Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront News

Hello everyone!

We have been very busy in the past weeks, working in all kinds of directions. For instance, we were setting up parts of the process to facilitate future beta testing. We also did some testing of our own. But now it’s time for a development update!
This dev blog is more about general game updates. Of course we want to show you some nice stuff we’ve been working on. Here is a collection of screenshots with the developer’s notes.
Have a good look, we hope you like them!



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If you take a close look, you can see this particular King Tiger has been in a fight. Two shots from T-34/85’s have scarred the upper glacis plate and one has bounced off the (Pre- production type) turret. It’s gun has been fired a number of times, blackening the barrel around the muzzle brake with burnt gunpowder. It also shows white stripes around the barrel, indicating that this tank has destroyed 8 enemy tanks. The screenie was taken “somewhere in Western Poland”. Note that the trees, bushes and grass are all new.



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We showed you a number of things from the Wintergewitter scenario in devblog #66. Here’s another scene from that scenario; note that the Panzer III has side skirts (and rather muddy ones). The tracks on the Panzer III were easily damaged - even by Soviet AT rifles - making this model one of the first German tanks to receive “Schürzen” for that reason.



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As you can see this Tiger is firing its gun. The flames, like they would in real life, go sideways thanks to the muzzle brake. At the front it’s mostly smoke. The spare track sections on the turret add armor protection in-game, but they can be shot off as well. Note the additional camouflage, mostly attached to the extra bits of track.



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This tank was a nasty surprise to the Germans in 1941. Its extremely heavy armor made it almost impenetrable, at least from the front, for most German AT guns. Some accounts will tell you that a handful of KV tanks could stop a large group of Panzers. In august 1941, a company commander, lieutenant Kolobanov, reported that his company destroyed 42 enemy tanks in 1 day, with just 5 KV tanks. Note that this screenshot clearly shows the infantry riding along, something the KV-1 offers plenty of room for. Also note the bolted armor on the turret.
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Here’s another angle; a maximum of 7 infantry can ride along.



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Here’s the Soviet ROKS flamethrower unit. As you see, the flames are one step up, and so is the coding behind it. It will be much harder to burn yourself with the new algorithms, which is something that had always been a nasty problem with flamethrowers in the game engine, and “farshooting” exploits in multiplayer are not possible any more. Its accuracy is also different; your aim will need to be more precise than before. Also note the volume of smoke.

Did you know?

• The King Tiger from the tank museum in Saumur, France has a non- historical paint scheme according to some people, so we don’t use its color scheme; however, we will use its sound in-game, as it is the only running example in the world.
• You can find more on our Facebook and VK pages. Like & follow us so you are sure to miss nothing, for instance when we open applications for our beta this summer!

Beta testing (15-20 testers) will be open for applications this summer (summer in Europe) and we are still on schedule to have EA in 2018.

That’s all for now. Do you like what you see? Let us know!

Hi everyone, here we are with the next update!
We have some new stuff we want to show you and get your opinion on.

This time it’s all about human models & uniforms. These go together because we want to show you stuff that is completed; not just human models and not just uniforms but both.



As always, we research before we design. In case of the Gates of Hell uniforms, a vast amount of effort went into consulting many different sources such as “Uniforms and insignia of Red Army 1918-1958 (Kharitonov O. V.), “Manual on fitting, assembly... of the marsh equipment of Red Army” (1941), orders of introduction of new items of equipment along the years spanning the war and many others. This was done by Artyom Kazarez who is our in- house historian for this subject.

This photo, said to have been taken in Stalingrad, shows off some accessories nicely (e.g. PPSH drum pouch, spade, shoes with puttee’s), but we can’t trust the colors because they may have been added later.

A number of Soviet uniforms are uniquely shaped. On some, the jacket does not open in the middle from the belt down; the reason for this being unclear. Does anyone of you know?
Anyway, sometimes uniforms seem to have been designed for anywhere but the battlefield. Some Soviet soldiers wore overalls; while these kept out dust and dirt, they must have been a total nuisance in the latrine.



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We will post more screenshots of the soviet models on Facebook in the coming days

As you can (maybe) see, there is much more detail modelled into these than you will find in most games.
The soldier on the close-up belongs to a cadre division of the Red Army from pre-war service. He is fully equipped with Y-straps, bread bag and marsh boots. You may note he is sub-machinegunner, so he has two PPSH drum pouches.
Sadly the image of a Soviet soldier in full gear with all equipment, backpack, marsh boots, etc was only a common sight in 1941. Big losses endured in the first months of war lead to tremendous losses of equipment. So during the Battle of Moscow, the standard soldier’s uniform and gear had many differences, and often most of the equipment was poorer than before. E.g: most bread bags and a substantial amount of Y-straps were lost in the summer & autumn of 1941.
This will be shown in the game - in 1942, soldiers will have other arrangements of equipment.

