Insurgency: Sandstorm News

Update 1.5 is here with performance improvements, changes to the matchmaking system, a new PvP game mode “Domination”, a player reporting system, gameplay adjustments, and more.

Thank you to everyone who shared their feedback with us since our last major update. We’ve made a bunch of improvements to the matchmaking system based on your input. In addition, we’ve further optimized the game and added a new Versus game mode, Domination. Although this mode was originally intended as a sample mode for modders, we decided to include it in 1.5 officially due to how well it performed during testing, its ability to function as a strong onboarding experience for new players, and to respond to the requests we frequently get to permanently reintroduce Team Deathmatch into the game. We’ve made a number of gameplay changes including adjustments to weapon sway and recoil, a slight sprint speed reduction, improved reliability of smoke grenades, and more advanced optional separation of vault, crouch, slide and jump keybindings. In celebration of the update and the holidays, we’ll be running 2x XP across all playlists.

See the full changelist below:

• Optimized CPU by preventing characters from ticking each frame when they are not being rendered. After benchmarking internally on higher end systems we have deduced this is now saving 0.5 to 1.0 ms per frame, or the equivalent of 6 frames per second. However, the impact of this optimization will be mostly felt by mid to lower tier systems where this gain could be more considerable.
  
• Made major art and optimization passes on several maps. The target of this optimization pass was to increase average frame rate, improve frame stability, and increase visual fidelity.
  
  • Outskirts
    
  • Refinery
    
  • Precinct
    
  • Summit
• Optimized environment assets by turning off tick events where they were not needed.

• Playlist Selection & Queueing
  
  • Multiple playlists within a single game type may now be queued into at the same time.
    
  • Added an estimated queue time measurement that will give a player in queue an estimate of how long it will take to find a match.
    
  • Removed the player count for playlists to prevent potential player bias that may have affected playlist population on certain playlists like Firefight.
    
  • The Ground Battle playlist has now been separated into Push and Frontline playlists.
• Team Balance
  
  • Added ability for players to manually switch teams if there is an imbalance.
    
  • Added team auto-balance feature where if teams go unbalanced for too long the game will automatically switch players from the excess player team over to the team with fewer players. Players will be notified with a warning in case they want to volunteer themselves manually.
• Joining Friends Mid-match
  
  • Added ability for players to join other party members who are already playing in-game.
• Player Reporting System
  
  • To report a player, pull up the scoreboard with Tab, right-click the offending player’s name, and press “Report Player”.
    
  • Offending players will receive a notification box informing them of their disruptive behavior.
  • We will continue to monitor and refine the system’s weights and penalties over time, this is just a first implementation.

• Fight over three objectives which give points to the controlling team.
  
• All weapons are available while playing this game mode.
  
• Respawn quickly in random locations around the map similar to Team Deathmatch.
  
• Domination is supported on the following maps:
  • Hideout
    
  • Hillside
    
  • Farmhouse
    
  • Crossing
    
  • Ministry

We’ve worked hard to listen to the players and make improvements to various gameplay mechanics. Our intent is to directly address player feedback about shooting and aiming not being rewarding enough of skill, to improve player movement and acceleration to feel more controlled, and to add some flexibility to certain key bindings which have been popularly requested.

• Made weapon sway more predictable and less punishing when standing and moving.
  
  • Set up Lissajous curve fixed pattern for sway instead of the more random current Perlin noise pattern seen in the public version since release.
    
  • Reduced sway speed by 20%. Sway magnitude has not been changed.
    
  • Reduced incentive for crouching and proning to reduce sway (crouching now reduces sway by 50% instead of 60%, prone now reduces sway by 70% instead of 80%).
    
  • Reduced sway penalties when moving (sway magnitude now increases by 15% instead of 50%, sway speed now increases by 50% instead of 200%).
    
  • Slightly reduced the sway speed and magnitude reduction when focusing to counterbalance the other sway changes (focusing now reduces sway speed and magnitude by 60% instead of 80%).
• Made recoil when standing and leaning less penalized compared to other stances.
  
  • Reduced overall recoil when aiming down your sights (ADS) by 15%.
    
  • Increased recoil when crouching and proning to compensate against the above change (crouching now 20% less recoil instead of 40%, prone now has 30% less recoil instead of 60%).
  • [Reduced recoil penalty for leaning when low weight (lowest weight now has 10% more recoil when leaning instead of 20%).
    
  • Recoil penalty while moving should be consistent across all weights rather than favoring players who are heavier (heavier players previously had a greater reduction in recoil).
    
  • Increased Mk 14 EBR recoil.
• Reduced top sprint speed by 8%.
  
• Smoke Grenade Improvements
  
  • Fixed an issue where smoke grenade clouds were inconsistent for players on a server. Now smoke clouds appear the same for all players.
    
  • Smoke grenades expand faster to make them more useful and is no longer frame-rate capped.
• Advanced Keybinding Options
  
  • Jump and vault can now be bound separately or as a combined key. The combined key is bound by default.
    
  • Crouch and slide can now be bound separately or as a combined key. The combined key is bound by default.

• Fixed an issue where it was possible for the player’s weapon selection to become soft locked when picking up and throwing back explosives under certain circumstances, which prevented them from being able to change weapons after it occurred.
  
• Fixed an issue where smoke, incendiary, and Molotov explosive particles would not be rendered if the player was inside a game menu before they detonated, leading to cases of invisible fire and smoke.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Rocket Barrage fire support that would prevent fired rockets from landing on their targets if they were called on a position too far away from its origin.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented players from being able to switch to the C-4 or IED detonator when in a vehicle.
  
• Fixed an issue with Lesson prompts potentially creating a hitch on lower tier systems when displayed.
  
• Fixed an issue where floating shells could be seen on the M870 while ADS and cocking the weapon.
  
• Fixed an issue where an animation would play twice when firing the last round of weapons with hold back bolts.
  
• Fixed an issue with the third person mesh for the 4x C79 optic, which had some visibly jagged edges.
  
