Hello there Raiders!

Soon we'll be close to nearing the final stretches of the next update, and in preparation we got some exciting news to share with you all!



From now on RAID: World War 2 on Steam will be $9.99 USD.
We hope players will be happy with this price and find it easier to convince their friends and family to play alongside them.
Please keep in mind that regional pricing may vary.

If you're feeling extra supportive as a base game owner we still have the Special Edition Upgrade or the Soundtrack you can purchase. The Special Edition Upgrade still contains the Soundtrack DLC.
Additionally the Soundtrack DLC has been updated to be a proper soundtrack item and can be purchased without ownership of the game. Enjoy the music!




To celebrate this change as well as showing off all the new things that have been worked on over this year in preparation for this monumental update, we have decided to do a developer stream.
Do not miss it HERE LIVE on the 15th of July at 19:00 CEST!
During the live stream we will be announcing a small competition, so stay tuned for that!




To everyone who has been giving us feedback on the forums, reviews and on the discord! The feedback has helped guide us in a direction we're very happy with and cant wait to finally let everyone enjoy the update. We know it has been taking way longer then expected, but after a year in development, hopefully it will have been worth the wait. ːRaidflagː

Don't forget your favorite kraut mowing simulator in the summer heat. Get in there, save the world and live your best life!

Also, Keep your eyes peeled for future news!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/414740/RAID_World_War_II/[/url

Jump in and have a grand ol' time lootin' and shootin' in every which corner of the Axis occupied Europe. We've got all your favorite lead slingers;

• The Model 1 Carbine, Its big brother the Garand
  
• The StG 44, very easy to come by as one can guess
  
• Some easy to produce Stens and Sterlings
  
• A Thompson SMG, Churchill loves this one
  
• The classic MP 38 (with a little tinkering some later models)
  
• A plethora of shotguns that can knock your block and your socks off
  
• And for the cherry on top some nice big fat machine guns

More coming soon from us, And give those Jerries a good hiding!



*Luger playable weapon not included!

This newsletter is taking more dev time than the update, Newyears was almost a month ago

Welcome to the new year, Raiders!
We've been working hard ever since Update 21 to make the next update, we're still getting the hang of scoping updates out so this one ended up being waaaay too much work for us to push in a reasonable time- BUT we wanted to keep everyone updated on what we've got so far since we've been very silent for some time and we have a few new players who may be unaware that development is still actually going on RAID.

So no more waiting, we have a wall of text for you to enjoy!


The new skills are really fun to play with we've found, but they're difficult to balance and a lot of work to implement and bug test, so the initial release of update 22 will not have a ton, but here's some of new skills and warcry options that might interest you all!

Recon: "Silver Bullet"

• When activated enemies will be highlighted through walls
  
• All your weapons will have extreme wall penetration
  
• When the warcry is active firing will decrease the length of the timer, making precision shooting the focus of the warcry.

Assault: "Sentry"

• When aiming you become almost completely static and gain perfect accuracy.
  
• Magazine size is increased when activated without needing to reload
  
• Standing still or mounting a turret will drain the warcry half as fast
  
• Your damage resistance is greatly increased during the warcry

Insurgent: "Hold The Line"

• On activation a flag is planted where you stand which boosts the players inside its radius.

Insurgent: "Pain Train"

• On activation you charge forwards knocking down and hurting all enemies in your way.
  
• Hitting an obstacle that stops your charge will deactivate the warcry leaving you with some remaining charge left.
  
• Higher level Pain Train includes an AOE stun on activation.

Why is there nothing for Demolitions?
We have plans for his future warcry abilities but they will need more work on the systems in place to make work how we want it to work and don't want to delay the update any further.

• Player movement is overall less floaty.
  
• Mantling system now lets you climb over waist high walls that you normally would not be able to jump over while carrying heavy items.
  
• FPS animations now blend better and have some subtle camera effects along with interactions. (Camera bobbing effects can be decreased in the settings.)
  