The more polygons you use in the design process, the better your models look, but a lot of time needs to be spent in optimising the mesh for performance reasons.
The “flipside” is - perhaps obviously - the amount of time it takes to finish and texture them all correctly. This is possibly the main reason why we are not developing at a break- neck pace. We use the “highpoly” method for human modelling, creating a model that contains millions of polygons, accurately simulating different cloth materials and down to the very moles on the soldiers’ skin. Later, the sculpture is broken down to just a couple of thousand polygons, something that the game can handle. The wrinkles of cloth and other tiny details that were once contained in the million-polygon mesh are transferred to the texture, giving a natural appearance to all details.

After the modelling is done we need to add something else to get a sense of realism: we should have a wide cross- section of all the different peoples that made the Soviet army a multicultural place by any standard. We have designed our 3D soldier models to represent just that. Note that the faces of the 3D models here only show a fraction of the total number of different faces, and we have collections of them for different nations.

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Besides that, we need to add texture variations that make the uniforms recognizable. Our historical advisors have made a specification catalogue to track the different uniforms that we will make, and all the separate pieces that conform it. We will be producing approximately 30 uniforms per nation for Early Access, which is not only a record for any MoW game, but perhaps for any RTS out there - we would have to check!
All in all we hope you can see that we are not only progressing but always choosing for ways that add to the quality. Do you like the result?



Quality, realism and historical correctness take time to integrate. Since all our devs are developing the game in their spare time, it is only logical that the game is not yet finished; however, we are progressing nicely toward release. At the time we write this, a huge volume of work is already finished and our goal for EA this year is realistic.
In one of our summer dev blogs we will announce the start of beta testing, the logical next step in any game development cycle. Make sure you keep following us and, when the time comes, subscribe as a tester. We are currently setting up the process for it. By the way, beta testers will receive a game key from us; they will not need to buy the game when it’s released.
Would you be interested to be among the first that see these uniforms and models in- game?

• Some Soviet items were looted off Soviet soldiers by default; the felted boot, for instance, was much better for cold conditions because it lacked the cold- conducting iron nails the German soldiers had in their boot soles.
  
• The “winter lesson” the Wehrmacht had to learn in 1941 was the absolute necessity to wear the uniform trousers over their boots to prevent snow from gathering in them. This could mean the difference between keeping or losing a foot.
  
• Many Soviet soldiers on war-photos have one interesting peculiarity: they have the lone belt without pouches, the foxhole spade or other items. It’s usually so, because many photos were staged and not taken in battle conditions. On the other hand, there’s many photos of soldiers in full gear as well.
  
• Every soldier should have a gas mask bag with it’s corresponding gas mask. It’s interesting to note that from the beginning of the war many soldiers dropped their gasmask and used the former bag for carrying other items - ammo, food, tobacco, etc. Below is a war-time picture showing the usual cargo of a gas mask bag in 1942.
  

Welcome everybody! It's time for a new dev blog (sorry for the week’s delay but we wanted to adjust some last things to deliver you better quality) and as promised, we want to tell you about sounds (voices) of soldiers in GoH and show you some examples of our work. This dev blog will be (beside some recordings) more text like, so please feel free to comment and rate our work below this blog (or vote a thumbs up/down) so we can evaluate your reactions and improve! Let's start!




Since our BWS dev team has members from all over the world, we noticed that voices of soldiers or humans in most games often were very childish or stereotyped, which here and there brought a “-_-” to our faces, especially if you are a native speaker of whatever language, taking the historical background and realism into account.

Hence, to change this for our game and to bring realism to a higher level within our capacities, we decided to make completely new recordings of the voices for the German and Russian soldiers. Our target is to innovate and refresh all voices to a point where we create a new atmosphere and intense immersion on the battlefield!


To realize good productions, we required good professional equipment and people which are motivated and skilled in doing this job - both of this aspects are very hard to find if you have no budget to pay a third party provider. Even Triple A games often have some problems with this. Fortunately, one of our staff members has an excellent network which helped us to have a large German voice acting team with excellent voice characteristics, acting skills and motivation to do this job.


