Hell Let Loose News

PTE & CHANGELOG

Hi everyone!

Focus remains on the next patch right now. We will be having a PTE today, starting at approximately 2pm BST.

PLEASE JOIN IF YOU CAN! Not sure how to join? Jump into Discord. This will be slightly earlier than last week, giving us a good time slot for the end of week.

Again we are looking at performance and optimization. Please if you are available, consider helping us stress test the PTE server!

Here is the updated Changelog for the upcoming patch and what will be in today's PTE.
It was tested at full capacity last week with good results. We are still working through feedback.

We really appreciate your participation and feedback again. See you there!

Cheers,
The HLL Team


Fanart Competition

A few weeks ago we launched a fanart/screenshot competition for the community. We have had some stellar submissions from many various entries.

Thanks to all that took the time to create, submit and join in the Showcasing of Hell Let Loose in a creative way. These were done in the form of sketches, drawings, paintings, original screenshots and reworked screenshots that were instantly recognizable as Hell Let Loose.

We have decided that the lucky winners listed below in random order will each receive a Hell Let Loose exclusive limited edition 82nd Airborne Helmet DLC.

Again our thanks to all who participated. If you feel you missed out, stay tuned for future events for your chance to snap up the limited edition 82 Airborne Helmet. Winners will be contacted directly in Discord.

Image by [82AD]VeryBadMoon

Winners (in random order):
B_17G
Brezz
[WTH] Sgt.exe
TOTENKOPF1902
Harrison2142
TW Red
Captain Higgins
[TC] Sgt Remeriz
Martin Freeman
LOKI95
[82AD]VeryBadMoon
|||™ BimSekai
[2.FJg] iAn
[2.FJg]bn.hall
Alpine Sniper (credit Header image for Dev Brief)
Scum
[fll.fi] Tuomainen


Hell Let Loose Discord Hits 50,000 + members

We are extremely excited to have passed the milestone of 50,000 members for the official Hell Let Loose Discord. Thanks to the entire community for getting us here!

[h3]Join the Official HLL Discord Here - https://discord.gg/hellletloose[/h3]


Don’t forget that if you haven’t joined, to do so already as the HLL discord is a great place for information and community interaction. Well done to all that helped us pass this awesome community milestone.


Sneak Peak

Along with the ongoing optimisation and programming works our artists have also remained busy.
Here is a sneak preview of a new Soviet Navy Uniform the Telnyashka.



War Correspondent, Content Creator and Community HLL Videos

Time for some more community highlights from the below creators

We highly recommend giving them a watch.
If you see a Video you like make sure to post in the Discord #hll-videos channel.

Insane Tank round in Hell Let Loose - Monoespacial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3qZ0rkz0iM

Hell Let Loose - NOT a great start but by the end it was a Scramble for Victory - Alpine Sniper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqLpRRM_Mvs

Hell Let Loose || Stalingrad Sniper Duel. - Wolfpack345
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL8H41RGVhk

Russian Infantry VS German Puma Gunner! - OperatorDrewski
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMfHEbEs2wY

Thanks to everyone involved in creating such entertaining material for us all.

That wraps up this week's Dev Brief!
Have a great weekend and see you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #140!

This week we're sharing more on our upcoming optimisation efforts, including special focus being given to Stalingrad, a first look at some upcoming free customisation DLC and highlighting some cool Hell Let Loose content that caught the attention of the team.

Let's get stuck in shall we!




In case you missed it, last week we talked briefly on optimisation and how we plan on tackling performance across the game, especially on Stalingrad. If you haven’t read this yet, you can check it out here -> Dev Brief #139

The main purpose of this week's early Dev Brief is to kindly ask the community to jump into the PTE if at all possible. In addition, if you can pass the message on to those who may not keep an eye on the day to day communications, we would really appreciate it.

We will be aiming to have the PTE on Thursday the 12th of August, starting at approximately 4pm BST. This will be later than the usual PTE start time, as we feel it will be easier for the community to fill the servers during this period. This will also mean it’s more suited for the different EU/US time-zones.

The focus of this PTE will be performance and optimization. We understand that this may not be as exciting as testing new content, but there is a benefit to the entire community if we get this tested. The sooner we get it tested at full capacity, the sooner we can deploy the patch. We prefer not to be in a situation where we have to patch again because we missed something crucial.

So please if you are available, consider helping us stress test the server & join us!

Once you have played, help the team by filling out the feedback form HERE.




We also want to quickly mention and give the community a heads up that soon we will be running our first console Beta. If this interests you, please keep an eye out for communication on how to be a part of it.

If you or someone you know has a PlayStation 5, we would love for you to join the DEVs in being one of the first to try Hell Let Loose on next gen consoles.

We are very excited to test this with the community, and will follow up with further details on how to apply for the BETA in the next week or two.

We are curious to know how many of the community have a next gen console, so if you do please take a minute to fill out this quick poll.

