Squad News

Hello squaddies,

We have an updated Shadows & Lighting Overhaul playtest build that will be available for public play this weekend Sunday 1st August 2021. We especially want to hear from players currently running Squad on PCs which can be considered low/minimum specification to observe if players using such hardware are affected by any significant performance problems. We will shortly be updating the Squad Public Testing* App on Steam in preparation for the weekend.

The playtest server will be available this Sunday, August 1st, and we would love to populate a full server, to have as many players - with varying hardware setups - as possible join us and help put it through its paces. The download should be available shortly on the Squad Public Testing app.

We welcome all player’s feedback and performance reports. Please use the #experimental-shadow-feedback discord channel or our joinsquad forums to provide this feedback.

When providing performance feedback, please supply the following information in your report:
-CPU
-Graphics Card
-RAM
-Resolution
-In-Game Settings

NOTE: The lighting/shadow overhaul changes you see in this build WILL NOT be in the forthcoming v2.11 update, these changes are in a test phase for us to continue receiving feedback before we implement these changes to the live version of Squad in the future.

If you are experiencing issues in the build, be sure to go to Settings -> “CLEAR CACHE” after updating to see if this offers some improvements.

*The Squad - Public Testing application will only appear within your Steam Library if you own Squad, and can be easily found via the search function within your Steam Library.

• Reduced the occurrence of client hitching during gameplay compared to the previous Shadows & Lighting playtest build.
  
• Muzzle flash effects have been overhauled and should be much more prominent and visible in this playtest. Also, infantry and vehicle muzzle flashes should now display at much further ranges than the current live build.
  
• Gorodok grass prototype: Much more lush foliage with better variety and shading. Needs to be evaluated for both performance and gameplay impact.
  
• Gorodok landscape overhaul: Much more detailed and realistic landscape materials, featuring micro detailing and better shading. The landscape texture should no longer appear to repeat.
  

• In this playtest build, walking into a wall will force your character out of ADS. This is not an intentional feature, it is a bug.
  

For those that did not see the full details from the last playtest on June 27th, here are the full changes:


Currently in the live game, when players run with lower Shadows and lower Ambient Occlusion settings, this can allow for somewhat easier spotting of enemies in certain circumstances, while also greatly downgrading the game’s visual quality. Also, the current Far Shadows are not optimized, leading to performance degradation for most player setups when Far Shadows are enabled.

This playtest version has an extensive overhaul of the way lighting and shadows work under the hood, accompanied by a vast new range of performance options, while greatly improving the overall visual quality of lighting and shadows across all quality settings. An essential aspect of this change is retaining a consistent gameplay experience across all settings levels - from low to epic - to reduce potential gameplay advantages that can be attained through toggling the various new shadows settings to a negligible level.

Shadows should now also give a better overall performance for all shadows settings, from low through high/epic settings. Even when running with the lowest possible settings, shadows will still be enabled to allow for an effect on gameplay consistent with higher shadow quality settings, albeit with greatly reduced visual quality to save on performance. We would love to get as many varied setups as possible playing to help us see what impact this potentially has on system performance - particularly on lower-end / minimum-spec hardware.

• Setting Shadows to “Low” will retain most of the gameplay impact of shadows and Ambient Occlusion when they’re set to higher levels, but drastically reduce their quality. Currently in the live game, setting Shadows to “Low” removes shadows almost entirely.
  
  
• This is expected to have a slight performance hit for players running on Low settings - but a large benefit to gameplay, in that all settings levels are much closer to presenting the same overall levels of lighting and shadows, thus providing similar effects on gameplay.
  
  
• Removed Far Shadows tickbox - The new shadow implementation covers the range of the current Far Shadows at higher quality and a lower performance cost. The new shadows will have potentially up to 10x less performance cost compared to the current shadows in the live game.
  
  
• Distant Field Ambient Occlusion will be enabled on all graphics quality settings while having been optimized at lower quality settings. DFAO allows the realistic dimming of enclosed spaces and areas of dense foliage. In combination with the extended shadow ranges, this will ensure that all players will have similar visibility when trying to spot targets.
  
  -Low - 25% quality, 1 sample
  -Medium - 50% quality, 1 sample
  -High - 75% quality, 2 samples
  -Epic - 100% quality, 3 samples
  
  
• Overhauled shadow rendering - all shadows will render up to 1.7 km at all quality levels, while having up to 8 km of surrounding mountain, terrain, and large detail shadows (some maps have exceptions and render at less range if the map is smaller or emphasizes CQB, such as Fallujah, Logar, etc).
  