As a first step, our voice team had to prepare the voice room (which is a little music rehearsal room) to make sure our recordings are not disturbed by feedback, which often is the case when edges or flat areas or objects are near the speaker (they also used a lot of improvised and self made material to make sure that this can be guaranteed). As a next step, the team built up all of the equipment required (microphone, monitors etc.) to do some tests afterwards and to make sure about that everything is adjusted and running fine for final recording. Before the first voices were recorded, our actors practices the specific sentences while trying different emotions within this process to make sure that our demands were met.




Our German voice team is about 16 passionate actors (among them a leader of a theater group, students of a film academy, a sound technician, musicians, a soldier and assistants) who work together. Their average age is ca. 28 years and an interesting fact is that most of them are gamers, so they know about good and bad (German) voice examples from different games and they were able to anticipate what must be done differently to make it better than anything that came before this. Before they started the whole project, they fulfilled some planning processes which included researching work to create texts and sentences that possibly could be heard in battles. They focused on the way of speaking in general, WWII era German words used, discussing all this and a lot more. A very abstract example of this work was looking at old WWII videos, but also at modern war situations, which we analysed to find out how soldiers would talk or scream when being in combat. As one of many examples, we were looking at this: Michael Wittmann interview (used to find out how he speaks and what words he used when doing that):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFtFfHGmgJA
Since one of our team members was in the German army, we also consulted him when creating visions, concepts and plans for the voices.
While our voice actors were acting, they sometimes were looking at WWII/war media to soak up the impressions and the atmosphere to be able to perform in the most realistic or plausible way possible. When doing this, the most important aspect always was and is about being authentic, in which we think we succeeded - BUT, enough said now, let's hear into some samples!

https://youtu.be/wr9BWx_J-mo
(If you don't speak German/Russian and you would like us to translate one part of the lines, post the time in the comment section and we will help you out!)

Have you ever tried voice acting? It’s really not as simple as it may seems and it takes a lot of hours (preparing, choosing good files, snipping and editing). As you´ve heard, we currently do have more actors for the German part but this will change in the future so more Russian voices will come!

What you could hear too is that the voices of our actors differ from each other (characteristics), which is very important to serve different roles ingame (young soldiers around 18 aged and older veterans etc.). Here we got some of them again speaking the same sentence to compare their voices. The following spoken line means, translated “Deckung! = Cover!”

Find it here

When recording, we also make more than one version out of one line to chose the bests out of them in the very end and to have some variations ingame.

Find it here

We are extremely proud of our voice team performances and hope you like their work too! If you have any suggestions to add, feel free to post your idea right here in the comments!

Hi everyone, here we are with a new dev blog. We want to thank you guys for the overwhelming reactions to our previous blog, that was really motivating. Keep it up guys!

This time, we would like to tell you about the sound(s) in the game and how we research and use them. Of course we also show you some of the results and ask you what you think of them.

This is a challenging subject for any developer.
Most Hollywood productions are useless as a source; except for just a handful of movies, they use the wrong sounds and equipment for almost everything. Does it sound familiar to you? You watch a ww2 movie and you hear yourself say “that’s a fake explosion” or “that’s the wrong tank” or “that equipment doesn’t belong here” every couple of minutes. As an example, check out JG2’s “FW190”s below:

https://youtu.be/t0gcap1hjPI
Even though this is an iconic movie, this bit just isn’t right at all.

So we can do several things: we can travel to museums and events where we can capture the original engine sounds of war (which we sometimes do), or buy the sounds.
Some of our weapon sounds are live recordings, some are acquired from 3rd parties. The right tank gun sounds were also difficult to find, just like engine sounds, but we got some already!
There again, unless we have had the extremely rare chance to do a live recording, it will have to come from elsewhere.

Last but not least we need explosions (lots of them ːsteamhappyː) and since we are not allowed to detonate anything at Barbedwire studios ːsteamsadː, we have to find another way to get those as well.
In the end, you don’t have to worry, we will make sure we get it absolutely right.



Are you one of those that can tell the number of cylinders when you hear an engine running? Allow us to reassure you with some of our assets then:

https://youtu.be/9xd8eV7h128
This is what the Maybach HL230 P30 sounds like.

https://youtu.be/gHuS82OL2bo
This is what the Model V-2-34 diesel engine sounds like.

We move on to artillery. Many games have a limited array of sounds for all guns. However, in reality, different shells make different sounds.
Let’s have a quick look at the use of larger calibre howitzers in- game. Logically, if we want to see an impact, first we have to fire the shell:

https://youtu.be/93djAdM7rNM
Friendly or enemy, if an artillery shell was incoming, everyone on the battlefield would duck for cover.

https://youtu.be/S-wi7vPvXD0
How do you like our sounds? Do you have any improvements to suggest?

