1918 Australians as could be found at Villers-Bretonneux

The first mystery squad hits the battlefield today! Many of you have requested them, and we're excited to announce that the ANZACs are the next new squad to be added for free for Verdun. While they might be best known for their role at Gallipoli, soldiers from Australia and New Zealand also made significant contributions in many battles on the Western Front.

https://youtu.be/0Uu_DiaKHj4



ANZACs get quite a distinct set of equipment and uniform


Special detail given to the equipment and leather webbing

The ANZACs will form an engineer squad with plentiful options for close combat, including the unusual Webley-Fosbery. For those who prefer to keep a bit more distance, there are plenty of loadouts with SMLEs, and the Lewis Gun for the Fire Support role.

And that’s not all...!


ANZAC engineers, tunnelers at hill 60


Verdun & Tannenberg get a big audio update. Our audio engineering team at Game Audio Squad has been working in parallel to redesign the audio from scratch. Since April this year the community was brought and has been polished since.

For the weapon audio they were working from recordings supplied by our friends over at C&Rsenal (Thank you Othais & Mae), who fired and reloaded most of the available weapons, which have found their way ingame. Check out a large selection of fired weapons here

There are many features in the new system, some are tied heavily to the gameplay such as:

• A dynamic weapon fire system now handles distant gunfire and gives a spacious and roomy feel to gun battles when you advance up a line
  
• A dynamic breathing system based on the fatigue / stamina of the soldier
  
• Gas mask now affects the breathing of a player when sprinting
  
• Vegetation now makes a noise when running through it
  
• A sonic ballistic system now determines the whizz and cracks of bullets as they pass by, sub or supersonic
  
• A suppression system will muffle audio out based on incoming fire
  
• The tinnitus effect will occur if the ears are subjected to enough pressure
  
• Impacts on different surfaces are now accurate for melee, bullets, grenades and bodies
  
• Footsteps were reworked and now allow you to hear better on which terrain surface players are walking, from the mud into the grass
  
• The off-map artillery now creates a sense that a battery of fire is opening up on the players
  
• Combat ambient is now dynamic, with higher and lower intensity gun battles in nearby sectors
  
• Nature ambient is based on the weather of the map (crickets at night for instance)
  
• Explosions were reworked, they now sound more powerful and bassy to give you a kick in the stomach
  
• Grenades now have accurate bouncing sounds
  
  
  Many thanks to everyone who has given feedback on our forums and the support website, it's been very helpful. Curious how it now sounds? Here is an overview video to give you an impression of the new sound effects:
  
  https://youtu.be/VyIZ2TCCwAQ
  
  To get a full picture of all the changes made, make sure to read the full changelog.
  
  Join the legendary ANZACs on the battlefield now!
  
  After some trench fighting the slouch hats become worn
  
  
  You call that a knife?
  
  With this update we are on track with our Q3 roadmap as outlined here: https://ww1gameseries.com/roadmap
  
  Welcome to the front mates!
  

As we approach Q4 of 2018, we have a roadmap update. Our networking improvements went live last week, so the only item remaining on the roadmap for Q3 is the new mystery squad…

It's always nice to add interesting new tools of war to the game. We've got two to show off today, one quite advanced for the time, and one a literal 'tool' of war.

Webley-Fosbery
The Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver was of unusual design with the zig-zag grooves on the cyclinder which were cocked by sliding the upper part of the frame back in recoil. Because this design did not require the rotation of the cylinder when pulling the trigger it was much easier to fire accurately and thus popular with target shooters. It saw limited action during WW1 as a private purchase weapon, never being adopted because of easy fouling of the mechanism.


The Webley-Fosbery was a recoil-operated automatic revolver.

Entrenching Tool
The desperate nature of the fighting in the trenches saw the use of entrenching tools as effective melee weapons. The 1908 E-Tool was carried by most commonwealth troops and was easily accessible as a melee weapon.


Not only useful for digging trenches!

If you fancy the idea of taking part in a 128 player Verdun battle, and don't mind a bit of discipline, take a look at this thread if you think you might be interested.

Here an example of a previous Reenactment Event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51mUI0hNKZI&feature=youtu.be

The tournament is happening this weekend! Our community has also organized a battle of national teams in Europe - last year saw 169 players take part! For more info check out this thread. Battle begins on Saturday 15th - best of luck to everyone involved!