  
• Optimized Shadow Cascades, as well as increased maximum resolution for epic settings:
  
  -Low - 1k, 3 Cascades
  -Medium - 2k, 3 Cascades
  -High - 4k, 4 Cascades
  -Epic - 8k, 5 Cascades
  
  
• Note that for both Shadows and Ambient Occlusion, "Low" settings will be at lower resolutions than they are now to offset the performance cost of having more shadows on screen. “High” and “Epic” settings will render shadows at a higher resolution than before, achieving improved visual quality while performing better than Far Shadows do in the current live version of the game. This means that you may want to raise or lower your Shadows and Ambient Occlusion graphics settings from what you normally run in the live game.
  
  
• Ambient Occlusion will be reworked for underground areas such as tunnels and bunkers to allow for more accurate shading, better gameplay and greatly improved atmosphere.
  
  
• Lighting will be improved on all layers. Some layers will be completely overhauled with new HDR lighting. The rest will be incrementally upgraded, and will gradually receive their finishing touches in further patches.
  

• Updated lighting to give more contrast, brighter highlights, and deeper shadows on most map layers.
  Overhauled the colour grading and post-processing on all map layers.
  
• Implemented Volumetric Lighting on all map layers.
  
• Reduced fog thickness on Tallil, Yehorivka, Gorodok, Lashkar, and Kohat. Adjustments of fog on many other layers.
  
• Removed Eye Adaptation from all layers to reduce exploits and allow for balanced gameplay in all areas of our maps.
  
• Removed Ambient Cubemaps from layers to reduce the washed out feeling across all maps.
  
• Most night layers are now brighter.
  
• Relit most underground tunnels with new lights and atmospheric effects, especially on Mestia.
  
• Adjusted layout and tooltips of the Graphics menu to improve clarity and user experience.
  
• Added localized volumetric fog for dusty areas such as tunnels.
  

• Fixed Ambient Occlusion artifacts on thousands of buildings, environment objects, and foliage assets.
  
• Fixed Ambient Occlusion artifacts where underground tunnels intersect with the landscape.
  
• Fixed incorrect PBR shading on several hundred environment assets.
  
• There are still some shading artifacts with some older assets on maps. We are continuing to address these.
  
• Fixed incorrect PBR shading on several landscapes, including Skorpo, Manic, Yehorivka, and Al Basrah.
  
• Improved palm tree shaders to have light scattering through the leaves.
  
• Fixed shiny road materials on many maps, including Al Basrah, Yehorivka, Belaya, and Goose Bay.
  

Offworld Out!

Hello Squaddies,

My name is Jenny, and I am the Server Licensing Manager at OWI. Welcome to the fifth edition of the server spotlight. This feature will highlight some of the community servers that we think you may want to check out, share information about them, and show what they are up to or where they excel.

Whether they are old or new, it's always good to highlight the fantastic stuff our established server owners are doing every day.

[h2]LiQuid Gaming[/h2]



LiQuid Gaming was created back in June of 2019 by our founding Members, Almtree, Apache1, Budge, and Chase. We created this community to be about the players, to make sure that their voice won't ever be lost and cast away because of the indifference of belief. Since then we have grown upwards of 2400 people in the discord and over 450 LiQ Members and reserves!

We love the fact that we care for over 25000 unique players per month with 47 Admins and moderators on our two public Servers, with a goal to help new players learn the fundamentals of Squad so they will fit in well as they fan out into the world of Squad!

We update our rotations bi-weekly using feedback from the community and try to make every layer as balanced as possible. Our main rule is to Play the Objective! This enables us to make sure you are never far away from any action and the games are always exciting!!

With the launch of V1.0 Liquid Gaming released player tracking of all stats on our website www.liqgaming.com, We track all Kills, Deaths, revives, and TK's! so come and play and then brag to your squadmates about who is the best!

Without our Advisors, Staff, Admins, and Moderators, LiQ would not be one of the top Squad communities and the fun social place it is. We thank all of our volunteers (including greeters) for the hours they put in, across all the games that we run and administer.

