In this release, we have added a submarine pen which you arrive in when you first start the game and return to between missions.
Inside the submarine pen is a blackboard on an easel which replaces the old user interface. You can either interact with the blackboard in VR using your tracked controllers or on the desktop using your mouse. It is now possible for players so join a game in progress. We have also improved robustness when handling players disconnects so that the UI will always inform players why a game has ended unexpectedly.
We have also added a wooden medal cabinet to the submarine pen which displays the medals acquired by everyone currently in your multiplayer session.
We have expanded the destroyer AI with some additional attack strategies to make it a more formidable opponent on the surface. The AI gun targeting has been improved to lead its targets more accurately.
The systems powering the blackboard are a significant addition for us as they provide the tools we need to create the complex user interactions required in an open world game. All users in the game can seamlessly interact with the same user interface at the same time. The system currently replicates the functionality in the previous user interface, however we can do a lot more with this going forward.
We have also been busy re-structuring the underlying systems that IronWolf is built upon to enable us to move away from the existing peer to peer networking architecture to an authoritative server architecture that will ultimately power the multiplayer open world and player vs player interactions.
Due to the significant number of changes, we are releasing this build as a beta so we can iron out any issues before releasing to everyone. You can opt-in to the beta using the normal methods on Steam.
Next we’ll be working on adding some more variety to the level environments with a weather system and night time missions.