Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-second devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of May 2022.
We are still currently having many internal discussions about our roadmap towards early access release, and the list that I included in the introduction to last month’s devblog is still highly relevant to the plans that we are discussing right now. At the moment, we are looking at this list, and starting to plan/prepare for how we will tackle these tasks (and in what order), and we are writing design documents so that the team knows how to approach the features that will need to be created.
Over the course of the next few months most of the work that we will be doing will be highly technical and mostly involve the programmers, so we might not have much in the way of content to show off in the near future (although rest assured there is still content being actively produced, just not at the rate that we once had). That being said, the items on this list are going to be critical towards making sure that when we do pivot back into ramping up and producing more content, the entire game’s foundation will be much more robust/solid, which will in turn only further enhance the experience overall.
Our main goal at this stage of development is to ensure that when we do go to early access, we will have a solid, infantry-based foundation with decent gameplay loops, and good support for server infrastructure and modding. It is very important to us that the community will have a quality release experience that isn’t riddled with game breaking bugs, server issues, or a lack of tools and systems to begin creating the experiences that they want to see. If we are successful in achieving this, we believe that any of the work that we do beyond this point (and, in turn, that modders have the potential to do) will have a compounding effect, and the value that will be returned to the game and to the community will be more significant and enjoyable overall.
On to the recap of work completed in May:
Expansions
Operation: Overlord
The WW2 US and German factions are currently being remade for Operation: Overlord so that they will be more appropriate for the battles that we plan on including in this expansion (namely those that occurred in Normandy):
1st Infantry Division (US) and Wehrmacht (Germany) WIP models
Maps
Tan Binh
Work on the first official map for Operation: Rolling Stone began. This map is meant to depict the hamlet of Tan Binh, which is located in the center of the Binh Duong Province of Vietnam, and will contain vast rice fields, thick jungle, hills with tunnels, scattered villages, and a small airfield to fight over.
Currently, Tan Binh is in a blockout phase where the level design team is focusing on shaping the terrain, and figuring out placement of buildings, key POIs, and so on:
Tan Binh will be a 2x2km 0LZQY map.
Omaha Beach
More blockout work on Omaha Beach was completed:
Argonne
Argonne received some new foliage and trees, and ramps were added throughout the trench networks to make it easier to get in and out:
Animations
The new and reworked third person character animations are now implemented into the Test Environment branch of the game, and should be in the next update. As mentioned in the last devblog, we are now utilizing Lyra’s shooter template blendspace animations in combination with our own in-house animations.
One thing to note with these new animations is that they mainly affect the lower body right now, and not the upper body. Upper body animations are a bit more complicated, as we need to factor in all of the weapons and gear that can be held in the hands, which can vary quite drastically due to the amount of variety we will need to account for. We are aware that at the moment these will look KJ08Z a bit strange due to how the upper body is positioned (I always thought it looked like they are sitting back in a chair on some occasions), however, the lower body movements should be a noticeable improvement over what is currently in game.
Upcoming and WIP Features
Vaulting and Mantling
The blockout animations for vaulting that were shown in the last devblog received more improvements and polish, and were brought into the SDK for further prototyping using our own models:
As mentioned in the last devblog, our goal with this system is to allow for the following types of vaulting/mantling scenarios: vaulting/mantling over/onto objects from an idle position, and vaulting/mantling over/onto objects from a sprint. Whether you vault or mantle will be determined by object height, and whether you should go over or up onto something will be determined by the object itself (i.e. is it a thin fence, or a shipping container). These blockout animations should be a fairly good demonstration of what we are hoping to achieve with this system in the future.
Bots/AI
The AI programmer has made some fairly significant updates to the bots/AI in the past month. Soon, bots in a squad will move together as a unit, and if one member (or more) is falling behind, the group will actually wait for them to catch up (but they will not wait forever). In addition, if/when a squad leader is killed, the squad will now fall back and regroup at a location close to their last spawning flag in order to reconnect with their squad leader. In the future, we will be enhancing this system to include “combat effectiveness” for squads, i.e. if 50% or more of a squad is killed, the squad will break contact and seek to regroup somewhere around the last spawn point (like they would for their squad leader) so that they can return to the fight in full force. Bot squads that are defending a flag will also now patrol around the flag capture zone, so that they aren’t just stationary/not moving the entire time.
The AI programmer is also working on making it possible for players to now take on the squad leader role and have an AI squad follow them around wherever they go on the map:
https://youtu.be/goTrbQNkL54
https://youtu.be/dFh6HPiXc7o
Last but not least, for modders, most (if not all) of the relevant parameters will be exposed to blueprints, as they usually are (including the ability to set their formations).
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That’s it for Z6M5A this month! If you have gotten this far, thank you for reading, and enjoy the key!
Make sure to join the O:HD Discord, and be sure to follow our Steam announcements to track updates. See you all next time!
-Goomes, Lead Community Manager