Squad 44 News

Greetings!

The road to Chapter 3 has not been completely smooth and we’ve had to deal with a number of issues that kept us from releasing our very anticipated Carentan map.



We are now a month down the line and we are finally satisfied with the state of Carentan, which means that it will release to the public 28th of May at 4 PM CEST and as you might have guessed this is tomorrow, we are super excited to share Carentan with you.



We spent the last month ensuring that Carentan is playing and performing the way we want it to as well as ensuring that the map is fun to play. The map had bad performance and micro stutter issues. These are all resolved now and we want to thank every one of our players who helped us in that effort via public tests.



With the Carentan map, we will also see the new American tanks like the M18 and M10 fight it out with the German armour like the King Tiger. The Infantry gets to fight as either the 101st Airborne or the 6th Fallschirmjäger regiment for control over the town.



You will also get to use the new FG42 for the German paratroopers, this weapon was designed specifically to cram the best of the German Kar98k bolt action rifle and machineguns into one compact package.

We hope you are all excited to hop in and try out the new map!

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

Hey guys!

This small hotfix should fix the server browser issue as well as a missing minimap for Stonne Skirmish 01.

[h3]Changelog v2.0.761.14859[/h3]

• Fixed text overlapping on the server browser.
  
• Fixed server list not updating when pressing refresh.
  
• Fixed missing minimap for Stonne Skirmish 01.
  

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

Hey guys!

This patch will fix and optimise a number of issues, including the most recent issues with the game loading slowly, this is still ongoing and we appreciate the feedback we've been getting.

[h3]Changelog v2.0.757.14854[/h3]
GENERAL FIXES

• Optimised loading times by removing blueprint references (still ongoing)
  
• Fixed the entry map to be more optimised
  
• Fixed St Mere Eglise server browser image
  
• Fixed dismemberment/gore physics so that it no longer spins
  
• Fixed collisions on several farmhouse meshes
  
• Fixed collisions on several buildings
  
• Fixed overlap collision on all support capsules for all weapons
  
• Fixed overlaps being generated on LCTs and LCVPs
  
• Adjusted background terrain texture sizes
  

ANIMATIONS

• Added new Lee Enfield cup discharger animations
  

VISUALS

• Optimised several textures sizes
  
• Adjusted P-51 LODs
  
• Fixed missing texture in gore material for the 4th Infantry uniform
  
• Fixed distant tree mesh LOD
  

EFFECTS

• Optimised smoke grenades, smoke mortars, smoke tank shells
  
• Optimised medium calibre sized impacts and muzzle flash effects
  

VEHICLES

• Fixed Jagdpanzer IV L48 seat state error
  
• Fixed Jagdpanzer IV L48 coax MG missing skeleton mesh
  
• Fixed several vehicle blueprints skeleton bounds
  
• Fixed several vehicle blueprints overlap events
  
• Fixed log spam caused by Jagdpanzer IV COAX mg firing
  

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

Greetings!

We feel it’s important to keep our users informed and up to date when it comes to issues that so directly affects their experience.

On the 5th of May, we released patch v2.0.708.14663 and a new issue was found causing some users to have excessively long loading times on game start, upwards of 20 minutes and some simply refuse to load at all.

Following this, we quickly pushed hotfix v2.0.716.14697 on May 7th in a hope of resolving the issue but to no avail. After this, we were quiet about the issue causing some users concern as to the status and progress in resolving the issue. This we can only apologize for.

We have since then worked with our support and testing team to find the cause of this new issue and to resolve it. The initial hypothesis revolved around the issue being localized to users with mechanical hard drives (HDD’s), this was the pattern we kept seeing over and over, but we later uncovered some users with fast solid-state drives (SSD’s) with the same or similar issue.

While investigating loading times we found some major issues in how Post Scriptum loads game content, most concerningly we found that the game loads massive amounts of assets when the game first loads, most of these the game doesn’t even need to load. Although there can be other issues that might be contributing to increased loading time that we might not know about and that we may discover as we continue working on the issue.

But to fully understand this, we need to get a little bit technical.

When Post Scriptum loads content it loads via references to files, this is what causes the game to decide what it should and shouldn’t load at any given time. In our case we found that there were many references that were entirely unnecessary and as thus, was causing the game to load in assets that aren’t required, this causes a number of issues one of which is the potential of contributing to the long loading time.

What all of this means is that as of right now we have eliminated over 12 minutes of loading times from standard loading during testing, this has been very consistent over multiple tests by different testers. Some tests indicate that some users have gone from loading into the game within 5, 10 or even 20 minutes to mere seconds thanks to the optimization on how the game references assets.

We are still working on the issue as we want to ensure that the loading time is as good as it can be across the entire game, this ensures that we aren’t just shifting the problem from one place to another.

Lastly, we want to thank everyone who has raised the concern with us, submitted tickets and helped us investigate the issue. For those who are experiencing the issue we understand the frustration and ask that you be patient with us as we work through the issue. We obviously highly encourage any user experiencing issues to contact support as they are able to better help you with your issues.

There is a temporary workaround that may work for some users, which involves moving Post Scriptum from an HDD to an SSD, this is by no means a fix, but it can work as a temporary workaround while the issue is being resolved by us.

See: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129 for information about how to move your game installations.


Sincerely,
Periscope Games

Hey everyone!

We have another small hotfix coming your way. We've been investigating the issues related to loading times and we might have a fix in this update.

If you are still having issues we want to remind you to clear your cache as this has sometimes been known to fix issues like these.

Should you still have issues after trying this then, please reach out to our support.

We've also optimized some building collisions while we were at it.

[h3]Changelog v2.0.716.14697[/h3]

• Possible fix for the issues with loading times.
  
• Optimization to building collisions.
  

Sincerely,
Periscope Games