Community members and friends!
Today we’d like to show you some of the technical innovations that will be introduced with the Liberation DLC, and how we intend to implement these.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2447590/Call_to_Arms__Gates_of_Hell_Liberation/
Goal
Our goal with ‘Liberation’ is to bring up the visual standard and the immersion of the game to new heights, so that the game will be able to stand the test of time. This way, we can work on the game for many years to come without it losing visual competitiveness. It also means we can work on third and first person modes and make the game’s graphics live up to modern expectations while playing from such a zoomed in perspective.
Full destructibility
Over a year ago, we began upgrading the buildings in the game to be more destructible, and all the buildings in ‘Talvisota’ were released with full destructibility. Now, with the increased manpower and experience which our team possesses, we have made every building in ‘Liberation’ fully destructible as well - which is no easy feat, since there are over 50 buildings with dozens of sections each, and each of these takes weeks to set up properly with full destructibility.
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Obliterate the trees
That’s right, we made trees able to be obliterated to small pieces by large caliber hits. It’s been a long time coming, and we’ve had a lot of fun blowing things up. We also added other interactions with foliage. Trees can shed their leaves, or shake off the excess snow built up over time with a convincing blastwave. This will make the tree become bare and allow your units to see through the shrubbery, something which already happens when you burn down the vegetation. These additions will make the gameplay much more fun and diverse. We will implement these changes to the content of Liberation, and we plan to retrofit it to all the content of the game over time. This way, all players will benefit from these improvements.
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Hedgerows
Liberation also has destructible “bocage”, or hedgerows. These were a quintessential part of the fighting in Normandy, dictating where vehicles could and couldn’t go. This will be the case in Liberation as well! You will be able to demolish the hedgerows and provide your units with a way of opening them, when you are trying to cut through the dense Bocage. The USA is well suited for this role with its diverse weaponry and plentiful explosives.
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Pathfinding
While we're busy making those landscapes, we also allocate some of our valuable engineering resources to improve vehicle pathfinding.
Pathfinding is a highly complex system with many calculations and factors involved. As you may have noticed, we have already released some improvements to the pathfinding over the last two updates, however, the most important changes were still to be implemented. The overall areas of work include:
- Improved the pathing system so vehicles get stuck less often.
- Improved AI’s ability to perform turns on tracked vehicles (so they stop less to perform neutral turns, which means they have to accelerate to top speed again).
- Improved the pathfinding route calculation so the vehicles choose more straight paths to their destination.
- Refactoring to minimize the computation.
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Winter
We have yet to post any pictures showing the new winter landscapes in Liberation. Let’s make up for that!. We hope you enjoy the new visuals and the level of detail that comes with it. Check out these landscapes:
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What do you think of these landscapes? Let us know in the comments!
in the meantime; have you seen the sale? Tell all your friends that the Steam Strategy Fest offers up to 75% discount - the perfect moment to get them started on any of our DLCs!
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/15824/Call_to_Arms_Gates_of_Hell__Ostfront/
Did you know?
- Our trailers show you in- game footage only, no Hollywood style post-production effort required.
- “Liberation” is about much more than Normandy or D-Day. The SP campaigns will take you through France, Belgium and Germany
- We have always planned to develop more factions, to be done one at a time. We’re not nearly done developing, and our roadmap reflects that
- Developing a new faction takes between 12 and 18 months, partly because we produce each and every one of our own sounds, assets, models, maps and weapons and everything else, requiring a lot of source material for each individual item. Working through it carefully and being in control of the full workflow is the only way we can achieve the quality we are after, and we do not recycle assets from previous games.
- Gates of Hell has quite a learning curve. Coming from other games, you really want to watch a few tutorial videos.
That’s it for now, thanks for your time and see you on the battlefield!