• Detection should now be a lot more gradual when entering viewcones, Along with some enemy voice indicators for when you're being seen.

All weapons and enemies have had their stats adjusted to give us a strong base on where we want to balance things, The amount of damage needed to kill enemies should be decreased.

• Weapon falloff is now less harsh overall, but falls roughly in the 10-30m range.
  
• Weapon spread has been changed to have a smaller impact when spraying.
  
• Flamer health was changed so headshots can kill easier but is still better to go for the gas tanks.
  
• Melee weapons should now be far more capable of killing on all difficulties.
  
• Total ammo counts has been decreased across all weapons, this was to account for ammo skills and the lower enemy health and shouldnt have too large of an impact.

Final note on stat changes, if you are finding you're running low on ammo constantly and feel like you have a fairly complete build make a feedback post on the forums, Large changes like these will likely not account for some play styles.


Shotguns in menus will look like their damage was extremely lowered but this is now per-pellet damage, shotguns will deal damage for every pellet that hits the enemy rather than dealing full damage if only a single pellet hits.
Damage falloff has been made less harsh on all shotguns to adjust for pellet spread being harder to hit.

What about upgrades that increase the spread?
Those are still present and may change in the future if its needed, but along with the changes to pellets, aiming down sights will now have a choke-effect on spread if you need to target someone far away.


These rewards have been re-balanced along the development of update 22 and will have better rewards on operations, where you normally might get 5 gold for doing a massive operation now the rewards can be all the way up to 200 gold bars!


Normally to earn gold in raids you have to pick up trinkets around the levels, we've made that less of the focus on raids that have gold bars on them. Trainwreck and Goldrush for instance will have piles of gold you can take as a bonus, all bonus gold you steal pays you similarly to the loose valuables you find only with a greater reward.


Changes are being made to the crates and shelves around levels that includes;

• Pickups will have increased returns, more ammo and health.
  
• Shelves having less supplies on higher difficulties.
  
• Crates will contain one item, this was changed for ease of use.
  
• Crates will have a higher chance of containing better supplies (larger health kits or ammo)
  
• Grenade stacks can now range from 1-5 with higher chances in locked crates.
  
• Break effects when opening green crates.
  
• New effects for dropped items and dogtags. (Image below)

The new carry system has been in the works for a while now, being able to carry two or three bags from a skill didnt seem right as not all loot is the same so we opted for a weight system, you can see how it works in our last U22 roadmap in the Update 21 annoucement


Some new and improved elements to the hud are coming too like loot, objective and warcry ready indicators. The rest of the hud and even menus will slowly receive similar improvements and overhauls in future updates.
Here's some examples for now:





Changes to the design for shotguns, logical color coding and contrast improvements.
Tracking mode and Off are still present as options and are supported with these changes.
Color Coding;

• White markers are non-lethal hits.
  
• Red markers are hits that were a kill.
  
• Gold markers are critical hits, If the critical hit was a kill it will show red.

Icon Coding;

• Cross formation was a hit.
  
• Cross formation with a dot in the middle was a headshot.
  
• Shotguns will always use a simple dot.

We haven't had the time (or budget) to call in voice actors but we do have audio sources and unused dialogue that we have been making functional again.
Raider dialogue should now include a bunch more lines while cruising in vehicles, running from barrages, reviving teammates or using turrets just to name a few. Voice lines also shouldn't cut over each other as much, and the frequency of some of the objective reminders have been reduced.

• General stability fixes overall, a lot of unnecessary leftover code from prior games have been cleaned out, and many microtask threading related crashes patched up.
  
• Last Orders: Added more cover to the surrounding road, along with more triggers for hiding bodies in bushes.
  
• Trainwreck: Large objective crates have been replaced with proper gold piles to support the new loot system.
  
• Goldrush: Gold piles have been increased to support the new loot system.
  
• All maps that have dynamite crates should now be able to spawn ammo and health instead of being empty if no dynamite is set.
  