Our latest update features changes and improvements to the networking code, as described in the roadmap. The exact effects will vary depending on how good your network connection is and what servers you typically play on, but the action should be smoother with less stuttering characters.


A laggy player seen through the old networking code.


The same level of lag under the new networking code.

This update also features many more tweaks and bug fixes (see changelog), such as:

• Syncing of players made instantaneous - this prevents heavy lag at the start of matches and lag spikes when new players join.
  
• Optimized character models, which should both reduce the GPU load and improve the visual appearance of characters.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause third person models to be at a different height to the first person view, particularly when prone (this stops other players appearing to be ‘buried’ in the ground).
  
• Trade kill checks now take into account how far a bullet has travelled, which should improve trade kill accuracy for long range shots.
  
• Improvements made to melee stabbing, with better locking on, better handling for stabs from above, and a slight speed boost during stabs.
  
• Improvements to deployable MG rotation and deployment to reduces instances where their third person appearance doesn’t match what the MG player was doing.
  
• Adjustments made to Vosges, Picardie, Flanders, Artois, Douaumont, and Champagne to reduce spawn killing.

A new optimization pass has allowed us to not only make the characters cheaper in performance terms, but also to increase the detail and variety.

No more silly moustaches, the new tommies are ready to go over the top!

Our character artist James was also able to give some extra attention to smaller details:

The tommy gunner carrying the M1914 Lewis Gun now has the appropriate drum mag pouch.

Part of the optimization was an overhaul to the way we render sleeves, and so we are now better able to match the sleeves and hands to the character. Such as on our gunner with gloves:

Keeping those gunner hands warm, since 1915.

We started feedback rounds for the Verdun audio overhaul in early April as we prepared to switch to the new FMOD system. Our partners at Game Audio Squad have been working on this project for a while, and are now in the final stages of its deployment. We addressed feedback in no less than 6 feedback rounds in 5 months and the last changes have been deployed to the opentesting branch for about 2 weeks now, gathering further feedback. In order to use the new sounds; either switch to the opentesting branch or add “FMOD FMOD_WIP” to your launch options.

Many features await: an advanced weapon reverb system, C&Rsenal recordings, supersonic cracks and more!

Read the changelog for the complete list.

Don’t forget that you can check out our roadmap to see our upcoming plans for Verdun. If you spot issues in the game or have suggestions, you can post on our support website - vote up the topic if someone else has already made a post, or create one yourself.

Let us know if you see an improvement in networking!

We have been making good progress on the networking update which is the next item on our roadmap. The exact effects will vary depending on how good your network connection is and what servers you typically play on, but the action should be smoother with less stuttering characters. Our data suggests that player positions are now 100% more accurate compared to the old networking, which should reduce the chance of being shot while behind cover and ping advantages.


A laggy player seen through the old networking code.


The same level of lag under the new networking code.

There are also a range of other bug fixes on our open testing build - of particular note:

• Syncing of players made instantaneous - this prevents heavy lag at the start of matches and lag spikes when new players join.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause third person models to be at a different height to the first person view, particularly when prone.
  
• Trade kill checks now take into account how far a bullet has travelled, which should improve trade kill accuracy for long range shots.
  
• Improvements made to melee stabbing, with better locking on, better handling for stabs from above, and a slight speed boost during stabs.
  
• Improvements to deployable MG rotation and deployment to reduces instances where their third person appearance doesn’t match what the MG player was doing.
  
• Adjustments made to Vosges, Picardie, Flanders, Artois, Douaumont, and Champagne to reduce spawn killing.

Read the full open testing changelog - with links to the support forum cases where applicable.
Note that you may encounter minor issues on the open testing build, and reporting them on the support forum will help get everything fixed for when the update goes live!

Try out these fixes by playing an open testing build (map changes excepted) - activate open testing by following these instructions:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=572388553
Our community is organizing a European Verdun tournament! Starting in September, national teams will be battling it out to find out who’s the best of the best. There are no restrictions on playtime or level, so whether you’re a regular competitive player or not, feel free to join. Last year saw 169 players take part! Read more and sign up in this thread.

Today we have updates on the new user interface, and some follow up on the spawning changes we made.

So, this is how spawning on Artois appeared before we made changes to spawning - the lines are showing shots which killed players shortly after they spawned.


Spawn killing heatmap on Artois before the update.