• Fixed an odd visual issue which was related to the bare arm cosmetic and forearm weights.
  
• Fixed an issue with the M9 pistol, where a hole in the rear of the first person model allowed you to see the loaded ammunition through it.
  
• Fixed a visual issue where fingertips could be seen protruding through certain glove cosmetics.
  
• Fixed an issue where weapons could briefly disappear when scavenging in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue where the VHS-2 would not receive more than one magazine when the Extended Magazines attachment was equipped.
  
• Fixed an issue where magazines could appear in the bottom left of the screen while speed reloading certain assault rifle type weapons.
  
• Fixed a third person reload animation issue with bolt action rifles while prone.
  
• Fixed an issue with the scale of the AT4 launcher causing it to become partially invisible.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could potentially stand while performing a slide.
  
• Fixed an issue where third person grenade launchers could look visually broken at certain distances.
  
• Updated the RPG-7, M3 MAAWS, AT4 and Panzerfaust 3 first person iron sight and hip fire animations to time them more directly with the audio and the projectile leaving the launcher, this should prevent cases where, when firing a rocket, it could leave the launcher at an unpredictable angle.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Panzerfaust 3 launcher using the incorrect first person sprint animation.
  
• Fixed an issue with the settings menu that caused the reset to defaults modal window to appear behind the settings window.
  
• Fixed an issue with the end round reason displaying the generic reason instead of the correct one.
  
• Fixed an issue where the M240B could be seen as flickering.
  
• Fixed a weight painting issue with the third person VHS-2 grenade launcher, which caused visual artefacts at certain distances.
  
• Fixed an issue where a player would resume their third person gas mask equip or unequip animation on respawn after being killed during that animation sequence.
  
• Fixed an issue where under barrel grenade launchers could occasionally be rendered invisible after the insertion sequence in Checkpoint.
  
• Fixed an issue where player gear would jitter erratically when initially rendering.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s leg could not be seen correctly when breaching a door in local play after respawning.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s arm would look odd while reloading a shotgun prone or crouched in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue with the first person mag release animations for the FAL base reloads.
  
• Fixed an issue where the range computer UI would list certain available actions with inverted wording.
  
• Fixed an issue where the screen could fade to black and remain black if the player switched player or view when watching another player die.
  
• Fixed an issue with the missing default action on some key action icons in the replay controls, that caused the playback speed action to always be displayed as a mouse scroll icon even though they were bound to different keys.
  
• Fixed a visual morph issue with balaclava and neck gaiter cosmetics.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s third person arm meshes would clip with the body while in vehicles.
  
• Fixed an issue where when prompted to play the tutorial as part of the users first time experience, clicking the popup would not take the player to the tutorial as suggested.
  
• Fixed an issue where if the player rolled a vehicle and all vehicle exits were blocked by objects they would not be able to exit the vehicle.
  
• Fixed an issue with crouched reloads on M3 MAAWS.
  
• Fixed an issue where kicking used the incorrect sequence when the player was equipped with anything other than a rifle.
  
• Fixed an issue where the third person fire particle was missing in third person for Molotovs.
  
• Fixed an issue with jumping in first person when equipped with a detonator.
  
• Fixed an issue with vaulting while equipped with binoculars.
  
• Fixed an issue where the “Do you want to save” prompt was behind the settings window in the replay.
  
• Fixed an issue where if you changed options in the video settings menu and returned to the game without applying your changes, on returning to the video settings menu the non applied changes could still be seen.
  
• Fixed an animation issue with shotguns while sprinting in Hardcore or when the Slow Movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where there was a visual disconnect between first person and third person sprinting animations in Hardcore or when the Slow Movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where if the player performed a high vault directly after throwing a grenade, on landing, their primary weapon would not be visible and they would need to reselect it.
  
• Fixed an issue where animations for detonators were hilariously broken.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Fragger class in Team Deathmatch and Domination had access to the underbarrel explosive launcher when they shouldn’t. Sorry noob tubers.
  
• Fixed an issue where the low scalability preset and low texture quality setting would not not correctly display anisotropic filtering x2.
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the scalability options from resetting properly when backing out of the video settings menu.
  
• Fixed an issue where underhand Molotov throws would not set the rag on fire.
  
• Fixed an issue where it was possible for players to decrease the amount of time taken to reload a weapon with a Bipod or Foregrip Bipod attached.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could perform a vault from the prone position.
  
• Fixed an issue when switching to and from grenade launchers would cause a noticeable delay before they could be fired.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Loadout menu character would always have a primary weapon in their hands, even when all weapons were removed from the players loadout.
  
• Fixed a rendering issue that caused the 4x M150 optic to have geometry visible inside its scope view.
  
• Fixed an issue where several first person pistol magazines would appear to have rounds remaining in them, even when the magazine was empty.
  
• Fixed an issue where when equipping a barrel attachment to the FAL would not prevent the stock barrel from being removed.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Alpha AK would not play the correct ready animation when the player had a drum magazine attached.
  
• Fixed an issue where, when spectating, the player would be shown the incorrect key bindings for change player and change camera, if they had re-bound those particular keys.
  
• Fixed an issue with the RPG-7 rocket projectile collision mesh also encompassing the fins when it should not have. This could have potentially contributed to some unwarranted deaths when firing through windows.
  
• Fixed an issue where the roaming spectator camera would be able to snap when zooming in and out.
  
• Fixed some additional roaming spectator camera snapping issues when roaming without any other players in the map.
  
• Fixed an issue where the mouse smoothing option was not being reset when “Reset To Defaults” was selected in the settings menu.
  
• Fixed floating left hand during the first person SVD reloads.
  
• Fixed a potential issue with the MP5A2 reload not being completed if you skipped the bolt release during the reload and completed it when you pulled it out again.
  
• Tutorial
  • Fixed an issue where the player could still trigger audio instructions by resupplying, even after finishing the current objective.
    