Next Gen Console Poll




We will be highlighting more and more of the fantastic HLL content we are seeing on a daily basis. We highly recommend giving them a watch. Below are a few recent videos we enjoyed, and we will share a few every Dev Brief, or as often as we can. If you see a Video you like make sure to post in the Discord #hll-videos channel.

Thanks to everyone involved in creating such entertaining material for the world to see:

AUTHENTIC WORLD WAR 2 COMBAT - Hell Let Loose Gameplay - FriendlyNikolai

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hell Let Loose | Random Moments 5 (Update 10: Soviet Time) - DarkLiberatorZone
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hell Let Loose - The Tiger Tank Is Still Great (Update 10) - The Fresh Baked Goods
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Tips for New Players - Hell Let Loose Hints and Tips - Terrydactyl Gaming
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]






After seeing the community enjoying the limited Silver Vanguard DLC we showcased on the release of Version 1.0 we've taken a minute to sneak a preview of some of the future free cosmetics currently in the pipeline.

Like the other forces, the Soviets will receive a line-up of equivalent unlockable uniforms to celebrate newly acquired role levels. Check out the Ameba Winter Uniform and Ameba Camo Autumn uniforms below.

Ameba Winter Uniform -



Ameba Camo Autumn Uniform -






Submission by: |||™ BimSekai

Submission by: RenanM

Showcase HLL in a creative way. This can be a sketch, drawing, painting, original screenshot or reworked screenshot that is instantly recognizable as Hell Let Loose.

Simply submit your linked art image, along with your Discord name and ID. Please make sure you are in the official Discord so we can contact you directly.

Join the Discord here.

We will be giving away a few HLL Keys, and an exclusive helmet to our favourite pieces. We will highlight this art across our channels and in the Discord.

This screenshot competition will run until Friday August 13th. So feel free to use the latest U10 Eastern Front content.

Please only ONE submission per person.

We look forward to seeing them - HLL Fan Art/ Screenshot submission form


That wraps up this week's Dev Brief!

If you join us in the PTE, thank you! We really appreciate it!

See you on the frontline.

Hi everyone!

Thanks for jumping into our release of Update 10 and fighting across the Eastern Front!
We were thrilled to see such a large number of players grab the game for the first time.

We want to thank you - the community - for being so welcoming to all the new players. We know that large influxes of new players are wonderful because the community grows, but that there are also teething issues as people learn the game for the first time. It’s always a tricky balance to manage and we greatly appreciate the welcoming environment that you’ve made the game - both on our social channels and in-game.

[h3]I’m new. What are Dev Briefings?[/h3]

We also want to explain to all new players that during the development of Hell Let Loose we post a weekly “dev briefing”. This weekly post tends to focus on one area of development - be it a new weapon, vehicle or feature, or it may look at a map, a technical change within the game or put a spotlight on community activity. We tend to post them on Thursday or Fridays - depending on the course of development. So far we’ve posted one every week for more than 130 weeks and will be continuing this into the future.

[h3]Optimisation
[/h3]

We know that optimisation has been an issue on Stalingrad - resulting in a stutter occurring on specific hardware. We spent a long time profiling this, as the correlation between the stutters and in-game activities were hard to trace. Each time we’d look at what may be causing it (explosions, or spawning, or throwing objects), the profiling would show acceptable results. We were also aware that this was only occurring on specific machines, and it didn’t seem to be universal to any spec of machine (meaning that some machines at each end of the spectrum suffered from it).

We can happily report that with the extremely hard work of our wonderful QA team, tech artists and programmers, the issue has been found - namely a texture streaming issue on specific hardware that locks up the machine temporarily on the game thread.

As a result of this, we’re currently running several PTEs to ensure that the fixes made give a considerable frame boost to Stalingrad especially and eliminate stutter.

• The micro stutter should be fixed across all maps on GPUs with 3GB+ of VRAM.
  
• These optimisations should increase FPS in all maps, but we have focused our testing on the Eastern Front.
  
• You should expect to see a major general FPS increase in Stalingrad.
  
• The physics stutter was removed from Stalingrad in PTE in the most recent PTE, and similar work is currently being done on Kursk.

We appreciate the patience as we continue optimisations across different areas of the game as quickly and methodically as we can. We are working very hard to make sure players have the best experience possible, cheers.

[h3]The PTEs[/h3]

Thanks to all those who jumped in the most recent PTE to test the latest build. We’ve seen some promising improvements with the latest round of optimisations, but still need to stress test this with more players. The feedback is that players are getting significantly more frames on Stalingrad (with reports between 10+ to 30+ FPS) and elimination of stutter.

To help us totally put this issue to bed, we’d love you to assist us by jumping into the PTEs that we’ll be hosting over the next couple of weeks before deploying Patch 16. We’ll attempt to give as much notice as possible, and will consider alternate & more flexible timing across the different timezones. Please checkout the discord, for the latest PTE information.

