Sitrep - September 2020
Hello everyone!
In this month's Sitrep we want to take you on a tour of the changes coming to Onward in the upcoming months: we will set out the milestones we’re working towards, and go into detail on several of them. Unfortunately we won’t be able to share all the details on all the updates yet, but we aim to give you some insight in what to look forward to in the updates to come. Since our last patch for Onward (v1.8.3) we’ve been busy behind the scenes, improving our workflow to get more stable and more frequent updates out to you. It’s an ongoing process, but we’re getting there! If you’re interested in reading more about our development process changes you can find a big post on Discord, Steam and Reddit with a lot more details, or simply follow this link to find it.
These are the milestones well be going over
- Upcoming patches: v1.8.4 and v1.8.5
- Custom content
- Haptics upgrade
- Reintroduction of pre-v1.8 maps
- Audio update
- Party system
- A new game mode, exclusive for PCVR
- High quality lighting returning to PC
- Anti toxicity improvements
- Miscellaneous improvements
Upcoming patches: v1.8.4 and v1.8.5
We’re aiming to release patch 1.8.4 later this week or early next week; with the release of Patch 1.8.4 we will address a couple of critical issues affecting both PC and Quest users that we feel need immediate attention. These issues relate to voice audio cutting out in a lobby or during a game, and an issue that caused gunfire audio to be missing in some cases.
Soon after the release of v1.8.4 we’ll be releasing version 1.8.5 which will include general game fixes, visual improvements for PC Downfall and Suburbia maps, and much more. We’re very excited about some of these changes, and wanted to share a quick preview of the changes to Downfall.
Before
After
Custom content
Ever since custom maps were first supported we’ve loved the creativity coming from our community. Since the release of v1.8 custom content hasn’t been available due to restrictions we mentioned in previous Sitreps. Now, bringing back support for custom maps is one of our top priorities and we’re aiming to release it with patch v1.8.6. It’s a little too early to make a definitive call on that, but we’ll keep you updated in our Sitreps. In addition to that we’ll be reaching out to several map creators to help us start testing the custom content implementation soon.
The return of Jungle, Turbine, Snowpeak, Outlet and Abandoned maps
The map designers here at Downpour have been putting in a lot of hours getting these maps ready for their return to Onward. First up, Jungle and Outlet will be the first maps to return with the Custom Content update slated for patch 1.8.6. Snowpeak, Turbine and Abandoned are still in production and will require more testing due to their complexity, and will therefore return to Onward later. While Jungle, Turbine and Snowpeak will remain mostly the same compared to their versions in v1.7, Abandoned has received a redesign to allow for more compelling gameplay: while keeping the original spirit of the map, its layout and its major landmarks have been updated, and some new landmarks will be introduced as well. We will share more on these upcoming changes for Abandoned, as well as the progress of Snowpeak and Turbine in the near future.
Haptics upgrade
Good news for fans of haptics: the tactile feedback when interacting with equipment will be coming back to Onward with a vengeance (and upgrades!). This means that like before you will get feedback when for example hovering over the equipment on your chest. We’ve also implemented stronger haptics overall and added new features including improved effects when taking out magazines out of your AKM, cycling the bolt or pistol slide, stabbing another player and more! In addition, the integration for ProTubeVR's ForceTube peripheral has been redesigned to bring support for the device to the Oculus Rift S and the Oculus Quest in addition to SteamVR. ForceTube is an optional attachment for ProTube rifle stocks that enables the user to feel the recoil of their weapon when they fire it, adding another layer of intensity to the realistic gameplay of Onward.
Finally for those who pursue the maximum amount of realism in their games, something at Onward's roots, we have worked with the talented folks at bHaptics to bring support to Onward for their haptic suit peripheral: the Tactsuit. Tactsuit is a collection of wearable devices for the torso, arms and face that contain arrays of haptic motors designed to simulate the feeling of firing weapons, being struck by projectiles and more. Those of us who’ve had the chance to test the initial implementations of the bHaptics suit were blown away by it.