• Team AI raiders will now use cosmetics you have equipped on your other save slots.
  
• Lighting improvements across all maps.

Click thumbnails to see complete image
Team Ai raiders wearing the players other save slot cosmetics;

Higher difficulty Commander variation finally used;

Updated flare design;

New lighting across all maps;



We've also been working on the odd challenge card idea, Here are some that are functional;

• Challenge: Dooms Day: +Increased movement speed, -You cannot aim down sights.
  
• Challenge: Holiday Rush: +Carry penalties become bonuses, -You take increased damage.
  
• Boost: Raise The Bar: +Spawn into the mission with a crowbar.

Note, we don't have a designer for new card art so if we release new cards it may have to use existing art or have blank card icons for the meantime.


We're still a very small group working from an incomplete resource and tool-set, Some of the tools we have are for licensed software which we don't all have easy access to. We also don't have a complete source of the game, project files are extremely large and to be quite frank we don't know where everything is located.
We fix what we can when we can, so if there's something that hasn't been fixed chances are we just can't at the moment.

A note on new levels;
We are working on new levels, we teased that Sea Forts level seen in Ilija's livestreams will be the next raid to release but we cannot say when that will release and we don't want to delay the entire update to work on Sea Forts.


With the year of development for update 21 and the amount of work being put into update 22 the update formats will change to focused updates, this gives our small team the ability of pushing out more fixes and content more frequently.


Happy Late New Year from Lion Game Lion and the M.U.G team here!

The M.U.G Team has got another small batches of critical fixes for you, that we just could not keep waiting until we can finally deliver the long awaited Update 22!

Lots of users on NVIDIA Cards were reporting seemingly random crashing, causing a so called TDR, during gameplay. This should likely be adressed with this patch.

TDR Crashes? Wasn't that a driver problem?
Yes it was, and still is technically. This was one of those crashes that had us stumped for quite a while, especially because it only happened on users of NVIDIA cards, while the AMD drivers were always running along.

Recently we have been experimenting with higher resolution assets for engine performance testing. During those tests we noticed that using decal meshes on them quickly triggered the infamous TDR crash when shooting at it.



Now having a reproducable crash our investigation lead to the shader code responsible for producing those decals. We quickly realized what was happening here:
Due to layering issues that sometimes occured a loop got started and ran infinitly, thus triggereing Windows to think that the driver was stuck. The AMD drivers simply noticed this and exited the loop, while others kept iterating until the crash happened.

Now a failsafe for this has been implemented in the shader, thus preventing the crash! Our testing showed that this works properly now, but if you happen to get the crash again please let us know!

Thought I would share some insights on how we approach these things while we keep working on the next major and long awaited Update - Update 22!

Additions and fixes adressed with this update:

• Fixed TDR crashes related to decal meshes.
  
• Reeanbled Ambient Occlusion.
  
• Fixed controller navigation for the video settings menus.
  
• Fixed doubled input on the stepper controls.

Mod users; Please check for broken mods!
If your game is not launching and you may have outdated or incompatible mods installed please be sure to completely uninstall mods if you have having immediate issues!
In your RAID World War II directory remove IPHLPAPI.dll or WSOCK32.dll files by hand, as verifying game cache will not remove these files.

Everyone at the M.U.G. headquarters is still working hard to deliver update 22 for you. In the meantime, here is a small hotfix update to address an issue with game performance from processors with E-Cores.

What are E-Cores?

E-Cores (Efficiency Cores) is a technology used on 12th and 13th Generation of Intel CPUs that allow optimization of workloads to run on lower power cores that don't require high power of the main cores.

Diesel, the game engine for RAID, was not aware of what is an E-Core and what is not, resulting in the engine running tasks that would require more performance on them, ultimately leading to bad FPS.

This was mitigated with an engine patch included in this small hotfix.

And now when the boring explanation is over, time for some... NEWS!

