Insurgency: Sandstorm News

Hello Gamers™,

2021 is already a quarter over and we’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes.

Our latest livestream just ended (if you missed it, you should tune in next time - www.twitch.tv/NewWorld) and we announced 1.9.2. It’s a minor release, but we’ve included a big community request. More details on that a few lines down.

The next stream will be Thursday, April 15th at 2:00pm MST, and we will start talking about 1.10!

Console development is chugging along and we’re still hopeful for a release in late summer of this year.

Let’s dig into the good stuff.



For anyone new here, we have smaller updates that come between our major updates (i.e. 1.8.1 came between 1.8 and 1.9). They’re community driven and usually focus on improvements to quality of life and occasionally small features.

For 1.9.2 we are proud to announce that we’re adding something you’ve all been asking for since I started just over a year ago:

WE’RE ADDING RAILGUNS...

Just kidding, we’re bringing back some HD Textures!

There were some changes to some textures with 1.6 for the sake of performance and optimization. While this helped Sandstorm to be more accessible to those with lower spec PCs, those with rigs on the higher end of the spectrum wanted their pretty graphics back.

We decided a while back that we wanted to dedicate time to exploring how to do this, and with 1.9.2 we had the time.

This will be an optional download via Steam, so those who saw the performance improvements that came with 1.6 - no need to worry, nothing will change for you.

While this took a large chunk of the 1.9.2 development time, we saw the constant requests (I’m looking at you, Discord members with HD Texture Pack in your name), so we think it’s a great addition.

Here is what will be included:

Character Textures:

• All character textures
  
• All equipment textures
  
• All cosmetics textures
  

Weapon Textures:

• All weapon textures
  
• All weapon skin textures
  

We are exploring weapon upgrade textures, but are not able to commit to this for 1.9.2 yet.

Most importantly, the toilet and fire extinguisher props will be returned to their former glory.

In addition to the optional HD Texture pack we will be reverting first person muzzle flashes to how they were pre-1.6. All the beautiful bespoke muzzle flashes unique to each weapon will be re-added with 1.9.2.

Our secondary focus was quality-of-life additions. Here's a quick rundown - the full extent of changes will be available in the 1.9.2 patch notes.

We spent some time adjusting the brightness of flashlights for night maps, so no more being blinded by team-mates (although the effect they have on AI remains).

The brightness of characters has been tweaked as well, this will improve visibility and team identification.

We’ve improved the server browser, so you can expect a handful of fixes and enhancements there (details will be in the patch notes of course).

We revisited a request from a few releases back and are adding the ability to bind voice commands, so those of you who dislike the radial wheel, your time has come.

Something else I kept hearing about was players rejoining the same server after being vote-kicked. We have added some matchmaking rules so that will no longer happen!

This is not everything - all of the other changes and bug-fixes will be detailed in the patch notes, when 1.9.2 releases on April 27th.



I have been working with our Player Support team a lot lately on improving player reporting and reducing in-game toxicity.

In-game reporting helps us track problematic players, but as we’re a relatively small team it can be difficult to act on these reports alone.

With things such as Nvidia Shadowplay being so prevalent we’d like to ask for your help to curb these kinds of players.

If you encounter someone cheating, someone constantly griefing other players, or players using racist, homophobic, or misogynistic slurs please grab a video for us - preferably with the scoreboard showing at some point in the video.

If you can then provide us this video via a support ticket, along with a quick explanation of what we’re looking for in the video, and timestamps of when the offenses occur, it will make it much easier for us to act.

If you see someone cheating please also provide a replay ID in your support ticket.

To submit a support ticket, just head to this link.



It's with a heavy heart that I have to announce that at some point in the next 3-4 months I will be leaving Canada. This kind of complicates me being the Community Manager for NWI. Makes it somewhat impossible to be honest.

As some of you know, my wife is from Australia; some family things have arisen that are forcing our hand a bit and necessitating a move back there. At least it's Australia and not... Antarctica or something. Always a silver lining.

Because of the current COVID-19 situation and Australia's incredibly strict-even-when-not-in-pandemic quarantine laws for dogs (and the fact we have two dogs), this process will take a few months, so I will still be taking your feedback and reading comments about console until at least July - likely August or later.

The time zone difference between Canada and Australia is about as extreme as it could be, so staying on as the Community Manager would, sadly, be impossible.

Luckily for me, NWI is being very supportive and I will likely be staying on with the studio, but shifting into a production role.

