Hell Let Loose News

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #92!

This week we've got some good news on the infamous 'PHYSX' crash fix, a first look at some shiny new uniforms for the Tankers among us and an update on the 'Wilhelm Scream' competition!

Before I hand over to Max and Spono who'll go into all the cool details, I just want to take the opportunity to relay the team's thanks for your patience, bug reports and understanding whilst we worked away on the crash fix. Every report we received helped us track down the root cause and, fingers crossed, address it.

So, you're probably wondering what the cause was, well... It could occur when body-parts from two different dismembered bodies collided with each other in the air, normally following an explosion.

This revelation led to a humorous take on the situation from the incredibly talented Moscatnt, who is equally impressive on both the frontline and canvas!






Hi everyone,

We’re thrilled to announce that after an enormous amount of debugging, we’ve isolated the issue in the physx code that has been causing the most common crash experienced in the game. After nearly five weeks of QA, we are very confident that we have resolved this specific crash, and as a result we’ll be rolling out Patch 13 alongside a fix for DX12 crashes on the map Foy. To make sure we don’t cause any other disruptions to gameplay, we will be limiting the patch to these two crash fixes.

We are in the process of signing off this Patch, and we will update the community on the release date as soon as it’s ready. All going well, this will likely drop on Friday next week.

We want to also note that if you are using DX12, there are still some known issues that are likely to cause crashes such as alt-tabbing.

Meanwhile we’re hard at work on all aspects of the game - content, bug fixes and optimisation. To give you a small taste - we’re working through giving all tanker roles at least two additional uniforms to unlock for both forces. Over the coming weeks we’ll start to do deep-dives on the ways we’re overhauling some underdeveloped aspects of the game, optimising, and generating new content.


















Wow, what a response we have had so far to the Wilhelm submissions! So far what we have received from you has been wonderfully harrowing to say the least and we as a team thank you greatly for the “overWilhelming” response. We are well underway in narrowing down the clips that we feel are most suitable and that would complement the atmosphere in game.

If you are reading this and still don’t know what all this means, please check out this link from Dev Brief #90 it has all the submission details.

In response to some questions of what exactly it is that we are looking for, we wanted to keep the description in the Wilhelm Dev Brief minimal to let your creative freedom flourish. We’ve had many different variations of screams, grunts, gasps, gurgles and whelps that have all been exciting and inspirational to listen to. Some members of the community have asked if we are accommodating spoken dialogue within this submission, whilst we are specifically looking for non-spoken audio lines that isn’t to say that somehow and some way we can’t filter in spoken lines, however we are primarily looking for more deathly oral sounds.

As a result of the massive response we have had, we’ve decided to extend the close off time for the submission for at least another week. So if you didn’t get the time to submit, now’s your chance! Submissions will only be accepted as a YouTube link via this FORM*

Here are just a select few clips that contain great examples of what we look for and also the quality of recording we like. These are by far not the only ones we love but we would like to give you a sneak peak at what some members have been up to.


Technical#6400
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


ScreamingMinnie#2180
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


pancake_soup#7050
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Su5hi#1170
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Forrest McGilvray#2210
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Thanks again to everyone who has made a submission so far, and we are super excited to listen to more.

*By submitting to this form you acknowledge and give Black Matter the permission to use your submission for purposes of in-game content, social media, marketing material and in any other manner, platform or format we may choose.




That wraps up this week's Dev Brief.

We hope you're as pleased with the crash fix news as we are and enjoyed your first look at some upcoming Tanker uniforms.

If you're on the fence about giving the 'Wilhelm Scream' competition a shout, go for it! Your dulcet tones may well become part of the frontline...

Have a fantastic weekend everyone.

See you on the frontline.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #91!

This week we're pleased to be sharing with you the updated roadmap for Hell Let Loose!

For the grand reveal, as well as some extra details on what the team are working on thanks to your feedback I'll be handing over today's brief to Lead Developer Max.

Enjoy!




Hi everyone,

We’re very excited this week to share our new roadmap with you as we lead up to Update 8. We also feel like the next update will be smaller and less content-rich in size - that is until we write down all the content to come. We hope you’re as excited about what will be coming in Update 8 as we are.

Update 8 is a great opportunity for us to fix broken gameloops (the redeploy Support loop) and vastly improve existing ones - such as the way that Supplies, Ammo and Engineer abilities work. As you’ll see there are also large amounts of map overhauls as we seek to bring each map to a universally optimised standard, as well as take them to the same level of visual and gameplay quality.

