I'm just back from London where we had a press event and some of my teammates tagged along as you can see. While this took precious time from our development it's necessary to spread the word so we sent the most useless person (me) and kept the professionals caged in home at work.
This meant that we didn't have a lot of news for you lately so we'll go over some general things, including me catching up on emails from the professionals on things which I'll give you example quotes from.
What is next for Early Access?
Our next update will be a full patch, not a hotfix. We have so many changes, fixes and new things integrated into the Early Access it is now practically impossible to cherrypick a single thing. This is both awesome and not so awesome. We have some serious improvements we'd like to get out right now but can't.
The awesome is, we have some serious improvements coming out. Let me quote one of my esteemed colleague:
Multithreaded renderer enabled. P4 CL : 219081 UnrealEngine SHA : ed24c3e241437b84d389a09d73c2dd222c67f19b This will increase the performance on PC Draw thread. In fact, is it an awesome gain.
Apparently, this is supposed to make a lot of people happy, especially on low-end multi-core machines.
WH-16037 Scoreboard optimizations Not sure how much better it will be on PS4 (will ask Philippe to monitor it) but it removed the spikes on PC.
Sounds nice and shows how a fix on PS4 affects PC so although I'm a fan of spikes, this one can go to hell.
Install size wise: Huge mesh has been reduced Rendering wise: a. big mesh with lots of instances has been reduced (both mesh and collision) b. LOD distance threshold has been set more aggressively (by spotting the biggest offenders in order) c. Simplygon pass has been made so a massive amount of mesh that wasn’t simplygonized are now fixed 3. Level designers added volumes that determine the playable area so Ivan will be able to use it for PhyX optimisation.
So many things! And these are just 3 checkins of over hundreds! Yay!
That being said, we have multiple teams - or pipelines - working on different segments of the game, some not even deployed yet to EA, and most will be delivering interesting stuff. A brief overview:
- Lots of cool things!
- More things!
- More Wargear!
- More Advancements!
- More Weapons!
- More Optimizations!
- More Optimizations to the optimizations that didn't work!
- More maps, older ones even optimized!
- Hopefully ... wait for it ... weapon mods! (can't remotely promise this one)
- More massive balancing!
- More fixing of matchmaking to prevent empty or low pop servers!
- More listed in a bulleted list!
- More fixes than can fit in this text field Steam provides (8000 characters max)
- More beard on our weekly Twitch!
So what's missing from this list? Well it's pretty obvious.
Orks.
Tyranid PVE.
These will be showing up on the UAT (Founders) server shortly as those two teams are on overdrive.
So rest assured that we most certainly are not resting assured nor do we take your happiness with the Eternal Crusade granted. That's why on this beautiful Saturday after Canada day are working. I mean, with teammates like in the picture above, who really needs encouragement to try the best we can?
Thank you all for staying with us and stay tuned to when when we have a target release week for the next patch.
Nathan "Beardy" Richardsson
Senior Producer and apparently not so tall
Warhammer 40,000 - Eternal Crusade