Hell Let Loose News

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #131!

This week we've got a bumper Dev Brief that proceeds an exciting weekend for Hell Let Loose. Did someone say leaving Early Access?

On top of that Max has stopped by to explain our plans for Hell Let Loose both as we leave Early Access and beyond.

Then, as a couple of cherries on the cake we've got news on our next PTE(s), including a rather special one next week as well as a first look at the overhauled Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont coming to the game as part of Update 10.

Now, there's lots of Dev Brief goodness for you to get through, so let's get stuck in shall we...




We want to let you know about an exciting announcement taking place during the Future Game Show event this weekend. You may have seen something about this via our social channels already.

THE FUTURE GAME SHOW
Sunday June 13th - 4pm PDT - 7pm EDT - 12am Midnight BST - 1am CEST

Max will announce the date for Hell Let Loose leaving Early Access. And we will tease and show off the 2nd map of the Eastern Front. We know you might have guessed it already...



We are very excited to be participating in this event, we are sure we will be in great company with some amazing people, companies and products that will entail the Future Gameshow.

Be sure to check it out!

Watch live on the day at the following locations:

GamesRadar Twitch GamesRadar YouTube




Hi everybody,

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be leaving Early Access with the launch of Update 10 in the coming weeks and the introduction of the Soviet forces. For us, it represents the solidification of several foundational elements for the game. We know that there will be many questions around us leaving Early Access and what that might mean for the future of the title. Don’t worry - as you’ll discover below this represents the completion of some key infrastructure beneath the hood - including finalising workflows that will enable us to work far more efficiently in the future. You’ll also see that we’ve got huge things planned for the game that we’ll talk through below.

Our Goals During Early Access

Hell Let Loose is an epic journey for both the whole development team and community.

Beginning in 2015 as a hobby, we’ve both expanded and learned so much during the development of Hell Let Loose.

When launching into Early Access, we had several key goals to accomplish during the period:

• We knew that there were several fundamental infrastructure overhauls that we’d need to achieve during the period in order to make sure we were best set up to support the title well beyond our Early Access period. Our animation system required more than 50 handmade animations per item, our texturing systems meant both our vehicles and weapons were so expensive on VRAM usage that they needed to be crushed in quality, and there was a total absence of ballistics in-game - to name just a few significant absences or issues.
  
  
• On top of this, we also wanted to build out the core offering of maps, roles and vehicles - and expand and polish Commander abilities.
  
  
• Lastly, we also wanted to expand the size of the studio and bring on new team members who could join us in refining and building Hell Let Loose long term.
  

For us, Update 10 represents the success of these initial goals and our leaving Early Access. All underlying infrastructure in the game has been rewritten for much easier iteration, expansion and optimisation and were used to help us introduce the all-new Soviet forces to the game.




As developers, we’re aware of every issue within the game - both technical, bug or features that could be polished, changed or refined. We’d be happy to stay in Early Access for several more years, however as part of our original commitment we felt that it’s important to draw a line under what we’d consider to be the “base game”.

As mentioned above, Early Access represented a time for us to implement huge infrastructure overhauls to the underlying code of the game - including entirely reworking our animation, sound effects, ballistics, mapping and texturing pipeline in a way that means our future work is far easier to adapt, optimise and expand.

We are also aware that every player will have their own feeling about what would be considered critical to achieve before leaving Early Access - and that there won’t necessarily be consensus. That said, it’s important to reassure the community as a whole that this is the end of the first foundational stage of our development.

Lastly, leaving Early Access will help us as a studio to continue to work on and support Hell Let Loose well into the future.


When will we leave Early Access?

We will be leaving Early Access with the launch of Update 10. We will be doing a special announcement this Sunday with the exact date as well as first teaser footage of the second unrevealed map and our new Eastern Front trailer.


Are you leaving Early Access because of the console development?

No. Many Early Access games stay in Early Access while also launching on console.


Will you honour Kickstarter Backers pledges?

