Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-ninth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of December 2022.
As a general reminder, we are now closing in on our official early access launch on February 15th! This will be the day that the base game experience will be available to everyone for free, and all of the supporter keys/perks will be redeemable since everyone will finally be able to acquire the base game (reminder that 0NCKC the Multiplayer Playtest build will be going away at that time, as will the demo). In addition, this will also be the day that Steam Workshop will become available, and everyone will be able to upload and download all of their mods through this one central source, which should drastically increase the ease of access for mods. Last but not least, this will also be the day that the game’s server files will be available to all, so anybody will be able to host a server anywhere in the world, running whatever mods/custom experiences that they/their community want. Our main focus and priority leading up to early access at this point is to just continue polishing and enhancing all of the currently existing content and features to the best of our ability, as well as throwing in a few bonuses that it’s looking like we will be able to include for early access (more on that later in the devblog).
Hopefully this should go without saying (although we know it won’t fully be communicated just because we are writing it here), but just to reiterate: please also remember that early access is just the start, and we still have a very long road ahead of us to bring O:HD as a project to the place that we hope for it to go. The game will still be in a very early alpha state, will be missing critical features and content, will have bugs/issues, not always have the best optimization, and so on, but releasing it and getting it into the public's hand at this stage is a critical step for us in this process, and one that we feel will bring great value in the long run (which is our ultimate goal).
Thank you to everyone that has been involved and contributed to the project thus far! While we still have a lot of work to do, we couldn’t have gotten this far without all of the members on the team, our Patreon supporters (and now Discord backers too), modders from all sorts of backgrounds and varying levels of experience tearing up the SDK and helping each other learn, and all of the other members in the community that have been watching the project, coming and having debates and discussions about things from game mechanics to the greater gaming industry at large, and so on KAI4G. We hope that everyone is pleased with what we have been able to achieve so far, and we hope that we will be able to deliver on everything else that we have set out to do and still have coming on the horizon.
On to December’s recap:
Maps
Saint Quentin
The level design team has begun working on the first official map for the Operation: Michael expansion: Saint Quentin. Saint Quentin is a 2x2km map located in France that will feature a lot of trench fighting, and mostly be a no man’s land where it will be tough to travel up top and out of the trenches. Ironically, this map does not actually feature the town of Saint Quentin itself (this area was part of the larger overall Battle of Saint Quentin), but rather an area just north of it in a large, open field that features many hills and uneven terrain.
The early stages 5LIZA of this map are currently available to Patreon supporters via the Itch.io page, so feel free to download it and check it out if you’d like.
Omaha Beach
The town locations on Omaha Beach have begun to be detailed as the team shifts away from blockout stages:
A reminder that Omaha Beach is currently 0NCY7 available to Patreon supporters via the Itch.io page, so just like Saint Quentin if you would like to check all of these updates out you can download it there.
Argonne
Landscape, foliage, and lighting updates were made to Argonne:
Monte Cassino
Monte Cassino received some temporary blockers to portions of the building that people would tend to get lost in in attempts to try and make the map a bit easier to navigate LRQ80 in this section. In addition, cluster meshes of grass and pebbles were made and used in order to further optimize the map.
Lam Dong
Landscape, foliage KPK28, and lighting updates were also made to Lam Dong:
Khafji
Cluster meshes of grass and pebbles were also placed into Khafji for further optimization and refinement.
Animations
Polishing the Leaning Animations
The animator spent some time refining and improving some of the existing leaning animations and poses. We 0NGMF will eventually be completely replacing these, so this is more of an attempt to improve upon what we already have in place—they aren’t the best in the world, but they should at least be some measure of improvement over the old ones.
Upcoming and WIP Features
Bullet and Magazine Vertex Shaders
Bullets inside magazines/belts are now animated using a “material vertex shader”. Each bullet now has an assigned vertex color value ranging from 0-1. As you deplete your ammunition, the 6VA8T percentage of bullets in your magazine is sent to the shader, and then all bullets with vertex color values lower than the ammo percentage in your magazine will be hidden by collapsing the vertices in the vertex shader—this results in a more realistic depiction of bullets in magazines, belts, and so on, as they are being depleted upon the weapon being fired and cycling rounds. Using this technique, we can also hide objects without using opacity. Last but not least, springs inside the magazine are also animated using the vertex shader by rotating the vertices around an axis.
Nametags
That’s right, we are finally going to be reintroducing nametags back into the game just in time for early access. The following images are part of the prototype system, and we are still doing some additional work to make it so that there is less clutter and overabundance of text on screen at once, but this should give everyone a pretty good picture of what it will more or less look like for its first iteration back into the game:
As you can see, we are attempting to create a simple and clean nametag UI that gives you the minimum critical information that you would really need to see and identify friendlies (up to a certain distance of course), and be able to tell whether or not they are in your squad or just another member of the team. At various distances, not only will nametags scale in size to portray their relative distance to you, but they will also fade out into simple dots/markers further reducing onscreen UI elements when they aren’t really necessary (we are still feeling these distances out to see what feels best). This L3QTE means that, at distance, you will be able to identify friendlies, however you will need to either use your map or communicate with other players to figure out what specific squads and/or players you are looking at.
Map Markers
On top of nametags, we are also doing some much needed polish and improvements to our map markers so that they will provide important and relevant information to players when they look at the map:
Players will now be able to see their fellow squad members, as well as the squad leaders for each of the other squads.
Bots/AI
Work on the AI covered in the past few devblogs has continued, and the AI programmer was heavily focused on his overhaul and refactoring process throughout the month. His first phase of changes is more or less complete, and just requires some more testing before it can be implemented. With this update, now when bots enter a combat state, they will alternate between a “safe” spot (whether that is concealment or hardcover), and an open location where they can attack from (thus paving the way for bounding overwatch where a portion of the bots in a squad will be able to effectively seek cover or concealment, while the remaining portion is able to acquire a sight line to provide covering firing during their movement). Once the enemy is either dispatched or moves away the bots will leave their combat state and continue working towards their objective as normal. We are not sure when this update will be coming to the game, but this should start to be the point at which we are able to start getting the bots to do more interesting and nuanced behaviors that will spice up their interactions some more compared to what they currently are capable of doing (which as many of you know is simply capture flags and shoot at enemies when they see them).
Critical Bug Fixes
Some of the more long standing and critical bugs that we have had for a while should now be fixed. This includes, but is not limited to, having to reload kits when you pick them up, needing to “reload” your bandages and grenades, scope bugs, certain situations in which you would not be able to use any items in your kit, and more.
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Thank you to everyone that checked 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