  • Fixed an issue where a tutorial waypoint could not be triggered if the player only creaked opened the door instead of opening or breaching it.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players could occasionally not validate the “Enter Building” waypoint under certain conditions.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could utilize the debug menu, thus allowing them to fly out of the playable area.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could potentially complete the “Pick Up Weapon” objective without properly validating it and thus not be able to progress.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could become stuck between a vehicle and a wall on the opening bridge sequence.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could move their character and camera during the opening moments.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could reach the extraction point by utilizing an Insurgent vehicle.
    
  • Fixed an AI navigation issue where AI could become blocked by a wall during the sequence in which the player must destroy a weapon cache.
    
  • Fixed an issue where respawning as the Commander class, selecting and calling in the Gunship before the related Objectives prompted the user to do so would block progression.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could not validate the “Scavenge Weapon” waypoint if they killed the AI while it was reloading.
    
  • Fixed an animation issue that would cause weapon animation to break during the scavenging section of the tutorial.
    
  • Fixed an issue where reaching the "Equip Binoculars" objective with the Binoculars already equipped did not validate the objective.
    
  • Fixed an issue in the tutorial, where using the Loadout Menu instead of holding F to resupply when prompted, would prevent the player from progressing.

• The Loadout UI now gives sound feedback unique to that category as you customize your equipment.
• Localization has been added for the following regions:
  • Czech
    
  • Danish
    
  • Dutch
    
  • Finnish
    
  • Hungarian
    
  • Japanese
    
  • Korean
    
  • Norwegian
    
  • Polish
    
  • Portuguese (Portugal)
    
  • Portuguese (Brazillian)
    
  • Swedish
    
  • Thai
    
  • Chinese (Traditional)
    
  • Turkish
• The tutorial will now end 25 seconds after entering the vehicle turret during that section of the tutorial. This is to ensure players are able to complete the tutorial and not be prevented from doing so by any more unpredictable issues caused by vehicle physics or AI behaviors.

• UI
  • Updated the style of icon utilized to indicated servers that are XP gain enabled.
  • Removed the “Customize” button from the bottom of the menu UI, it is now an option on the side right under tutorials.
    
  • The “Profile” menu option has now been moved further down the list and has been renamed to “Stats”.
  • “History” has now been renamed to “Replays”.
• Weapons & Equipment
  
  • Added new third person Hardcore sprint sequence for LMGs.
    
  • Added new prone gasmask equip & unequip third person sequences.
    
  • Added a new third person toss sequence for discarded launchers.
    
  • Added new third person standing and crouched reloads for the M240 machine gun.
    
  • Added a new third person standing and crouched bolt cycle animation for the Mosin.
    
  • Unified third person and first person Hardcore sprint pistol animations.
    
  • Added a new folding bipod for the first person and third person FAL rifle, it was utilizing an incorrect bipod type before.
    
  • Added a specific foregrip animation to the MP5A2.
    
  • Added first person drum magazine speed reloads for the VHS-2 assault rifle.
• Translucent glass rendering has now been improved to prevent cases of flickering.

• Outskirts
  • Fixed a number of clipping and flickering issues.
    
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to spawn on top of another player in Firefight West Security spawn.
    
  • Fixed collision issues with certain columns near the H objective which prevented grenades to pass between them on Checkpoint Insurgents.
    
  • Fixed an issue with incorrectly rendered shadows near the A objective on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Eliminated a line of sight that allowed longer range rockets to destroy the final cache on Push Insurgents.
• Crossing
  
  • Fixed an issue where players on the Insurgent team could potentially spawn under the map on Frontline when the last objective was captured.
    
  • Fixed being able to destroy the cache, objective D, from a far distance on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed being able to destroy the cache, objective A, from a far distance on Frontline.
• Summit
  • Opened a new path to improve level flow for approaching objective A on Push Insurgents.
    
  • Added a missing blocking volume behind the H objective on Security Checkpoint.
    
  • Fixed various places where players can get stuck.
• Refinery
  • Fixed an issue where players could become stuck between a piece of sheet metal and a chain link fence near the Security spawn on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed a collision issue which would block the player from using a door.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the players could leave the playable area near Push Insurgents final spawn.

• Farmhouse
  
  • Fixed a collision issue where weapons could become stuck in a specific metal fence near objective A on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could see through the map if deployed and prone near Objective C Firefight West.
    
  • Fixed an issue with a specific light being overly bright in objective B building on Push Security.
• Ministry
  • Fixed an issue where players could become stuck in an area near the restroom entrance.
• Hillside
  • Fixed a collision issue which prevented players from throwing projectiles over a specific wall near Push Security B.
    
  • Fixed collision issues with certain columns near the F objective which prevented grenades to pass between them on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where you could cap the B objective in Firefight mode from an unintended position.
• Hideout
  • Tweaked the post processing settings to make the map a tad less dark.
    
  • Fixed collision issues with certain columns near the A objective which prevented grenades to pass between them on Push Security.
• Precinct
  • Fixed an issue allowing players to destroy the cache, D objective, from a long distance on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue which allowed players to vault on a specific prop in ways they should not be able to near the E objective building on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed multiple collision issues near to the A, D, E and F objectives on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players could pixel walk to an unintended position near the B objective on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed collisions on crates near objective H on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could stick through the roof when vaulting on a stack of crates near objective H on Checkpoint Security.

Over the last couple of months, the team has been communicating with competitive players and collecting feedback to improve the competitive scene and overall experience with ranked games. Along with an increase of support for community tournaments and other competitive events, we have made the following changes to competitive:

• A reset of Competitive ranks to address issues of players not being able to find matches at various tiers.
  
• An increase in ranked Elo decay for inactive users.
  
• Created competitive leaderboard that can be accessed here. Please note that this leaderboard will populate itself as people play, and updates every hour.

We intend for these three changes combined to help address the current low population in Competitive and generate more interest. We’ll continue to monitor feedback on these systems and make adjustments as needed.




