Hi all,
Pleased to announce that after 30 months in development, 0.2 is now considered more stable than the stable branch (by quite a bit too!).
0.2 is moving to the main branch, where it will become the default experience. 0.1261 (the current default branch) will move to its own dedicated branch in perpetuity.
The experimental branch will go back to being unstable changes, but will be kept close to the default branch. So stay on it if you'd like to help test and can put up with more frequent bugs.
The 0.2-alpha branch will be closed.
Recap
The main focus of this update is tank interiors.
Everything now has a physical presence and needs to be crammed inside your vehicle. The whole internal space resource system has been removed. This removes the need to measure internal space, which wasn't feasible with vehicles that were partially open to the elements (e.g. the Marder III).
Parts no longer being fluid enforces more realistic looking designs, and moves the most effective designs in-game closer to the most effective designs in real life.
There's been quite a few changes, so I've compiled a changelog for the most notable:
Overhauls
All parts are now 3D and have physical models which need to fit inside the vehicle.
Riveting was overhauled. Rivets can now be automatically generated and be edited much more easily. +
Powertrains are now physically modelled from the engine through to the tracks, requiring the driveshaft to be threaded through your vehicle.
Cannon rotation limits are now manually set, instead of automatically calculated (which didn't work very well). This creates an area of space which needs to be kept clear.
Crew members now need to have all limbs posed to be able to fit inside the vehicle.
Armour plates now have visual thickness.
The damage model was rewritten to be partially-volumetric, allowing for much more in-depth damage simulations. +
Freeform was in-housed and rebuilt from the ground up, allowing it to be tailored to tank design.
The requirement for sealed compartments was removed, allowing for open-top vehicles.
Track belt generation was rewritten to create better results and allow belt sag. +
Crew members now operate at 100% efficiency, regardless of their number of tasks. They can only do one task at a time with each limb.
The armour visualization overlay now lets you run simulations to see exactly how your armour would react in-game. +
The scenario framework is now much more flexible, allowing for more advanced scenarios as demonstrated in the reworked Fields scenario. +
All scenarios have been reworked to be less random, letting your vehicle be the only variable. The focus has been moving away from simple deathmatches which can be easily recreated through custom battles
Parts can now be attached to cannon barrels. This combined with the addon plate structures adds built-in support for custom mantlets.
Eras, limitations and the parts configs are now moddable, letting you set your own limits.
Major changes
Part repositioning is much more stable and now supports reorienting, to keep hatches (etc) flush with the surface during edits.
Return roller arrays can now be slanted.
Paint job tinting now supports RGB, HSV and HEX editing.
Weathering dirt/snow is now more prominent closer to the ground
All parts now support flipping.
Part obstruction has been removed for all decorative parts.
Freeform now supports duplication.
New freeform selection tools: full-plate, linked, selection inversion, radial and box selection.
Tracks now provide armour.
Fire delay has been reworked to be more intuitive and allow more control.
Crew can now switch seats.
Added addon plate structures, which can be attached and modelled the same way as hulls and turrets. No more placing turrets and hiding their turret rings.
The powertrain (tracks, engine, transmission, etc) can be fully removed, allowing you to make AT guns.
Added an in-battle overlay to show the health of each part and the remaining ammo in each ammo rack. +
Minor changes
Freeform can now mirror deletions, fills and extrusions.
Parts can now be moved on planes, instead of purely on single axes.
All parts attached to a part will now move when it is moved.
Parts can now be placed on cannon barrels.
Exhaust visual effects have been reworked to plume more and linger longer.
Duplicate and move now applies to every selected part, instead of only the last selected.
Decals can now have their projection depth configured.
Cannons now have textured bore rifling.
Added colour variation on vehicle dirt.
Added paint colour variation. Particularly noticeable on flat paint, which is no longer one solid colour.
Suspension arm length can now be edited.
Track wheel grouping can now have an offset. Letting you layout wheels like [oo ooo o] instead of being limited to [ooo ooo].
Ammo racks can now be extended lengthways.
Cannons can now be assigned to more than one firegroup.
Cannons are now placed independently from mantlets. Though they wont be able to move unless they're placed on a mantlet. Multiple cannons can be placed on each mantlet now.