Yes. We are fully committed to honouring these pledges and will be following up with specific backers. For example, we are currently testing one of the kickstarter uniform rewards in the PTE.


Does this mean the meta or “feature/bug I don’t like” will never be fixed or changed?

No. Hell Let Loose is an enormous game with hundreds of features that all need to coexist and all will continue to be refined or changed as we always have.
New content will continue to shift the meta towards our ultimate vision for the title. For example, the introduction of halftracks will shift the way in which teams stage attacks into enemy territory, while the new armour rework will shift the power of AT from the straight destruction of vehicles to component damage.


Does this mean that updates and work will slow down or end on Hell Let Loose?

No. This simply represents another milestone in our development journey. We will be releasing a roadmap soon to outline what you can expect to see in the future. This roadmap will include large amounts of content underpinned by continued polish, fixes, balancing and optimisations.

The future includes:

• Addition of new Western and Eastern Front maps
  
• Continued polish on all existing maps
  
• Addition of new forces and theatres
  
• Addition of new vehicles eg. halftracks, jeeps, heavy tanks, assault guns, specialist variants etc.
  
• Addition of new weapons eg. trench guns, flamethrowers, mortars, FG-42 and many more
  
• Addition of new gadgets and features (night maps, flare guns etc.)
  
• Expansion of types of deployable emplacements (HMGs, AA guns etc.)
  
• Expansion and continued balancing of Commander abilities
  
• Campaign mode to tie public matches together
  
• Solo and grouped matchmaking
  
• And much, much more.
  

Thank You

Fundamentally, World War Two is an enormous conflict, with thousands of different aspects worth exploring. As a development team, we’re fully committed to continuing to work together with the community to build on this core foundation of Hell Let Loose well into the future. We’re very excited to have you on the journey with us!




We would like to take a moment in this week’s Dev Brief to say a big thank you to all who joined us in yesterday’s PTE, once again we had an amazing turnout of players getting their boots dirty in the upcoming Eastern Front. We had a blast as a team fighting beside you through all the chaos and action.

Due to your profound commitment in providing feedback and bug reports we’re able to move forward with a greater confidence in knowing the changes we need to make. Some of the changes you experienced during the PTE were experimental changes that we wanted to test in a populated environment. Going forward we will continue to make alterations and additions based on your feedback and how we felt they impacted the flow of the game.

We have listened to the community feedback and will be running several more PTE’s over the coming weeks. Also next week we plan to host yet another PTE, only this time we have something very special in mind, something we’re sure you won't want to miss…

If you haven’t played in any of the PTEs before, or wish to receive notifications of upcoming PTEs, please join the official HLL Discord here where you can find all the relevant information:

YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD

We are still looking to host additional PTEs leading up to the release of Update 10, so if for any reason you can make this one, don’t worry!






Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont is by far the oldest Hell Let Loose map - being our initial Alpha map and the first one we ever made. As a result, we made several early mistakes in how we set the map up, including laying it out for a diagonal orientation (leading to one of the key locations - the town - being between two strongpoints).

In addition to this, many graphical aspects of the map were extremely low quality due to outdated workflows. As a result, we’re now seeking to unify the quality and look of all our maps - including starting to use uniformly optimised props, buildings and foliage. The idea being that we have far more consolidated points of control, so that we can uniformly improve performance and gameplay across all of our maps.

Included below is the new tactical map for Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont. We’ve kept all the favourite locations, while shifting the orientation and location of the map so that the key road (Rue De La Gare) runs straight down the map and so the town itself features as its own Strong Point. In addition to this, we’ve built out some more rational and exciting Strong Points, with a focus on keeping similar cover density to the original map.



Finally, due to shifting the map, we’ve opened up some ground on the south western edge that is slightly more dramatic in height - allowing for engaging long range vehicle and infantry combat.



More about SMDM

Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont is situated 6 miles (10 km) north of Carentan and some 3 miles (5 km) inland of Utah Beach. Saint-Marie-du-Mont lies at the end of a long causeway linking the beach to higher ground and was therefore a principal objective of paratroopers of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division.