As we get closer to the first public deployment of our mod support, we’re looking for community members with experience creating custom levels for games in Source Engine/Unreal Engine to participate in our Sandstorm Level Editor Alpha. If you’re interested in participating and are willing to bug test and provide feedback, please sign up here. Also included in these tools is the ability to make custom game modes and new gameplay configurations, but we are looking for feedback specifically on level creation at the moment.

Hotfix 1 - December 9th

• Added potential fix for a frequent crash which could prevent certain players from being able to progress past the initial splash screens, or crash after approximately 5 to 10 minutes of game time. If you continue to have this issue please report it here.
  

• Fixed an issue which prevented the pre-order cosmetic tattoo from being accessible.
  
• Fixed an issue where Firefight mode was not awarding players the correct XP boost as advertised.
  
• Fixed a visual layout issue with the vote kick popup window.
  

• Adjusted Weapon Sway while using Focus back to be closer to pre 1.5 values.
  
• Increased objective capture time in Domination from 10 seconds to 15 seconds.
  
• Enabled the objectives column in the scoreboard in Domination.
  

• Sandstorm Competitive Leaderboard: https://leaderboard.sandstorm.game
  • Fixed a caching issue that caused old matches to be displayed instead of matches post-reset.
    
  • Fixed username search order so the closest username match now appears first.
    
  • Increased the players-per-page display from 10 to 25.
    
  • Fixed calculation to determine ranked division.
    

• Added new image for the Push playlist under the Versus section of the Play menu.
  
• Removed the player name and Steam avatar information from the loading screen. This was done to create a cleaner presentation and draw more attention to the game mode information and gameplay tips.
  

• Refinery
  
  • Fixed a player collision issue which prevented players from being able to access a staircase.
• Hideout
  
  • Extended the playable area slightly to fix a spawn that was too close to the border of the playable area in Domination mode.
    
  • Tweaked the overview area location to improve the readability of the tactical map in Domination mode.

The Community Test Environment for our next update, update 1.5, is now live. Go to your Steam Library and download “Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Test Environment” to play.

We’ll be having a “Play with the Devs” event on the CTE on Tuesday December 3 & Friday December 6 from 11:00 AM MST - 1:00 PM MST. We’ll be testing playlist improvements on the US servers in the official matchmaking of our new game mode Domination (see more information below), NOT on a server under Community Servers as we’ve done in the past. To join us, just boot up the CTE, go to Play, select Domination, and Find Match. All the devs won’t necessarily be in one game, but you’ll see us floating around your matches!

This update features a ton of quality of life improvements, gameplay improvements, optimization, and bug fixes. Please share your feedback on the CTE forums here. The highlights can be seen below:


We’ve made both game and map changes to further optimize Sandstorm. This is part of an ongoing effort to address performance issues with other maps and the game as a whole. Changes include:

• Disabled AlwaysTickPose to minimize CPU overhead of character animations which aren’t rendered on the screen
  
• Performed optimization pass on the following maps:
  
  • Refinery
    
  • Outskirts
    
  • Summit
    
  • Precinct

Before




After



Over the past couple of months, we have received and read numerous pieces of feedback from the community relating to playlist changes that were implemented earlier in the year as well as the overall matchmaking experience. The new playlist-based matchmaking introduced several issues and had some undesirable impacts on our queues’ health. We’ve made the following improvements:

• Players are now able to queue for multiple playlists within a game type (Versus or Coop). This should help to ensure that players are spending less time waiting in the queue, and more time playing the game.
  
• We’ve removed the player count for playlists, and replaced it with estimated queue times instead. This should reduce situations where players feel like it isn’t worth queuing into a playlist that doesn’t have a lot of players, which could have led to some playlists (like Firefight) not having a healthy population.
  
• Team auto-balancing will ensure that teams are always made even automatically by the server. Autobalancing will occur whenever a team has 2 or more players on it. If you are in a party, the system will work to ensure that you are placed on the same team.
  
• Players can manually switch teams if they become unbalanced as a result of leavers, disconnections, etc.
  
• Players can now join in-progress matches their friends are already in. This was something technical we had been meaning to do for a while.
  
• We’ve separated Ground Battle into separate playlists by the mode: one for Push mode and one for Frontline mode.

These are the playlists available in the CTE and will be eventually available for 1.5:

Versus

• Push
  
• Frontline
  
• Firefight
  
• Domination

Coop

• Normal
  
• Hardcore
  
• Frenzy

We know that a lot of players would love to see Skirmish make a return here, especially since multi-queueing would help its population. However, we still have issues with the mode’s vehicles, including their bugs and performance issues. We also still feel that the Skirmish gameplay experience as a whole isn’t as strong as these other modes, especially for new players. We can expand our mode selection with the new playlist improvements, but we can only go so far until we risk too much fragmentation and a weak gameplay experience for incoming new players. For the time being, Skirmish will continue to be available on community servers for the players who really want that experience.





We’ve added the popular game mode Domination to the game, which some of you may already be familiar with from games like Unreal Tournament, Battlefield, and Call of Duty. In Domination there are three objectives: A, B, and C. Your team’s score will increase faster the more objectives you own. Once one team reaches the score limit, or time runs out and they have the highest score, they win the round. Domination uses the same instant respawning system and weapon loadout as Team Deathmatch, which means you are always in the action and you can use just about any weapon in the game. Right now Domination supports the Hideout, Hillside, Farmhouse, Crossing, and Ministry maps, but more may be added in the future.

We know that adding a new game mode risks further fracturing of the playerbase, something we are trying to address with the playlist changes above. We also know that there may be other game modes that some players would like to see before Domination, such as Outpost, which was discussed in our last roadmap for 2019. Domination was originally created in Sandstorm as an “example mode” using Unreal Engine 4’s blueprint system to demonstrate to modders how they could build custom game modes using our upcoming modding tools. It ended up being really fun when we tested it, and so we decided to include it as an official mode. Domination will still exist as that example mode, and modders are free to use that as a basis to build totally new game modes.

