Hello! This was a long time coming and represents some very major milestones in the game's development. For a quick recap of what's been happening, read check out the previous news post regarding vehicles.
Until all features are restored, these new features are restricted to the TESTERS BRANCH of the game. Due to recent code changes, ONLY ARENA IS ACCESSIBLE IN THIS BUILD. Instant Action and Database have been temporarily disabled. For more information on how to access the tester's branch, see this Steam news post.
In addition to the features mentioned in the vehicles Steam news post, another major change and addition is how vehicles are spawned into Arena.
Groups and Supplies
Vehicles are now spawned in groups rather than the gigantic and cumbersome formations. This gives more flexibility to how they move around the battlefield, and helps to spread the units out a bit more. Battles are a lot cooler to watch now!
Strategic Targets now have supplies and scenario defined group limits. Each base can support a certain number of groups of certain vehicle types. Strategic targets will automatically "build" new groups to hit their unit cap, and will replace groups that have been destroyed. Building is not instantaneous, though for the moment it is very quick.
Building vehicle groups costs supplies! Each group has a cost associated with it and if the strategic target expends all of its supplies it can no longer build units. Destroying units matters way more now that bases have supplies. If you destroy enough of their vehicles to run it out of supplies, those vehicles are gone forever. It makes vehicles much more valuable than before.
Testers Branch means there will be bugs!
As stated above, ONLY ARENA IS ACCESSIBLE IN THIS BUILD. There's also a few things that are going to be a bit rough in this build, as the vehicle changes are not quite done yet.
- The Arena UI is currently very busy. The way strategic targets are represented, along with much of the Arena UI, will be getting a pass once the vehicle work is finished as it is in a placeholder state.
- Balance is going to be pretty wonky. Right now the mission is designed more around testing features than being very balanced. Many vehicles, tanks in particular, got some pretty big stats changes, so how they fit into combat has shifted.
- The AI for vehicles is about halfway there. The capture AI shouldn't all try to converge on one point, and the attack AI should do a better job of seeking out targets. The AI should also spread out more when in combat rather than clump up on the roads. These are all known issues and are planned to be fixed.
- Vehicles with machineguns (AAA and APCs) are actually a lot more accurate than they should be, due to some unimplemented code, but I kind of like it.
Share your Feedback!
I'm very curious to hear you all's thoughts on how this affects the flow of the game, and what you think can be improved.
This moves the game much closer to my original goal of the player's main mission being to support and influence the ground battles, so I'm very excited with where this will go now that maps can get a lot more interesting. These new mechanics also open the door to some interesting ideas that I plan on exploring such as supply convoys to replenish supplies.
Changelog
New Features:
- New navmesh driven vehicles
- Vehicles will prefer roads when out of Combat
- Vehicles can navigate around fixed obstacles such as buildings
- Completely new turret code for vehicles
- Vehicles can now have multiple turrets
- Completely new bullet code (used only by vehicles at the moment)
- Bullets created and loaded through JSON data, exposing them for editing
- Bullet constants file defines pools for different types of bullets and effects
- Bullets and their visual effects pooled in a new, less disruptive way
- Sensors are added to the vehicle, not the turret
- Individual turrets can now be linked to specific sensors on the vehicle
- Added error messages when spawning vehicles with invalid weapon or bullet names
- Added error messages for invalid barrel and firepoint subparts, or turrets with no barrels
- Navmesh support for "Sand Island" map
- Buildings have built in "no go" navmesh option
- Bridges default to "road" navmesh
- Vehicles now operate in "Groups" instead of massive formations
- Strategic Targets can support a scenario defined number of Groups
- Groups are "built" one at a time, and require supplies to build
- Strategic Target icons show group and "construction" related information
- Strategic Targets can be run out of supplies to prevent spawning of new vehicles
- When a strategic target is destroyed, its supplies are destroyed with it
- If a Strategic Target has <5 supply on capture, it will get 5 supplies for free
- Vehicle groups in combat will slow down to fire on the move and try to avoid roads
- Vehicles further from camera run at reduced tick rates to allow for higher vehicle counts
- "IsImportant" flag used on vehicles that require full fidelity regardless of distance (e.g. AAA)
Improvements:
- Vehicle movement has been significantly optimized
- Vehicles no longer clip into and overlap each other
- Bullets and their visual effects should no longer produce intermittent stuttering
- JSON: Renamed TurretBase->TurretAzimuth and Barrels->TurretElevation
- JSON: Explicitly defined Barrel data now required for turrets
- Significantly optimized targeting calculations allow for all vehicles to use bullets with gravity
- Tank cannons now named after their real cannons
- New visual effects for all machinegun impact types (Hit, Penetrate, Water, Grass, Explode)
- Crater counts adjusted (Small 175->100, Medium 75->150)
- Machineguns can not be heard from as far away
- Cannons can be heard from further away
- Bullet flyby SFX completely redone
- Longer tracers
- Targeting priorities are now specified on the turret level
- Max range and targeting priorities of a vehicle moved to the turrets in the Database
- Dust trail effect tweaked for performance
- JSON: BurstLength now refers to how many shots per burst rather than a time interval
- Vehicles wiggle a bit when off-road to simulate suspension
- Aircraft guns use new impact SFX
- Garbage collection optimizations for the old style bullets (still in use by aircraft)
- Capturing of Stratgic Targets now happens in smooth "real time" versus one second "ticks"
- Experimental incremental garbage collection enabled
Balance:
- Fixed scaling options not applied to wreckages
- M60A1 has a functional machinegun turret on top of its main turret
- Machineguns no longer use thick bullets
- Tank shell velocity more closely matches their real stats (1500-1700 m/s depending on gun)
- M68 mounted on M1 is more accurate than the standard one mounted on the M60
- T80B has its own more powerful gun and projectile (2A46-2, 125mm)
Bugfixes:
- Planar shadows render correctly for scaled buildings (i.e. bridges)
- Bullets fired from AAA will no longer disappear when the vehicle is destroyed
- Looping gun audio works correctly for vehicles (affected M163 and Shilka)
- Ocean shader uses same depth offset as terrain
- M1A1 has a proper barrel submesh for recoiling barrel animation
- Potential fix for the elusive CAP null reference error that would shut down a flight of jets