Eglise Notre-Dame is a large stone church set in the middle of the town of Sainte Marie du Mont. This area of town and the church saw heavy fighting between the 101st and the German Wehrmacht. The fighting continued in the church with snipers using the belltower and, later in the day, Germans hiding in the confessional. There are still bullet holes which show the intensity of the battle, inside and outside the stone walls.





We'll be sharing more exciting goodies with you in the coming weeks. We hope you are all as happy and excited as we are with this next Update. Next week we will have a preview of some more new Soviet content.


Onwards to the weekend!

That wraps up this week's bumper Dev Brief! We've got an exciting weekend ahead of us and we hope you'll join us as we announce our full launch from Steam Early Access.

We'll see you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

This Sunday we're deploying to the GamesRadar Future Games Show!



Standby: June 13th at 4PM PDT / 7PM EDT /12AM* Midnight BST / 1AM* CEST

*The morning of Monday, June 14, 2021

Watch on: Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or GamesRadar!

We'll see you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #130!

This week we're taking a look at smart materials and how we're applying them to vehicles to not only make them looking fantastic up close, but also improve performance at the same time.

If you're not familiar with what 'smart materials' are, don't worry - we'll be explaining all that and more below.

Also make sure to stick around until the end if you'd like to take part in next week's Kursk PTE, we'll have further details, including how to sign-up at the end of the brief.

Right then, let's get stuck in shall we...




Hi everyone,

This week, we’ll take you through the usage of smart materials when it comes to vehicles. We’re rolling this out with our new Soviet vehicles first, and we think the results are pretty incredible when it comes to preserving detail right up close - at LESS expense than any time before.

Many of you may have seen the process of implementing smart materials on handheld weapons. Normally, a 3d artist will bake unique texture sets to be used in-game on a weapon. In order to make sure those textures are optimised (and in a game like HLL with more than 40 handheld objects it’s a challenge), we are forced to adjust the resolution of them - often resulting in extremely blurry looking textures. Unfortunately, this was the same for vehicles. Crisp beautiful textures in renders were crunched down for performance purposes and ended up becoming a blurry mess. For example:



As we’ve grown and matured as a team, Danny was convinced that he’d be able to set up a far more robust smart material system for all vehicles.

In essence, smart materials take the idea that there are core materials (wood, metal, painted metal) and then use those over and over again for different objects or vehicles using unique parameters for wear, colour, roughness and so on. What has resulted is a fantastic visual upgrade for our vehicles. It also drastically speeds up the texturing process (going from 2-3 days per vehicle to 20-30 minutes!) while also enabling incredible detail up close - and best of all a significant performance increase as we move from using 24 low quality textures for our Soviet vehicles to just 6 high quality textures.

We feel the results speak for themselves:



Finally, many of you will be pleased to know that we’ve built a camo system into the new smart material system. While we’re beginning with what we’d consider the base colour scheme for the Soviet, we have the potential to apply totally completely new appearances for each vehicle - at no extra cost.





Lastly, while we’ve applied this system first to the Soviets, we’ll be retroactively rolling this out to all vehicles in-game over the coming updates.






Thanks to all who participated in the recent PTE we held on the upcoming soviet map Kursk. The turnout of players was great and higher than we had expected. Most of the development team was present in this PTE and even though a few anticipated bugs surfaced we were very happy with how this new addition is moving forwards.

The feedback that everyone provided was great to help us now work tirelessly on streamlining this map for the future. Thanks to everyone that played and took the time to post the issues that they found. The team is crushing bugs and already looking forward to the new build for another playtest later next week.

We would really appreciate the community's participation again in next week's PTE. This will be another test on the new eastern front map Kursk, including both Offensive modes. As we are still in development mode for U10, this build will be buggy, so please consider that if you are participating. We really appreciate your help in keeping all feedback to the specific channels and not streaming or broadcasting this content, as we want to build some anticipation before we reveal this to the broader community.