In addition to already having it ready as this unique “sample mode” for modders, one of the main reasons we made it an official mode was because a lot of players have requested that Team Deathmatch be reintroduced as an official playlist. We feel like those players can get their fix from Domination in a way that, in its objective-based gameplay, is less mindless than Team Deathmatch, and thus truer to Sandstorm’s identity. Also, with our upcoming console release, we’ll be getting a lot of new players. Domination mode is a bit more casual and easy to learn, which means it’s an excellent way to ease those players into the more hardcore experience that is Insurgency: Sandstorm. Finally, to be blunt, we see an opportunity to attract some of the new Modern Warfare’s audience. If a player isn’t feeling the experience there, they’re welcome here with a familiar game mode as a vessel for our unique brand of gameplay.


We’ve worked hard to listen to the players and make improvements to various gameplay mechanics. Our intent is to directly address player feedback about shooting and aiming not being rewarding enough of skill, to improve player movement and acceleration to feel more controlled, and to add some flexibility to certain key bindings which have been popularly requested. Additionally, we were able to make improvements to smoke grenades so that particles are visualized reliably across all clients, which has an important gameplay impact of making smoke grenades more dependable. The changes include the following:

• Weapon Sway
  • Set up Lissajous curve fixed pattern for sway instead of the more random current Perlin noise pattern seen in the public version since release. This Lissajous curve makes the sway pattern more predictable.
    
  • Reduced sway speed by 20%. Sway magnitude is the same
    
  • Reduced incentive for crouching and proning to reduce sway (crouching now reduces sway by 50% instead of 60%, prone now reduces sway by 70% instead of 80%)
    
  • Reduced sway penalties when moving (sway magnitude now increases by 15% instead of 50%, sway speed now increases by 50% instead of 200%)
    
  • Slightly reduced the sway speed and magnitude reduction when focusing to counterbalance the other sway changes (focusing now reduces sway speed and magnitude by 60% instead of 80%)
    
• Recoil
  • Reduced overall recoil when ADS by 15%
    
  • Reduced recoil incentive for crouching and proning (crouching now 20% less recoil instead of 40%, prone now has 30% less recoil instead of 60%)
    
  • Reduced recoil penalty for leaning when low weight (lowest weight now has 10% more recoil when leaning instead of 20%)
    
  • Recoil penalty while moving should be consistent across all weights rather than favoring players who are heavier (heavier players previously had a greater reduction in recoil)
    
  • Increased Mk 14 EBR recoil with same magnitude as the recent FAL recoil increase
    
  Movement
  • Sprint speed reduced by 8%
    
• Key Binding Changes
  • Jump and Vault keys can now be bound as three separate binds: Jump/Vault, Jump, and Vault. This means you can jump in places where you would otherwise be forced to vault, because they keys were shared by spacebar. The default key is still Spacebar for the combined Vault/Jump key.
    
  • Crouch and Slide can be bound separately. If you want to go from a full sprint to an immediate crouch instead of an automatic slide, you can now do so. The default key is still Ctrl for the combined Crouch (Hold)/Slide.
    
• Client Side Smoke Reliability
  • All smoke grenades should now utilize the same seed for all clients so player A will see the same smoke coverage as player B. Smoke also expands faster to be more useful and is no longer frame-rate capped.
    

Thanks and enjoy! Remember to share your feedback on the CTE forums and let us know what you like and don’t like!

Hotfix 1 - December 4th, 2019

• Fixed a major issue where occasionally the player’s weapon selection could become locked after attempting to pick up and throw back an explosive, preventing them from being able to change weapons when it occurred.
  
• Fixed an issue where a blank name was shown for cosmetics in the confirmation dialog when attempting to buy a cosmetic which does not have variations.
  
• Fixed a third person issue where the C-4 and IED detonators would be floating in front of the player.
  
• Fixed and issue with Japanese localization for objective letters and the North-West direction on the compass.
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the scalability options from resetting properly when backing out of the video settings menu.
  
• Fixed an animation issue with shotguns while sprinting in hardcore or when the slow movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where there was a visual disconnect between first person and third person sprinting animations in hardcore or when the slow movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Fragger class in Team Deathmatch and Domination had access to the underbarrel explosive launcher when they shouldn’t. Sorry noob tubers.
  
• Fixed an issue where the low scalability preset and low texture quality setting would not not correctly display anisotropic filtering x2.
  
• Fixed an issue that would allow the roaming spectator camera to snap when zooming in and out.
  
• Fixed an animation issue that would cause the weapon animation to become broken during the scavenging section of the tutorial.
  
• Fixed an issue where the pre-order tattoo was not set correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue where underhand molotov throws would not set the rag on fire as it should.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Tutorial Level where respawning as the Commander, selecting the Gunship, and calling in the Gunship before the related objective prompted the user to do such would block progression.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Tutorial Level where reaching the "Equip Binoculars" objective with the Binoculars already equipped did not validate the objective
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented mouse smoothing settings from being reset to defaults from the settings menu.
  
• Fixed a minor UI label overflow with the [Cancel] button while running the Dutch localization.
  

• Hideout
  
  • Fixed issues related to Domination capture zones.
• Farmhouse
  
  • Fixed issues related to Domination and Firefight capture zones.
• Hillside
  
  • Fixed an issue where players could capture the A objective on Domination while hidden behind a curtain.

• Players might "vibrate" or switch between states rapidly while idle or moving after respawning.
  
• Players will spawn into the level during the map voting screen.
  
• Not all of the players are able to connect to the subsequent match after a map vote. Some players may be placed back into the queue and become backfilled into another region’s game.
  
• If an automated team balance occurs during a respawn wave, it is possible for the player to be prevented from respawning with the "You will respawn when your team captures an objective" message on screen, even after an objective has been captured.
  
• Dying mid weapon transition can potentially lead to the player’s primary weapon not being available on respawn.
  

Hotfix 2 - December 6th, 2019

• Fixed an issue where if a player was killed during the door kicking animation, on respawning their character model would seen to be switching rapidly between animation states by other players.
  
• Fixed an issue where smoke, incendiary, and molotov explosive particles would not be rendered if the player was inside a game menu before they detonated, leading to cases of invisible fire and smoke.
  
• Fixed an issue where when submitting a player report the user would see an infinite progress spinner instead of the report being submitted.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Tutorial Level where using the Loadout Menu instead of holding F to resupply when prompted would prevent the player from progressing.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could perform a vault from the prone position.
  
• Fixed an issue when switching to and from grenade launchers would cause a noticeable delay before they could be fired.
  
• Fixed an issue where players would be automatically respawned after a Domination match had ended, showing them in first person while the post round screen and map vote UI elements were on-screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Loadout menu character would always have a primary weapon in their hands, even when all weapons were removed from the players loadout.
  
• Fixed a rendering issue that caused the x4 M150 optic to have geometry visible inside its scope view.
  
• Fixed an issue where changing the spectator camera from free roam to first person view would cause an odd transition with the character being spectated.
  
• Fixed an issue where several first person sidearm magazines would appear to have rounds remaining in them, even when the magazine was empty.
  
• Fixed an issue where when equipping a barrel attachment to the FAL would not prevent the stock barrel from being removed.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Alpha AK would not play the correct ready animation when the player had a drum magazine attached.
  
• Fixed an issue where, when spectating, the player would be shown the incorrect key bindings for change player and change camera, if they had re-bound those particular keys.
  
• Fixed an issue where the correct map ambience and weapon environment sounds were not being applied to a number of spawn points in Domination.
  
• Fixed a number of line break UI issues with Japanese & Traditional Chinese localizations.
  
• Fixed a number of issues in the newly supported additional localizations.

• Domination mode will now show players non-neutral held objectives above the score bar UI element for each team.
  
• Domination mode will now play the last man standing music when the win limit is approaching to notify players a win is imminent, this is by default, 20 points.
  
• Domination mode now has the kill feed disabled by default.
  
• Co-op and Versus playlists now have Push, Domination, and Normal playlists selected by default. This is so new players can have an idea of which content to start with that is more accessible and newer.

• Hillside
  
  • Fixed an issue where you could capture the B objective in Domination and Firefight modes from an unintended position.
• Hideout
  • Fixed an issue where a spawn point was too close to the playable area boundary.
    
  • Removed duplicated player spawn points in Domination mode.
• Ministry
  
  • Fixed an issue where a number of spawn points in Domination mode where intersecting with props, this would potentially cause those spawn points to become invalid and lead to players being spawned elsewhere.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players could become stuck in an area near the entrance restrooms.

• Not all of the players are able to connect to the subsequent match after a map vote. Some players may be placed back into the queue and become backfilled into another region’s game.
  
• If an automated team balance occurs during a respawn wave, it is possible for the player to be prevented from respawning with the "You will respawn when your team captures an objective" message on screen, even after an objective has been captured.

The nominations for the 2019 Steam Awards are here! Insurgency Sandstorm has been out for nearly a year now, and the team has worked non-stop since release to bring players free, fresh content. Since releasing last December we have added:

• 3 additional maps
  
• 10 new weapons
  
• Dozens of added cosmetics
  
• 3 new game modes
  
• And more!
  

While there are a few categories that you can nominate Insurgency: Sandstorm! We feel Sandstorm is a game played, “Better with Friends”. The tactical gameplay requires important communication between teammates to best capture objectives and come out on top, which is way more fun to do with friends! If you agree, please feel free to nominate us!

By the way, Sandstorm is 50% off from now until December 3rd!

We are releasing a hotfix today that addresses several issues with last week’s 1.4.2 patch. Some changes not intended for patch 1.4.2 were accidentally included. This hotfix tweaks things to be closer to our intentions. They are still however a work in progress. More changes are to come as needed, including an improvement to sway that will replace the current Perlin noise weapon sway pattern with a fixed and more predictable Lissajous curve pattern. For more information on this and our other plans, see our third State of Production post here. The hotfix changelist can be found below:

• Toned back some of the movement acceleration and deceleration changes from the 1.4.2 patch.
  • Increased default movement acceleration speed.
    
  • Increased sprint acceleration speed.
    
  • Increased friction and deceleration.
  
  
• Fixed issue where low stamina had no effect on weapon sway. Low stamina used to increase both weapon sway magnitude and speed before 1.4.2, but now has been tweaked so it only increases weapon sway speed.
  
• Low stamina sway speed is less than before, 150% instead of 200%.
  

• Removed camera shake from pistol and rifle sprint animations.
  
• Improved knife sprinting animation to better time with footstep audio.
  

• Fixed an issue where the tutorial level might not be able to be completed due to the extraction vehicle not being able to properly navigate.
  

Critical Fixes

• Fixed an issue on Crossing Frontline, where if an Insurgent player dies just before the Security captures Objective F, the Insurgent player could potentially respawn under the map.
  
• Fixed a crash caused by viewing the weapon model in the Loadout menu.
  
• Fixed a client side crash that would happen when certain types of friendly fire were applied to the player.

Greetings!

My name is Derek, and I am New World Interactive's Head of Production in charge of scheduling and scoping on the team, here to give you an update on what's been happening in the past month. It’s been a busy month here at New World Interactive. We’ve continued to immigrate more members of our design and programming teams in to Canada. Our efforts at ramping up have continued full speed, and our team is starting to take on some scalable structure as we quickly move towards 2020. In response to community feedback, we made some significant adjustments to our internal roadmap, as well as a decision pertaining to publicly posting our roadmap. Additionally, I’m going to be clarifying our stance on competitive, as it seems like our video announcement was misunderstood. Let’s dive right in to this next State of Production.

