Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-eighth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of November 2022.
With the latest update to all of the builds of the game we have now begun letting in people who have signed up for the Multiplayer Playtest sessions! It has been awesome the past week getting into the servers and playing with everyone, and we are very grateful for all of the feedback and bug reports that we have been receiving—all of this information is invaluable to us, and will greatly help improve the overall experience. We plan on continuing to regularly admit people who have signed up leading all the way up to our early access release in February 2023. If you would like to skip that wait, remember that the Patreon and now Discord support are both options—please consider supporting the team and the project! Every little bit goes a long way, and makes a huge difference towards the speed at which we can make O:HD the experience that we know it can be for everyone in the community!
Our plan at this point (moving forward to early access) is to eliminate some of the peskier and long standing bugs that have been in the game for a while, such as being unable to utilize certain parts of your kit (bandage “reloads”, 0V08M, etc.), animation bugs (like the SKS double reload), scope issues (actually basically already done on Dev Build), rare instances where you pick up a kit and are unable to use anything (all items red/inaccessible), and so on. We are also doing some optimization and polish passes, and QoL changes as well to try and get the current experience as solid as possible, and give us a good basis to pivot off of and continue on with our next batch of features that we will be focusing on (namely some of the other items that we have discussed in prior devblogs that we wanted to get done around release).
Moving on to the November recap:
Maps
Omaha Beach
Work continued on adding in buildings and walls to the Omaha Beach map:
Risala
The embassy 5LMPL building in Risala has now been replaced with a shipping container yard. This is temporary as the embassy building will eventually wind up being remade—the current version that we have is simply too unoptimized for the map, so we decided to replace it to help improve performance:
In addition, some 5M7CJ of the landscape for the map was improved.
Lam Dong
More work was done to experiment with and improve upon the lighting on Lam Dong:
Upcoming and WIP Features
Steam Workshop Support
Steam Workshop is now 0V26Z complete and ready for day 1 of early access! Once we release, everyone will be able to upload and download mods from the Workshop tab like you are used to seeing with other Workshop supported games on Steam. Until then, the O:HD website will still be the main location to get mods (unfortunately we are unable to implement Workshop to things like the playtest or demo).
Audio Overhaul
This task has been in progress for quite some time, and many of you have likely already heard many (if not all) of the new gun/explosion sounds that we have implemented. That said, I wanted to wait until we were up to about this point before really talking about the work that was done here in the T9AXT devblog since audio is a bit harder to portray here in text format, and there is a lot going on underneath the hood, so I felt it is better to tackle this when a more significant amount of work had been completed that we can actually show alongside these explanations for better context.
In order to better showcase this, we consulted with our sound designer to get some more in-depth information on how his work is set up and what you are actually hearing when a gun is firing, rockets are exploding, etc.
What was O:HD using before for gun sounds?
The problem with the previous sounds is that the stereo channels were too wide for the shooting of the gun, which made the gunshots sound unnatural and not coming from the gun itself
There were IK0ZW also problems with inconsistencies between different weapon sounds and lack of sound spatialization.
Some footage of the old audio:
https://youtu.be/ME2DGXCwjpk
How was this improved?
The most notable improvement is on the overall soundscape—gunfights sound more dynamic because the loudness and distortion of the gunshots come from the gun itself, while the echo and tails are playing on both stereo channels, which makes the gunshot sound more natural and it gives the illusion that the sound is actually traveling through the environment.
What is the difference between “core sounds” and “reflections”?
As mentioned before, most sounds are made with two layers—the core and the reflection. The core is a mono sound effect that has the transient, kick, distortion and mechanics of the firearm. The core itself is spatialized, which means that the panning is always directed towards the weapon itself. Meanwhile, the reflection is a stereo sound effect that has the tail of the gunshot representing a specific environment, which is not spatialized on “close” and “close-distant” distances 0V4DP and makes the sound on both sides of your headphones (as in the gunshot is reverberating and echoing through the environment around you while you are receiving it on both ears). In the case of Medium and Far distances, the sound has a "wider" stereo separation compared to the core sound file, which also makes it sound more realistic. These two layers are mixed together and crossfaded by distance and then go through the output.
The potential with this new "system", is that we can more easily add environmental variations, since all you need to change on each gunshot to represent a different environment is the reflection sound effects, so that way you can have tons of different reflection sets for forest environments, urban environments, open fields, mountains, indoor rooms, etc.
How does the explosion audio work?
For the explosions you have the previous "core" layer, and "reflection" layer, but you also have an extra layer called "LFE" which stands for Low Frequency Effect. This layer is also not spatialized, which means that it will sound on both sides of your headphones and it consists of very low frequency kicks and bassy impacts. The point of this layer is to have a very low frequency 98333 rumble playing on both stereo channels when an explosion happens, which makes it sound more deep and have a stronger impact, which also makes sense from a realism standpoint, as you can physically feel the explosions both in your body and in the ground, so low frequencies can get very close to this effect.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/FvVp7c2rogc
Currently, we only have the field reflections implemented, so all of the audio you are hearing right now is as if everyone was fighting in a big open field. We also have some preliminary work started on some of the other reflection layers, such as indoors, urban, etc., however, in order to properly implement them this will require the lead programmer to make an actual coded function that will switch the reflection layer based upon where the sound is being generated, and then from there the level designers can place these switchers in the appropriate areas when designing maps.
For example, shooting your rifle in a big open field will get you the sounds you hear now, and then when you walk into a building and continue firing the reflection layer would then switch upon entering the building and your gunshots would now sound like they are being shot indoors where the sound wave itself will come to a rather abrupt end vs. traveling far and wide. In this sense, in the future, you will not only be able to know where a gunfight is happening relative to you, but also what sort of environment they are in (i.e. “I hear a bunch of gunfire to my north and it sounds like that is indoors—there must be a squad holding down a building over there). Without the switcher, we can only implement one layer at a time, so eventually this will be the next natural evolution of our sound design as a whole.
Last but not least, the sound designer has also recently implemented a lot of new bullet impact noises for all sorts of materials (woods, metals, 8AGRH, concrete, etc.), impacts on players getting shot, etc.
—
That’s all for November, thank you everyone for checking out the devblog!
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