Hey everyone,
Welcome to Dev Brief #112!
This week we're doing our weekly post slightly earlier than usual to coincide with this morning's hotfix.
So, get ready for patch notes, an update on the current VoIP situation, a development state of play from Max and the opportunity to submit your hot topics for our upcoming community Q&A.
Oh and there's a little uniform reveal for our next faction...
Hotfix Notes
We’ve released a small hotfix to address some servers not being shown in the browser. As this was a low risk fix we are able to do this by itself and you should see more servers to choose from now in the browser!
VIVOX/VOIP
We’ve been in constant communication with our friends at Vivox and are working hard with them to establish the cause of the VOIP loss in game. While several issues have now been addressed in the back-end (specific server VOIP dropouts), we feel we are getting close to a fix for the disconnect/reconnect issue.
Community Q & A - Ask your burning question!
With the first roadmap of 2021 just around the corner we wanted to again give you a chance to ask that one burning question you may have. Although we won’t be able to answer them all, we will do our best to consolidate them and give you as detailed of an answer as possible at this current point of development.
Please fill out this form for your one burning question!
We look forward to going through your questions and sharing our answers with you soon.
Development State of Play: Quality of Life, New Content and Beyond
A Message From Max
Hi everyone,
As always, the team is working across a huge amount of quality of life fixes, bug fixes, crash fixes, optimisation, new content and planning into the future.
We thought we’d take some time to quickly address the hot topics currently in the community and let you know where we're at with them:
Tank MG Hit Registration
Currently the tank is using a cheap version of hitreg that initially was designed and suited to the pre-ballistics form of the MG (linetrace). It was designed to be as cheap as humanly possible, due to the then incredibly high volume of fire that tanks could put out.
The basic thought was that continuous saturation of fire was a quick way to degrade the tickrate of a server incredibly quickly - causing lagging, rubber banding etc. After adding the ballistics model to the tank MGs, we thought in testing that the old hit reg would continue to function as well as it always had. However, we've seen since the update that there are some very strange things occurring when different angles are reached from both the player capsule (the networked position of the player on the server) and the way the hit prediction works for the MG rounds fired from the tank.
We've tested several fixes for this and each one has introduced other weird effects, so the outcome we're going to push for is implementing the infantry hit reg solution (from the handheld firearms) onto the tank MGs. While this is certainly do-able, the time it takes to do this will mean a significant rework and re-test of all vehicle mounted MGs in the game. It's on our list for the next update, but isn't something we've been able to hotfix.
HE Shells
While we limited the total insta-gib range of the HE shell, we've noticed that there are several issues occurring where players are landing shells very close to the enemy (ie within the killzone) and they're walking away unscathed.
We've investigated ways to fix this, and have reworked a huge amount of the way we trace damage from an explosive source. In testing, we've seen that landing shells can sometimes have damage occluded from the blast by tiny portions of the landscape geometry and other small props. The damage then reflected outwards and wouldn't hit the area of the player that would trigger the damage. While we've made tons of changes and custom fixes to most explosives to negate this (satchels, grenades, arty), there are still complexities to add and refine - especially on our heavy weapons projectile weapon type.
As a result, we've re-written the way in which we trace damage for the heavy weapons, both making some aspects of it more expensive on the netcode, but we've also made efficiencies in other places too. As a result, there should be no more accurate shots failing to kill your target. Obviously though, this is something we'll continue to monitor after we roll this change out in U9.
Grass Issues
Since this was spoken about recently, we’ve optimised much of the engine code that handles this and are seeing significant improvements across the board. The engine now longer force-unloads the grass, and instead keeps it culled when the player dies which then allows us to bring it back in on spawn very quickly. We’re very excited to roll this out in Update 9.
Armor Issues
There are tons of these and each dependent on the vehicle, the player and the expectation of what should happen. We've got lots of detailed feedback across this from clans and the community more broadly, and we've broken each issue down into a bug to be worked through (and many already are). There are some easy ones to fix, and then there are some tough ones to fix. Physics are always exceedingly painful - especially when using them in a way that needs to be incredibly lightweight.
The main thing here is that we're working on aspects such as: manoeuvrability, hit boxes, damage effects, shell non-pen effects, weird hitbox issues causing single shot kills, bouncing/floaty physics, offset reticles etc. The list is really long and often the moment you tweak any aspect of the physics, lots of strange things happen. In any case, we're working through the feedback as efficiently as possible to get as many meaningful changes in for U9. We should also note that we’re still building out the base armor roster for the game - including bringing in the more unsung heroes like the Pz4 and Stug, alongside the stock Sherman variants.
Metagame
We’re currently looking across all feedback and have been thinking deeply about how we will adjust the metagame in order to better enable off-set attacks on Strong Points, without returning to the previous ninja Garrison metagame.
Optimisation
This is ongoing over the course of development as we work through a ton of issues and overhaul the fundamentals. Now that many of those overhauls are complete, we've been able to make some big leaps forward, with more to come. The weapon overhaul and grass changes have increased performance, as well as other optimisations.
Tutorial and Tips
These are key for us, but they've also been on the back burner while we work out what the actual meta and functionality of the base game is before we start creating tips (that would soon become outdated the moment we changed something). The need for this and good localisation is ever more apparent, and something that we're prioritising more and more.
Localisation
With the growth of several new communities, we’re introducing improved localisation for all languages (with updates to the now long out-of-date text currently in the game) and adding certain languages. This will include iterative updates to the in game Field Manual.
Thank you all for your continued support, feedback and patience. It really goes a long way! Now, we'd like to give you a first official look at a uniform from the Eastern Front...
Russian Summer Field Uniform 1940-1943
1. SH-40 (Steel helmet-40)
2. Summer field uniform 1940-1943
3. Tarpaulin boots
4. Universal ammo pouch
5. Mosin rifle ammo pouch
6. MPL-50 (small infantry spade-50)
7. Сable pouch
8. Small sapper ax
9. Sapper tool bag
10. Sidor (Duffel bag) with satchel charge.
That wraps up this week's Dev Brief!
We hope you like what you've read and seen today! The team are looking forward to going through your questions for our Community Q&A and we're keen to give you some answers, so if you've got something you'd like to ask us make sure to get it submitted!
Have a great weekend everyone.
See you on the frontline.