*Note: This will be added as an addendum to the "Tanks! Tanks! Tanks!" announcement as well
Hello troops,
With the Golden Week Sale treating Brass Brigade well, I've taken to heart some of the critiques Brass Brigade received and have implemented some changes that I think everyone will welcome:
Tank Controls
- Tank driving controls are now mapped to your character's movement controls, which can be changed in the Settings > Controls menu
- Additional tank specific controls (such as the gun sight and tank machine-gun) are also bindable in the Settings > Controls menu
Tank Gameplay
- All tank shells have seen a drastic increase in velocity, ranging from 50-100% increase over original values; this means you won't have to account for drop-off & travel time as much over long ranges.
- All tanks have had armor buffs to their fronts (65-70% damage reduction from a direct hit compared to 40-50% reduction before).
- All tanks have significant weak spots in their rears (500-800% increase from a direct hit compared to 200-400% increase before). This means that (usually) 2 hits in the rear of the tank is sufficient for a kill.
- All tanks have had side armor buffs (40-50% damage reduction from a direct hit compared to 20-30% reduction before).
- Tanks with an exposed magazine on their turret (Tiger, Firefly, Sherman) receive extra damage if hit there.
- StuG received substantial armor buff on its front of 80% incoming damage reduction due to its inability to rotate its turret.
- Firefly has had its reload time shortened by 20% to make it more suitable against stronger Axis tanks.
Graphical Optimizations
Unity Profiler data points to camera rendering & physics calculations as the primary time-sink as far as performance. Some graphical changes to counter this include:
- Significantly decreased shadow resolution across all graphical settings.
- Disabled countless reflection processes that were not being used by any materials/textures in the game from the rendering pipeline
- Reduced global physics solver iterations
- Reduced particle raycasting (this should help maintain frame rate when many particles are being rendered on screen at once)
AI Optimizations
Several critical AI behaviors and bugs have been addressed, though I am monitoring their new behavior closely for stability. AI optimizations are often unpredictable, but I am happy with the results being shown on my test systems.
- Corrected bot rigidbodies to act as kinematics - bots should now smoothly traverse bumps and terrain without getting stuck much if at all. This should also finally resolve the "stretching ragdoll" problem.
- Bot hitboxes has been stabilized greatly. There were occasions before where bot hitboxes would de-sync from their bodies before - this should now be corrected & hit registration should be stable.
- CPU Time slider now has a VASTLY MORE AGGRESSIVE affect on the CPU cycle time spent on bots. This means that when the sliders are zeroed out, bots will behave a little dumber, but if you're running a high bot count for your machine, this should buy you more framerate stability for higher bot counts. This effectively gives you more breathing room with high bot counts.
- Optimized situations where bots raycast when determining to shoot, further reducing CPU load
- Bots will now try to navigate around tanks rather than running straight into them.
- Added logic to make bots stand still when shooting under circumstances. This increases as bot count increases to prevent bots from endlessly charging into one another like a mosh-pit.
- Sniper bot accuracy has been reduced in general. It has been reduced even more when they are not stationary at their "sniper spot."
- Sniper bots no longer use handguns for long range encounters, which should resolve problems of being sniped by pistols from across the map.
Other Fixes
- Fixed 2 flags being named exactly the same on Battle of the Bulge, which would prevent you from selecting one of them when trying to spawn (German Center Flank).
Keep the feedback coming, and if you like Brass Brigade & what I'm doing, please leave a review on the Steam Store page.
That's all for now.
Until next time,
Henry Kucab