Hi Squaddies,
​
Heads up, a new version is inbound: Version 5.1! We’re back from hunting those pesky chocolate rabbits, and we bring some additional stability to Squad, in the form of client and server crashes, gameplay improvements, and revised UI elements.
Before we begin on the goodies we want to extend our thanks to all the people in the community, who have helped us fix some of these issues through sending us server logs, pictures of bugs, and improvement ideas, your help has been greatly appreciated.
​
Changelog...
​
Read the full changelog at Release: Alpha V5

Hi Squaddies,
​
Heads up, a new version is inbound: Version 5.1! We’re back from hunting those pesky chocolate rabbits, and we bring some additional stability to Squad, in the form of client and server crashes, gameplay improvements, and revised UI elements.
Before we begin on the goodies we want to extend our thanks to all the people in the community, who have helped us fix some of these issues through sending us server logs, pictures of bugs, and improvement ideas, your help has been greatly appreciated.
​
Changelog...
​
Read the full changelog at Release: Alpha V5

Hi Squaddies,

Head up, a new version is inbound! Version 5.0 comes packed with a number of UI and quality of life improvements to help smooth out your experience in-game, as well as a number of balance and performance tweaks, not to mention a whole slew of additional expanded areas for maps that are currently in rotation.

A full Changelog can be read here.



As outlined in the last monthly recap, we have a number of map updates and new areas for players to duke it out.




The map and respawn screen has received a huge code and art pass. Porting over parts of the heavy Blueprint code over to C++, weve achieved a major performance increase over the previous versions, as well as fixed a large number of annoying issues like not being able to switch between the spawn screen and the map. Additionally, we are doing an art pass to improve the readability and look and feel of the map.




We added a blur filter and improved the sight picture on some of the optics.



Standing around waiting for your stamina to regenerate before you jumped over a knee high wall is not fun, so weve fixed that. Weve reduced the stamina cost for the first jump, but added an increasing stamina penalty the more you jump in succession. Preserve your stamina, spread out your jumps!

We now have official server licensing system in place for communities and server providers wishing to officially host a server and be officially sanctioned by us to provide the ideal Squad experience to players. We are adding this system in order to quickly direct players to servers that have -

• Quality, dedicated administration
  
• Have reliable and powerful server hardware
  
• Promote teamwork and communication in their community and/or clan.
  
• Provide a positive environment for new players to learn the game and play with more experienced players.
  
• Use the vanilla Squad gamemode rules so regular players know what to expect (will be important once modding is possible)

More information about applications and server licensing HERE.

A full Changelog can be read here.

- Offworld Out

Hi Squaddies,

Head up, a new version is inbound! Version 5.0 comes packed with a number of UI and quality of life improvements to help smooth out your experience in-game, as well as a number of balance and performance tweaks, not to mention a whole slew of additional expanded areas for maps that are currently in rotation.

A full Changelog can be read here.



As outlined in the last monthly recap, we have a number of map updates and new areas for players to duke it out.




The map and respawn screen has received a huge code and art pass. Porting over parts of the heavy Blueprint code over to C++, weve achieved a major performance increase over the previous versions, as well as fixed a large number of annoying issues like not being able to switch between the spawn screen and the map. Additionally, we are doing an art pass to improve the readability and look and feel of the map.




We added a blur filter and improved the sight picture on some of the optics.



Standing around waiting for your stamina to regenerate before you jumped over a knee high wall is not fun, so weve fixed that. Weve reduced the stamina cost for the first jump, but added an increasing stamina penalty the more you jump in succession. Preserve your stamina, spread out your jumps!

We now have official server licensing system in place for communities and server providers wishing to officially host a server and be officially sanctioned by us to provide the ideal Squad experience to players. We are adding this system in order to quickly direct players to servers that have -

• Quality, dedicated administration
  
• Have reliable and powerful server hardware
  
• Promote teamwork and communication in their community and/or clan.
  
• Provide a positive environment for new players to learn the game and play with more experienced players.
  