We will also include known issues and a changelog overview so you know what to expect. This test will be best suited for those in the GMT tz, and will take place from approximately 11am to 4pm GMT. We will look to have several more PTEs, so if for any reason you can make this one, don’t worry!.

If you want to know how to join the PTE, please join the official HLL Discord here

YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD

You will find all the details you need to join there.




Onwards to the weekend!

That wraps up today's brief! We'll be sharing more Soviet goodies with you in the coming weeks. We hope you are all as happy and excited as we are with this next Update. Next week we'll have a preview of the new overhaul of St. Marie Du Mont.

Have a great weekend everyone, we'll see you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #129!

This week we've got plenty for you to look at with the announcement of the winners and runners up of our video competition! The level of quality in these are amazing and well worth checking out, so get comfy and give them a watch.

On top of that we've also got news on our next PTE (Spoilers: Kursk) and an update on our current optimisation focus, including specifics on how it's being addressed from Lead Developer Max.

So, we've got entertainment, information and an opportunity to help us test Kursk ahead of its upcoming arrival to the frontline - Let's get stuck in that we...




With an amazing array of many entries it is time to announce a winner for the Hell Let Loose Video Competitions ‘Filming Private Ryan’ and ‘We Want You’.



Again we would like to express our thanks to all those who entered and helped their friends and communities in any way.

The quality and numbers of entries was fantastic and impressed us all here at Dev HQ. After a lot of consideration we have managed to (and this was no easy task) pick a winner for each genre.

Once we agreed on a winner, we hit another roadblock trying to work out a runners up for each category. After a few days of discussion and arm wrestling we have decided that the quality of the entries was so high that we have decided to have multiple runner ups.

Also ‘ALL SUBMISSIONS’ who were not a winner or runner up, will receive a prize. This will be in the form of one Hell Let Loose Steam Key.

Congratulations to all who were involved in this comp, the community is extremely talented! o7

We hope it was as much fun for you all to make those clips as it was for us to watch and appreciate them all. We cannot thank the community enough for their contributions. We have been very humbled by your enthusiasm for our game.

We look forward to seeing you all in the future, with more to come on the horizon.

And now the winners!

Filming Private Ryan

WINNER:
[EASY] submitted by Bickley with the entry ‘War is Hell - Hell Let Loose’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Runner ups for this category are:

[82AD] submitted by Very_Bad_Moon with the entry ‘South West’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[18.PzDiv] submitted by Moe with the entry ‘Hell Let´s Saving Ryan’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[NPA] submitted by Lord Vader with the entry ‘Hell Let Loose Archival Footage Preservation’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Honourable mention:

Submitted by Richie Mason with the entry ‘German Heart Lane’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
This was created by one man, who jumped into a random game and recorded the events.


We Want You

WINNER:

Koju Sone with the entry ‘Survive in Hell’.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Runner ups for this category are:

Alpine Sniper with the entry ‘These Blades Only’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Lexhy with the entry ‘Hell of a Boogie Woogie’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Br0ken_English with the entry ‘Plink’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

MBS with the entry ‘My First 6 Hours of HLL’
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We will be contacting the winners and runner ups directly. Also everyone else who made a submission can expect an email from us, if you haven’t had one already.

Again we wish we could have included you all, and thanks again for the enthusiasm shown! We will look at getting out as much of the content as possible via our various social channels.




We would really appreciate the community's participation in next week's PTE. This will be a test on the new Eastern Front map Kursk. As we are still in development mode for U10, this build will be buggy, so please consider that if you are participating.

We will follow up with the exact day and time next week. We will also include known issues and a changelog overview so you know what to expect. This test will be best suited for those in the GMT timezone, and will take place from approximately 11am to 4pm GMT. We will look to have several PTEs, so if for any reason you can make this one, don’t worry!.



If you want to know how to join the PTE, please join the official HLL Discord below:

YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD

You will find all the details you need to join there.