...and this is how it looks after the updates!

Spawn killing heatmap on Artois after the update.

As you can see, things look quite different now. In particular, the number of short distance spawn killings along trench lines have been greatly reduced. Across all the maps we've seen a huge decrease in spawn kills, which weren’t all that common to start with! The following table shows exactly how things have changed. We measured two periods of 8 days, from 18-25 June and then 9-16 July.



We’re also not done yet. Two maps (Argonne and Aisne) have been adjusted to reduce spawn kills, but we have changes to a few other maps in the works as well.


GIF of spawn killing heatmaps on Aisne.

We have new WIP images of the upcoming UI to show off! Take a look at how the post-game summary and scoreboard are coming along:


WIP of the new post match summary screen - the player icons (currently grey boxes) are planned to use Steam avatars.


The WIP new scoreboard.

That’s all for this week. Have a great summer everyone!

As announced previously, our focus has been on improving performance and polishing the game but that isn’t all that’s in the pipeline for Verdun. We’ve already mentioned bots, sound overhaul and the UI overhaul, but we’ve also had a range of requests for new content and features. Today we are excited to share our plans with you!

Below we have a list of planned new content and features based on our expected release dates. Keep in mind things can change - we’ll do our best to keep you in the loop. When release dates are confirmed, we will highlight it here. You can follow the current state of development and our plans for both Verdun and Tannenberg here. We will be updating this roadmap around the beginning of each month.

Be aware that the listing below (and roadmap items in the same quarter) have no specific order. Some tasks are unrelated to each other and run in parallel, while others have dependencies. This means that items that have been planned in the far future can be already in progress, or partially complete but waiting for another items to be completed first.

Networking Update
Alongside our continued updates to chase down bugs and make gameplay improvements such as the spawning changes to reduce spawn killing, we are working on sound and networking. You can already try out the new sound system and give us feedback - check out this post to find out how.

We are also planning to make a significant push to improve our networking code. Our focus will be on providing a smoother experience and less stuttering player characters if they have a bad connection.

New Squad
We have a new squad planned for Verdun! A squad that has been much requested by the community will be joining the Western Front! This will be a completely free content addition.

Another Squad!
In fact, we have not one but two squads planned! This squad we’re going to leave as a surprise - what we can say is that it will be representing some of the lesser-known combatants involved in significant actions on the Western Front. This will also be completely free content addition.

New Map!
Verdun already covers a wide variety of battlefields, but we’ve been inspired by community suggestions and have a new map planned! We’ll drop more details and teasers in the coming months, but it will continue the tradition of being distinct from existing maps. This will be a completely free content addition.

In-game Report System
The user feedback and bug reports on our support website have been very useful, so we are planning to add a tool which makes it easy to report issues from inside the game itself. This system will also allow people to effectively report harassment, griefers, and potential cheaters so we can gather some solid data alongside reports.

Map Voting
By community request, we are planning to add a way for players to vote in the game on which map they want to battle on next. This will not be an option to vote for all available maps but rather a choice between two maps.

Bots
We are working on adding optional bots to the Frontlines game mode and we hope to be able to release them before the end of the year. Of course anything to do with AI can be unpredictable in terms of how long it takes to complete, but Q4 is what we’re hoping for.

Prestige System
Many of our players are Verdun veterans and we thought it would be nice to add a system to show off that veterancy. Currently the max player level is 100 - we would like to offer the chance to go beyond that and show a different rank icon for each prestige tier you gain.

New User Interface
We’ve been teasing the upcoming user interface overhaul for a while now and our plan is to release it before the end of the year! We will make sure all of the current features will also be available in the new UI and plan to gather early user feedback in the same manner as we did with the sound update.

Tutorial
We have also been looking into the creation of an improved tutorial for Verdun. Trench warfare is a challenge for the inexperienced and it can feel very harsh when people start playing Verdun. Anything we can do to address this and make new players more likely to stick around is good news.

New Languages
Another addition to the game we have been considering is support for more languages. For instance, by request we are looking at adding support for simplified and traditional Chinese. This could also help boost the population of the servers in South-East Asia.

Big Console Update
As console is much more complex to update compared to Steam, we haven’t been able to do as many updates to the console versions of Verdun as we’d like. But now we have a plan for a very substantial update (hopefully early next year) which would bring all the fixes, improvements, and new content we’ve created into the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of the game.

