Update 174: Battle Reports - Released!

Hello everyone,

Today, we’re very happy to announce the release of alpha update 174 of War of Rights! Before we will get into the patch notes themselves, let us take a brief look at 3 of the major additions update 174 brings to War of Rights: Battle reports & the historical events being narrated, overhauled artillery physics and last but certainly not least: the biggest client & server performance improvements we have released yet!





Starting from today, players will be presented with a battle report as the round ends. The battle report consists of an overview map of the finished skirmish or picket patrol area, showing a 30 second timelapse of the entire round, with animated markers such as Union or Confederate skirmishing units, line formations, artillery, casualties, etc.

Battle Report at Evening East Woods in action.

This is not all that has changed with the “inter-skirmish area flow” in the game in this update, however. Update 174 also brings new unique victory screens for each skirmish area and a “Historical Events” narration written and presented by Campfire Games Historical Advisor George Crecy. This is part of our continued efforts in pushing the boundaries of what is achievable in terms of historical and geographical context in a multiplayer game and how said context is best presented to the players.

If you wish to read a more complete run-down of the new features listed above, you can do so by checking out our latest Field Report.



The transport system originally developed to support artillery in its initial implementation last summer has now been upgraded to a vehicle system, sporting much more accurate physics for the cannons and limbers, resulting in more realistic behavior when pushed over an uneven terrain, down a steep slope, etc.

The upgrade also means that players can no longer enter an artillery seat (such as pushing the wheels) while it is blocked by the environment.

The introduction of the vehicle system is also an integral part in bringing future content additions such as mounted infantry officers, horse drawn artillery and mounted cavalry to the game.



Update 174 brings major CPU performance improvements for both clients as well as servers achieved by several code optimizations implemented by our programmers the past few months in an effort to gain more performance headroom to make higher player counts on the servers a possibility in the future.

Below is a comparison of the results of the in-game benchmark results in update 173 (66 FPS) and update 174 (81 FPS) using the same hardware and options settings.



We expect to be able to test a 200 player cap in the days or weeks following the release of today’s update (depending on how many bugs & issues surface when mass testing begins today) so please keep an eye out for an announcement in the near future if you wish to take part in the test.





- The 36th Ohio is now issued with Enfield rifles.
- Detail work, Garland’s Stand skirmish area, South Mountain.
- Detail work Mumma Farm & East Woods areas, Antietam.
- West woods & Dunker Church area detail work, Antietam.
- Hatch’s Attack area updates, South Mountain.
- Maryland Heights skirmish area updates, Harpers Ferry.
- Added rifle butt impact sounds.
- Drill Camp level detail work.
- Added more click sounds to the UI.
- New cornfield footstep sounds.
- Reworked drill camp kitchen utensils.
- Various modular building asset fixes.
- Reworked Saint John’s Church, Harpers Ferry.
- Detail Work, Colquitt’s Defence, South Mountain.
- Reworked the weather system.
- Miller & Nicodemus area work, Antietam.
- Updates to Cox’s Push, South Mountain.
- Overhauled the Pry Grist Mill model and proxy.
- Detail work, Shenandoah Street area, Harpers Ferry.
- Decal & Prefab work, Harpers Ferry.
- The sun is now smaller.
- Overhauled the environment probes to support probe blending resulting in much smoother time of day transitions.
- All environment probes are now cached on level load, resulting in no probe texture changing stutters while playing the game.
- Improved the global illumination, resulting in more accurate lighting based off of the surrounding area you are in.
- Improved the sharps rifle and carbine reload animations.
- Overhauled the quicktime animations when moving while At The Ready.
- Updated the strafing animations while at Shoulder Arms in quicktime.
- Fixed the server restart messages not being correctly shown in the text chat.
- Removed all dead body entities pre-placed in the levels - these will likely make a return at a later date.
- Added a global field of view (FOV) of 65 when aiming a weapon resulting in a level playing field when aiming no matter your FOV settings.
- Converted all animobjects to AnimatedMesh components.
- Added 18 new battle flags:

• 2nd Mississippi Regimental
  
• 18th North Carolina National
  
• 14th Tennessee Regimental
  
• 72nd Pennsylvania Regimental
  
• 2nd USA Regulars Regimental
  
• 10th USA Regulars regimental
  
• 2nd Maryland National & Regimental
  
• 2nd Georgia National
  
• 6th Georgia National
  
• 20th Georgia National
  
• 4th Alabama National
  
• 8th Ohio Regimental
  
• 1st Louisiana Zouave National
  
• 7th Michigan Regimental
  
• 28th Massachusetts Regimental
  
• 6th Louisiana National
  
• 9th Louisiana National
  

- Replaced the remaining legacy Lua particles with ones made with the newer particle editor. This includes the large smokestack from the burning Mumma Farm on the Antietam battlefield.
- Evened out how often various regiments are featured on Harpers Ferry to reduce the amount of overused units there.
- Detail work, Picket Patrol areas.
- Fixed GenericBuilding windows.
- Tweaked the materials of most windows in the game.
- Added soldier class images in the UI for the 17th Michigan, 28th Massachusetts and 5th New York.
- Changed the license screen on startup.
- Replaced Hampton’s Legion with the 4th Texas at the Evening East Woods skirmish area, Antietam.
- Fixed a team changing exploit used by exploiters to legally teamkill.
- Fixed the Picket Patrol game mode.
- Fixed up a bunch of unsupported symbols in the level descriptions/loading screens and regimental descriptions.
- Replaced the player info in the bottom right corner of the screen with a new version that is much more flexible as well as way cleaner behind the scenes.
- Overhauled the Henry Rohrback farmhouse to match an earlier version of the structure much closer to how it would have appeared in 1862.
- Shell, case and canister rounds can now be placed back into the limber.
- Fixed bullets passing through enemies if they get shot while standing too close to the player shooting. To reduce friendly fire incidents, bullets can still pass through friendly players at very close range.
- Fixed a desertion bug which would occur if you ran into the enemy staging area to die and then switched to the enemy team and spawned in their base.
- Made the field of view and audio volume option sliders update as they are dragged instead of first updating when the slider is released.
- Added a FPS counter setting in the Graphics Options menu.