• Use the vanilla Squad gamemode rules so regular players know what to expect (will be important once modding is possible)

More information about applications and server licensing HERE.

A full Changelog can be read here.

- Offworld Out

Original Article HERE.

Vehicle Dev-blog Part 1 -

FROM NOTHING TO SOMETHING

Hey Folks,

I’m Garrett, a Senior Programmer here at OWI. You guys probably know me as RoyAwesome on the forums and reddit.  I’ve been working on Squad for almost a year now, implementing a variety of features you guys play with every day, like the Deployable system, The Gamemode system, AAS gamemode, flags, scoring and so on.  One of my main tasks for the last several months has been implementing one of our headlining features: Vehicles.  




A Vehicle on the Test Map


I started working on Vehicles in September 2015.  At this point we had done two proof-of-concept prototypes, both in Blueprint (Unreal Engine’s scripting system). I quickly discovered that both prototypes had some fatal flaws, which prompted my decision to simply start from scratch with our vehicle implementation.  This proved to be the correct decision, as it allowed us to create a very robust system that can create some really unique vehicles.  


However, before I could write a single line of code, I needed to know what exactly did we want to do with vehicles.  What kind of actions could you take?  What happens if a vehicle gets shot by a rifle? A rocket? A tank shell?  What do we want passengers to be able to do?  Gunners?  Drivers?  I had a lot of questions I needed answers to, so I turned to our awesome designers Z-Trooper and SgtRoss to help brainstorm up some ideas for what they wanted Vehicles to look like in their final form.  That simple question set off a massive round of design discussions, ending up with a huge design document with all kinds of cool ideas and features to add.  With a design in hand, I had work to do.


Starting with an empty code file, I had to decide where to start.  The previous prototypes had focused on the Physics and movement portion of Vehicles, and since I was starting from scratch, I figured I’d start with the part that neither of those prototypes ever tackled… Getting into the vehicle and how seats work.  How seats work and what you can do in them was a major focus of the design, so I figured I’d start there but implement a simplified version for now.  As an added bonus, this also meant that we could leverage this code for Emplaced Weapons, as getting in and out of the weapon was something we needed to do to make them work.  


The initial implementation of Seats and interacting with them went by pretty quick, and by the end of September I had a working prototype of a static Vehicle that could have any number of seats.  I encountered a serious issue testing it though… the game crashed every time I would get into the Vehicle.  After some quick investigation, I discovered that parts of our code assumed that PlayerController (what you are) always controlled a Soldier (your person in the game).  “Oh simple”, I thought, “I’ll just fix those assumptions”.  Yeah, It wasn’t that simple.




Configuring the Seats for a Technical


To understand the problem a bit more, Unreal Engine has a few important objects.  Players are represented by the PlayerController.  The PlayerController’s job is to handle all input from players, as well as track their state across the game.  They don’t exist in the world, but they can “Possess” objects called Pawns, which are objects in the world that can be controlled.  From the beginning of development until now, we have only had one type of Pawn: The Soldier.  Because of that, some very core systems such as weapons and damage only really worked when a PlayerController was controlling a Soldier.  If the PlayerController was controlling something else (let’s say, a Vehicle), those systems just broke.  




How you actually get into a vehicle


Breaking these assumptions and fixing them took me quite a bit of time, from October into most of November.  Some of them were easy to fix, such as instances where our code would cast a Pawn into a Soldier and not check if the cast failed, but some of them were not. I figured, around the start of October, we could get these issues fixed and released Emplaced Weapons in November.  However, I discovered that our Weapons assumed that our PlayerController controlled a soldier in a big way. Progress on fixing Weapons was very slow. Weapons needed to be inside of an Inventory, which was part of the Soldier. I had to split that off into a component (horribly breaking it in the process).  October slipped into November, and I was still changing things like instances where the weapon was playing Soldier Animations on any Pawn that was controlled (which obviously didn’t work with vehicles).  