Performance improvements and bug fixes will be ongoing of course! We recently released a large update with bug fixes and gameplay improvements and we will carry on making progress here.These items will continue to be a priority even as we introduce the other new content. Your user reports on our support website have been instrumental here, and we’ll continue to be steering our efforts based on player input there.

Following our release of the Supporter’s Edition in Tannenberg, we have had requests for a similar DLC for Verdun as well. It’s great to hear that some of you would like to support the game even more! We’ve been developing Verdun for over five years now with free content from new squads and maps to the Horrors of War update and the Christmas Truce. Everything on this roadmap is going to be completely free as well. Purchases of the Supporter’s Edition DLCs are completely optional and help us keep on cranking out the updates!

Today’s update is the result of some intense bug fixing work over the last few weeks, and it comes jam-packed with fixes. Many of these will be familiar to those of you trying out our open testing branch.

Here are a few of the most requested / long-standing issues fixed or greatly improved:

• Spawn changes to reduce spawn killing:
  
  • For selecting spawns, we now require enemies to be at least 25+ meters away if they are in the same sector, otherwise 15+ meters (Used to be 10+ for squadspawn and 15+ for other spawns). This should greatly reduce spawnkilling when inside a contested Verdun-Frontlines sector.
    
  • Squad spawns (on player) are now allowed within 15 meters (instead of sometimes 8 [when in own sector] or 15 [other]).
    
  • Spawn sorting: We used to sort based on closest distance to goal (contestedsector/breach point). However we now give spawnpoints a score that takes into account the distance to goal, distance to enemy and distance to squadmates.
    
  • Spawn protection against explosions (arty/grenades) raised from 2 to 4 seconds as arty/grenades can be in-progress during your spawn.
    
  • We have made changes to notorious spawnkilling spots in Aisne, other maps and further tweaks will be based on the new results.
• Fixed a case of third person machine gun animations not playing correctly which resulted in weapons being held wrong
  
• Allowed more trade-kill time for melee hits which should make close combat more reliable.
  
• Fixed wall and ceiling exploits in Douaumont, improved map boundaries on Champagne.
  
• Frontlines: Fixed, no longer let players spawn on NCO who is in a 'desertion' area
  
• Fixed bug where you would spawn with a gray screen
  
• Fixed case where you could get stuck in ADS
  
• Fixed a specific syncing issue where calling in an ability was not allowed

Read the full changelog for Verdun.



Smoothed out first person weapon movement


Tweaked distance shadows and overlap with realtime


Tweaked gasmask goggle FX and how light falls into the mask

We’ve been helped hugely by the reports on our UserEcho site, which have allowed us to gather information and track down some stubborn issues. Please do keep on reporting bugs and issues so we can reproduce and fix them! The more info you provide in reports, the quicker we can reproduce and start solving them.

This has made a big dent in our pile of bug reports, and we are still going through the feedback as well. We haven’t responded to everything yet, but we’re getting there!

That said, we will be announcing a more extensive roadmap for Verdun any day now. So expect Verdun news shortly!

Cheers!

Our open testing branch already contained a large number of fixes and changes, but we’ve now added even more! We’ve also written a bit about our ongoing efforts to reduce spawn killing.

Some key changes include:

• Spawnkilling has been greatly reduced via tweaked spawn rules and some mapping changes. More info below.
  
• Fixed the bug where ladders were often not detected by making ladder collisions not affect movement. This fixes some ladder that were not walkable.
  
• Allowed more trade-kill time for melee hits which should make close combat more reliable.
  
• Fixed a case of third person machine gun animations not playing correctly which resulted in weapons being held wrong.
  
• Fixed various first person weapon animation bugs/stutters.
  
• Fixed overlapping messages when many messages are sent.
  
• Fixed wall and ceiling exploits in Douaumont, improved map boundaries on Champagne.
  
• Fixed case where you could get stuck in ADS.

You can find the full changelog on the discussion boards, including links to cases on our our UserEcho support forum where appropriate. If you happen to see an issue which hasn’t been resolved, dropping a note on the UserEcho case will allow us to look into it again. It’s also helpful to let us know if issues have been fixed.