• The first series of Panthers was rushed into battle at Kursk despite known technical problems, and the first two were lost to engine fires already during unloading from the train.
  
• T-34’s are still fighting today, in the civil war in Yemen.
  
• The Panther cost 117.100 Reichsmark, less than half the cost for a Tiger I (250.800 Reichsmark).
  
• The 1943 model T-34 cost 135.000 Rubel. The exchange rate of the day was 5:1 which means in Reichsmark it cost 27.000 so the Panther would have been more than 4 times the price of a T-34!
  
• Just a mortar shell explosion near a soldier (under cover) results in loss of hearing. Many soldiers went deaf this way.
  
• Engine sounds could be heard hundreds of meters far away. This would be good intel, especially at night.
  
• We have a facebookpage! Like & follow us to get our other “did you know” posts as well!
  

In the meantime, please tell us what you think would be really cool to have in the voice acting, so we can consider using it.
Last but not least; are you Russian speaking and would you be interested in recording for us as a voice actor? Please let us know.

In the next dev blog, we want to show you some German voice acting, so start getting excited for that!
Thank you for all your support and good luck until the next dev blog.

Hi everybody, it’s time for an update.

In this dev blog it’s about both Winter scenery and a map showing you how we use some of our assets to create a wintery atmosphere. We also want to show you part of our development to recreate operation “Wintergewitter”.


When we consider winter scenery for the game, we want things to be realistic of course. The conditions and atmosphere can be found in photographs like the ones below.





These are good study material but they are static and there are no dynamic effects.
So we used some different sources to complement this and the result can be seen in these effects and textures (all work in progress):



What do you think about these? Do they meet your expectations?


While we are showing you this content, we can reveal that we created a scenario with it!
As you may know, Wintergewitter (winter storm) was an attempt by the German 4th Panzer Army under the command of Erich von Manstein to break the Stalingrad encirclement. On December 12th, 1942 when the German offensive started at Kotelnikovo, it was a surprise to Soviet high command and initial gains suggested the offensive might just be able to relieve the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. After some days, the Soviet 2nd Guards Army was sent to block the advance, which it did.


One of our campaign missions will take you to Gromoslavka, the village that marked the end of the German advance - only 48 kilometres from Stalingrad.


The 6th Panzer division, under the command of Colonel von Hünersdorff, reaches the River Mishkova near Gromoslavka. There, the Germans run into the Second Guards Army streaming south across the bridge. Hünersdorff’s tanks are low on fuel and face a numerically superior enemy. Despite this, he deploys his tanks to engage the Soviets.
As the German tanks and assault guns blaze away at the Soviet positions, a Panzergrenadier Regiment crosses the Myshkova and secures a small bridgehead. Hünersdorff quickly sends reinforcements across and expands the German hold to a perimeter of just a few kilometres.
The bitter fighting for the expansion of the bridgehead lasts from December 20 to 22.


The situation that develops makes further German attack risky; the connection to the bridgehead is under severe pressure and besides that, the situation to the rear of the battleground (south of Mishkova) is anything but stable.

This is as far as “Wintergewitter” will get.
The 6th Panzer Army is not only blocked by the 2nd Guards Army after crossing the Mishkova, but there are all kinds of signs that the Soviets are readying themselves for a counterattack. German high command calls off Wintergewitter on the 23rd of December and all hope of rescue or relief for the German soldier in Stalingrad has now gone.


HD link The Second Guards Army crosses the Mishkova river by night to engage the German attack. Hours later, the bridge is fiercely disputed.


HD link After the battle at the south part of the village, the fight for the Gromoslavka bridge takes centre stage.


HD link Gromoslavka. Note the icicles on the roof edges.

Did you know:

• One of the untold reasons why Wintergewitter failed was that the German reinforcements dispatched to von Manstein were exhausted from fighting in the “Rzhev Meat Grinder” near Moscow during Operation Mars. In this way, the heavy Soviet losses at Rzhev contributed significantly to the tactical victory at Stalingrad.
• Likewise, the quick gains made by von Manstein in the second week of the offensive were in part due to Soviet forces suffering from exhaustion after already having fought for weeks.
  

NOW: Back to our development, we have some questions for you!

1. When you look at these assets and imagine the wind blowing across at -30 celsius and the snow blowing in your face, can you feel it too?
   
2. Looking at the new map and scenario, what do you think?
   

We hope you liked today´s dev blog topic and we thank you for all your input that brings important infos to us to improve ourself and the game!