Welcome back to another installment of Verdun’s “Weapon Wednesday”, we use these media updates to tease upcoming content and provide you with an update on the overall state of the games development.
Stielhandgranate M1917 + Geballte Ladung M1917 6x / 9x
Earlier during the war both French and Germans experimented with explosives tied to wooden sticks. The Germans actually took this concept and created the infamous “stielhandgranate” (stalk hand grenade) line of grenades. While the M1915 which is currently in-game has the simple string taped to the stick, the M1917 model (5.5 sec fuse) used a cap at the bottom of the stick to prevent both humidity from affecting the string and offering better safety (far more difficult to accidentally detonate). The cap had prongs lining the bottom of it to allow for better grip in the muddy trenches.
We have also decided to include 2 “geballte” ladung (concentrated charges), effectively an improvised explosive made by the Germans out of several of the m1917 stick grenades. It was used nearer the end of the war to counter allied tanks. The main disadvantage with these bundled grenades was they could only really be thrown short distances (due to obvious weight issues) and this makes for a far riskier task for the grenadier getting within range of target.
Ingame the updated stielhandgranate and “geballte ladung”s will be in the hands of the German Pionier units. With extra explosive power to deal with enemy strong points. More information about the new units will follow in later installments.
Game update status status
Again our efforts to deal with performance spike issues continues. We have found some issues with the way character art is being loaded from the disk resulting in massive stuttering. To deal with this we are building a new system to render the characters, however there are some engine limitations with this so we are forced to find a work around. As you may have guessed, that does means a slight delay in the performance updates. We expect a performance patch to be able to go live before the weekend if everything works out with the new engine update and loading system. In addition we hope to have dealt with the hike in performance and some bugs related to invincibility as well. The update should also tackle the issue where people are experiencing crashing when loading levels.
For those who didn’t notice, during the halloween sale, rats overran the main menu! This was only visible during the 30th and 31st of October 2015.:
You might consider it a little teaser for the gore update which will in time allow us to create much grittier maps
Game Development Status
Tests last week with the upcoming Fort Douaumont map proved that A) The map is awesome and B) has several issues that need to be resolved. Most importantly we had errors with the way the fort was being rendered, we’ve been exploring fixes for this. Secondly we had to change the way the capturable sectors were ordered. The scenario for Fort Douaumont is the French Assault on the fort on the 22nd of May, 1916. In this assault the French succeeded in capturing some locations on the site. They were violently repelled. In light with this, and gameplay mechanics (fighting down the long hallway proofed a challenge). We decided to change the sectors as to better reflect the fighting and concentrate the battles more around the western side of the fort.
An impression of the massive scale of Douaumont (In-game)
On the weapon front things are advancing well asol, we hope to have finished animating most existing firearms by the this week and then new set in the coming week, ready for trials. One of the latest additions is the hard hitting Reichsrevolver, which due to it’s difficult reload and single action mechanism will certainly be a weapon for the veterans!
Work in progress M1883 reichsrevolver reloading loop
Screenshot of the Week
A British soldier falls victim to poison gas at the Battle of Loos, Artois
That will be all for this week. Tune in next week for more!