Task Force 0.7.2.2159
This update includes support for ultrawide resolutions. The opening sequences have all been adjusted to accommodate 32:9 aspect ratios: The main menu now supports ultrawide monitors as well. Here is a comparison between the 16:9 and 32:9 variations: The in-game HUD has also been
This update includes support for ultrawide resolutions. The opening sequences have all been adjusted to accommodate 32:9 aspect ratios:
The main menu now supports ultrawide monitors as well. Here is a comparison between the 16:9 and 32:9 variations:
The in-game HUD has also been adjusted to ensure all elements are within the 16:9 portion of the screen. We do not allow the camera beyond 16:9 in third-person view. Therefore the extra space on the sides is planned to be used for real-time competitive player stats and information about the current round:
This will include each player's avatar, name, alive/dead status, selected weapon in the armory, ect.
You start by registering a team using the `/register` command in the chat. You can create any type of team you wish, whether it's an entire clan, squads team, doubles team, or singles profile. If you're registering a clan, you can reserve a clan tag on the ladder that NO OTHER TEAM CAN USE. It will be unique to your clan, and only members of your clan will have this tag.
You can then send roster invites to other players in the game using their Steam IDs:
You can use the `/roster list` command to view your roster for a specific ladder type:
You can also promote members to "admins" so that they can send/accept challenges and schedule matches for your team, since basic members do not have the ability to manage your clan (and can only play in scheduled matches). Most importantly, to reduce the abuse of "ringers" you must register a player 12 hours in advance prior to a match for them to be on the roster for that match.
You can view the current stats/ranking of your team using the `/team profile` command:
Once you post on the match finder and organize a scheduled match with another team, you can send them a "challenge" using the `/challenge send` command:
The opposing team can then "accept" this challenge using the `/challenge accept` command:
Once a challenge is accepted, an official match will be scheduled on the ladder. You can check the upcoming matches for your team using the `/match schedule` command:
Now that a match is scheduled, here is where the real magic happens! When it's close to the time for your match, our entirely AUTOMATED SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE will just create a server for your match, INSTANTLY! We've setup an entire geo-location service that calculates the optimal location for the server, based on the location of all the players on each roster:
It will automatically cross-reference this information with your entire team along with the entire opposing team in order to select the most optimal server location for everyone in the match:
You just boot up the game right before your match is scheduled to start, and you'll see a server for your teams. Nobody else can join this server, it's completely restricted to only the authorized players on each rosters, so no password or anything is required to join:
Once in the match server you'll be in a temporary "respawn lobby" where everyone is waiting for the match to start. You can go to the "players" screen to see a bunch of "green up" icons, where each player has to "green up" in order to start the match. After every player in the game is ready, the match will start:
Then you just play out the entire match, without worrying about anything! After the match is over, all the stats data will be logged for the match, including the final outcome of which teams won/lost. The losing team DOES NOT need to head over to the website to "report the loss" it just does everything automatically:
Once the match is over, the server will be automatically destroyed after 5 minutes, so that more servers can be created for upcoming matches. And that's it! The process is really that simple, it's an entirely AUTOMATED LADDER SYSTEM!!! Just the way we dreamed of it many years ago, now finally ready for testing! If you want to get in early and help test the new ladder system, be sure to join the official Task Force Discord for more information: discord.gg/zGha2gtFzX
Finally there's an all new update system integrated into our custom workshop launcher. You can now update your workshop projects with the click of a button, rather than needing to create a new project entirely and move your files over.
This makes updating workshop projects a lot easier than before, and everything is carefully outlined in the documentation on GitHub:
The "audio glitch" has been fixed! We've completely removed "bink audio" so it can no longer cause us any problems. Previously if you played for a certain amount of time (or a lot of audio data was being loaded) it would cause your weapon sounds to no longer play. This means you would hear bullets impacting around you, but even though you saw your weapon firing it wouldn't make any sounds. It also was the primary reason your game would crash. This issue even required a full restart of the game in order to fix and happened quite frequently. So having it corrected is a major step forward towards being ready to put the buy button back up on the store.
We've made a very significant optimization pass on our petrochemical plant map. It should now get a much higher FPS than before as we're now properly instancing many of the modular meshes used throughout the map. There's also an initial optimization pass performed on our military outpost map since the landscape and road meshes were causing extreme FPS drops and preventing the map from being tested.