• Delaying our 2019 Roadmap goals and removing them from the Steam Store Page as we have refocused development on optimization and console release.
  
• Improving playlist system by removing player population count from playlist, allowing multiple playlists to be selected, manual team switching, auto team balance, and a “pre-match” Team Deathmatch mode where players waiting to queue into Versus or Competitive matches can play TDM against other players also in queues while they wait.
  
• Continuing competitive community outreach as stated in our last video in publicly joinable VoIP meetings in our official Discord.
  
• New Art Producer and Associate Producer have been hired; offer has been extended to a prospective Head of Marketing to follow.
  
• Analyzing lower performing maps Refinery, Outskirts, Summit, and Precinct as part of our initial optimization pass.
  
• Creating for modders an alpha build of our level editor, and the ability to auto-download custom maps upon connecting to a server.

I’m anticipating some anxiety/concerns over our decision to remove our roadmap from the store page, so I want to try and get ahead of that. “Why is New World Interactive removing the roadmap?” It’s a fairly simple answer: our plans have changed. Given the immense amount of feedback we’ve received about the needs to optimize, the development impacts associated with clearing TRC/co-dev of the console version of the game, and our efforts towards providing mod support for our players, we have had to make some adjustments in order to ensure we can achieve all of the things that the community is looking for. Given how much content we provided throughout 2019 already for free, including 3 new maps, 10 new weapons, 3 new game modes, limited time “mutated” game modes, and dozens of new cosmetics, we felt it made the most sense to focus on getting our pre-existing content into a better state as opposed to focusing on the introduction of even more content. Let me address the major concerns that are likely to bubble up:

• We’ve delayed night maps and associated equipment until next year. Given what a large undertaking this is (Multiple types of night vision goggles, night vision scopes, IR lasers, night maps themselves, lighting, AI overhauls, etc.) we decided it would be better to give these features more time in the oven than to release them preemptively. We’ll still be releasing one of the night maps for our Halloween event, so you’ll get a teaser of where we’re headed there!
  
• While not in our Roadmap, we have heard feedback and begun working on an AI overhaul which unfortunately must be delayed until next year as well. In order to best-service our cooperative modes, as well as our night maps, we’re working on reducing inconsistencies within our AI’s behavior trees. However, this is a time consuming process, and given how loaded our sprints are between now and the end of the year, we didn’t feel there was time to complete this task in its entirety at the level we desired.

As we get closer to completing TRC, which is one of our biggest challenges (as we’ve never done a console release before as a studio) we’re hoping we’ll be able to put up a better, more accurate roadmap for 2020. At this time, however, things are shifting around on a per-need basis of our console co-dev partner and community feedback.


We understand that a lot of people responded negatively to our introduction of the playlist system in 1.4. It’s important to note that the main design motivations for introducing the system were to (a) keep players contained in a single continuous game experience of their preference without being arbitrarily matched across multiple dissimilar game modes. The idea was that players would stick together in a server with map voting in between matches, and that servers would not need to be generated, taken down, and repopulated over and over (b) create a more intuitive and visually appealing way for new players to learn about and select which game modes to play (c) to allow for the use of limited time playlists leveraging the new mutator system and, in the future, community made mods.

We acknowledge there have been unintended consequences of the addition of this system. It’s important to us that we achieve the design intentions above, but also address the shortfalls of the system since its debut. We know that the quick-fixes we’ve done since the system was released have not been ideal, so instead of applying band-aid solutions to get better player distribution results, we are now in the process of developing a ‘take two’ on the system which we will unveil when ready. Some of the changes we are working on include the following:

• No longer seeing the amount of players playing each playlist, but instead letting people know an approximate queue time once they’ve started queueing so that if it’s longer than average players have the option to back out.
  
• The ability to select multiple playlists to potentially queue into rather than only one. While this may not prove to be immediately handy with our currently available playlists as they are so different in experience, we may consider making further adjustments to which playlists are available in such a way that multiple playlist queueing would be appreciated.
  
• Solutions for team balance issues, including the ability to change teams manually and an auto team balance feature that triggers if players don’t address team balance on their own. This should help with matches where teams are stuck at being uneven, causing people to leave prematurely and harming playlist population. As well as just being a generally frustrating player experience.
  
• Allowing players to play in a pre-match Team Deathmatch round while they wait in the queue for a Versus or Competitive playlist match to be formed.

We anticipate that these changes should result in a better distribution of players throughout the different playlists, so there will likely be some adjustments to the available playlists themselves to accompany this change in response to the aversion we’re seeing towards game modes being grouped together. We appreciate your feedback and we hope that these changes clearly demonstrate we are acting on your input. Please keep in mind that these changes and this iterative process takes time. If you have any more input for us, or if you appreciate these changes, by all means please share your feedback and we will continue to work to improve the playlist system.


I’d like to start off by saying that this announcement was my idea. Feel free to direct all hate at me accordingly if you felt neglected, slighted, or trampled as a result.

The purpose of this announcement, however, was not to say that “We are going all in on the competitive scene.”; it was to express our interest in establishing a dialogue with players and communities to get a better understanding of what it would take to develop and grow a competitive environment within our community. At this stage we can’t make any full commitments to improve the competitive experience. We want to be very honest and open about that. However, we do recognize that there are things we might be able to do within our resources and current production plan to improve the health of competitive gameplay. This may include fixes, minor new features, assisting the comp community in running tournaments or events, etc.

As for “Why create a video announcement?” for the formatting, it was a goal of mine to develop a digital messaging presence within the studio. We thought it would be a neat idea to compare the traction and stickiness of the medium from which we messaged, with the hypothesis that our players would respond better to a video dialogue than written blog formats. Moving forward, I’d like to use even more digital messaging in the future; this was merely our first attempt at doing so to get a better idea of what we can do well, where we need to shore up our skills, and to assess our production capabilities when it comes to creating video content in the future. We recognize it wasn’t perfect, and we’re going to experiment with presentation styles a lot in 2020.