As always, for each feature you see on the roadmap, we’ll be accompanying it with a developer briefing to better explain it.









Many of you will be aware that the occurrence of what we’re calling the “Physx Crash” (the key crash you’re experiencing within the game currently) has meant that we’ve delayed our roadmap release while we find a fix as soon as possible.

As a result, we’ve taken the last couple of weeks to dig deep into it (involving largely working through the physics code in a very granular way) before sitting down to discuss the contents of the next update.

The good news is that we’ve found a 100% reproduction method for the crash, and that it occurs when two limbs from separate bodies collide after being dismembered. As you can imagine, it was not a fun task to deduce this - given the very little information being output from the engine despite all our logging.

We’re now working on a fix for this crash, and will constantly communicate about an ETA on when we will deploy this.




While DX12 is not fully supported by Hell Let Loose yet, we’ve also got good news to share in that we’ve found a fix for Foy crashing for those with DX12 enabled. We’re aware of several other non-map related crashes for DX12 users, but we feel that fixing Foy will allow a much greater level of stability for the time being.




Although the roadmap serves as a public declaration of our intent around short term development goals, we’re also hard at work behind the scenes on some as-yet unannounced content - both small and large.

As a dev team, we’re really excited about the future of all the content coming to Hell Let Loose and look forward to revealing more in the near future!




That wraps up this week's Dev Brief and Max's update!

As you can see there's a lot of new content on the way with Update 8 and we're really looking forward to sharing more details with you in our upcoming Developer Briefings!

If there's anything you're really keen to know more about, or have any questions about the new roadmap then let us know in the comments and on the forums.

Have a great weekend everyone.

See you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #90!

Today's Brief comes to you from Black Matter Dev Spono who brings with him an exciting opportunity...




Hello everyone, Spono here.

Start LOOSENING up those vocal chords!

We are very excited to give our community an opportunity to become a larger part of Hell Let Loose.

We’re asking those of you with some talent (or without any talent whatsoever!), to submit one or more of the following sounds in a YouTube video. This will then be considered for implementation into HLL, as well as securing you a spot in the credits.

We’ve listened to much of the community feedback about adding greater ambience to the battlefield with the grunts, screams and voice lines of soldiers. While we’ve been planning to create these sounds ourselves, we felt it could be good fun to open this up to our beloved community first. You can be as creative as you wish - we’re excited to see what you come up with! But please bear in mind, to be considered for game implementation we want sounds that are in line with the vibe of HLL, and audio that would add to the atmosphere without it breaking immersion.




The Wilhelm scream is an iconic sound effect used in over 400 films and TV series since 1951. You have likely heard it many times before, perhaps not ever knowing exactly what it was.


Still not sure what the Wilhelm scream is, watch this video from WatchMojo

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So yes that’s right, your Wilhelm scream, war cries, moments of anguish have an opportunity to become embedded into Hell Let Loose and history forever!




Submissions will only be accepted as a YouTube link via this FORM*

All submissions received via this form will then be considered for possible implementation into Hell Let Loose!

We ask that you title your video: Hell Let Loose Wilhelm Audio Submission. And include your Discord name, ID and clan tag if you wish.

Example here: Hell Let Loose Wilhelm Audio Submission - Spono#7368

You can find your ID at the bottom left of your Discord and copy it by simply clicking on it. If you are not a member of the official Hell Let Loose Discord yet, you can join by simply clicking on this DISCORD LINK and following the instructions. We also recommend installing the Discord App if you have not done so already.

We ask that you label your sound(s) and use the description area to timestamp them if you wish to do multiple sounds in one video. Please only one submission per person!


*By submitting to this FORM you give Black Matter the right to use your submission for purposes of game content and or marketing material.

If we do like your video submission we will reach out to you via email and or Discord and make sure you are added to the in game credits and receive the deserved acknowledgement!

We will also supply you with a couple of game keys, so you can show off to your mates. And maybe even a certificate that you can put on the fridge :D

Please note, It is very important that you use your own original voice! And we will verify this with you.




Your video excerpt should not last more than 60 seconds, and can be a series of sounds and footage strung together. It should contain footage of your own gameplay, with your sounds edited in.

It can be as amateur or professional as you like, but the focus is audio quality.

We are at this stage after both the United States, and or German variations of the following sounds.

You can get creative, but the sound must be original and what the player would emit orally.

You can choose one or more of the 10 sounds for your video up to 60 seconds.