The climbing system has been updated so you can now press your action button to "pull up" when hanging on a ledge. Previously you would have to either move forwards or backwards to either "pull up" or "drop down" but this wasn't very intuitive for new players. So now when hanging the climb system will display another popup that says "press to climb" for those that are unaware of the existing gameplay mechanics.
An issue where death replication wouldn't trigger has now been corrected. This would occasionally cause players to go into T-pose rather than ragdoll after dying. It was due to some network replication delays but should no longer be an issue. Another bug was also corrected that would cause your weapon trigger to get stuck when spamming buttons. This should no longer happen since the weapon system doesn't have the ability to artificially delay shots anymore.
Finally the workshop system has been updated so you can setup custom "player skins" without actually including any skins at all. This means you can customize the audio queues of the existing character skins that come with the game. Therefore workshop mappers can now include custom grenade callouts and dynamic voice taunts as well. However keep in mind that using voice taunts before the round is over will give away your position on the map.
There's also dynamic weather that we've setup so the map is sometimes day time or night time, which will automatically enable/disable dynamic lighting such as industrial lights and spotlights.
We plan to add a lot more assets over the coming weeks as well. This should make the game feel fresh and up-to-date prior to re-releasing back on the store.
This update also addresses a critical issue with throwables falling through the ground when landing in water. It fixes a problem with footsteps as well that caused them to sound as if they're behind the player when spectating another player.
Please note this is a slowed down view of the animation. We also have an all new ADS system coming in a future update with new FPS arms along with sights, scopes, and snipers. So until then the animation only needs to support hip fire for the time being.
The update includes all new water mechanics as well. There are now "water volumes" available which slow down player movement based on the water depth. If the water is not shallow enough then you will be prevented from proning. The same goes for crouching where you cannot crouch in water that's deep enough to put your weapon underwater. In both these situations the movement system will automatically force the character to stand up.
If you find yourself in water that is so deep you cannot even stand in it without your weapon being underwater, then you will be killed with a "has drowned" killfeed message. So don't tread out too far!
This should prevent players from abusing water areas on various maps. The footsteps system has been updated as well so that you make proper splashing sounds when moving through shallow water. However we haven't setup any special effects for deep water scenarios just yet, such as ripples and whooshing noises.
We've setup buoyancy for ragdolls too!
There's also a new water blueprint that's available for workshop mappers to designate which areas of their map consist of water. In a future update we'll include more buoyancy support for other physics-based objects as well.
Finally the update addresses an issue with footsteps not registering when running downhill on certain types of objects. Now these sounds should register a bit more often, but there's still some testing and fine tuning required for things such as staircases.
There's also dynamic weather that we've setup so the map is sometimes party cloudy, raining, or even an all out thunderstorm.
We plan to add a lot more assets over the coming weeks as well. This should make the game feel fresh and up-to-date prior to re-releasing back on the store.
The update also makes some critical changes to explosive forces, which will apply most specifically to grenade damage priorities. The previous system would just randomly loop through each player on the map and didn't provide any concrete output in terms of the order that players were killed.
Now explosive forces will apply any and all damage to each hostage or VIP inside the damage radius before applying damage to each individual player based on their distance. This means an explosion will damage the closest player and then work outwards applying damage as a real explosion would. However this also prevents players from abusing the mechanic by killing a player first even though that explosion would have actually killed the hostages or VIPs as well.
The update implements a new system for console messages that allows dedicated servers to redirect output to clients. This is very important to admin commands as there was previously no information being provided when a command was submitted, which made it quite difficult to know why a command wasn't actually working.
We've added an automatic AFK kicking system that monitors whether or not players are actually playing each round. If a player is AFK for a certain period of time the server will kick this player while still allowing them to rejoin, whereas the admin kick command would prevent the player from rejoining for a certain period of time. There's also a custom disconnect message that says that player was "kicked for being AFK" rather than "disconnected" so other players can know when someone was kicked automatically rather than by an admin.
There's now a physics restriction on weapons when dropping them to the ground which limits the speed at which they can move. This should prevent weapons from flying very far or unrealistically whereas they should now fall to the ground more appropriately. We've also added some important debug output for the new user interface system as more DirectX 12 functionality is built out behind the scenes until we make the switch back from DirectX 11 later this year.
There are still some significant benefits to DirectX 12 along with many optimizations that save developers time so they don't have to optimize their assets as much. So by falling back to DirectX 11 you do lose some of these newer benefits, and it's worth trying out which mode works best for your current system. But again based on all of our tester feedback it appears that DirectX 11 was the preferred renderer a majority of the time, with players noticing very little change in how good the graphics actually looked.
