Update 169: Platform System - Released!

Hello everyone,

Today marks yet another major milestone in the development of War of Rights as the long awaited platform system is released as part of update 169!

Platform System

The platform system, having been in the works since January of 2018 is one of the biggest programming updates to the alpha we’ve ever done. It is bound to change how a lot of the game features function on the backend due to its complexity and thus bugs should be expected in this very first deployment of it on the live alpha branch.

Here to give you all a brief rundown on the details regarding what exactly the platform system is, why we’ve decided to spend the time required to create it, what today’s implementation of the initial platform system version brings to the alpha and what to expect coming from later additions going forward, is Philipp, one half of our programming team & creator of the platform system:

With the release of the platform system in its first iteration it's time to talk about its purpose again.

As mentioned in an earlier field report, the goal of the platform system is to replace the old system that handles all “social” and platform related functionality and allow us to expand functionality in that area as well as make it far easier to diagnose and fix problems.

At its core, the Platform System is a data driven collection and management system, built around the entity component system framework EnTT. This means it collects information from various sources, like steam, aggregates it, filters it and then has other subsystems operate on it depending on their needs. As a result, all sub-systems and “information” providers are completely disconnected from each other and can operate only on the data they need, or not at all if the required data combination is not available. Furthermore, data collection can be deferred so that systems only start using it when it's available, without blocking any work while waiting for it.

As with the old system, the networking functionalities provided by platforms like steam are also included in their own modules to facilitate direct connections between clients and servers.

For the user this replaces the back end to the current connection and matchmaking systems, so visually there will not be any changes for this release, but probably some improvement in responsiveness.

Since the matchmaking and connection handling is now completely separate from game systems, we were already able to identify the cause of some major issues that have eluded us for quite a while with just two public test sessions. One of them is the famous “mass booting” issue, which, as it turns out, was caused by the basic steam P2P system timing out a large number of users seemingly at random. This has now been replaced with a lower level system that also resulted in some connection speedups.

The intent for all this is to serve as a base for future features, like the integration of the company tool, and potential expansion into other platforms as well. For the near future I am planning to add in a few steam social features like friend/server joining and currently playing information which did not quite make it into this release. But with all the work that has been put into the platform system, this has become a far less complicated and much, much quicker task, which was the core of the problem in the first place.

Update 169 Patch Notes

Today’s update contains quite a bit of changes and additions (some are tied to the platform system’s introduction while others are not). Below is a complete list of what update 169 brings to the alpha.

- Implemented the first iteration of the platform system, resulting in added features such as better messaging to players when issues or unexpected things happen, possible fixes for long-lasting alpha major issues such as servers mass booting players and drastically increasing the rate at which we can locate and thus work on fixing bugs in the future.
- Added or updated the following battle flags in our continued effort to bring you the most beautiful & accurate battle flags in any game:

CSA

• 1st Virginia Infantry national

• 18th Virginia regimental
• 4th Alabama regimental
• 27th North Carolina national
• 3rd South Carolina national
• 17th South Carolina national

USA

• 1st Maryland regimental
• 20th Maine regimental
• 5th New York national
• 5th New York regimental
• 20th New York regimental
• 39th New York regimental
• 126th New York regimental
• 30th Ohio regimental
• 32nd Ohio regimental
• 4th Rhode Island regimental
• 1st Delaware national
• 1st Delaware regimental
• 51st Pennsylvania national
• 51st Pennsylvania regimental
• 72nd Pennsylvania national
• 9th Vermont national
• 9th Vermont regimental

- Added the 5th New York “Duryee’s Zouaves” Infantry regiment to the game, playable on the fictitious Pry House skirmish area.

Organized under the command of Col. Abram Duryee at Fort Schuyler at New York harbor in April of 1861, the regiment soon became renowned as the efficient and disciplined “Duryee’s Zouaves.” However, they would also quickly prove their mettle and coolness under fire over the course of their regiment’s brief career, including their first fight at Big Bethel in June, and in the Peninsula Campaign a year later. After several charges into Rebel lines, their ranks were already depleted by the time they met their foe again at Second Bull Run. Joined by the equally small 10th NY Zouaves, the 5th NY barely mustered 490 men when a Confederate division 30,000 strong under James Longstreet crashed against them. The Zouave lines were literally ripped to shreds by the Rebel volleys, leaving only 200 to stagger back. As such, the 5th NY was left in reserve for several months while the ranks were reestablished, while a final engagement at Chancellorsville heralded the end of their two-year enlistment, where several hundred reenlisted into the 146th NY Infantry.

- Added 10pdr Parrott rifled cannons and their matching limbers to various batteries throughout the game.

