Hi all,
Happy to announce that the experimental build is stable enough to move back to the stable branch.
For those who haven't been keeping up with development these past 5 months, here's a changelog for everything added and changed:
Major Features
Additions
- The last saved vehicle is now loaded when entering the designer.
- Track segments and spare wheels are now affected by grime level.
- Persistent track trails. (Performance intensive, toggled with the 'Track trail effects' option).
- Parts and turrets now have a chance to fly off the vehicle when ammo racks detonate. The turret will need a certain amount of force, so this will be more common in vehicles with more ammo stored.
- Added suspension test bumps to sandbox flat.
- Nvidia DLSS now possible, this can give an enormous performance boost. Limited to the most performant setting as higher quality settings were conflicting with another process.
- Added minimum graphics preset, designed to be the bare minimum graphics possible.
- Screen space reflections are now possible.
- Added maximum graphics preset, with screen space reflections, more accurate ambient occlusion and soft shadow filtering.
- Min and max cannon rotation limits now displayed as text at the end of the range of motion visualizations.
- Attempting to load a blueprint from a version above the current now requires a confirmation. Only works on newly saved blueprints.
- Loader now has a position in the damage model. They're located just behind the cannon they're loading.
- Armour view now displays the true effective thickness of armour, taking angle into account. The previous effective thickness is displayed as line of sight thickness.
- You can now recess the cannon into its compartment, to sacrifice internal space and depression for cannon balance. This is an alternative to counterweights where you sacrifice mass.
- Parts can now be moved according to their rotation. The global space toggle now replaces the overlay toggle in the bottom left (this is now done via the UI toggle).
- Added camera shake to ground and tree collisions.
- The tracks will now become see-through when editing the hull compartment.
- The compartment below your turret and tracks will become see-through when editing a turret's ammo racks.
- Editing a compartment's racks will make attached turrets see-through and highlight their turret baskets in red to help you avoid them.
UI Additions
- Added team member balance indicator, to show how the battle is going more clearly.
- Can now sort by fields on selection panel. e.g. Sorting vehicle blueprints from highest mass to lowest.
- Added search bar to selection panel.
- Added a button on the designer GUI to select the faction to load designs from. It's next to the reset design button.
- Can now change pages in selection panel using the arrow keys.
- Added entrance animation to health icons of newly damaged vehicle modules. This grabs your attention a little better.
- Damage delt to vehicle internals by the player is now logged.
- More information on the player's penetrations/ricochets/non-penetrations is now logged.
- Added main menu link to the, now official, Sprocket subreddit (I lurk).
- Added arrows to dropdowns to cycle through options.
16 New Parts
- Bed rolls
- Tarp
- Pz 38t cupola
- T34-76 Mantlet
- Matilda II cupola
- Renault FT17 cupola
- Churchill VII Fender (front & middle)
- Hetzer exhaust
- Strv M/42 sprocket wheel
- Handle bar
- Square hooks
- 3 new crane hooks (square, triangular and a triangle with a hole).
- Pz II Mantlet
Designer Changes
- Turrets are now required to be connected to the vehicle (this can be disabled by the "Place Anywhere" cheat in general settings). This can show seemingly incorrectly on some outdated designs, due to a large face being present between the upper and lower hull, remove that and it should work.
- Load screen now active until the designer and initial vehicle is fully loaded.
- Lowered design platform on flat sandbox map.
- Internal component visualizations no longer visible outside of the vehicle. Avoids confusion on whether they'll be hit or not if they're partially outside of the vehicle.
- Decal designer no longer allows parts other than decals to be selected/detached.
- The shell length slider now describes the propellant length of the shell, with the projectile length fixed to 3 calibers long. Old blueprints will have their propellant length values adjusted to be the same size, though the projectile length has to change size.
- Generated engine presets now have target RPM values set appropriately.
Gameplay Changes
- Design selection approach changed for scenario AI teams. It now selects random units from certain eras within a mass range. You might find ALLEN on dunes now.
- Allied vehicles in scenarios now use the weathering settings set in the blueprint.
- Made track traction more realistic. It's no longer applied as torque to the roadwheels, which pulls their suspension, which pulls the vehicle. Instead, it's applied directly to the vehicle as a force at the roadwheel's contact point with the ground. This is plays much nicer with the physics engine and is closer to the blanket of force provided by real track belts.
- Moved ramps on flat sandbox map.
- Third person aiming now detects vehicles. The cannon will aim at the point on the vehicle under the crosshair - instead of where the crosshair is pointing at on the ground.
- Sprocket/idler traction now takes more power from the roadwheels when in contact with the ground. Increasing sprocket/idler traction.
- Overhauled tree falling animations and interaction, it's less silly and more predictable now.
- Trees now need certain amounts of force to run over. Heavier tanks will find it easier, though lighter tanks work too if you hurl yourself at it fast enough.
- Adjusted tree density for most levels, making use of the fact that smaller trees are now fun to drive over.
- Shells can now go through trees, knocking them over in the process.
- Transmissions now have locations in the damage model, meaning penetrating at/between the sprockets will damage them (the location depends on the steering system).
- Settings are no longer synced across devices via the Steam cloud.
- Muzzle velocity, shell penetration and shell mass formulae made much more realistic with help from Page, one of the community experts. Raises the penetration of cannons significantly, while simulating the rapid loss of penetration the steeper the angle. These are also necessary changes for the shell designer.
- Increased laying drive top speeds.