Wilhelm Scream:
1 . Your best death scream/cry

Fatal Damage:
2. Bullet to the Head
3. Bullet to the Body
4. Ran over by vehicle
5. Dismembered
6. Drowning

None Fatal damage:
7. Bullet
8. Shrapnel/Explosion
9. Fall damage
10. Burning/On Fire


To be considered for including into HLL

• Must be a clean original recording.
  
• Not have added effects or reverberation
  

Please keep any audio files you use in your video SEPARATE from the in-game audio, such as WAV files. This is because we will likely request them from you.

Post editing in the form of file clean-up/de-noise is welcomed but by no means necessary.

Other accepted file formats if necessary but not preferred:
ACID, AIFF, AVI, BWF, CDDA, EDL, FLAC, KAR, MIDI, MOGG, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG VORBIS, OGG OPUS, QT, RADAR, REX2, SYX, W64, WAVPACK, WMV

Minimum Requirements
Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
Bit Depth: 16 bit

Maximum Requirements
Sample Rate: 96 kHz
Bit Depth: 24bit




Last day for submissions will be on the 2nd of September, giving you almost 2 weeks. After that the form will be closed.




Again it is very important that you use your own original sounds. If it does not meet the audio specification we may not be able to use it, so please keep this in mind.

If we love your video submission we will reach out to you and make sure you are also added to the in game credits, and may request raw audio files so again please keep these saved. We will likely share some of these amazing videos with you all in Discord. And we are sure to see them on the Hell Let Loose subreddit too.

*By submitting to this form you acknowledge and give Black Matter the permission to use your submission for purposes of in-game content, social media, marketing material and in any other manner, platform or format we may choose.




We are currently working on our next roadmap, and will share this with you in next weeks Developer Briefing!

Good luck & Cheers,
Spono

Hear you on the frontline!?




That wraps up this week's Developer Briefing!

We're really excited to hear what you come up with over the next two weeks. Who knows, you may well be hearing yourself or a friend on the frontline in the not too distant future.

Have a great weekend and we'll see you next week as we detail what's next in our updated roadmap.

See you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #89!

This week we're taking a look at something we've seen mentioned a few times over on the forums and what will actually become even more important when bullet penetration arrives - Grass!

Long grass, short grass, bushes, these features enable stealthy plays and approaches for all sorts of playstyles and can be crucial in making tough pushes or evading an enemy patrol.

Because of this the team have been hard at work improving not only the quality and draw distance of our green features, but also that tasty optimisation!

To go into the full details we've got Lead Developer Max who's put on his gardening gloves for this Dev Brief.

Make sure to stick around until the end too as today Spono from the Black Matter team has stopped by to celebrate a big community Discord milestone!




Hi everyone,

Alongside much of the programming team working through the remaining crash and some large scale optimisation (as well as bug fixes and an engine upgrade to 4.25), we’re in an interesting period now where the team is hard at work on some huge future features, maps and a broad array of content that we’re keen to save to reveal in full at a later date.

Development and marketing a game is always a balance between showing as much as possible as we go, while also retaining some surprise and excitement for the future in order to build up a release.

In the meantime, this week we thought we’d return to a small, but very important aspect of Hell Let Loose:




We’ve been profiling the game across the board, and have always known that some aspects of the visuals are particularly heavy across the board. One of these is grass. For any of you that have followed Hell Let Loose, you’ll be aware that grass has had more than five iterations within the game, and that each time it’s had its positives and negatives with regard to the three key aspects: optimisation, visual fidelity and impact on gameplay.



Grass within games is hilariously complicated. Often increasing visual fidelity hurts optimisation, which means it needs to be culled quickly - removing it from gameplay. However, ugly and optimised grass can seriously degrade the look of the game - which is a huge issue when Hell Let Loose contains fields and fields of it.

That said, in order for grass to look nice within a game it also needs a very refined shader and texture set up, and each stage of it has to be defined very carefully (both up close and at greater ranges).



Coming in Update 8, we’ve totally overhauled our grass - both visually and in terms of performance and gameplay. This has been something we’ve known was a significant area for optimisation for a while and we’re very excited to return to it.



Visually, we’ve retained the photoreal quality of it up close, but have greatly reduced the polycount. The pain of grass is that in a game like Hell Let Loose (and broadly this can be said across the whole title), visuals have to hold up with a camera 10cm away, as well as a kilometer away (compared to an isometric game like Path of Exile, where the visuals are always sitting a fixed distance from the camera). This rework has allowed us to retain a great look up close, but it’s also allowed us to optimise the grass in a way that allows us to keep it present at much greater ranges.



On a gameplay level, every map in Hell Let Loose has “long grass” and “short grass” layers. Previously, our long grass layer has been so expensive that we’ve had to cull it away much quicker than we’d like.

