap to the explosive drone. The drone is detonated with a button press. Then observe the damage after swapping back to the recon drone.



There’s still some polish work to be done along with tying it into the enemy AI so they have a chance to scatter or shoot down your drones.



[h2]Bullet Penetration[/h2]

Bullet penetration has been on the to do list for a long time. I’m happy to say it’s finally in! A few things go into determining how and if projectiles penetrate a surface. First you have the material of the object getting hit. Solid stone and metal offer higher protections vs. wood boards or concrete blocks. Next, the thickness of the surface at the point and the angle of impact. Shooting straight onto a wooden board will be more likely to penetrate vs. hitting it at a 45 degree angle as the path is then longer. Finally you have the bullet itself which adds in velocity at the time of impact, mass of the bullet, and its density. A 9mm impacting a cinder block at 100m probably won’t penetrate. Swap over to a .50 cal and you’ll tear right through it and probably the next block or two as well.


Below you can see the cinder block wall of this building now only provides concealment for this enemy when facing a .50 BMG.



This goes both ways. Taking cover in a small dilapidated building doesn’t provide quite the same level of cover that it did before. The enemy rounds will rip right through the walls.





[h2]AI Rework[/h2]

That brings us to one of the largest changes over the last month, the AI overhaul. I had a few goals when developing the AI; high enemy counts, dynamic cover, a variety of actions, and team work. I was having issues adapting the old AI system as new features got added. It got to the point where a full rework was needed.

I started with a utility AI system. While it was responsive, evaluating a ton of conditions hurt performance. I then moved to a behavior tree. It was easy to build, but could not cover all the cases I wanted too without again becoming unmanageable or worse, unresponsive. Finally I settled on this new system that merges the performance of states with a sort of hierarchy of actions to help with performance. It’s like a state system but with a number of sets of sub-states to reduce indecisiveness.

So far it’s working well. The AI feels more responsive, dynamic, and intense. Some of them will hold back, take cover, and suppress you. Others will fan out to the sides and attempt to attack you from the sides. As you move and shoot, the AI will shift their positions and behaviors to counter you.

I’m not sure how helpful screen shots will be but here you can see a battle in a small town. The player is attacking from the right. The clumps of short green triangles are all positions where an AI character is testing cover as they try to find good positions to hold back and suppress the player. The individual green triangles are the AI testing for bounding cover as they approach the player. Finally the long, dim, green lines are the bounds where AI that have chosen to flank will push out before converging on the player's location.



Here’s the same battle but from a different angle.



There’s a lot of tuning left to do as more features are added and I get feedback from testers. A dedicated AI walkthrough video would probably be better so I may do one of those in the future.



[h3]Bugs[/h3]

Things don’t always work right the first time. I’m not sure what they were shooting at but it looked cool!




Thanks for reading through all of this! I know some of it, especially the AI section was a bit dense but it’s important to show when things go poorly too. Come back next month for some more content! You may be blown away by what you see!

Hi everyone this will be the first in a series of monthly dev blogs. First off I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Dan, an engineer and designer. I’ve been working on video games since around 2010. I’ve worked on a mix of web and mobile games; AdVenture Capitalist and a couple unreleased games at NCSOFT, up to more recent games; Onward and Batman Arkham Shadows. I left Downpour / Meta back in July in order to focus on Dagger Directive full time.

Dagger Directive has been in development for about 4 years now. It started as my fun side project that I used to test out ideas for things like grass generation and AI behaviors, but has since grown into a full game.

I’ve been pretty busy since the publishing announcement. Adding content, upgrading Unity, and fixing bugs found by the MicroProse QA team. Plus, artists from MicroProse have been re-doing older art and creating new characters, vehicles, and weapons for the game.


[h2]Weapons Additions and Improvements[/h2]

First up is the M4. Dagger Directive is heavily inspired by the old Novilogic Delta Force games and the M4 was a big part of those games. It was the first weapon in Dagger Directive and I made a few different versions before the artists at MicroProse came in and did an amazing job with the final version. Here’s the evolution of the M4 over the last few years, the old one is on the bottom.



Next up is a new weapon to the game, the PKM. It’s the second belt fed machine gun to be added. It comes with built in bipods for stability when shooting from a prone or supported position.





The SVD is a solid marksman rifle and can be equipped with the PSO-1 optic.





Finally, the first bullpup rifle in the game, the AUG A1. It’s the older model and comes equipped with a foregrip and the built in 1.5x scope.






[h2]Technical Changes[/h2]

The engine has been upgraded from Unity 2021.3 to Unity 6. This brings a variety of improvements, not just to the built game itself, but to the development experience in the editor.

Using the new rendering features I’ve seen up to a 20% increase in rendering performance. The game is running at a solid 30 FPS on the Steam Deck during intense fighting and can reach 60 FPS in many areas. (Note: Steam applied some compression to the exported screen shot)



Using the updated asset management features I’ve been able to get the game size down from 4.1GB down to 2.6GB. There’s still content to add so this may go up some more before release. Builds are also a bit faster. They were only about 10 minutes before but they’re down to 3-4 minutes now.

There were of course some issues that came with jumping up 3 years of Unity changes. The grass system had to be updated due to a memory leak, Vulkan had issues creating frame buffers and would cause crashes, and various shaders had to be fixed. Overall I’m pretty excited about the new possibilities that come with the Unity upgrade!


[h2]Thanks![/h2]

That’s it for the first dev update! If you want to follow along you can join the Dagger Directive Discord server here: https://discord.com/invite/NnY2JrNPPd Thanks for reading through the update and come back next month for more news. You never know what I may drone on about next.

Hi Everyone!

We’re happy to announce that Dagger Directive will be published by Microprose! I’ve been working on Dagger Directive for four years now. There’s still a lot of work to be done and I’m excited that Microprose has joined in! With their support through art, marketing, QA, and more, Dagger Directive will be a better game in the end.



Now for a quick update on development. The core gameplay is done and about half of the content is in. I’m currently focused on building out missions, adding weapons and equipment, balancing gameplay, and of course fixing bugs.



I’m excited about the news and I hope you are too! If you want to keep up with the latest news you can Wishlist Dagger Directive and join the Discord: https://discord.gg/NnY2JrNPPd


Thanks!
Dan