When Patch 1.8.6 launches players will be able to connect their bHaptics devices to both PCVR and Oculus Quest versions of Onward to unlock a new level of immersion through specific haptic effects for different weapons, bullet calibers, explosions, melee and more. You will be able to feel the raw power of the m249 and PKM machine guns as they rattle off deadly rounds, and experience terror as you duck from a grenade and its shockwave rips through you. Use your instincts to interpret where you were struck by the enemy and fire back in an instant.
Audio update
We’re working with Dynamedion, a renowned audio studio, to improve Onward’s in-game audio. Sound is a major factor in the immersion in the game and the first results are really showing an impact. Our main focus at the moment is to improve the audio occlusion and reverberation in the game. This is a complicated subject which definitely warrants a deep dive in a future Sitrep, so let us know if this peaks your interest.
Onward Party System
One of the things we’ve heard from our community after the Quest release was that it became noticeably more difficult to team up with your friends and join the same lobby because the number of game lobbies had exploded. To make it easier for everyone to find and team up with their friends in Onward we’re going to be working on integrating an Onward Party system in the game which can be used on all platforms.
A new game mode for PCVR
In our last Sitrep we indicated that the 1.8 update had given us a lot of headroom to work with to improve the game going forward on PC. One of the ways we’ll be leveraging all these advances is through a 'PCVR only' new game mode to extend Onward even further. While we can’t share all the details on this game mode yet, we can state it’s going to bring a lot of fun and mayhem to Onward, and will leverage the PC computing power to support more players in a lobby
High quality lighting returning to PC
With the v1.8 release we updated the game to use a more updated version of the Unity engine and their Universal Render Pipeline(URP). With these changes we got the unfortunate result that the Shadowmask lighting wasn’t supported with the current unity version and URP, which resulted in noticeably worse lighting quality compared to previous versions of the game. Shadowmask results in a much better looking game without the necessity to calculate lighting in real time. Real time lighting calculations are extremely resource intensive game developers therefore typically calculate (‘bake’) the lighting and shadows ahead of time and then store the resulting lighting maps to be used by the players later. Shadowmask improves on this system by keeping the real-time specular highlights for baked lights and vastly improved real-time shadows for non baked objects like players which work much better alongside the traditional shadow bakes.We’re currently looking into a couple of option to combine Shadowmask support with Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline. We considered moving away from URP, but this isn’t an option because we already use a lot of URP specific features, and depend on it for its performance improvements. Therefore we have two options:
- Jury rig the Shadowmask feature back in ourselves; or
- Wait for Unity to release a new version of URP with Shadowmask support.
Because we don’t have a timeline for Shadowmask support in URP we opted to implement Shadowmask support ourselves. While we’re making progress this isn’t the most stable approach and it could be prone to break when we perform an Unity upgrade in the future.
Although we’re not yet sure if our implementation of Shadowmask will work yet, we do want to share some pictures of the potential improvements, and we’ll keep you updated in future Sitreps.
See this album for more comparison screenshots!
Anti toxicity improvements
We’ve been excited to welcome so many new players to Onward in the past couple of months. As with any rapidly expanding community though, we’ve unfortunately seen that a small number of people are actively ruining other people’s fun in the game with toxic or otherwise unwanted behavior. We’re working on ideas to combat this behavior and make sure everyone can enjoy playing Onward without having to deal with the toxic behavior from some players.
We’ll share more on the upcoming changes in this area in future Sitreps, but for now we’d like to encourage you that when you run into toxic behavior you record it, and report it to our community managers.
Miscellaneous improvements
More changes are coming to Onward in the coming months than we have space to write about, but we briefly want to mention a few more. By popular demand we’re designing a ranking system for Onward to give you a sense of achievement and recognition for your skills in game. You will get real time stats on your captured objectives, accuracy, kills/deaths, revives, headshots, body shots and more. This is still in its infancy, but keep an eye out for updates.
We will be adding more spawn locations to Assault and PVE game modes to add more variety to these game modes, and we’re working on new social game modes for Onward to complement Spec Ops, One in the Chamber and Gun Game
Finally, there’s always room to improve the game’s code, and top of our list is currently refactoring our lobby and game mode states to further improve stability and remove inconsistencies in these areas. Especially competitive players have been running into issues here, and we will be addressing this.
We’re constantly working and preparing on polishing the current existing features. If you have any suggestions please share them in our Discord!
Stay frosty!