Optimisation is an ongoing process and challenge when developing Hell Let Loose - with a special combination of high player count, huge emphasis on replicated physics and large scale maps. We know that it’s one of the most requested aspects of work, and it’s something we’ve had a dedicated team working hard on for the last several months (as opposed to having to bounce back and forth between content creation and optimization).

One area of key significance (and ongoing pain) is the grass within Hell Let Loose. Setting a game in Normandy - amidst endless rolling fields - demands that grass not only be present, but play a somewhat active role in the gameplay - typically concealing you at close range when lying down. It also plays a large role in adding detail to large stretches of otherwise featureless landscape. As a result, we’ve tried to balance our grass to provide a photoreal look up close that is also appropriate concealment, while also billboarding it in a way that allows us to keep it present at longer distances (instead of culling it - as you’d do in games that don’t rely on longer range engagements).

At present, we’re currently working on creating much smoother blends between the different levels of detail of the grass. This will mean that you’ll notice far fewer shape changes the closer or further you walk from the grass, and that the final transition to the billboard (the version of the grass we use at very long range) will be much softer and less noticeable. We’re also performing some key optimisations to the way it’s rendered - including reducing triangle count to lower costs and increase visual bang for buck.

Next week, we’ll take you through the usage of smart materials when it comes to vehicles. We’re rolling this out with our new Russian vehicles first, and we think the results are pretty incredible when it comes to preserving detail right up close - at LESS expense than any time before.

Optimisation is ongoing and has greatly increased in the last several months. We want to assure you that it has huge priority within the team and we’re excited to show you the results.




Onwards to the weekend!

That wraps up this week's brief, thanks for checking it out!

Have a fantastic weekend everyone, we'll see you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #128!

This week we're sharing an update on the two Hell Let Loose video competitions, which have been absolutely astonishing by the way, as well as giving you all an update on what you can expect around our next steps with the PTE - Yes, that includes the upcoming Eastern Front content!

We'll wrap things up with a little look at some of the cosmetics you'll be able to wear when representing the Soviets too!

Right, let's get stuck in shall we...




Thanks to everyone for participating in the two Hell Let Loose Video competitions “We Want You” and “Filming Private Ryan”.

Wow what a response to this competition we have had! We are very hard at work on Update 10, and it’s good to be able to take a quick break and enjoy what the community is creating.

We have been super impressed with the number and quality of entries received, there were well over 100 submissions, and we have watched every single one!

We hope it was as much fun for you all to film and capture these clips as it was for us to watch and appreciate them all. We cannot thank the community enough for their contributions. We have been very humbled by your enthusiasm.

The winners and runners up will be announced soon, but as a sign of appreciation we have decided to give ALL entrants a small token of our appreciation.

Stay tuned for more updates on this soon, also make sure you are following on Facebook and Twitter as we intend to highlight not only the winners but also some honourable mentions in the coming weeks.

If you have made a submission, you may receive an email asking for the original file, so please make sure to save these and lookout for any emails from us.

Thanks again to all of you in this amazing community that is Hell Let Loose.

Below are a selection of each of the two categories. And a reminder that we will have more competitions coming up with different prizes in the not so distant future.

"We Want You!"

Lexhy - Hell of a Boogie Woogie
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Alpine Sniper - These Blades Only
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Moe Savastano - Naked Guns “Best of”
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


“Filming Private Ryan”

107th Touchdown Jesus - 107th Assemble
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Pm. Vova - Para Bellum Movie
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Team HFKT - Carentan
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




Soon we will be back into PTE testing mode, and will aim to have an initial smoke test soon. We would really appreciate the community's participation, as we have lots of new content to test (especially Eastern Front content). We will follow up with the details on how to get involved shortly. So please keep an eye on the official HLL Discord.

If you haven’t already now is the perfect time to join!

YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD!




A new front means new Uniforms, hats and helmets!

We will be sharing more cosmetics with you, in the coming weeks. Will will be also adding in a few more to the US and German cosmetic options but wanted to give you a tease of what you can expect to see for the Soviets.





That's all for this week's Dev Brief, have a great weekend everyone!

See you on the frontline!