To investigate the reports on spawn killing we have created heatmaps so we could research all possible cases. Through these heatmaps we have found that around 20% of the spawn killing happens because spawns are simply too exposed. This requires map changes which we will work on over the course of the coming updates. We have already adjusted Aisne and Argonne. The other 80% cases of spawn killing happened in trenches because the distances there often exceeded the spawn safety distance of 15m. To fix this we had to adjust the spawning rules.


An example of the heatmap in action.

For selecting spawns, we now require enemies to be at least 25+ meters away if they are in the same sector, otherwise they need to be 15+ meters away. It used to be 10+ for squad spawn and 15+ for other spawns.

Spawn point selection also takes into account the distance to enemies and squad mates with more weight given there compared to distance to the objective. So it’s possible you may spawn a bit further from the current objective, but also further from enemies and closer to allies.

We also increased the spawn protection time vs spawn killing by grenades and artillery from 2 to 4 seconds, since it was found that 2 seconds was not enough. Artillery salvos can last quite a while! We are pretty positive these changes will significantly reduce spawn killing and we look forward to your feedback!

Be aware that this change doesn't instantly apply when you are playing on the open testing version - the host of the match needs to be on the open testing version to have the new spawning behavior since the host dictates the spawning behavior.

It’s a very simple process which is part of Steam itself, so it’s also easy to switch back to the regular version of the game. Here’s a guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=572388553

We have put out an update on the Opentesting branch of Verdun. This is a development version of the game which everyone can access if they want to try out new updates before we release them officially. Activating Opentesting is an easy process - this post explains it. And don’t worry, it’s equally easy to switch back to regular Verdun.

Additionally, player biggalloot is planning an event this Saturday 9th to try out many of the new changes to private matches, including 100+ player counts. They wrote a nice post outlining some of the possibilities for our new system, which was made using feedback from this thread.


Here’s another awesome screenshot by player echo1, taken during a test event with 110 players. These player counts aren’t supported for official servers, but we allow the option for private matches.

We visited the Museum Huis het Doorn from May 26-27 during their ‘Living History’ weekend. It was a great time, and we got to meet some Scottish, Italian and Dutch Verdun players (also reenactors) who have also helped us with weapon percussion sound effects. You can take a look at our photo album on Facebook!


One of the photos from the reenactment weekend.

Our first War Correspondent competition finished earlier this week, and we had a lot of good entries! But there could only be two winners… here they are:

Player Votes Winner: Thomas Friedrich Grump
"War Correspondent: Today the German High Command announced plans to combat recent British gains in Ypres with Unrestricted Submarine Warfare"

Mods and Devs Choice Winner: SOVIETDOGE "OUR WAR CORRESPONDENT IN FRANCE - Our French allies have commenced their attack to retake the fort of Douamont. Over the top mon amis!"

Another War Correspondent contest will be starting soon - keep an eye on our social media or Steam Hub to find out when. For now, check out both entries on our Facebook album!

Our update today is dedicated to everyone who has taken the time to vote, comment or start cases on our UserEcho support website! Thank you all for your input, we’ve been steadily working through cases and hope you are all happy with another big sweep!

New Frontlines rule: Defenders and attackers may no longer be further away than 2 sectors before getting a desertion warning. This should keep the action more concentrated and encourage people to engage in the attack and defense rather than trying to rack up kills from safety.


Douaumont map update: access to the roof has been blocked. We’ll be keeping a close eye out for similar issues.



MG deployment changed: First and third person should now matchup much better. We still have one glitch left to kill when tweaking your position, but we’re working on it!



Medal fix Players missing a medal for participating in the Christmas Truce and/or Early Access should get their medal on logging in.

Inconsistent settings fix: we understand that it’s annoying having to adjust your settings constantly after a game switch, this should be resolved now. Our apologies!

As we’ve been fixing issues with Verdun, it’s helped us address issues in Tannenberg, and vice-versa. The Tannenberg update and changelog can be found here.

Please keep the reports coming! If we don’t know about issues, we can’t fix them. Post them on our UserEcho support website so we can continue smashing bugs and make this game greater! Don’t forget to vote and comment on issues you think are important so we know how many people are affected.

We also have some exciting news from the Eastern Front, where a new Roumanian squad has been added to the game. They come with new weapons and… a new map! The Roumania map is inspired by Mount Cosna and the north-northwestern areas of Roumania. Take a look at the our new trailer dedicated to the Roumanian update: https://youtu.be/1q7mzfUizDE


Now back to the battlefield!