Visit us at https://liqgaming.com/discord and for player stats https://liqgaming.com/playerstats

Jenny Notes:

When I joined the server, I saw that one of the liquid members created a squad calling it ‘teaching noob players’. When I joined his squad, he was supporting the new players in his squad, giving them direction and answering questions they had about the game. This was very refreshing to see and experience. I had lots of fun on the server, I would highly recommend giving them a go.

[h2]German Squad Gaming[/h2]



A friendship between our now two “Community project managers” developed while playing Squad, thoughts were exchanged, and an idea evolved: A new community looking for communication and teamplay while maintaining the focus on having fun after a day of work. One of our main goals is recruiting new Squad players and beginners of all backgrounds giving us a chance to expand our community and the Squad community as a whole. With the goal of uniting national and international players under one virtual roof, a continuously developing cooperation with groups such as HMC, SSC, BF, and Time led to the creation and growth of what we may now call our “GSG” community.

First and foremost, the capability of military realism to the extent we want. Naturally, team play, communication, and the development of situational tactics play a defining role in this endeavor. Furthermore, the continuously developing and evolving gameplay and content of Squad has kept us hooked for quite a while.

GSG has a good exchange due to the relatively small partner clans. We have a “beginner-friendly playstyle”, a willingness to help and support new players. With the organized events we provide, the team opens as many Squads as possible to play with new players. We also provide tutorials for “Squad Leading” and other roles to help players develop further.

Discord: https://discord.gg/Cq95cYYMaW

Jenny’s Notes:

When I joined a squad on this server, the squad leaders along with the rest of the players chose to speak English to help me understand what was going on. Although they didn't need to as the server advertises that they are a German-speaking server and I had made the choice to join them. I had a lot of fun on the server and appreciated the support from the team. I highly recommend this server for some games.

[h2]ZSU Gaming[/h2]



Originally, ZSU Gaming was simply known as “Z Special Unit” starting out in Mid 2008 as an ARMA unit with only a handful of players, bearing the namesake of an Australian WWII unit. Eventually, as the membership grew to around 200 people close to 2015, ZSU started to move towards a more community-focused group, and in 2018 after a massive rebrand to "ZSU Gaming" we really started branching into the full-blown server host and gaming community we're known as today - supporting close to 300 players over 3 licensed servers when required and being asked for a 4th and 5th for mods and training servers, whilst also still supporting our roots in ARMA. We also started branching out to other games like Space Engineers, Dead Matter, Dual Universe, R6S, and many others. Now reaching 5600 players and rising within Discord, ZSU Gaming is well established as a leader in Australia for servers and the community spirit that Squad tries to instill in its players.

We think something that the community really enjoys about Squad as compared to other games is its reliance on teamwork, which is one of the pillars of ZSU Gaming. You cannot win by being a Rambo, you need to cooperate with your squad and the wider team to win. That's what originally drew us to Squad in the first place. The Oceanic community centered around Australia is a diverse set of people, something the Americans find hilarious (don't worry yanks, we think your accent is funny too), but we play to win, we play to have fun, and the community has prospered as a result of the determination the staff, community representatives and community members of ZSU Gaming put into the game every single day. We couldn't be more proud of what we've managed to achieve with 1/10 the player base of other regions.

Apart from our community itself, we believe providing the players a great environment by

• Purchasing dedicated top spec server hardware - so the game runs as smoothly as possible for the players on our server.
  
• Developing a custom map selection and voting script - so the players have the say on what they play next based on what hasn't or has played previously.
  
• Our large, collaborative and multicultural admin team - Our team is sourced from the entirety of the ZSU Gaming player base - not just those with our tags. We actively recruit players from other communities, countries, groups, and backgrounds who regularly play on our servers.
  
• Providing our admin team with extra tools and dashboards - so they can see what is happening in-game to a high level of detail and can make informed decisions.
  

Discord: https://discord.gg/zsu

Jenny’s Notes:

I had lots of fun on this server, the players were very welcoming and focused on playing the game. The community on the server also had a great sense of humor which was relaxing to new players on the server. I highly recommend this server for a visit.

Hey Squaddies!

Welcome to the first edition of our new Quarterly Development Update, where we will be giving our community some insight into how development works behind the scenes. In these updates, we will be exploring recent challenges faced by our development team, provide some insight into our process, and provide a bit of discussion surrounding our priorities. Once you’re done reading this update, feel free to head over to our forums to ask your questions in the discussion thread found here. We will compile the questions and answer as many of them as possible!