While you will still all have to put up with me for a few more months, I wanted to say thank you all for all the feedback over the past year - you've all helped me grow in my position and helped us to steer Sandstorm in the right direction. It's a very challenging job, but being able to announce things like HD Textures really makes it worth it.

You’re all the reason I have a job in the industry at all, full stop; so thank you for existing. It’s been a whirlwind 13 months working with all of you, and it’s been a lot more good than bad.

Even after moving I will still be around on the Discord servers and the subreddit. Sadly you can’t get rid of me this easily.

Whomever the next CM ends up being - go easy on them, it’s not as easy a job as it looks. You know how you get when you’re tired, hungry, or talking about deathcam.

Keep the feedback coming, I've got a few months left as your Community Manager.




We're leading with a wholesome meme this month. Thanks Capturesque.

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The A-10 can put in some work (shoutout to Danatov on Reddit).

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Eziokas with some excellent editing skills on display here.

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This is what modding was made for (From WintorOperator via Reddit).



Closing it up is our boy Tom, who has managed to port Embassy (and some other maps) from Insurgency 2014 to be playable in Sandstorm!

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[h3]That's it for this month. I'm happy for textures, but I'm sad to be moving on from Community Management.

I'll keep up the fight for y'all until NWI changes my title (and beyond that, let's be honest)

fatherHank[/h3]

After weeks of careful playtesting and deliberation by our judging team, New World Interactive is pleased to announce the winners of the Insurgency: Sandstorm Mapping Contest.

Before we dive into the results, we would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors Intel, Nvidia, Epic Games, and Mod.io. As well as all the players who helped test, provide feedback, and vote for submissions, and of course, the entrants who spent hundreds of hours crafting incredible custom maps for the community.

There were many fantastic entries and only five prize positions; however, all finalists will receive a copy of World War Z - Game of the Year Edition thanks to our partners at Saber Interactive & Focus Home Interactive.

Maps were extensively playtested and judged based on the following criteria:

• Gameplay (50 marks)
  
• Visual Aesthetics (25 marks)
  
• Performance & Optimisation (25 marks)
  

After careful consideration, the winners are…..




Winning: $5,000 + 1x RTX 2080Ti GPU(1) + 1x Intel i7 7700k CPU + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: This map has an amazing atmosphere and some great storytelling that blends well with the gameplay. The feel of fighting through a prison is a lot of fun and results in quite intense firefights due to the narrow spaces. Navigating through the map can be challenging, but it didn’t have a huge impact on the fun factor.


Winning: $2,500 + 1x Intel® NUC 10 Performance + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: This Is a very fun map and has a great atmosphere. Firefight is the absolute must-play mode on this map, the firefight design works really well with the more compact size and layout of the level. Checkpoint, however, suffers a bit from the more compact size and doesn’t offer enough gameplay variation to stand out.


Winning: $1,500 + 1x i7 7700k + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: An absolutely stunning-looking map with a great atmosphere! An adventurous experience that offers something new to the player every time. It almost feels like treasure hunting, finding an underground waterfall was definitely one of the highlights in our playtests. Unfortunately for Firefight, the map falls a bit short, it’s too much of a platformer and quite difficult to navigate through. Still a work of art that has a lot of potential for Checkpoint.


Winning: $750 + 1x i7 7700k + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: Overall a great-looking map. The mud village was very well constructed and offered some fun gameplay, especially on Checkpoint. It almost feels like a mini-campaign where each objective offers something different, the larger capture zones are a nice touch and require more tactical gameplay than usual. We had a lot of fun with this layout.

Push Security however is not working so great on this map, the line of sights are too long and we had a difficult time as Security to even exit the start spawn, overall the map just feels too big for Push.


Winning: $250 + 1x i7 7700k + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: This map has a strong visual identity, the spaces have a purpose, like the tank factory, which is definitely one of the visual highlights of this level. The cohesive design and visuals make it feel like a real place. Unfortunately, the realism that was put into this level made some of the spaces less fun to play in. Lacking cover on objectives made them difficult to defend and long travel times to objectives, were things we all noticed in our playtests. Nonetheless, this is a map with a lot of potential.



Congratulations to all our winners; our team will contact you via mod.io to arrange prize distribution and additional feedback over the coming days. Entrants can now update contest submissions to reflect feedback from the community or any changes made during the judging phase.

We hope this was a valuable experience for all involved and look forward to seeing many more community maps in the near future!

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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