Insurgency: Sandstorm News

It was received really well last month... so we're doing it again! TRIPLE XP from now until Monday at 11:00am MST.

Hello everyone, my name is Tim Perreault and I’m the Production Director at New World Interactive. March is half done and the team has quite a few different things on the go. Let’s jump right in.

Key Points for State of Production #18

• Community Driven Update
  
• 1.10 Progress
  
• Test Automation
  
• Mapping Contest Update
  

[h3]Community Driven Update[/h3]
Planning wrapped up shortly after the last SoP and we’ve since moved into development. This update will be relatively small, but it’s going to pack a big punch in terms of requested features. I don’t want to spoil the reveal, but the main feature in the update has been highly requested.

[h3]1.10 Progress[/h3]
Our next major update is trucking along. We’ve got a lot completed so far, but there are still a few elements we’re working on before we’ll be able to schedule an open CTE event to preview the update and collect feedback. Based on our updated art guidelines we’ve taken an opportunity to review all the cosmetics in the release and are making some minor adjustments. We’ve also committed to spending more time testing and polishing before we release, so you should expect more of a delay after the playtest until the release goes live.

[h3]Test Automation[/h3]
One of the goals of the State of Production is to shine a bit of a spotlight on some of the developers who work behind the scenes on our project. This month, I’ve invited our Automation Developer to talk about the work he has started doing on Sandstorm over the past four months.

Hey! I'm PHEN, or Stephen Ma, and I'm an Automation Developer here at New World Interactive. Today I'd like to share with you a little bit behind the scenes of game development and hopefully you'll learn a bit more about development in general!

To describe an Automation Developer, I'll have to talk about Test Automation. First, let's talk about what a 'test' is. A test (in this case) is a deliberate process of verifying systems, features, and regressing bugs to ensure the game behaves the way we intended. As a game develops in number of features, so does the number of tests. More often than not, the number of tests needed is hundreds of times more than the number of features.

Whether that addition is being able to have a player kick open doors, blow others up with explosives, or interacting with AI, the number of ways two systems interact with each other need to be tested. Adding a new feature means we need to develop new tests to cover all new behaviors and every interaction they will have with other systems.

Each of those tests takes a non-small amount of time to execute, and with the need to test everything with every small change it can quickly scale outside what a team can do on any given day.

To come back to what I do as an Automation Developer at New World Interactive, it's someone who will actively work on getting tests into an "automatically-testable" state as early as possible. This would mean identifying a test, bringing parts of the process into code, and having it automatically run on a machine.

You might say this sounds a lot like "AI" or "Bots" - and you would be correct since there is an overlap in those development aspects, but, I'm avoiding those terms here because they don't include other aspects of the testing such as:

• Documenting evidence
  
• Identifying the root causes of issues
  
• Scheduling the test to run optimally
  
• Communicating the scale and impact of issues to the team
  
• Observing differences in actual behavior vs. expected behavior
  

A good human test will convey those important aspects in the form of a bug report, while a good automated test will have to do the same thing; but will have to do it without any human intervention.

Describing it as "AI" or "Bots" will limit someone's thinking about what automated test development should be. Designing well automated tests is a non-trivial task and requires thinking outside of bot development, hence the Automation Developer's role!

At the end of the day, I'm a developer working on the game and play an important part of the team to ensure we're making the best game we can. Most of my work is something gamers will never see in game but I'm thrilled I can share a little bit of it with you today.

[h3]Mapping Contest Update[/h3]
Community voting on our mapping contest has concluded. The top ten entries are now under review. We had our second playtest with the devs on Friday and it was an absolute blast. We’ll be continuing to playtest the remaining maps and scenarios to get a final ranking which will be announced once all the entries have been reviewed.


That’s it for this month’s SoP, until next time, keep your stick on the ice.

Hello Gamers™,

February was short, sharp, and shiny - just like this blog will be.

We just had our first free weekend in a while - welcome to any new players that have joined us; we are glad to have you all aboard! Please send us your feedback either here on Steam, on our subreddit, or via a support ticket.

While we have just started development on 1.9.2 we are not ready to share details yet. I can say it will be a highly defined update.

[hr][/hr]
Earlier this month we closed out submissions for our 2020 Mapping Contest.

After 20 weeks of our community working hard and creating and testing their own maps we ended up with over 30 submissions. Following a 10 day period of public voting we finalized our Top 10!

Our panel at NWI will now be taking a look at these finalists and the winners will go on to take home over $17,000 of prizes from us here at New World and our amazing sponsors Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games.

We covered the finalists in our announcement (available here) but these homies worked incredibly hard on these maps, so I want to show them off again.

Here are your 2020 Insurgency Mapping Contest finalists!

Oasis by ZAPATISTA

Prison by 13Tisa13

Diplomacy by Flaykes

Sultan of Drugs by Klian

SaltMine by FredricoDLac

Last Light by invalid_nick

Mud Village by Juu_

Coastline by Reeecompile

International by Gremlinmode

Mintaqah (District) by Jason26

Over the next month we will judge and test these finalists along with our sponsors and will be announcing the winning entries around March 22nd.