Click and drag editing of compartments can now be cancelled by right clicking.
.blueprintMeta files are no longer necessary and wont be created for new designs.
Improved responsiveness of the move placement tool and generated compartment click & drag, removing the disconnect from the part and the cursor.
Part mirroring is no longer detected by their positions, but by a solid link. Meaning if they get out of alignment, moving them with mirroring enabled will re-align them.
Disabling mirroring now disables mirroring when moving parts via the move tools. Instead of only disabling mirroring during placement.
Autosaved designs now preserve their design name, instead of renaming the vehicle to 'Autosave'.
On axles with more than one wheel, the inner-most wheel will now face inwards.
Rotated flat sandbox sky 180 degrees and reduced contrast to brighten dark areas.
Reworked the freeform slope tool to use a linear input instead of a radial one. It now acts like dragging a glacis on generated compartments.
Improved track sound effects.
Visual effects are now affected by wind.
Penetration holes now glow red around the rim. Not realistic, but provides good feedback.
Unattached parts which aren't being actively placed are now see-through. This better shows which parts will be destroyed when exiting the editor.
Part move, rotate and resize can now be started using the same hotkeys as when editing points in freeform.
Fixes
Undo redo has had a complete rewrite. It should be much more reliable now.
Made freeform vertex and edge selection more predictable and responsive.
The vehicle editor now goes through a more thorough reload when changing designs and eras. This increases general stability.
Track belts now adjust track segment length slightly when belts are generated, allowing belts to fit together perfectly, without a non-aligned belt segment near the rearmost roadwheel.
Adjusting turret ring height now moves all parts, regardless of whether they're picked up by part repositioning.
Improved freeform detection of mirrored faces.
Mirrored non-planar plates will now preserve symmetry better across the vehicle. Also prevents many cases of part repositioning breaking part symmetry.
Fixed part repositioning sometimes scattering your parts randomly across your vehicle.
Fixed DLSS not working in scope-view.
Updating your designs to 0.2
0.2 is semi-backwards compatible. The size of the changes made it very difficult to perfectly preserve 0.1 designs.
Some work has been done to let them be loaded in. They should be in a mostly put-together state, enough to preserve the vehicle's overall layout and style. You'll have to do some manual adjustments yourself but this should only take a few minutes for simple designs.
If you're struggling to get to grips with some of the 0.2 changes, Colson from the community has created a brilliant tutorial covering most bases.
Project size & team expansion
The game's codebase, now unrecognizable from 0.127, has been almost completely rewritten. The source code sits now at just over 5MB across 135,000 lines of code. That's up from 3.43MB across 97,000 lines in 0.127.
It's safe to say the project has grown too big for a single developer. The first order of business now is to bring another developer on. If you're interested this will get its own announcement, so stay tuned.
This project grew very organically up to 0.127. It wasn't heavily planned out and didn't know exactly where it was heading. The tech debt built up steadily until it came time to implement geometric internals. That's when it was realized that the project was going to need a major restructure if everything on the roadmap was going to be delivered.
0.2 knew precisely what features it was building around, allowing for a well structured codebase. The rewrites were done with all roadmap goals in mind (namely mod-support and multiplayer), and they set the project up to be worked on by multiple developers more smoothly.
What’s next
First up, a roadmap update.
Following that I’ll be doing lower intensity content updates, fixes and polish while I sort out the team expansion.
Then it's an overdue major UI rework. The goal is to add translation (localization) support, improve the overall GUI graphics and feel, optimize it and increase flexibility for more advanced UI (graphs, tables, continuous sliders, pop-out windows).
On a personal note
A huge thanks to the closed testers, who've been catching all of the biggest bugs before they hit the main 0.2 branch.
Thank you to all those who reported issues and gave feedback, can't stress how useful this is.
Finally, a thank you to everyone for being so patient and encouraging with every update, it seriously drives development and keeps motivation high.
I'm always excited to start focusing on content and polish and am always working to get that to you as fast as possible. Only I'm trying to be smart about it and ensure the foundations and tech are all there to support the quantity and quality I'm going for.
Still learning and getting better every day, so thanks for bearing with me as I figure this all out.
- Hamish