Hello and welcome to the Thirty-eighth Field Report!
Today we’re pleased to be releasing the next major update of War of Rights. The update brings the alpha up to the newest version of CRYENGINE (5.4) and introduces a number of bug fixes as well as backend improvements to various tools we use when developing the game.
An engine upgrade is not a small matter – everything from animations, sounds, networking, user interface, spawn points and more has been affected by it in some form or another. We therefore urge all of our alpha testers to use our bug report section of the forum at: http://www.warofrightsforum.com/forumdisplay.php?28-Alpha-Bug-Reports whenever you run into a new, undocumented bug as well as the error report tool at: https://warofrights.com/ErrorReporter whenever you crash.
While the initial release of the CRYENGINE 5.4 update may prove to have a number of issues we’re confident the engine upgrade will result in a much more stable game and thus bring us closer to a wider public release of the game. We look forward to be hearing your feedback of the update.
As always, the changes presented are all subject to be tweaked throughout the development of the game. Below are the patch notes for update 86.
- Introducing the 12th skirmish area of Antietam: Piper Farm. This skirmish area is inspired by the 7th Maine’s push past the bodies at the Bloody Lane, the Piper Cornfield and the apple orchard towards the farm buildings themselves, which had acted as headquarters for the Confederate Wing commander General Longstreet. At 1300 hours, whereas most of the fighting was taking place elsewhere on the battlefield, the brigade commander of the 7th Maine, Colonel Irwin, ordered the 7th alone to move forward against four Confederate brigades. The day after Antietam Irwin would be relieved of command while Major Hyde, the one which lead the attack, would be awarded the medal of honor in the 1890’s for his actions where an otherwise doomed regiment got out alive having lost 50 casualties of its 200-man regiment against the four confederate brigades defending Piper Farm.
- Updated double quick animations (with several slight variations) when carrying a rifle.
- Updated revolver aim, fire & moving while aiming animations.
- Updated moving with a sword while in melee mode.
- Trees and bushes have had an art pass with updated models, textures and billboards.
- All uniforms have had a specular material pass which will result in clearer colors, a dark union blue uniform is now more consistently dark blue for instance.
- Heavily reduced distance blur and used new anti-aliasing settings introduced in CRYENGINE 5.4. This change will drastically increase the overall sharpness of the game.
- Several updates to the freelook system now means you’re able to use it to much greater effect while, for instance, reloading. No more odd angles!
- Reduced the amount of time needed to go from at the ready to aiming by 0.5 seconds, resulting in faster aiming.
- Fixed facial hair LOD’s using the wrong material.
- Added several beech tree forested areas on the drill camp map.
- Updates to several ground textures.
- Added quartermaster wagon to the drill camps and a few other places.
- Updated environment probe and time of day settings slightly.
- Due to a newly introduced engine bug, we have had to replace the ghosting effect when low on stamina or suppressed with some other screen effects.
- Increased the defending team’s starting morale slightly on most skirmish areas.
- Removed “fort bush” from the Pry Ford skirmish capture area and heavily increased the defending team’s starting morale.
- Recompiled the shader library. Expect to run into some compiling shaders the first one or two updates after the deployment until the library is back to its former self.
- Fixed a crash related to a memory leak when viewing the player roster (TAB).
- Fixed a ton of potential crashes.
- Fixed the collision model on one of the broken fences that made it very difficult for players to get through.
- Improved the performance of the collision meshes on the trees.
- The servers are now able to startup much faster after a new update has been deployed.
- Whenever the servers auto restart or a new update has been deployed, the time of day now automatically gets set to 6 in the morning.
- Fixed a bug with the Union cavalry troops where if they had the sword equipped in melee mode and then switched back to the Sharps Carbine, they would be unable to get out of melee mode and fire their weapon.
- Friendly fire is now enabled for melee attacks.
- Improved revolver animations in first person.
Known issues
- The game will often not shut down as it should (this results in the game being at the "running" state on steam even though it's nowhere to be found. To fix this, open up the task manager and locate the game process running under the "details" tab.
- While leaving a server works it is currently not possible to join another server before you've restarted the game. Joining another server will result in being stuck in a loading screen.- Drill camps are currently not available. They will be so in the near future.
- Ambience audio areas are buggy - expect odd results every now and again.
- Several camera animations need work after the engine upgrade.
- Several decals throughout the game are buggy and will look off to you.
- Character eyes & hair shaders are at times buggy resulting in some bad visuals.
That’s all for today’s update - we look forward to be seeing you in-game during the holidays whenever you’ve eaten too much great food and feel like killing a virtual yankee or reb as a timeout.
A brief look back
2017 is drawing to a close and we’d therefore like to thank every single one of our backers (be they long timers or newcomers) for your support of helping War of Rights become a thing. The biggest event for us in 2017 by far was the release of Skirmishes back in late May. It brought actual combat and game mechanics into the game for the first time. We’ve been hard at work improving the alpha the entire year. Countless of bugs and server stability fixes, updated animations, new game systems, updated and expanded character models and going from the initial 3 skirmish areas released back in may to 12 today. Update 86 marks the 48th update in 2017 alone. We intend to continue keeping our update pace up in the next year.
A bit less than a year ago, on December 15th, 2016 we released a field report showcasing some of the areas you could expect to fight on in the soon to be released skirmishes. The two images below are a year apart – much has happened in War of Rights and will continue to do so thanks to your support!
2018 is going to be a very exciting year for the game and we can’t wait to share its ups (and downs) with all of you.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Campfire Games.