Setting up a 50cal’s Inventory


Luckily, while I was busy fixing these issues Kory, another programmer, finished up his tasks and started working on Vehicles with me.  At this point we had blown vehicles for the November patch, but we were still trying to get them out for Early Access. I asked Kory to look into getting physics working with the vehicles, getting the M1151 Enhanced Armament Carrier drivable.  At this point, I had fixed all the simple soldier-only assumptions so driving the vehicle was possible.  We figured we could at least have transport vehicles.  Kory set to work integrating the UE4 vehicle system into the multiplayer Vehicle system I had built.  By Thanksgiving, Kory and I were driving M1151s around our test map.  However, after turning on fake lag we started to notice some odd behavior, with the M1151s and Technicals rubber banding and desyncing when driven.  We needed to do some more investigation, but with Alpha 3 right around the corner it would have to wait.  



Vehicles on the Test Map


Around this exact same time, I finally fixed the last few issues with weapons, and successfully fired an Emplaced .50 cal.  However, due to how buggy the Alpha 3 release was looking in testing, like Kory, I tabled working on Vehicles to focus on Alpha 3 and making the Early Access release awesome.  I did add a method of spawning vehicles in any map so that post-EA we could spawn vehicles on full servers and see how they performed.  


After the Early Access release, we did a number of tests, spawning M1151s and Technicals on full servers and seeing how they performed.  The results were not promising.  The issues we saw with desyncing and rubber banding were much worse in full servers.  I took a short break from firefighting post-release bugs to investigate, and I discovered that the default vehicle code didn’t really have netcode or lag correction.  Vehicles were warping around because the driver’s inputs were sent to every client and the server, but only the server’s position was “Correct”.  Due to the nature of physics engines, every client had small but compounding errors in positions and velocity, causing every client to see vehicles in different positions.  When the server sent the “Correct” positions, the vehicle was teleported to the proper position, giving a very ugly warping and rubber banding effect.  


The netcode for Vehicles had to be redone.  


In Part 2, I’ll talk about the process of rewriting the Netcode for Vehicles, putting the last few pieces together for vehicles, and talk a bit about how to mod them.  For now, I hope you enjoyed this look into the development process of Vehicles.  If you have any questions, you can follow me on Twitter, @RoyAwesome.  

Offworld Out.  

Original Article HERE.

Vehicle Dev-blog Part 1 -

FROM NOTHING TO SOMETHING

Hey Folks,

I’m Garrett, a Senior Programmer here at OWI. You guys probably know me as RoyAwesome on the forums and reddit.  I’ve been working on Squad for almost a year now, implementing a variety of features you guys play with every day, like the Deployable system, The Gamemode system, AAS gamemode, flags, scoring and so on.  One of my main tasks for the last several months has been implementing one of our headlining features: Vehicles.  




A Vehicle on the Test Map


I started working on Vehicles in September 2015.  At this point we had done two proof-of-concept prototypes, both in Blueprint (Unreal Engine’s scripting system). I quickly discovered that both prototypes had some fatal flaws, which prompted my decision to simply start from scratch with our vehicle implementation.  This proved to be the correct decision, as it allowed us to create a very robust system that can create some really unique vehicles.  


However, before I could write a single line of code, I needed to know what exactly did we want to do with vehicles.  What kind of actions could you take?  What happens if a vehicle gets shot by a rifle? A rocket? A tank shell?  What do we want passengers to be able to do?  Gunners?  Drivers?  I had a lot of questions I needed answers to, so I turned to our awesome designers Z-Trooper and SgtRoss to help brainstorm up some ideas for what they wanted Vehicles to look like in their final form.  That simple question set off a massive round of design discussions, ending up with a huge design document with all kinds of cool ideas and features to add.  With a design in hand, I had work to do.


Starting with an empty code file, I had to decide where to start.  The previous prototypes had focused on the Physics and movement portion of Vehicles, and since I was starting from scratch, I figured I’d start with the part that neither of those prototypes ever tackled… Getting into the vehicle and how seats work.  How seats work and what you can do in them was a major focus of the design, so I figured I’d start there but implement a simplified version for now.  As an added bonus, this also meant that we could leverage this code for Emplaced Weapons, as getting in and out of the weapon was something we needed to do to make them work.  


