Dear Mechanics,
welcome to our ninety-ninth development status update.
This week we would like to present our plans for the 1.2.0 patch. We would like to show the list of all planned features, where we are currently and what is yet ahead of us.
Main plan
The main plan for this patch was to add the ability to use custom tanks and collectables through Steam Workshop, as well as adding new damage system, that will allow to make the extraction tanks have a real damage, repairable by player (but not required, player might leave the destruction and still repair the other part of the tank, if that is possible).
A list of main features, to have them clearly stated:
- Custom tanks
- Custom collectables
- Damage system
- Welder (to fix damage)
- Collectable shop
- Second tank on extraction
- Movable stairs
- Tank Warehouse (parking for tanks)
- Ammo in tanks
- Merging workshop and test-drive tank models
- All the new tanks shown in previous dev statuses
The mistake
When starting to work on the new stuff, after releasing last patch in June 2020, we've made a big mistake. We did not begin working on the new stuff on a separate branch of the project. Instead, we kept working on the production/standard main branch of the project repositorium, and the amount of work required to finish the patch caused to severly prolong the planned release date. It is November and we have yet lot of work ahead of us, instead of steadily sending out smaller patches, to bug fix the game, as you guys had reported us lot of times. It is my fault, by not thinking ahead, and now we are paying the price. We can only keep working on.
Where we are now
We have reworked how the game handles the tanks, instead of hardcoding everything, it now dynamicly loads tanks and collectables and ammo models from files, and actually can handle them.
Oonly thing left is to add the mechanic, to delete information about the tank/collectable when player unsubscribes from it from Steam Workshop, and the game needs to handle it correctly (like some of you suggested, just erase the information from the next save at all about that missing tank or collectable).
Also, we are working on allowing the player to enter the tank on extraction, and be able to pick up ammo from inside. When adding this logic I found it very hard to navigate inside the tank, when the player has taken a crew slot - so we want to add some ability to crouch/lean when player is inside the tank as crewman - we will see how this folds out.
When all this is done, we can start working on adding mechanics to fix the damages, and add the collectable shop.
When are we going to release the patch?
We think that most probable date is late January 2021 - after good testing (probably through the new Steam Testing tool, we will see if we can do it this way, or the standard way of sending the patch to the Unstable version).
And of course, there is the need of adding the new tanks, which are coming in from our artists. We will soon show them implemented in game, these will also require good testing.
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Thanks for all the support and have a good day,
DeGenerals