- Lowered shell drag.
- Significantly increased suspension strength. This only changes the physics, you wont see a change in the suspension design tab.
- The engine's target RPM range can no longer go above the engine's safe RPM range.
- Made barrel explosions less silly.
Scenario Iterations
- No Tank's Land - Now with more mud.
- Railway - Now with trees. Major changes to verticality around the edges of the map, no changes to the centre.
- Fields - Increased verticality and larger rocks.
- Ambush - Background mountains.
- Silent Border - AT gun engagement polish. Removed need to get to a position. The superheavy now starts crawling towards you once combat starts.
- Dunes - Full overhaul of terrain.
- Taiga - Now with more snow. Overall more interesting terrain textures. Minor tweaks to verticality and cover.
UI Changes
- Crosshair moved closer to the top of the screen. Results in less screen space used for the sky and more for looking at your beautiful tank. This might take some getting used to.
- Crosshair no longer affected by camera smoothing or shake. This naturally makes it move position on your screen. If you don't like it then it can be locked in-place via the 'Static crosshair' gameplay setting.
- Reworked armour view sample display formatting.
- Expanding the '+' dropdown under cannon design now increases precision of cannon output displays.
- Sliders now snap to their nearest step, instead of moving smoothly - then rounding to the nearest step.
- Overhauled dropdowns to improve UX and reduce clunk. Notably changed the mouse press and release handling, allowing things like click-drag-release to expand and select an option quickly.
- Removed descriptions for anti aliasing options.
- Changed a twin transmission downside description from "Functions poorly with a small number of gears" to "Functions poorly with a small gear range".
- Ammo storage display now shows how much longer the current rack takes to load than the fastest rack in the vehicle.
- Kill log now highlights the player name.
- Vehicle crosshair now becomes a dot when your vehicle is destroyed.
- Increased contrast of log messages.
- Reload timer now disappears when your vehicle has no weapons and when your vehicle stops functioning.
- Designer overlays, game version and FPS counter are all now enabled/disabled when showing/hiding the GUI.
- Blueprint preview images now fade out around the edges, instead of cutting off.
- Made vehicle position consistent in preview images across different vehicles, they should all sit on the bottom of the image now. (Only for newly generated previews)
- Moved vehicle module health to bottom centre of screen, to allow the ammo storage display to go further to the left of the screen.
- Main gun load progress is now shown on the crosshair, instead of with a timer beside the crosshair.
Graphical Changes
- Made shell tracer size match their caliber better.
- Reworked exhaust visual effect.
- Decals now visible from further away.
- Reworked most terrains using new shaders. Allows things like visible wind, height-mapping, texture repetition reduction and deformable tracks.
- Adjusted weathering grime textures and rendering technique. Resolution improved and it now looks like it adds bumps on the surface.
- Tweaked vehicle shader to make paint scratches have a slight dip, affecting lighting.
- Adjusted paint texture mapping. It should be much less distorted on side vertical faces, though it's still far from perfect.
- Reworked textures of the square engine vent and the German commander cupola.
- Shell marks no longer disabled on destroyed vehicles.
- Automated vehicle part icon creation. Updated all part icons.
- Edges of part selection icons are now faded out.
- Exhaust visual effect darkness now changes with cylinder displacement and engine technology.
- Exhaust volume now scales with total engine volume divided by the number of exhausts.
- Overhauled almost all explosion/flame visual effects in the game.
- Muzzle flash visual effects now scale linearly with caliber, instead of having separate effects for light, medium and heavy calibers.
Audio Changes
- An iteration on all GUI SFX in the game.
- Audio no longer completely muted when the game is paused.
- Battle music on Silent Border isn't played until the superheavy appears.
- Cannon fires now have a slight random pitch variation, to reduce repetition.
- Audio now supports more sound effects playing simultaneously, and is more responsive to effects playing in quick succession (e.g. slider changes).
- Cannon elevation motor now also has sound when moving, instead of only when accelerating.
Camera Changes
- Camera tracking smoothing now only affects the vertical axis.
- Changed camera smoothing technique, removing the drag behind the vehicle.
- As you move the camera closer to your tank, the camera pivot gradually moves from above the centre of the fighting compartment to above the commander cupola. The camera won't pivot to the cupola if a) The cupola is mounted on the hull and you have a turret. b) Your turret is rotated past a certain angle from the vertical.
- Can now zoom to 0 distance from the camera pivot, resulting in a first person perspective.
- Gameplay camera orbit is now squashed vertically, lowering the max and min height of the camera. This typically makes your tank take up more of the bottom of the screen. This can be adjusted in the camera settings.
- Removed engine redlining camera shake.
- Disabled camera clip prevention for trees.
Notable Fixes
- Reworked camera movement to remove a cap on gameplay camera movement refresh rate. This will appear like the game is running at a much higher FPS.
Notable Optimizations
- Enabled texture streaming. Allowing significant decreases in video memory usage of far away vehicles.
- Removed heat distortion and sparks from far away visual effects. Should help performance when the field is littered with smouldering tanks.
Full Rewrites
Making future additions faster and more stable. These ones included preparations for mod support.
- Vehicle assembly (designer to gameplay transition, as well as spawning vehicles from blueprints).
- Vehicle structure (making mobility, crew, effects and health work together).
I admittedly got carried away with this experimental - keeping an eye on that next time.
A few features coming in the major update intermission, before I start on Geometric internals.
Starting with configurable brakes.
- Hamish