This has led to awkward gameplay where lying down in it only serves as a disadvantage - as you can be both seen and shot from long ranges (because the grass is not rendering for enemy players), while also having your own view obstructed. However, due to the huge cost savings on the new grass, we’re now able to cull the long grass far further away than previously. This means that large Normandy grass-heavy maps like Purple Heart Lane, SME, SMDM have become infinitely more interesting when crossing fields and fighting around strong points. Grassy fields and clearings now feel far more three-dimensional, with different concealment creating possibilities to use longer grass to flank and hide.



Finally, this overhaul has lifted frames across every single map significantly. While it’s difficult to give a uniform number, depending on the current strength of your GPU this could be double digits for many players.






I want to congratulate the entire community as we have now reached a milestone of 30,000 Discord members!

I can remember when Max and I first set up the Discord just before the Kickstarter campaign, and we had our first 100 members. We were buzzing and super excited. Now look how far we have come and still with a massive journey in front of us!

Some of you may also have noticed that we have setup two Announcement Channels that you can follow to get the, #special_news_bulletin & #telegrams channel announcements in your own discords.

If you still haven’t joined the official Hell Let Loose Discord, I certainly recommend joining in the conversations on everything HLL. We invite all new and veteran players, and value everyone's feedback. We invite you in to share this journey with us.

You can jump in now using this invite and please share it with your other HLL comrades.

Also please read our server rules in #readme-rules as well as the Discord community guidelines.

Cheers,
On behalf of Black Matter and Team17 team.

See you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #88!

This week Max is back to give the first formal details on a new mechanic that will be coming to Hell Let Loose in Update 8 - Bullet Penetration!

Now I'll hand over this week's brief to Max so he can go through things...




Hi everyone,

When approaching bullet penetration systems, we thought hard about what would make the difference to Hell Let Loose. Hell Let Loose is a huge game in scale, and a feature like bullet penetration - if made too complex or obscure - may make little to no noticeable difference to players. We also felt that making the system too obvious and powerful would create very cheesy gameplay - with players being shot through solid surfaces and nowhere ever feeling safe.

After several brainstorming sessions, we felt that the best option would be to apply bullet penetration across the game on an individual basis - both for the object being penetrated and the type of ammunition being fired.

We stepped back and looked at our netcode budget (the higher the amount of complexity - the worse it’ll hold up in 100 player conditions) and then looked at how far the system would need to stretch.

As a result of this we’ve created several categories - both on the material side (eg. the wood of a wooden fence), and on the caliber side (a weapon’s ammunition).

We’ve built out a huge amount of materials - with several different types and styles of each (eg. wood_hollow, wood_solid etc.), each material in the game is then given a “material penetrability” value. Setting this figure essentially acts as a penetration check - if the penetration power of the round is higher than the penetrability of the material - then the round will travel through the surface.

If the round is able to travel through the surface, we’re then able to set up other values in the ammunition, including numbers of times the round can penetrate subsequent objects, as well as the degrading velocity of the round and the lowered resulting damage to the player hit by the round. Eg. a player who is hit by a round that has travelled through several planks of wood will take less damage than the same round that has travelled through one plank of the same wood.

Finally, we now have the ability to take our specific ammunition: ie. the Kar98k 7.92×57mm Mauser and then set its “penetration power”. This lets us tune each ammunition type to penetrate different materials with different levels of effectiveness.

What we end up with is a rough breakdown in the power hierarchy of weapons, with a rough order as follows:

All weapons can penetrate:

• Fabric
  
• Paper
  
• Glass
  

Smaller rounds will be able to penetrate:

• Thin Wood
  
• Plaster
  

Large rounds will be able to penetrate

• Thicker Wood
  
• Some Brick
  
• Thin Metal (sheet metal)
  

We’re currently working through the majority of props in the game and thinking carefully about what we want to enable with regards to penetration - as it’s important that hard cover still feels reliable and therefore valuable to infantry players.

The images below should give you an idea of what we're going for:

Yellow: All Weapons
Orange: Smaller Rounds
Red: Large Rounds





Please note, like all features we release - we’ll be watching your feedback and playing a lot in order to understand what (if any) changes need to be made once this is live.




That wraps up Max's message and this week's Dev Brief!

We hope you enjoyed your first detailed information on the Bullet Penetration mechanic coming in Update 8 - Let us know what you think!

In the meantime the team are continuing their work on bug fixes, optimisation and even more new content.

Have a great weekend everyone.

See you on the frontline.