The initial implementation of Seats and interacting with them went by pretty quick, and by the end of September I had a working prototype of a static Vehicle that could have any number of seats.  I encountered a serious issue testing it though… the game crashed every time I would get into the Vehicle.  After some quick investigation, I discovered that parts of our code assumed that PlayerController (what you are) always controlled a Soldier (your person in the game).  “Oh simple”, I thought, “I’ll just fix those assumptions”.  Yeah, It wasn’t that simple.




Configuring the Seats for a Technical


To understand the problem a bit more, Unreal Engine has a few important objects.  Players are represented by the PlayerController.  The PlayerController’s job is to handle all input from players, as well as track their state across the game.  They don’t exist in the world, but they can “Possess” objects called Pawns, which are objects in the world that can be controlled.  From the beginning of development until now, we have only had one type of Pawn: The Soldier.  Because of that, some very core systems such as weapons and damage only really worked when a PlayerController was controlling a Soldier.  If the PlayerController was controlling something else (let’s say, a Vehicle), those systems just broke.  




How you actually get into a vehicle


Breaking these assumptions and fixing them took me quite a bit of time, from October into most of November.  Some of them were easy to fix, such as instances where our code would cast a Pawn into a Soldier and not check if the cast failed, but some of them were not. I figured, around the start of October, we could get these issues fixed and released Emplaced Weapons in November.  However, I discovered that our Weapons assumed that our PlayerController controlled a soldier in a big way. Progress on fixing Weapons was very slow. Weapons needed to be inside of an Inventory, which was part of the Soldier. I had to split that off into a component (horribly breaking it in the process).  October slipped into November, and I was still changing things like instances where the weapon was playing Soldier Animations on any Pawn that was controlled (which obviously didn’t work with vehicles).  


Setting up a 50cal’s Inventory


Luckily, while I was busy fixing these issues Kory, another programmer, finished up his tasks and started working on Vehicles with me.  At this point we had blown vehicles for the November patch, but we were still trying to get them out for Early Access. I asked Kory to look into getting physics working with the vehicles, getting the M1151 Enhanced Armament Carrier drivable.  At this point, I had fixed all the simple soldier-only assumptions so driving the vehicle was possible.  We figured we could at least have transport vehicles.  Kory set to work integrating the UE4 vehicle system into the multiplayer Vehicle system I had built.  By Thanksgiving, Kory and I were driving M1151s around our test map.  However, after turning on fake lag we started to notice some odd behavior, with the M1151s and Technicals rubber banding and desyncing when driven.  We needed to do some more investigation, but with Alpha 3 right around the corner it would have to wait.  



Vehicles on the Test Map


Around this exact same time, I finally fixed the last few issues with weapons, and successfully fired an Emplaced .50 cal.  However, due to how buggy the Alpha 3 release was looking in testing, like Kory, I tabled working on Vehicles to focus on Alpha 3 and making the Early Access release awesome.  I did add a method of spawning vehicles in any map so that post-EA we could spawn vehicles on full servers and see how they performed.  


After the Early Access release, we did a number of tests, spawning M1151s and Technicals on full servers and seeing how they performed.  The results were not promising.  The issues we saw with desyncing and rubber banding were much worse in full servers.  I took a short break from firefighting post-release bugs to investigate, and I discovered that the default vehicle code didn’t really have netcode or lag correction.  Vehicles were warping around because the driver’s inputs were sent to every client and the server, but only the server’s position was “Correct”.  Due to the nature of physics engines, every client had small but compounding errors in positions and velocity, causing every client to see vehicles in different positions.  When the server sent the “Correct” positions, the vehicle was teleported to the proper position, giving a very ugly warping and rubber banding effect.  


The netcode for Vehicles had to be redone.  


In Part 2, I’ll talk about the process of rewriting the Netcode for Vehicles, putting the last few pieces together for vehicles, and talk a bit about how to mod them.  For now, I hope you enjoyed this look into the development process of Vehicles.  If you have any questions, you can follow me on Twitter, @RoyAwesome.  