During the last few months, the team faced a difficult challenge in finding a resolution for the logistics supply bug. The bug was tied to several other issues including the turret-disappearance bug and the passenger seat bug. This made it difficult to investigate and pin down the root cause.

Through the team's investigations, the team discovered that the bug is a symptom of an overarching engine issue. This issue is caused by the client and server’s GUIDs for certain objects in the world being mismatched upon loading a new level. The issue is unfortunately not completely resolved, but it is less frequent with the mitigation the team has implemented. The team is continuing to investigate new solutions to completely eradicate the bug once and for all.

Several months were used to diagnose the source of the problem, and get an acceptable patch to the player base. The interconnectedness of the issue pushed our timeline far beyond what we expected and we ended up spending most of March diagnosing the source of the problem, then the majority of April testing several different possible solutions.

After several tests, we took a new approach reviewing the engineering side of things. During our testing phase, we were able to find a better solution that significantly reduced the frequency of users experiencing this bug. Thanks to the discovery of some previously hidden settings and testing several different engine changes. We eventually found a new understanding of how the engine caches client GUID values and we have been able to make a significant amount of progress.



As many of you know, another issue several players had been facing within Squad was the Vehicle Mesh bug, which caused the armor of the vehicle to become indestructible. This bug came out of the new functionality we created for armor meshes. The new functionality replaced armor meshes with a newly created component that allows us to decouple the armor rating information and information about the physical material used on the mesh.



Previously, armor rating information was embedded into the physical material, causing numerous headaches for our VFX artists and game designers due to the sheer number of different physical materials needed to represent different armor values. The new component the team has designed has allowed us to move away from the physical materials-based workflow, making it simpler to set up and tune armor values without affecting the VFX and audio used for that armor. This also allows us to extend our methods of armor penetration more easily in the future if need be. Unfortunately, this new system had a bug where the projectile would not use the correct value for penetration, and the fix for the bug would cause a crash while using mods that had custom projectiles. This meant that we needed to disable this change until we could get a solution for the crash in place.



In update 2.9 the Forward Operating Base’s (FOB) Exclusion Radius has been increased back to 400m from 300m. This change is intended to reduce the effectiveness of massed FOBs surrounding an objective, and tone down the spawn point spam meta which is a staple of current public games. The spam meta is where teams use the ability to deploy multiple spawn points in close proximity to the surrounding objective area and this is not aligned with the focus of our game.

We hope the exclusion radius change encourages players to put more emphasis on teamwork when picking locations for their FOB placements. In the future, we are looking at more changes to help mitigate this broader strategic meta, and encourage a wider variety of effective strategies. The goal is to better align Squad’s gameplay more closely with our focus on teamwork, communication, planning, and coordination. This alignment would allow and encourage more often a wider range of strategic options with more effective planning.



In update 2.9 a future change to the HAB proxy radius was mixed with a merge and pushed to the live game an update early. The change makes it so that players can proximity block a spawning unit from an increasing radius with more players, 3 at 30 meters, 4 at 40, and so on until 8 players can block it at 80 meters. We are currently reading the feedback about this change from multiple channels and are actively looking for the right way to fine-tune this change that takes into account all of your feedback. You can read a more detailed post from us on the subject here.



The team has been designing a new feature called the helicopter rotor wash system. It allows for helicopters to affect the environment it comes into contact with. For example, when a helicopter flies over a field of grass, it will flatten the grass as the air is blown down onto it. The system is dynamic, so there is no constant shader cost of the effect unless there is a helicopter with an engine on, within 60m of the ground, and within 700m of your player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1_pp1Wv2qU

Wash can overlap from multiple helicopters, causing vast turbulence between them, with a max of 8 active at a time. The active helicopters sort by distance, opening possibilities for future effects from helicopters, other vehicles, or players.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for your deep interest in everything Squad-related! As a reminder, if you have any questions, please head over to the discussion thread in our forums, found here. We will be reading your questions and aim to answer them over the coming weeks.

As always, you can catch a glimpse of the Squad Roadmap. The roadmap has always been our way of providing the community with transparency, but with that transparency comes the caveat that things we’ve discussed may change.

Offworld Out!

Hey Squaddies!