Thank you again to all the entrants, there is a lot of incredible work here. Even if you don't win, keep plugging away, take on feedback where you think it's helpful, and some of you definitely have the creativity to break into this industry.



As I said last year our Developer Livestreams will not be happening as often moving forward - I just want to ensure that the streams are full of information and not a waste of your time. The next stream will be coming in early March once we can start sharing some new juicy tidbits.

The last stream we did featured the announcement of our 1.9.1 update. As a lot of you saw, the cosmetics were not well received. We take your feedback very seriously so after a few days of discussion we decided it was in the best interest of Sandstorm to not release the skins.

We understood we missed the mark, and we have updated the visual guidelines that we follow for Sandstorm. This will help us adhere to the aesthetic we are looking for, and the aesthetic that you all want to see in the game.

[hr][/hr]
Something that was created and launched this month was our community Trello board. Available here, this is a page to help us communicate with all of you - we will list our known issues (and attach workarounds when applicable), post important links (like how to submit a bug), and attach all patch notes for our releases.

If you are running into any bugs in the game, head here to see if they’re known. If not, please send us a bug report using the link on the left of the page and we can investigate.

We are hoping this is a better method of communication than having people scroll to the bottom of patch notes every time they want to check something.

[hr][/hr]

Interested in competitive Sandstorm?

DGL will be having a PUG Event on the 6th of March at 2PM EST/8PM CET. The sign ups close on March 4th with the teams being picked after that. Captains will contact their players once picked. Registration is available here.

The Newbloods event will be on the 13th of March and start at 2PM EST/7PM GMT/8PM CET. It is expected to run for 3-4 hours. Hideout West will be played for all of the matches to try and ensure a good base amount of map knowledge. Each team will have a coach showing them the map and will arrange practice and scrims the week before the event. If you're interested, you can sign-up here.

Signups close on the 5th of March at 4PM EST/9PM GMT/10PM CET.

DGL Season 4: Round 4
The DGL season is comprised four team divisions. After each round, the top team of each division is promoted to the next division, and the bottom team moves down a division.

Round 4 will begin on the 14th of March and the signups are open until the 13th. All new teams signing up will begin in the lower divisions.

Each team plays a match each week with two maps played. For more information please go to the event page.



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]The first clip in this video is one of our partners, MGE Gibs, with some self-fulfilling prophecy *chefs kiss*.



When 1.9.1 launched, the QBZ-97's grenade launcher may have had a velocity issue. Sadly, we fixed it. OK, SO I MAY have lost the source on this. I am very sorry, but I love it. If this was you, please DM me on twitter and I will credit you.

EDIT: We found him! Thanks to @mikeytheasian on Twitter.



Continuing our theme of both 16-bit art and art created with mines, we have this masterpiece created by yeonggille on Reddit.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Some beautiful coordination while playing the amazing ISMC mod, posted by ControlledPairs on Reddit.


F4tTony on Reddit created a stats sheet for all of our weapons. Rejoice fellow numbers nerds! The entire sheet with all weapons available here.



I mean, the mask is free, you should be prepared. Thanks to Piromansor on Reddit.

[hr][/hr]
That's it, that's all for February. Just like the final wave of Outpost, grab your butts - fun stuff is coming.

Stay safe, take care of each other, and I will talk to you all soon.

fatherHank

I have the week off, so I won't be around for anyone to yell at me for this. Enjoy TRIPLE XP until Monday @ 11AM MST. -fatherHank

After twenty long weeks of development, we received over 30 incredible submissions for the Insurgency: Sandstorm mapping contest. Today after 10 days of public voting we are pleased to announce the ten finalists that will go through to be judged by our expert panel for the chance to win over $17,000 worth of prizes from New World and our incredible sponsors, Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games. 



[h2]The ten finalists are: [/h2]

Oasis by ZAPATISTA

Prison by 13Tisa13

Diplomacy by Flaykes

Sultan of Drugs by Klian

SaltMine by FredricoDLac

Last Light by invalid_nick

Mud Village by Juu_

Coastline by Reeecompile

International by Gremlinmode

Mintaqah (District) by Jason26

Over the next 30 days, our team at New World will begin testing and judging the finalists with our sponsors. We plan to announce the winning entries on or around Monday, March 22nd.

Congratulations to all the finalists, as well as our runners up! 

Note to submitters:

Entrants who did not make the shortlist are now able to freely modify their submissions and take onboard any player feedback. 

We want to encourage everyone despite not making it in the top 10 to keep working on your levels or new levels. The contest results are simply a review of the work at this moment. It doesn’t say anything about your future quality of work or pursuing a career as a professional level designer. We hope you enjoyed the contest and we are looking forward to seeing more of your levels in the future! 

Finalists must not alter their submission until the expert voting period has concluded and winners are announced.