Dear Mechanics,
Welcome to our one hundred and third development status update.
We continue following the roadmap! Please meet new friends in our TMS family - Little Willie and Vickers E Type B!
Here is some information about these vehicles:
Little Willie
Little Willie was the first fully completed prototype tank in the world. It was constructed in 1915 by the Landship Committee. The only model ever produced is currently situated in the collection of The Tank Museum in Bovington, England. This machine was propelled by the means of a 13 liter, 105 horsepower Daimler-Knight engine. It was supposed to be fitted with a 40mm Vickers 2-pounder in a non-routable turret, but the idea was later scratched. Most mechanical have been adapted from the Foster-Daimler heavy artillery tractor.
Despite having the legendary reputation as the first completed tank, the design was horrendous. Little Willie could barely reach 2 miles per hour, the engine was overheating, cooking the crew alive and the tank couldn't do the only thing it was designed for - cross trenches. But all in all, if not Willie's flaws, today's tanks might not look like they do now.
Vickers E Type B
The Vickers Mark E, also called Vickers 6-Ton Tank was a British light tank. It was designed as a private project in 1928 by the company in its name, Vickers. The tank was not purchased by the British army, but it was very widely sold to foreign nations. Some of them even licensed it, such as the Soviet T-26 or Polish 7TP.
The tank was powered by a modified version of the Armstron-Siddeley Puma engine, producing 80-95 horsepower (depending on the versions) and that gave it an approximate speed of 35km/h on road.
The suspension was pretty simple; two axles, each of them carried a two-wheeled bogie, everything sprung by leaf springs. Performance was not comparable to Christie suspension, but it was deemed enough, with a lifetime of 4,800 kilometers.
Armament depended on the version: Type A had two turrets, both mounting the Vickers Machine Gun, and the Type B sported a single turret, housing a short-barreled 47mm OQF 3-pounder and a single machine gun.
The reason for the tank not being implemented to the British Forces was the questionable suspension reliability. The tests in Poland also proved that the Puma engine tended to overheat excessively, being cooled only by air. Finnish tests proved disastrous - 6 out of 13 were in working order, one was unable to cross a trench and forced to stop, then met Soviet tanks. They managed to knock out 3 of them but soon were wiped out.
All in all, the design was lacking, but revolutionary nonetheless. The two-man turret proved to be a superb design, increasing the fire rate tremendously, of both the main gun and the machine gun.
And now about the upcoming patch itself, what are the biggest upcoming changes:
Metal Objects
The good news for modders - Metal Object Creator Modding Tool is almost done. It works in the following workflow:
- Prepare collectible in FBX/OBJ file;
- Install free Unity 2018.4.34, create a new project;
- Import package MetalObjectCreatorPackage in Unity (package will be shipped together with the new patch);
- Build mod (bundle files);
- Use SteamWorkshopUploader to upload mod (new version of SteamWorkshop64.exe tool will be shipped together with the new patch);
- Subscribe item, run game.
- Enter to extraction mission, and you will have a chance to find a new metal object :)
Clouds/void when launching game
We have changed the way we handle the game assets/files. Previously we rebuilt the files each time we have made changes to them (files include tank models/configs etc.) - this caused Steam to sometimes not detect that it has to download a new file, but tried to load an old file that was no more available, and players spawned in the air after pressing Start Game button in Main Menu.
Now we will use other settings when managing game files - the process will be as follows:
- We again need to, just one time, rebuild the game files with different settings
- Upload it to steam (and again this bug might happen)
- After this, every hotfix/patch that would previously require a file rebuild will now be only be updated, so Steam won't have to download new files in place of old ones, instead the game will just update old files - this is the place where we want to check if this could solve this issue - not making Steam download completely new set of files, but instead just updating the same ones
Other than that, we have a lot of reports still to process to fix the bugs, this will be our focus for next week to fix whatever we can. We want to tackle two problems before launching this patch next week on 30.04.2021, welded holes reappearing and picking up ammo from tanks causes each time the game to save its state and for some people, this means serious waiting times.
In may this focus will be the same time and operation time when a player buys/sells/repairs parts through the shop/crafting/storage menu.
Thanks for all the support and have a good weekend.
DeGenerals