Offworld Out.  

Continued from Part 1

-----


Another exciting system that we're working on is one for Doors, which will allow players to dynamically open and close passages, and further down the track, breach or even lock them. For now the system is in its infancy and we will be iterating on them well into the future.







Continuing to push the envelope of map sizes we're beginning work on a new map called Yehorivka, featuring large open expanses and a total 8km x 8km terrain size letting us open up the full expanses of the 4km x 4km base terrain and provide a real sandbox for vehicle based combat coming over the horizon. In its infancy but we will keep you guys posted!












More work has been done on Gorodok since our last feature, here is featured a unique elevated rail system used to break up the landscape and present an interesting tactical obstacle for squads moving on foot. Bear in mind in these early stages that the lighting and detailing has not been done yet and will look dramatically different the closer we get to release.












Operation First Light has been polished up to a near finished stage. (after popular request it not be scrapped!). Removal of the train wreck allows for the addition of an additional small village and fields. Over all the map has also gotten a good treatment of micro details of debris and trash to make it feel a little more lived in.








The expansion of the play area continues, and with the addition of numerous crop fields around the city edges, provides ample concealment for squads seeking to flank hardened positions.








Chora continues to snake its way across the valley floor expanding both ways down the river and opening up some new combat areas. We expect another month to finish up the base compound layouts and then 2-3 months of detail polish and tweaking before this map finally gets close to a finished stage. We are also planning to integrate Truesky and some new terrain materials in this time frame as well.







That’s all for this update but as ever we are furiously pounding away at the new content, squashing bugs and iterating till our fingers are raw. We appreciate everyones continued support and look forward to getting this content out to you as soon as possible. Onward and upward!


Read Part 1 Here.

Continued from Part 1

-----


Another exciting system that we're working on is one for Doors, which will allow players to dynamically open and close passages, and further down the track, breach or even lock them. For now the system is in its infancy and we will be iterating on them well into the future.







Continuing to push the envelope of map sizes we're beginning work on a new map called Yehorivka, featuring large open expanses and a total 8km x 8km terrain size letting us open up the full expanses of the 4km x 4km base terrain and provide a real sandbox for vehicle based combat coming over the horizon. In its infancy but we will keep you guys posted!












More work has been done on Gorodok since our last feature, here is featured a unique elevated rail system used to break up the landscape and present an interesting tactical obstacle for squads moving on foot. Bear in mind in these early stages that the lighting and detailing has not been done yet and will look dramatically different the closer we get to release.












Operation First Light has been polished up to a near finished stage. (after popular request it not be scrapped!). Removal of the train wreck allows for the addition of an additional small village and fields. Over all the map has also gotten a good treatment of micro details of debris and trash to make it feel a little more lived in.








The expansion of the play area continues, and with the addition of numerous crop fields around the city edges, provides ample concealment for squads seeking to flank hardened positions.








Chora continues to snake its way across the valley floor expanding both ways down the river and opening up some new combat areas. We expect another month to finish up the base compound layouts and then 2-3 months of detail polish and tweaking before this map finally gets close to a finished stage. We are also planning to integrate Truesky and some new terrain materials in this time frame as well.







That’s all for this update but as ever we are furiously pounding away at the new content, squashing bugs and iterating till our fingers are raw. We appreciate everyones continued support and look forward to getting this content out to you as soon as possible. Onward and upward!


Read Part 1 Here.

Hi Squaddies,

After a very busy six weeks post EA launch the development team has spent the past month digging into more of our core game systems in an effort to get them closer to our final vision. We will show you some of the progress in this update and also push some of the finished content out with our Alpha v5 update which is going through a hardening phase currently before moving into release candidate testing.





