Greetings!
We are super excited to finally be able to talk and show you what we have been up to since the start of the year, our big focus after the Armour Overhaul late last year has been on reaching 100 players and improving performance as well as stability with the game. To that end, we decided to push forward our Engine Upgrade plans and as such we have spent the last few months upgrading Unreal Engine to the latest version.
With the latest version of Unreal Engine, we had the capability to explore and make use of new technology.
Since Mercury Arts released the first Third-Party Content for Post Scriptum in January with their new Maleme map, since then focus for Mercury Arts has been to bugfix and improve upon their release as well as their next phase of content.
Unreal Engine 4.27 Upgrade
Since we released the Armour Overhaul last year, we made the decision to push for testing of 100 player capability, testing showed us that in order to reach the numbers we want, an engine upgrade was likely required and as such, we made the decision to push forward the upgrade and started working on this not long after the Armoured update released.
Unlike the last time we upgraded our engine we decided to not commit to an OWI Core upgrade as this would save us a lot of time on the upgrade. At the beginning of February, we began internal testing with our Community QA team with regular testing involving our Community Testing team.
Graphical Improvements
One aspect of the engine upgrade was that it gives us some native improvements graphically, one such aspect is the visual one, with Unreal Engine 4.27 we have new and improved lighting, as you navigate the fields, forests and cities, you’ll notice that lighting is much warmer, brighter and lifelike, something we hope will be received well amongst our players.
In addition, we have made significant improvements in how objects such as houses, trees and various foliage are rendered for the game, while we don’t expect to see huge improvements in performance this helps us bring the performance closer to where we would like it to be.
There are many more changes that we are looking into for the visual aspect of the game and how it performs and as we move forward we’ll be exploring and implementing these where it makes sense.
Improved Spawn Menu
The Spawn Menu is a vital tool for all players regardless of roles and function. Over the years we have made some changes to our spawn menu in order to streamline it and make the experience better, we spent a lot of time reading and discussing player feedback and suggestions, with the many changes already being made to the game in various ways thanks to our community, it would only make sense for us to see where we can improve the interaction with the spawn menu.
We identified a few key areas that we wanted to improve upon
- The number of pages players have to navigate in order to select roles, kits and teams.
- Better streamlined experience to ensure that going from Joining a team to selecting a kit, a role and a place to spawn is set up in a more intuitive way for players.
- Rework various items that aren’t on the spawn menu, or take up unnecessary space.
To address these we started out by outlining that going from joining a server to spawning should consist of no more than 2 pages, to achieve this we merged the Section and Loadout pages into one seamless page.
We also made the requirement for the map, section & kit selection as well as role information to be displayed in such a way that it's more intuitive to switch from one column to another.
We then looked at any items on the spawn menu that were not necessary or were missing from the players and we realised that players have no intuitive way to respawn when necessary, this is especially true for new players who aren’t familiar with the command line and the respawn command.
We have now added the ability to respawn directly from the spawn menu when you are spawned in, this also gives you a warning that respawning comes at a cost in tickets and spawn time. It is still possible to respawn using a command, but we encourage players to make use of the new respawn button as eventually the command could be removed.
The biggest one for us was the spawn list which would show you the spawns on a list rather than making use of the map, we decided to remove this feature as it really only doubled as a way to spawn and most players make use of the map when deciding where to spawn in.
We also learned that most players prefer to have the largest map possible so that navigating and placing markers is easy. Because of the new layout, the map was made smaller in the overall UI and this was something that we very quickly learned was offputting, to counter this we made it so that when players hover over the map, it will now scale up over the rest of the spawn menu, allowing you to make better use of the map. This we call “Dynamic Map Scaling” and it can be turned on or off based on player preferences from the game settings.
The chat was another point in which we saw a lot of unnecessary space being taken up, the chat is something players rarely use on the spawn menu itself, but we couldn’t remove it instead we now allow players to collapse and uncollapse the chat, by default its collapsed and only displays the last message from the chat.
Nvidia DLSS Implementation
With Unreal Engine 4.27, we had the chance to experiment with the implementation of brand new tech that has changed how we play video games quite heavily, one such technology is Nvidia DLSS.
Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an AI-based technology developed by Nvidia to improve performance using Tensor cores on their special hardware, particularly the RTX series of graphics cards. DLSS uses AI deep learning neural networks to upscale images from lower resolutions to higher resolution using the AI Tensor cores available on their RTX series of graphics cards. The performance improvements come at virtually no cost to visual fidelity.
With 4.27 Post Scriptum will also feature the ability for players with RTX graphics cards to make use of DLSS to improve their performance in the game. Players can expect to see as big as a 50% performance boost to their game performance using DLSS.
Nvidia NIS Implementation
Because DLSS requires an RTX series card from Nvidia there is a limit to who can make use of this technology, but Nvidia recently released NIS (Nvidia Image Scaling) which uses the same principles of upscaling lower-resolution images to achieve better performance.
NIS is essentially Nvidia's version of AMD FSR and it works in the same way and this means that it is not required to have a Nvidia graphics card as this technology works with cards from other manufacturers like AMD, Intel and so on.
Unlike DLSS, NIS does not make use of any AI deep learning or neural network to upscale, but rather relies on an upscaling algorithm and sharpening to achieve a similar result.
Performance improvements here aren’t as high as they are using DLSS, but on the other hand, NIS is driver based and does not require any particular type of graphics cards, as such even older Nvidia or AMD series cards can make use of this feature.
Intel 10/11/12th Gen CPU Crash Fix.
With Unreal Engine 4.21, we had an issue in which 10th, 11th and 12th gen Intel CPUs were unable to start due to a bug in OpenSSH that Unreal Engine uses which caused a game crash on startup, we were unable to deploy a fix manually and had to resort to a temporary workaround in the form of “Safe Mode”, but with the new version of the engine this issue should be resolved.
Armour Overhaul APCR Changes
We are also currently working through all our APCR, HVAP and APDS shells to ensure they behave correctly, we were made aware that these shells have a tendency to penetrate extreme angles when they shouldn’t.
APCR, HVAP and APDS especially those deployed during WW2 had a tendency to ricochet off high impact angles, this wasn’t very well represented due to the curves that were initially created. We have gone through each and every one of these shells to ensure they behave more correctly to their real-life counterpart.
Public 4.27 Playtest Announcement
With all of those changes covered we are excited to announce a public playtest on the new 4.27 Engine version and all the improvements made. We want to ensure the game is stable and works for everyone, but also to give people a chance to see what is new, help give their feedback on what we have ready.
It’s also an opportunity for us to profile the server and bug hunt for issues that we can’t normally look for because it needs a full server. We might even try out 100 player capability again to see where we sit with server-side performance now that we have upgraded.
The public playtest will run on a special Beta branch that you can access starting March 13th @ 10 AM Pacific | 1 PM Eastern | 5 PM UTC until March 13th @ 3 PM Pacific | 6 PM Eastern | 10 PM UTC by following the small guide below:
NOTE: If you do not see the validation-branch yet, it has either not gone live yet, or you need to restart Steam.
HOW TO OPT INTO BETA BRANCHES
- Right-click Post Scriptum in your library.
- Press the “Properties” button and navigate to the “BETAS” tab.
- Select the dropdown and opt into “Validation-Branch”
Sincerely,
Periscope Games
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Roadmap 2021 / 2022
