Developers Update 31

Welcome to our thirty-one developers update for Call to Arms! We will use these updates to keep you posted on the progress of the development and features.

We are currently preparing a massive update for Call to Arms and we are super excited to hand it out to you guys soon.



We added a new armor system so that we can finally balance vehicle and tank combat properly. Vehicles will have an armor value for each component, next to the armor thickness. While a 7.62mm projectile can penetrate a technical, it may not instantly knock it out, or randomly knock it out after some magic threshold has been reached. Instead each hit will cause some damage to the armor value depending on a basic projectile damage value and penetration power.
If you penetrate a vehicles’ armor the strength of the penetration matters too, for instance if an armor plate has a thickness of 10mm and your weapon penetrates it will 11mm, it will cause much less damage than a weapon that penetrates with 50mm.
This allows us to make it easier for autocannons to penetrate vehicles, but don’t knock them out instantly, or use some magic random factors that would decide whether the vehicle breaks or not. It also helps us to simulate vehicles with a lot of mass vs. vehicles with little mass but with similar armor stats. Overall this system gets rid of all the randomness that happens to vehicle combat, while preserving the realistic armor penetration system that takes armor angle and weapon type into consideration.

Furthermore, we can scale it better between the regular gameplay and hardcore. Before only the human damage would change, but now both can be adjusted for much smoother transitions.





We noticed that a lot of users tend to use the third/first person controls way too much in online games, which can be fun, but puts the focus away from the RTS perspective of the game and makes the gameplay quite messy, as often, using direct control wouldn’t necessary lead to a success but makes it cumbersome for the other player to counter it.
Hence, we decided to limit the usage of direct control in the RTS gamemodes. You will now have a Power Bar that fills up very slowly by time, or much faster by kills. This bar allows you to use direct control for a limited amount of time, when you really need it and when it really helps you to change the course of the battle. It also protects you from direct control spam by the other team. This feature can be disabled in server settings, but we generally recommend using it for a better experience.





Engineers come now with the ability to build fortifications, such as sandbags, tank traps and so on. Later, we will allow them to create real emplacements, like heavy mortars, but these will cost you MP like any other unit in the game. Our goal is to make the engineer class more interesting and more worthwhile, while adding more options and strategies to our players.





We finally finished the new netcode for Call to Arms. Multiplayer is now supported in 64-bit, which means you can enjoy much better graphics, longer and bigger battles without crashes and support for huge mods. On top of it, the input lag is reduced quite noticeably, which will enhance the overall online experience for everyone, especially in direct control.



We did several things to enhance the visual experience for future, as well as existing maps. We added a new altitude haze to simulate fog in lower regions of a map. Furthermore, we added the ability to disable the border fog, as well as support for 3d background landscapes for long distance views. Our latest improvement is an enhanced lightning of the landscape, which helps a lot to render natural cliffs and hills. This feature adds a lot of details to existing maps and make them look more natural. It also helps you to distinguish between slopes. On top of that, we improved our workstyle for future maps. They will have much more natural landscapes, that are more fun to play and simply look better.





More good news: the new factions are progressing very well and will be most likely available in beta for Season Pass owners within 2 months!



Follow our developer website to stay updated on future sales, new games and upcoming updates! We are also posting small updates and insights on game development on our newly set up Twitter account.