Our Lead Environment artist and foliage wizard GhostDance has been carefully plugging away at our next generation of foliage. Our next iteration will start to integrate vertex pivot bending allowing interaction of players and foliage. As well we will be adding more natural looking procedural wind system. Both of which we have examples of below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTWSEo4PL54


Since the last update a lot of effort has been poured into the map, user interface and general quality of life by JrWebster and Motherdear. The ongoing improvements of our user interface systems has allowed the gameplay programmers to focus more on improving the look and feel of some of the core spawn and map features, as well as making the system leaner and easier to implement future features.

The main focus has been to move the map towards a C++ implementation and to fix any bugs that were plaguing 4.0, such as map and spawn menu switching back and forth, not being able to switch directly to the map from the spawn menu, roles not always being displayed as used etc.. Among these changes we now have a cleaner and more informative kit system, both for our menu and our ammo crates, as well as brand new map icons to improve map readability.



The spawn menu has been improved with new icons, better displaying which weapon the player will get with the kit, making each spawn menu unique for the faction, as well as better drawing the eyes to specialty kits. This also brings some improvements to squad management since the squad leader no longer is in doubt of what weapons are available in his squads arsenal.



The ammo crate kit icons now clearly display what role they are and what weapon will be your most important, the icons are now more unified with the spawn menu and less language dependent, both in art style and functionality, allowing the users to have the standard kit tooltips and readability of the spawn menu.



The players map icon now slowly pulses to allow you to easily find your own position, other players directions and important features, like medic and SLs are now easier to find on the map, and the mouse wheel and button zoom now functions much better than in earlier iterations.

Improvements have been made made for the way that we display the player inventory, there has been some frustration among players, and devs, that the inventory system did not give good enough feedback to user actions, which we will address in two phases.

Phase 1 will be a feature upgrade for the user interface of the inventory, we are adding expanding groups, which will give the player a better overview of equipment in a group, and we are adding fading to items that are not currently selected, making it much easier for the player to find the active weapon.


UI Artwork is still a WIP.

Phase 2 will be adding the ability to change away from weapons while they are still just being equipped, which will allow the player to traverse the inventory with much more confidence without being punished for a small miss-click.

Another quality of life improvement that has been long awaited and that we want to mention is name tag drawing reliability. We are now tracing from your camera location to the head, chest and feet of the other soldier, instead of the default Unreal Engine 4 method of tracing from waist to waist. This tracing method makes sure that you always get a name-tag when you can see your team members head, chest or feet, which solves a lot of issues for new and old players alike. We have also made some minor improvements to the feel of scoped weapons, namely giving them a post process effect around the reticle when zoomed.



Lastly we have re-implemented the way that we handle jumping and stamina to allow for smoother traversal of walls and less frustration and stamina cost, while still stopping bunny-hopping and other game breakers. The system will now allow you to jump at full height with no stamina penalty, but with a loss of forward momentum and jump height for each consecutive jump. This allows you to be able to traverse walls with no worry of suddenly running out of stamina and reduces the frustration of the stamina cost.





With the refactoring of our Animation System going underway there is a need to update almost all our animations to a newer and better standard. We recently brought aboard a new addition to the team, Kab, to help out in creating new animations for weapons and equipment new and old. Heres a few friendly Gifs to sate your appetite!

AK74M Rifle

MP443 Pistol

RPG7

M4A1 Rifle

M249 SAW


The G3A3 is a German 7.62x51mm NATO battle rifle developed in the 1950s, produced by license around the world. Still a very reliable platform, the rifle has seen many wars and conflicts around the world and is still in use by second-world militaries and insurgent groups to this day.




Adding tunnel systems has always been a big wish list item for us and the latest Fools Road release gave us a quick crash course on how our game mechanics and code would react to them. Guided greatly by the things we have learned in the last month our environment artist Drav has begun formally working on a modular underground system that would allow our mappers to create more elaborate functional tunnel networks and create a whole extra dimension for Squad environments.



---

Continued in Part 2!

Hi Squaddies,

After a very busy six weeks post EA launch the development team has spent the past month digging into more of our core game systems in an effort to get them closer to our final vision. We will show you some of the progress in this update and also push some of the finished content out with our Alpha v5 update which is going through a hardening phase currently before moving into release candidate testing.