Robert Parrott of New Hampshire, who graduated third of his class with honors from the US Military Academy in 1824, was the inventor of the famous line of Parrott guns in 1860. The 10-lb Parrott Rifle was one of the most common rifled guns to be found on both sides, but was often shunned by artillerymen as being a gun prone to bursting. However, perhaps due to a low production cost compared to other guns, it could be found in many sizes, the largest being the 300-lb Parrott Siege Rifle used against Confederate held Fort Sumter in August of 1863. Parrotts continued to be used in coastal defense roles until phased out in 1900 with the Endicott Fort Reforms.

- Updated the 2nd & 6th Wisconsin uniforms to better portray the uniformity & discipline of the units during the Maryland Campaign of 1862.

- Added several worn Hardee hat models.
- Added a short-brimmed beehive hat model.
- Added a tin bullseye canteen model.
- Reduced the complexity of the setup of every first person animation resulting in slightly different looking first person animations in the game.
- Improved the hand poses when carrying a flag.
- Improved the hand poses when kneeling with a rifle.
- Added different animation variants of entering aiming with a musket.
- Improved the revolver first person recoil animation when firing.
- Updated the two-banded rifle reload animation.
- Updated the double quick animation when carrying an artillery round.
- Added a sword order arms emote (F6 by default).
- Added a sword parade rest emote (F7 by default).

- Made the union cannons & limbers on the River Crossing skirmish area vaultable in order to lessen the blocking strategy as seen often used at the area after the introduction of artillery.
- Fixed a game-breaking bug that would cause counter-attackers to not be able to spawn when they entered final push.
- Added the burned down Wager Hotel, replacing the placeholder model at River Crossing, Harpers Ferry.

- Updated the canal wall models on the Maryland Heights side of the Potomac, Harpers Ferry.
- Added shale roof as a variant to the townhouses of Harpers Ferry.
- Added a St. John's Church model, replacing the generic town house placeholder structure in Harpers Ferry.

- Made the options menu way more reliable by recreating its backend functionality from scratch.
- Improved the usability of the options menu, now featuring tooltips, instant changes to settings (no need to press save settings anymore) & several bug fixes.
- Added a fullscreen and borderless setting to the options menu as well as settings for screen space reflections and ambient occlusion.
- Overhauled the keybindings menu, now allowing the user to change keybindings of every single action in the game.
- Overhauled the in-game controls screen (activated by pressing F2) to display every single action in the game (scroll your mouse wheel to view the entire list).
- Updated the admin menu in order for it to work with the new platform system and generally make it easier to use (now with F3 as its new default activation key).
- Added varying heights to all the characters in the game, resulting in a more realistic look when in tight and large formations.

- Flags now won’t as quickly get dirty when dropped as they did before (the speed at which bullet holes are added has not been changed).
- Updated the small arms projectile impact particle effect on dirt and grass surfaces.
- Increased the max amount of dismembered body parts a player killed by an artillery round might turn into.
- Fixed the bug where players might spawn inside one of the bush models when spawning on the flag bearer.
- Increased the CSA starting morale amount on the Pry House skirmish area by roughly 10% as one in four enlisted men of the newly added 5th New York regiment will be issued with a Sharps rifle.
- Made the canister balls spread out a bit more when fired from the Napoleon cannon.
- Updated the cooking implements of the cook tents featured throughout the game.
- Various level detail work.
- Updated the setup of all of the flags of the drill camps to make them less rubbery and more predictable.
- Wall tents are now enterable.
- Fixed several NCO characters spawning without a weapon selected, requiring the player to spam 1 in order to get a weapon.
- Weapon selection when having several weapons no longer requires the user to cycle through them sequentially. Instead, key 1 will select the primary weapon, key 2 will select the secondary weapon and key 3 will select binoculars. Switching cartridge type on the Springfield M1842 has now been moved to key 5 as its default key.
- Fixed the third person microstutters when in at the ready or in the rifle club melee mode.
- Fixed a bug where the dynamic depth of field didn’t always calculate the proper distance to what you were looking at and thus sometimes blurred the image incorrectly.
- Fixed most occurrences of a bug where an artillery shell hitting a wooden surface, like the roof of a building, would spawn the brick impact effect instead of the wood effect.
- The amount of dark red tint added when wounded now scales based on the time of day, resulting in players not going blind when wounded at night.
- Added a popup warning that the user is going to be killed when enabling the spectator camera (sorry, no more “press F9 for a scoreboard/godmode/fully automatic musket” trolling!).
- Added a lock icon next to passworded servers in the serverbrowser.
- The correct loading screen should now be shown when you’re joining a server.
- Added a “Tutorials” entry to the main menu. Pressing this will open a website containing tutorial videos created by the community & Campfire Games alike which explain most of the current features of the alpha.
- The War of Rights error reporter found at: https://warofrights.com/errorreporter has been updated to support the platform system.

That’s all for now. We look forward to partaking in playtesting the patch with all of you as well as gathering your feedback, especially in regards to the platform system, in order to iron out the bugs almost certainly introduced in its initial implementation as well as to be utilizing the additional data provided by the system to help us improve the stability of the game on a quicker, continuous basis going forward.

See you on the fields of glory!