This update also overhauls the entire audio system with some very significant optimizations and reorganizations. We've setup audio priorities for every single audio sample in the game so the engine can know which sounds are most important in order to prioritize them over others to ensure they always play. This is because audio engines are limited by a certain number of channels that they can mix together before the engine has to start choosing which sounds to play and which sounds to drop.
The weapon optimizations are very significant as we're no long spamming the game world with audio and particle components to simulate weapon fire. Instead we now have a much more robust system that properly cycles through preallocated audio and particle effects that repeat in order to simulate the effect of constant firing. This should make the shooting feel a bit snappier as the entire system is now using a lot less resources. We've also added new "dry fire" sounds to the weapons which should trigger when you try to fire the weapon when it's out of ammo.
We've included accelerated paint support for DirectX 12 now as well. This means the DirectX 12 user interface will be just as snappy and quick as the DirectX 11 user interface after our previous update last week. This means accelerated paint mode is being officially rolled out across both rendering platforms and ensures that your web-based user interface (a web browser floating on top of the game engine) works at full 4K 60FPS. That's because the underlying system is now sharing a live texture from the web browser with the game engine, which allows for instant graphics copying rather than the extremely slow process that previously had to go through the CPU. Now that everything stays on the GPU the entire user interface system is extremely quick and snappy compared to before, and will work just as fluidly at 4K resolutions.
This also means we've removed the temporary 90 FPS cap in the game, which was in place to prevent the game engine from overloading the web browser and causing the entire user interface to lock up. Now with accelerated paint we no longer have to worry about the game engine and the web browser fighting for CPU power, and you can run your entire game now with a completely uncapped FPS if you'd like.
We fixed a critical issue with workshop blueprints breaking between map changes. This caused doors and other workshop components to glitch out and have multiple copies on the map, because the "fake" ones that are used in-editor to place around were accidentally showing up in-game when they shouldn't. This also made it difficult to pick up the bomb at times as it would appear that there were two different bombs on the ground. The grenade arc has been fixed up as well and should now no longer appear overly dark or create any kind of "glowing" effect in the game world. We've also disabled all post processes on workshop maps which should prevent custom maps from using undesired features such as motion blur, film grain, vignettes, auto exposure, and more.
This update makes some very significant performance optimizations for Steam Deck. We've completely reconfigured the entire graphics system in UE5 for Steam Deck with automatic detection of the platform and implementing default settings that provide a smooth gameplay experience on Steam Deck. There's even special graphics modes that we're using to provide the best performance possible which would normally not be necessary on PC, so hopefully these updates really help to provide the best experience possible on Steam Deck.
A small issue in the training map was corrected where you'd keep your weapon from the previous round. This should no longer be the case in the training map anymore. Another bug was also addressed regarding the HUD completely freezing. This was not because of any user interface issues, but because of a certain data connection breaking between the server and your game client. However there's still some extensive testing required for us to confirm this issue is indeed fixed, as there might be more to it depending on how testing goes.
The "map" command has been fixed so that it will now look for existing maps in the maplist prior to loading the requested map. This allows the command to maintain the existing round timer and total rounds from the maplist rather than using the default 3 rounds as was previously happening. It's also very smart in that if a map appears on the maplist multiple times but with different game modes, it will actually pick the proper settings from the maplist that match the desired game mode rather than picking the first match in the maplist.
Finally this update overhauls the entire collision and physics of the third-person camera. We've added an entire "smooth gliding" system that prevents the camera from stuttering or glitching out for quick instants, which especially happens when running through doors or underneath other objects. Now the camera will pop forward but slowly slide outwards to create a very subtle effect that allows the player to focus more on their aiming and less on their camera collision.
There's also been some adjustments to smoke grenades, which should now deploy faster than before, as the timer has been reduced by 1 second. We've added some new graphics commands as well to disable some newer features such as virtual shadow maps via the graphics_vsm command.
As you can see, these new GI and reflection modes significantly increase the graphical fidelity of the game. There are now actual light bounces that adjust the color of surfaces to create a much more sophisticated representation of a scene. It also creates high quality reflections that can now show elements that are completely off-screen.
However while these new lighting modes look fantastic, we want to ensure performance is never compromised. Therefore we've included some new graphics settings that allow players to manually enable/disable these new features if they aren't desired. The following commands can be used to control Lumen settings: