Insurgency: Sandstorm News

Hello Gamers™,

Sorry for the overlap with the State of Production, it's been a crazy month so far. Next month we will try and publish them further apart.

Well, this is it! By this time next week, Operation: Breakaway will be live and you will all have had the opportunity to try our new Bullpup style rifles and take a trip down memory lane through Tell.

To those of you who played on the CTE, how are you all feeling about it so far? Have you gotten lost in Tell like me... constantly? Dry-fired the FAMAS F1 repeatedly after burning through all your ammo? How about the AUG A3 and it's 'a-baby-could-control-this' amount of recoil?



Let us know how you feel about Operation: Breakaway - you can hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Steam, or our Official Discord to give us feedback. I will have browsers open across all my monitors just reading the feedback as it continues to roll in.

I have to say that I truly love Outpost so far. “Reverse checkpoint” feels really fresh and the tension as your supply point slowly builds feels incredible. My strategy has been to get rid of the sidearm and light carrier for an M16 to start. 400 IQ play right there. Rocketmen and I are not friends, though. Peeking a corner and eating six rockets smh my head; I never learn.

I’m hooked on using the Aiming Grip and the Masterkey. Reducing my ADS speed makes such a difference for me - I feel like I win way more firefights with it. Then I just swap to my underbarrel and CQC is covered. These new accessories have really opened up the options as far as loadouts go.



In six days EVERYTHING will be live, but have you seen the new DLC and in-game cosmetics? We’ve posted them across our social accounts, which can be found here. You wanted militaristic Insurgents, so there ya go; the Rogue Spec Ops is in the house. The Security side DLC you haven’t seen yet. You may not have explicitly asked for chain mail and an armored up aesthetic, but the Urban Warden is TOUGH looking, based in reality (the German SEK), and shown here on the blog first!



The in-game cosmetics aren’t slouching either, we can finally show off our beautiful Internal-Affairs-Security-Dad™ and the “Rogue Cop”. Security dad is looking t h i c c, just needs some tongs, fanny pack, and a BBQ. The Rogue Cop gives the Insurgent some camo as many of you requested.



Along with all these character cosmetics we added some new weapon skins. We heard you after the release of the 1.7 cosmetics and we have shifted into a direction that’s more in line with what you (the community as a whole) are really looking for as far as weapon skins go. Let me know your thoughts after you see the new skins in game next week.



Our final Operation: Breakaway stream will be on launch day (October 6th) at 11am MST, right as the update releases! We are excited to hop in and play with everyone, so hopefully you can be on around then. Maybe I will carry you to victory in Outpost? Stranger things have happened. I saw a frog with wings once, so it’s possible. (Editor note: this never happened, he's lying)

I mentioned on the last stream that to make room for Outpost mode we will be removing Frenzy from the permanent playlist options. We will still bring it back as a limited time mode here and there, so don't worry, it's not gone forever.

I'm making one small addition to the monthly blog; my favourite stupid community video of the month. This month I am calling it "Perfectly Cut Scream". This was sent to me on Discord, so I don't have the original creator - if that's you, please get in touch and I will make sure to give you credit!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

That’s it for updates before Operation: Breakaway, thanks to everyone who has played the game, tested on the CTE, given feedback, and watched our streams, it means the world to me (and everyone else at New World).

Speaking of streams, I’ve been happy with how they’ve been going lately. One thing I want to build on is the variety of the content we showcase. For example, my shoe reveals will probably continue (some of you made the mistake of enjoying them and telling me). Do you have any ideas on what else we could include? Send me a DM on Twitter if you do, I’d love to hear from you.

One idea I’ve had is getting some community members in a stream for a “Make Hank Better at the Game” segment. I can use the help, I think it would be entertaining, and maybe some other players could pick up some tips as well.

1.8.1 and 1.9 are in the works already, but I need the opposite of a cup of coffee (is that a Valium?) before we can even start to think about sharing them. The weeks surrounding a release are amazing and full of energy, but now I feel like there’s pure espresso flowing through my veins. Almost time for a nap.

See you all on Tuesday, can’t wait to play with everyone,
fatherHank

Hello everyone, my name is Tim Perreault and I’m the Executive Producer at New World Interactive. September has been a productive month for us. We’ve got a hotfix for the live game, a CTE Preview Event for our next update, and we announced a Mapping Contest for Insurgency: Sandstorm!

Key Points of State of Production #12

• 1.7.1 Hotfix 2
  
• 1.8 Open CTE Event
  
• AI Update
  
• Mapping Contest
  
• Operation: Breakaway

[h2]1.7.1 Hotfix 2[/h2]
We’ve been spending a lot of time investigating the stuttering issue that some of our community members have been encountering. With the help of Epic we’ve found the cause relates to a recent Global Invalidation change that was done to improve performance. For the time being, we are disabling global invalidation. Because this did have a meaningful impact on the game’s performance we’ll be looking to reimplement global invalidation in the future when we can do so without any unintended side effects. This hotfix also addresses a few other issues that were annoying to the community including the lack of collision on Summit point D, mines not detonating when being run over by vehicles, and an issue preventing kills from AI controlled fire support for counting on Commanders and Observers.

[h2]Open CTE Event Results[/h2]
Our Open CTE Event was quite successful. We had great participation from the community both turning up to play and providing feedback. We’ve collected a lot of information on player sentiment about the upcoming update as well as found a few issues to correct before we go live. We’ll be spending the coming weeks before our release on October 6 addressing all the issues we can reproduce. For our next CTE event we’ll be expanding the abilities of our bug reporting tool, which allowed players to provide us with feedback and information during this public test.

[h2]AI Update[/h2]
I’ve asked Jason Campbell, our AI Programmer, to speak a bit about the upcoming AI improvements coming with the Operation: Breakaway update.

What's coming in 1.8? In Operation: Breakaway we're releasing the first major improvements in our AI Overhaul. The largest issue with the AI right now is how unfair it can feel at times. Getting shot through the wall, through smoke, from halfway across the map, or just getting nailed with a laser guided Molotov is just not any fun. For this update, our highest priority is fixing those unfun behaviours. This gives us a solid foundation that will allow us to look into ways to add new, more intelligent behaviours that will make the AI more fun and interesting in future updates.

When deciding if the AI should shoot a player, there are two major questions to answer. Should the AI be aware of the player's presence? If so, how quickly and accurately should they react? Both of those questions are deceptively difficult to answer. Most of our changes in Operation Breakaway are focused on getting better answers to the first question. To that end, we've migrated to Unreal Engine's newer Perception System, which gives us more detailed information regarding what the AI can hear and see. Once we had that information we could nail down the situations in which the AI were being unfair and added a bunch of new configurations to tune them to be nice reasonable soldiers who give you at least a little time to shoot back.

Another aspect of AI in Operation: Breakaway is the special enemies for Outpost mode. While most of these were simple to add through configuration changes and playtesting, a few of them needed some new logic to be written. We made sure to make this logic configurable, so any modders will be able to use it in any new maps or modes they dream up.

So what happened with 1.7.1? Some of you may have noticed that after Operation Clean Sweep the AI seemed to have gotten upgraded with wall hacks and aim cheats. This was a side effect of including the new Perception System in 1.7.1, but without the extra configuration and polish that we’re bringing you in Operation: Breakaway. When we were testing 1.7.1, we got reports back that devs were getting snapshot and wall banged, and of course we knew that wall banging and snap shooting were issues in 1.7. Since we planned to fix this in 1.8 we marked it as a known issue and moved on. However because we didn't have the scope of testing that comes with a larger release, such as the public community test (CTE), we didn't realize just how much more frequently these issues were occurring until it hit the live servers.

Fortunately, we were able to learn a lot from this situation and we've already improved our testing process for 1.8. Not only do we have the full CTE (as we do for all major releases), but we began internal testing of the AI much sooner, and have been testing much more frequently to allow us to iterate on the behaviours faster to get better tuned AI. Those of you who tried out the CTE should have had a much better experience, even before we’ve had the opportunity to take your feedback into account. We're now being more thorough about our before and after observations to help ensure this doesn't happen again.