Our Lead Environment artist and foliage wizard GhostDance has been carefully plugging away at our next generation of foliage. Our next iteration will start to integrate vertex pivot bending allowing interaction of players and foliage. As well we will be adding more natural looking procedural wind system. Both of which we have examples of below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTWSEo4PL54


Since the last update a lot of effort has been poured into the map, user interface and general quality of life by JrWebster and Motherdear. The ongoing improvements of our user interface systems has allowed the gameplay programmers to focus more on improving the look and feel of some of the core spawn and map features, as well as making the system leaner and easier to implement future features.

The main focus has been to move the map towards a C++ implementation and to fix any bugs that were plaguing 4.0, such as map and spawn menu switching back and forth, not being able to switch directly to the map from the spawn menu, roles not always being displayed as used etc.. Among these changes we now have a cleaner and more informative kit system, both for our menu and our ammo crates, as well as brand new map icons to improve map readability.



The spawn menu has been improved with new icons, better displaying which weapon the player will get with the kit, making each spawn menu unique for the faction, as well as better drawing the eyes to specialty kits. This also brings some improvements to squad management since the squad leader no longer is in doubt of what weapons are available in his squads arsenal.



The ammo crate kit icons now clearly display what role they are and what weapon will be your most important, the icons are now more unified with the spawn menu and less language dependent, both in art style and functionality, allowing the users to have the standard kit tooltips and readability of the spawn menu.



The players map icon now slowly pulses to allow you to easily find your own position, other players directions and important features, like medic and SLs are now easier to find on the map, and the mouse wheel and button zoom now functions much better than in earlier iterations.

Improvements have been made made for the way that we display the player inventory, there has been some frustration among players, and devs, that the inventory system did not give good enough feedback to user actions, which we will address in two phases.

Phase 1 will be a feature upgrade for the user interface of the inventory, we are adding expanding groups, which will give the player a better overview of equipment in a group, and we are adding fading to items that are not currently selected, making it much easier for the player to find the active weapon.


UI Artwork is still a WIP.

Phase 2 will be adding the ability to change away from weapons while they are still just being equipped, which will allow the player to traverse the inventory with much more confidence without being punished for a small miss-click.

Another quality of life improvement that has been long awaited and that we want to mention is name tag drawing reliability. We are now tracing from your camera location to the head, chest and feet of the other soldier, instead of the default Unreal Engine 4 method of tracing from waist to waist. This tracing method makes sure that you always get a name-tag when you can see your team members head, chest or feet, which solves a lot of issues for new and old players alike. We have also made some minor improvements to the feel of scoped weapons, namely giving them a post process effect around the reticle when zoomed.



Lastly we have re-implemented the way that we handle jumping and stamina to allow for smoother traversal of walls and less frustration and stamina cost, while still stopping bunny-hopping and other game breakers. The system will now allow you to jump at full height with no stamina penalty, but with a loss of forward momentum and jump height for each consecutive jump. This allows you to be able to traverse walls with no worry of suddenly running out of stamina and reduces the frustration of the stamina cost.





With the refactoring of our Animation System going underway there is a need to update almost all our animations to a newer and better standard. We recently brought aboard a new addition to the team, Kab, to help out in creating new animations for weapons and equipment new and old. Heres a few friendly Gifs to sate your appetite!

AK74M Rifle

MP443 Pistol

RPG7

M4A1 Rifle

M249 SAW


The G3A3 is a German 7.62x51mm NATO battle rifle developed in the 1950s, produced by license around the world. Still a very reliable platform, the rifle has seen many wars and conflicts around the world and is still in use by second-world militaries and insurgent groups to this day.




Adding tunnel systems has always been a big wish list item for us and the latest Fools Road release gave us a quick crash course on how our game mechanics and code would react to them. Guided greatly by the things we have learned in the last month our environment artist Drav has begun formally working on a modular underground system that would allow our mappers to create more elaborate functional tunnel networks and create a whole extra dimension for Squad environments.



---

Continued in Part 2!