Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-fourth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of July 2022.
This will be another shorter/brief devblog this month, as we don’t have much in the way of new content to show off since the team has been heavily focused on improvements to bots/AI, as well as developing the vaulting and mantling framework. As we have outlined in devblog #21, almost all of our remaining tasks before early access are entirely programming based, so there won’t be an abundance of screenshots and so on that you all are used to seeing from our past devblogs. That being said, these updates and 0K6JA systems are going to be fundamental to enhancing and rounding out the overall gameplay experience that we hope to launch with, and will be critical to ensuring that the content that we do develop in the future (as well as modded content) is built on as solid of a framework as possible. We are still on track to complete this list with the exception of FOB/construction, which might not make it in before we actually go to early access, and as such might potentially become a post-early access task (although we will probably re-introduce the rallypoint system in the interim).
On to the work that was done in July:
Expansions
Operation: Overlord
The new character models for the 1st Infantry Division soldiers were completed:
Maps
Risala
One of our level designers started working on fleshing out interiors for the buildings in Risala:
in addition, he QRA7V worked on a new lighting preset:
Omaha Beach
The landscape for Omaha FZ968 Beach was redone:
Upcoming and WIP Features
Bots/AI
A lot of rather substantial improvements have been made to the bots/AI in the past month. To start, bots will no longer see 0K9LP players through foliage or smoke, which makes a huge difference to the pace of gameplay as players can now prioritize concealment options that they could not before (and makes foliage-heavy maps like Lam Dong actually playable with bots now).
Bots are now also much more efficient at how they actually see players, namely their specific body parts/regions:
Instead of looking at the center of character only (like they were before), they will now look at and prioritize the chest, head, feet, MXNIC and both shoulders (in that order). If they see a player’s chest, they won't look for the rest of potential target locations and will focus fire on the center mass of the player until they lose sight of the chest, and then they will readjust and check their prioritization accordingly based on what else they can actually see. This also takes into account and includes leaning.
In addition, some critical bug fixes to their movement were fixed that were causing them to get stuck and stop moving, and the way bots determine their target flag was updated to better distribute squads over available flags. These fixes will also pave the way for an update on how squads maneuver on and handle flag capture, conditions for how they regroup when they become combat ineffective, and so on.
Vaulting and Mantling
The first iteration of our vaulting and mantling system has now been implemented:
As you can see demonstrated above, it is now possible to vault over obstacles, as well as climb up onto things. In addition, it is possible to initiate these maneuvers from a sprint, which will actually change the speed and distance traveled, however, this is not fully implemented just yet. Mantling is also not currently implemented as we do not have animations made for it, however, it will be utilizing the same framework and A2P75 concepts, so that is something that we will be adding relatively soon as well.
UI Overhaul
The team also continued working on a revamp to the main menu UI:
The first image depicts roughly how the main menu will depict donator status, as well as ownership badges of the various WIP content expansions. The second image is what our new multiplayer server browser will look like, complete with filters, server listings and icons, and server descriptions. The third image is what our new options menu will look like. As you can see, we are essentially repurposing what the current singleplayer menu layout offers, as we feel this system works quite well and is rather easy to navigate and use while still being able to compartmentalize the various submenus and settings/options in a way that is intuitive and makes sense.
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That’s it for this month!
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