Dear Tankers,
Welcome to our 49th Development Status. You can see what we were working on in two weeks!
Environment on Tutorial Mission
Ten months ago we started developing tools and workflow necessary to push our graphics fidelity forward. Environment artists have been working tirelessly to achieve high quality immersive scenery for Tank Squad.
The whole production pipeline was made from scratch, and all workflow necessities with tools were made with help of our programmers and designers. Every piece of map you will see is carefully designed, tested, and created manually.
Deep forest path
For today’s update, we want to show you the upcoming Tutorial Map, which will introduce players to the game mechanics we have, and how to operate with battle plans in the field.
Sunroots and wheat fields
T-70
This time a new vehicle for the Soviet side. It is a T-70, a light tank that was used by the Red Army during World War II. This tank replaced the scout tank T-60 and infantry tank support T-50. T-70 is armed with a 45-mm L/46 gun and carrying forty-five rounds.
T-70 is also equipped with a coaxial 7.62mm DT machine gun. The tank was operated by a driver and a commander who loaded and fired the gun. Armour thickness on the turret front was 60 mm, turret sides, and rear: 35 mm, hull front, and sides: 45 mm, and roof and bottom: 10 mm.
Crater generator
We made another new tool for Tank Squad, and it is called Crater Generator. As the name suggests, this technique is responsible for terrain deformation after explosions. Some readers may remember that a similar system is included in Tank Mechanic Simulator, where a crater generation process is involved for creating excavation places. Our experience collected last year allowed us to refine, redesign and optimize this algorithm. Now the whole stage of geometry and topology recalculation is done parallelly with GPU power. It means that simultaneously we can generate many craters at the same time - not just one - without a significant drop in performance. An interesting feature is that craters are fully procedural. It means they have thousands of various shapes, depending on random seed and input parameters. It is based on a mix of fractal noise and signed distance fields.
Steam Next Fest in June
To prepare for the upcoming demo fest in June we are running an ever more intensive QA of our game. Last week's tests were an introduction to sending the build to our publisher QA team, to have the required recommendation for the demo fest.
The most important problems were:
- low performance with many AIs at once
- enemy AI not reacting correctly to our actions (being very static and shooting back only when shot upon)
- AI is able to see through high grass/vegetation (when a player could not)
Every few weeks we will be running such tests to have the game as polished as it can be for the fest and then the Early Access version.
Thank you and have a good one!
DeGenerals