We wanted to take a moment to address the recent HAB Spawn Proximity Disable Scaling rework, and the feedback we’ve been seeing from our player base on this matter so far. This changed the distance at which a Hab can be proxied by enemies (i.e. the HAB Spawn is considered overrun and becomes unspawnable). It will now scale by the number of enemies in proximity to the Hab. For example:

• 2 soldiers can proximity disable a HAB if they are all positioned within 20m of it.
  
• 8 soldiers can proximity disable a HAB if they are all positioned within 80m of it.
  
• Note: A minimum of 2 players is required to proxy a HAB. The maximum proxy range now scales up to 80m (this was previously fixed always at 30m).
  

You may have noticed that the v2.9 release notes received an edit after release and were updated to include the above details which, as we mentioned during the recent SquadChat, was originally slated for a possible release in Squad v2.10.

Several weeks ago we had planned a playtest for the reworked FOB Exclusion Radius increase, as well as the reworked HAB Proximity Scaling. As we specifically wanted to test both changes together, this was to be done in a separate playtest which included both changes and was a content sandbox separated from our then-upcoming, now live release of v2.9. The HAB Proximity Scaling was intended to be enabled for that playtest and then temporarily removed before the v2.9 release. This playtest was then canceled due to various technical issues, and FOB Proxy Scaling was to be temporarily reconfigured to be identical to v2.8.

At this point, an accidental merge of the FOB Exclusion Radius content, which still included the HAB Proxy changes, overwrote the correct values and resulted in the overhauled HAB Proximity Scaling being released with v2.9. We did not discover the change had slipped through until after the update had gone live.

This was a mistake in our internal release process, which led to the release of this feature earlier than intended and prior to the desired testing. We apologize for the discrepancy between our previous communications, the v2.9 patch notes, and the reality of what shipped in the update. A hotfix at this time specifically to revert these changes would be quite disruptive, and come with new technical problems of its own. This feature, while released prematurely, is meant to address gameplay mechanics that previously encouraged undesirable in-game behavior - lone wolf tactics being utilized to counter larger combat efforts with a FOB/HAB, and overall game pacing.

We know this is a large meta shift, one that the team has been planning to implement for a long time, and we are in the process of evaluating additional possible tuning. We encourage and appreciate all of your comments on this change, especially related to the way spawns affect the pacing and general battle cohesion. Our team is continuing to review player feedback, and this feedback combined with in-game behavior will help us further fine-tune these changes.

We will update everyone once we have had more time to review our tuning and all of your comments. Please keep the comments coming!

Offworld Out!

Hello squaddies,

Today’s update brings in an urgent server crash fix we have been notified about since the release of V2.9, as well as a couple of fixes for some long-standing client crashes.

See below for complete explanations of these issues, and thanks again to those who submitted server crash logs to help us address these as soon as possible.

Be sure to let us know if you continue to experience any of these issues through our dedicated channels and try clearing your in-game cache if you continue to experience residual issues.

• Fixed the Server Crash related to UB32 Rocket Pod & SPG9 Recoilless Rifle’s backblast.
  
• Fixed a problematic and difficult to reproduce client crash that is related to the Particle System and switching maps. The Particle System was reusing a Particle Emitter Instance from a pool, which is tied to the FX System in the current map world, which was persisting to the new map world after a map change, and then re-using one of these instances from the pool, but the FX System it was created with was no longer valid. There has been an attempt to fix the same (or similar) issue with particle rendering, which essentially iterates all particle systems at the end of the match and force deactivates them. This fix has been extended to also reset the particles, and therefore clear the instance pool which should hopefully fix this assertion failure. As we still do not have proper reproduction steps for this, this is not straightforward to test or be certain the issue is resolved completely. If this issue persists, full crash dump logs are appreciated to investigate the issue further.
  
• Fixed a Client Crash when switching maps, related to the vehicle tire configs. After investigation, the client crash was determined to be caused by a race condition in the Tire Config. Tire Configs are modified on initialization and destruction, however async loading initialization can happen on a separate thread and these functions are not thread-safe. Added locks around access to the Tire Configs array, to ensure it is thread-safe. This should address the fundamental issue causing the crash. Some reports of this crash mention that it was happening specifically while Alt-Tabbed, but this is not conclusive.
  

If you are experiencing issues, be sure to go to Settings -> “CLEAR CACHE” after updating.