[h3]Max & Dan Carlin - HARDCORE HISTORY[/h3]

Description:

Dan Carlin - the man behind the fantastic Hardcore History podcasts - talks with Max about Hell Let Loose, the genre, its development, growth and challenges through the broader context of wargaming, ethics and depiction of history.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]ICYMI - New Player Guide, by The Community for the Community[/h3]

Incase you missed it, we’re excited to present an incredible player guide that has been put together by some brilliant contributors. Even in its early stages this unique concept impressed the team and we were very excited to see it progress from start to finish. Our heartfelt thanks goes out to the people involved for making it possible:

Authors: Dbl0Douche, General T, Inchon, Nuc1e4r, Oddball, Xiang_Ganger.
Editor: Dashthirty
Art and Design: MoscaTnT


You can Download the New PLayer Guide PDF here: https://bit.ly/HLLNewPlyrGuide
We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did!


[h3]Hell Let Loose Community Fan Art or Screenshot Reminder[/h3]

This will run for approximately 1 more week. So please consider U10 Eastern Front content.
Showcase HLL in a creative way. This can be a sketch, drawing, painting, original screenshot or reworked screenshot that is instantly recognizable as Hell Let Loose.

Simply submit your linked art image, along with your Discord name and ID. Please make sure you are in the official Discord so we can contact you directly.

Submission by: JT1902

Submission by: [BST2] El CaMaRaDa

Join the Discord here - https://discord.gg/hellletloose

We will be giving away a few HLL Keys, and an exclusive helmet to our favourite pieces. We will highlight this art across our channels and in the Discord.

Please only ONE submission per person.

We look forward to seeing them!
HLL Fan Art/ Screenshot submission form - https://forms.gle/4rkW2ZGJsKWjRcuv6


And that’s all for this Dev Brief. Once again thanks for all the support, have a great weekend and see you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

We hope you all had a great weekend on the frontline!

Today we're humbled to share with you a truly amazing community created guide that can only be described as 'The Ultimate New Player Handbook!.

This fantastic guide combines top tier knowledge of the frontline with fantastic artwork and design to create something truly special.

Before we dive into the guide we'd like to highlight the frontline heroes who together planned, designed, wrote and created what you're about to read:

Authors
Dbl0Douche
General T
Inchon
Nuc1e4r
Oddball
Xiang_Ganger

Editor
DashThirty

Art and Design
Moscatnt

If you see any of these damn fine soldiers on your team be sure to say hi and make sure they get a seat on the transport truck!

A Message From Inchon

This guide was created to help improve the quality of gameplay for new players, help clarify some items for veteran players, and maybe even provide something for those of us with thousands of hours in game. I would like to thank the team from around the globe that helped put this together and especially Mosca whose cartoons and presentation made an otherwise dull product look like an actual used World War II soldiers guide. Thank you to DannyArt and the Black Matter team for providing the in-game icons and their factual review of the guide before presentation.

We do plan to keep this updated as the game changes and possibly move onto an advanced guide as there was many things we cut out in order to make each page roughly a 2 minute read. We hope you enjoy!






NOTE: If you require a version with a larger page / font size, or would like to chat with the creators of the guide you can do both over on their Reddit post HERE.

That wraps up today's post, we just had to share this fantastic community project with you and we hope you find it equally entertaining and informative.

You really are an amazing community - thank you.

We'll catch up with everyone in a few days as part of our weekly Developer Briefing, so speak to you again soon!

See you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Thank you all for your amazing support so far with the arrival of Update 10 and our launch out of Early Access.

The team are already working hard going through everyone's feedback, comments and bug reports as we move towards our first post-launch steps. More news on that will be coming soon!

With Update 10 came with it a swathe of new and returning players to the frontline, which is awesome! To you we'd like to say welcome, it's great to have you with us!

To aid those of you who are fresh to the front we thought we'd share an awesome video guide created by veteran player and Community Bastion, Monoespacial.




The video below is Mono's complete guide for beginners, covering everything from tanks, Roles and the metagame to spawn points, use of supplies and strategic understanding of the game.

These next 20 minutes are well worth your time:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Knowledge is power!

If you're looking for specific information from the video we've grabbed some timestamps for you below -

Intro & Content Guide Team Comp & Important of Supplies Squad Basics Role - Medic Garrisons & Outposts (Spawn Points) Commander Abilities Role - Machine Gunner Role - Anti-Tank Role - Engineer Role - Armour & Recon Basics Capturing a Sector & Winning Communication General Tips Artillery Tanks Closing Comments

If you learn something from Mono's video and appreciate his welcoming information, give his video a like and maybe even drop him a subscribe to keep up to date with his Hell Let Loose content.


That wraps up today's post!

If you haven't yet be sure to download the free Silver Vanguard DLC, you've only got until August 10th to claim it before it goes...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1647960/Hell_Let_Loose__Silver_Vanguard_DLC/

We'll see you on the frontline.