What can we expect to see in the future? While Operation: Breakaway was focusing on the AIs awareness of players, in our next updates we're going to focus on the AI’s awareness of the world around them. If they're running to attack Objective B we want them to know if they're crossing an open field, down narrow corridors, or through a rubble filled courtyard, so that they can change their movement accordingly. If they hear gunfire from 10m to the west, and see a window 8m to the northwest, they should realize that there's a good chance the window leads to the room with the defender, and is a great place to lob a grenade.

At this point in time, we're focused on wrapping up Operation: Breakaway, and we are just beginning to work on these next set of changes. The first step of the process is to get the information the AI needs to make more tactical decisions, then build out the behaviours that make use of it. To make sure we don't have a repeat of 1.7.1 we're going to continue testing the AI early and often. This means you shouldn't expect the AI to begin maneuvering like a well oiled special forces team in future updates, but you should see steady improvements as we go.

[h2]Mapping Contest[/h2]
We recently had a stream announcing the Insurgency: Sandstorm 2020 Mapping Contest. It’s our largest contest to date, in collaboration with Nvidia, Intel, Epic Games, Focus Home Interactive, Saber Interactive, and Mod.io. There are over $17,000 in prizes available so if you’re at all interested in map making, download our Mod Tools and let your creativity flow.

NWI has a deep-rooted history in the modding community and our previous contests for Insurgency and Day of Infamy have led to some amazing community maps. We’re very excited to see what our community comes up with this time!

Submissions must be received before January 28, 2021 at 2PM EST. For full contest details, see the post here.

[h2]Operation: Breakaway[/h2]
We’re very excited for Operation: Breakaway to release on October 6. Between now and then the team will be putting the finishing touches on the update. If you missed out on the open CTE event you can still check out the website where you can get a sneak peek at some of the content (including a few things we didn’t have in the Open CTE!). That’s it for this month’s SoP, until next time, keep your stick on the ice.

[h3]It's that time again, Double XP from now until Monday @ 11:00AM MST![/h3]

[h2]We've released a hotfix for update 1.7.1 that addresses the following issues:[/h2]

• Removed global invalidation from the game which was causing extreme stuttering for some players
  
• Fixed an issue where helicopter Fire Support kills wouldn’t be marked as Commander and Observer kills
  
• Fixed a collision issue on Summit Frontline objective D allowing players to move through a wall
  
• Fixed an issue with mines not exploding when driven over by vehicles
  
• Fixed an issue preventing ammo boxes from being available in Hardcore checkpoint scenarios
  
• Addressed some lighting issues on night version of Outskirts map

[h3]Known Issues:[/h3]

• Fire support sounds will sometimes play out of order or not at all
  
• Voice over lines for fire support kills are not triggering properly
  
• In-game hints may show a gap between the text and relevant hotkey under certain circumstances
  
• Setting a community server as a favorite does not save
  
• The Welrod may clip with the camera in restricted areas
  
• The third person vaulting animation may show the players leg clipping with the world
  
• Night Maps Replays are played back with the incorrect lighting scenario
  
• Not able to scavenge skinned weapon magazines from the Honey Badger and Mk14 EBR

In anticipation of our upcoming Operation: Breakaway update, our Play with the Devs event is happening NOW from 11:00 AM MST - 12:00 PM MST on the Community Test Environment.

Help test upcoming content for Operation: Nightfall on the Community Test Environment:

• New map: Tell
  
• 2 New weapons
  
• Outpost: a new co-op focused game mode
  
• New Accessories

To play with us, go to your Steam Library and download “Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Test Environment." Boot up the CTE, and please set matchmaking regions to US East.
Click Play, select Co-op, Tell Checkpoint, and Find Match. All of the devs won’t necessarily be in one game, but you’ll see us floating around your matches!

During the CTE, we will be restricting the playlists to focus solely on the new content.

Please note that all devs will have a DEV tag next to their name in-game. Anyone posing as a dev without the DEV tag is not an NWI developer.

After playing, please fill out this survey. The only other place the team will be funneling feedback is on our Steam CTE Sub-Forum. Please ensure to use the search function in the Sub Forum to see if your feedback/question has already been posted, and stick to ONE topic per thread.

See you soon!