The M.U.G. team consists of a few core members that keep this game progression with each update, which means progress is slow. We said this many times before but it still holds true for now, more than ever. Passion projects can only take up so much of ones time before real life events take precedent.

Nevertheless, RAID's next update will be possibly the heaviest update to date. In the last major update's announcement post, we mentioned that there will be a new "Pick 10" system for how to build a character. This can open up to many new build ideas, and ultimately, travel down the road to new war-cry abilities!


We have been going back and forth on what could we add that would be unique for the game, coming up with some truly bizarre ideas that could fit certain play-styles, but we wanted to do something more with this new concept.

We want to include you for this new step in RAID.


To our players who still endure with us, we value your time, patience, and feedback; but if you wanted to go the extra mile; we would love to value your creativity and ideas for the upcoming new War-Cry system.


This is NOT a competition or a demand from you. We will not restrict multiple ideas from the same person. Go wild - think of something you wish could happen with the mechanics of raid, and create an idea of how it could be implemented in your new War-Cry.



PLEASE READ: If you decide to share your ideas with us, please be reminded that your entire idea might not make it in the update. It all depends on how it's structured and if it could fit into already existing ideas better; or maybe your idea might have one REALLY good part about it and the rest are duplication of existing newer War-Cries. There are many different elements at play here so keep those ideas coming!

Either way, we will try our best to keep your ideas as pure as they are offered, but as with everything with game development, things are always subject to change.

In order to participate in this raidstorming session, head over to the official discord server.

#blammosweep

Card drops have been tweaked recently to allow more than one card pack to drop per day.

Additions and fixes for issues people have regularly reported:

• Added "Camera Effect Strength" option in the Video Settings.
  
• Fixed bug where Halloween drops were exceedingly common, This should also fix rarely getting anything other than gold and xp.
  
• Fixed alignment of the Distraction Coin in the weapons menu.
  
• Improved stances to prevent some camera clipping on the Bren LMG.
  
• Reduced the horde, somewhat.

Mod users; Please check for broken mods!
Lua mods are not supported for the major recent update, if your game is not launching and you may have outdated or incompatible mods installed please be sure to completely uninstall mods if you have having immediate issues!
In your RAID World War II directory remove IPHLPAPI.dll or WSOCK32.dll files by hand, as verifying game cache will not remove these files.

Fixes for issues people have regularly reported:

• Fixed soft-lock when trying to start an online game from either Tutorial or Offline mode.
  
• Fixed loot not properly resetting when you reload levels after securing loot.
  
• Fixed Browning Auto-5 magazine size being too large when upgraded.
  
• Fixed shotguns and some other weapons ghost reloading extra rounds when lacking total ammo.
  
• Changed localization for Extraction on non-English games to fix clarity issue with the escape.

Please uninstall LUA mods!
Lua mods are not supported for the major recent update, if your game is not launching and you have mods installed please be sure to remove the IPHLPAPI.dll or WSOCK32.dll files by hand, as verifying game cache will not remove these files.

Another few fixes for the currently pressing gameplay issues.

• Fixed hardlock in the loot reward UI when getting card drops.
  
• Fixed down counter UI showing blank text.
  
• Fixed interactions being interrupted for animated shells.

Lua mods are not supported for updates this large, if your game is not launching and you have mods installed please be sure to remove the IPHLPAPI.dll or WSOCK32.dll files by hand, as verifying game cache will not remove these files.

More fixes to come but this should fix the pressing issues for now.

• Fixed Outlaw Raid loot rewards giving 0 gold.
  
• Fixed interaction issues on Tiger Trap.
  
• Fixed flak shells despawning on Tiger Trap.
  
• Fixed the ammo pile in the camp not being enabled.
  
• Re-enabled Lv.40 XP drops to prevent soft-locking menus. (Still looking into why this happens!)

Lua mods are not supported for updates this large, if your game is not launching and you have mods installed please be sure to remove the IPHLPAPI.dll or WSOCK32.dll files by hand, as verifying game cache will not remove these files.