I’d also like to speak to the community, especially those who seem to have taken our initiative most personally. Many comments along the lines of:

• “Competitive is dead”
  
• “NWI let competitive die”
  
• “This is a slap in the face to those of us who have been advocating for competitive since the game released”
  
• “We’ve already told you what the game needs before”

We definitely understand why you feel this way. We acknowledge our team has room to improve in regards to how we interface with and support a competitive ecosystem. The primary reason for this absence of proper attention to competitive is because post-release we prioritized other content that satisfied the broader playerbase. That includes optimization, weapons, levels, polish, general improvements, etc. There was a lot we wanted to do to fix up and flesh out the game. However, these changes take time, and we are currently in the process of determining both what those changes are and if we have the resources to do them. Some of our efforts at establishing a feedback loop, while small in nature, include:

• Improving our community feedback loop via centralized documentation
  
• Establishing an active conversation and a dialogue with players who have an interest in helping us to improve our competitive scene and overall gameplay moving forward
  
• The establishment of a dedicated support manager, who is building us a service desk entirely from scratch via Freshdesk as opposed to HappyFox
  
• Chatting with the leaders of various community leagues and organizations to identify opportunities for collaboration and intra-league events in the future

These are not excuses; this is the way we are moving forward. We are HAPPY to have a dialogue with players who want to help us continue to develop and grow this game. We had over 200 people show up to our first day of open dialogue, which was exciting and rewarding for all of us here at New World Interactive. We recently conducted 4 separate sessions for competitive feedback (2 for the North America region, and 2 for the EU region) which we’ll be analyzing and processing over the next few weeks. We’re hoping to conduct more of these focused discussion sessions in the future, but for the time being, we have hundreds of feedback items to measure and parse.


Continuing the format from the prior SoP, I’m going to break it down by a few key talking points.

• Personnel

The last month represented a very big and exciting milestone for me personally. We carried out dozens of interviews, and we were able to find some exceptional candidates for a few of our most-needed positions. The Production team is now nearly fully fleshed out. The Production team is responsible for scheduling, scoping, managing and cutting features, and identifying quality concerns for deliverables that make it into the live game; with the expansion of this team, we’ll have significantly more eyes focused on all aspects of development. Once on-boarded, we should be able to hit projected milestones with greater consistency and quality, in turn establishing a newfound trust in what we promise and what we are able to deliver. We now have a dedicated Art Producer, as well as a new general Associate Producer starting with us on November 1st. This should help our efforts at optimizing the game, as well as ensuring we are more organized and on-top of our day-to-day on a company-wide basis. We’ve hired a new additional programmer, who specializes in gameplay programming and the creation of tools for our programming team. We’re closing in on our Head of Marketing, and expect to announce their hire within the next month.

• Art Audit + Optimization

Our Art Director has now commenced an audit on 4 levels within our game. These 4 maps are Refinery, Outskirts, Summit, and Precinct. These maps were selected because they were our worst-offenders from the standpoint of performance, memory usage and navigation (e.g. collision bugs). This audit will be focused on flow, performance, and usability. Given the size of our team, as well as the size of the tasks that lie before us, we’re approaching it from the angle that we’ll tackle it in increments as opposed to all at once. These levels will be targeted by both the art team (asset review, LOD texture distancing, pop-ins, level-tailoring, lighting optimization) as well as our internal QA team (collision passes, “soft spot” passes, windows/ledges passes, restricted area review, etc) to focus on both quality of life changes as well as usability testing. This audit will be carried out between now and December, 2019.

• Porting Progress

We’ve continued supporting our co-dev partner, Black Tower, with the console version of Insurgency: Sandstorm. Our biggest challenge thus far has been reducing memory consumption, as many of our maps are still running at 6GB of memory; this is presently higher than the standard edition console can handle. We’re experimenting with numerous solutions and approaches, and as meaningful milestones develop, we’ll continue to share them via the State of Production updates. These solutions for console optimization will directly correlate with performance gains on the PC version of the games as well.

• Mod Support

In an effort to branch out beyond a singular platform, we’ve adopted a platform-agnostic toolset for modding, and have been working towards rolling out our mod capabilities. Since our publisher is still in the process of finalizing an agreement with the solution provider, we are unable to announce at this time which toolset we’ve decided to go with. Expect an announcement about this very soon! There are 3 main focuses for our first rendition:

• Integration of our platform-agnostic solution for mod uploading and distribution
  
• An alpha version of the level editor to create and share custom maps
  
• The ability to connect to a server and automatically download any custom map it is running so you don’t always need to obtain the map manually.

It’s important to note, this is not the full extent of the modding capabilities we have planned, but rather a starting point to build off of. We’re hoping to have this released in an early-access capacity by December of this year, with additional contributions throughout the year to refine support for these features.


With our last patch, 1.4.2, a few issues slipped past us which we are working on addressing. In particular, there were a few changes we were testing internally which were not meant to be introduced yet in the form they were released. This includes somewhat intense camera animations when sprinting (which can be removed via settings for those interested in a temporary workaround), work in progress increases to player inertia affecting the feeling of movement, and changes to stamina which have it no longer affect recoil or sway. These changes were not meant to be released, and we sincerely apologize for this slip. Admittedly, things are a bit chaotic right now for us with our new location, onboarding of new team members and our console co-development. This is not reflective of the standards we hold ourselves to, and we will do everything we can to ensure this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

We are presently working on a hotfix which we hope to roll out as soon as possible. It will contain the removal of these sprinting camera animations as well as ‘tuning’ of the player inertia and stamina-based sway changes closer to what we intend. These changes are a work in progress, and we are planning to make further tweaks to these mechanics as needed. One thing we are exploring in internal testing right now which we feel some players might appreciate is introducing a new Lissajous curve pattern for weapon sway. This pattern is fixed and more predictable than the current Perlin noise weapon sway pattern, and we’re hoping it addresses feedback we’ve received that sway feels too random and arbitrary.