It has been a very long time since we have released a new field report - the last one having been released at the anniversary of the battle of Antietam back in 2019. It detailed the progress we were making with the artillery branch at the time which was a major game addition. Today’s field report showcases several key systems and features as well as the biggest team composition shake-up we’ve had in years so let us get started!


Since the initial introduction of three skirmish areas in 2016, to now featuring more than thirty, the player's experience cycling from the completed round to the next round of play has largely remained the same. Throughout the years we have noticed just how often players take screenshots of the end-of-round victory/casualty screen so it has been obvious to us for a long time that this part of the game/result of the game is of key importance to many.

Knowing this, we set out to revamp the entire flow of what is presented to the players when a skirmish area ends and how they are moved on to the next area to fight at. We will detail the exact steps that a player is taken through in chronological order below:


Once a skirmish round ends all of the players are greeted with a new victory screen showing the two winning infantry regiments proudly standing at a key point of the just finished area while the familiar victory jingle is played.


When the new victory screen has finished all players will be shown the new “Battle Report” screen. This is a quick 30 second replay of the match that has just ended, shown on the overview paper map. It features a number of exciting features such as being able to show the locations of formations, skirmish formations, casualties, officer casualties, dropped flags, cannons and artillery shell impacts. It also shows each player his own position and places where he became a casualty during the round.

All of it is an accurate representation of the round that was just finished (but greatly sped-up).

Players will be able to see how clusters of skirmishers band together to form formations or how a formation is pushing the flank of the enemy and how they respond and position their own formation to halt the advancing enemy and lots of other exciting tactical choices and outcomes!

We can’t wait to see what you all think of the battle report feature and how you use it once it is released (might be a good post-event tactical debriefing tool for our company players for instance!).


While the battle report is showing the timelapse of the round just finished, players will notice a familiar voice that is subtitled below the battle report screen and titled as “Historical Events” playing. The narrator (voiced by Campfire Games Historical Advisor George Crecy) will present the historical outcome of the just finished skirmish area while the battle report screen is playing (he will be easily mutable if you’d rather wish to discuss the specifics of the battle report timelapse with your mates instead).

Once the battle report timelapse and historical outcome of the area is finished, players will be taken on a quick flight to the next skirmish area in line to be played while the historical narrator introduces the new area and its relation to the old one from a historical standpoint.

We have seen that a fair few, often newer, players do not realize that they are in fact playing on smaller key sections of either Antietam, South Mountain or Harpers Ferry, likely primarily due to our pop-up text based screens at the start of each skirmish area not being very readable (being shown after the players have deployed, resulting in most players just wanting to get moving or get organized and less so reading a pop-up screen). We believe the in-game overhead flight to the next skirmish area in line to be played is going to help players view our battlefields in more of their entirety than ever before.

Once the flight has settled on the new skirmish area and the historical introduction of it has finished the players will be shown the faction selection screen as the new round begins...


Enough talk about it though. Here is a WIP demonstration of the above 3 new additions to the inter-skirmish area flow of the game. Being a work in progress, please remember that everything is subject to major or minor change.



The inter-skirmish area flow updates are scheduled to be released in the next alpha update. We hope you will all enjoy them when they are released.


One of the main goals for War of Rights has always been to bring as much teamplay and organization often only found within passworded servers into the public servers of the game by designing game mechanics to nurture such general player behavior.

This continues to be a major goal of ours and so we take troll reports by our community seriously. One of the major things left for us to squash is providing players on servers with no present admins an option to take matters into their own hands in some fashion in order to limit trollability while the admins are offline (and when they are online as well for that matter). This is where the new demotion system comes into play.

This is a preview of a system that is going to enter production soon and so please keep in mind that things are subject to change between now and its release. That being said, we thought it a good idea to give you a heads up as to the direction we are headed and get your early feedback of it prior to testing it:


We have seen several community members suggesting a vote ban system to be implemented as that is what is usually used in other games but such a feature, we think, would be hugely problematic in WoR due to the limited amount of information we’re passing on to the individual players compared to most other games (no way of checking any kinds of stats to fact check an initiated vote claiming some random guy is a massive teamkiller for instance).

Instead of a vote ban system we have come up with a downvote-based demotion system:


Every player on a server can downvote any other player on their team using the tab screen. Here, they will find a down arrow icon next to all of their teammates.

Upon pressing the down arrow icon next to a player name it will be highlighted to indicate that they have downvoted the individual. A 1 will appear above the down arrow icon to indicate that the player has 1 downvote (if the player already has a number of downvotes his total tally will be increased by 1 upon clicking on the down arrow icon).

A red background will appear behind any player name on the tab screen that has downvoted you. This is to ensure that people are not trying to exploit the system by, say, switching teams in order to try to demote a competent officer of the enemy team without said officer having a clue as to who is downvoting him. It also ensures that I, as a downvoted player, have as much information at hand as the person downvoting me. This is only fair and while it may cause conflict it will also help solve it (both parties know they have downvoted each other and so both parties know to avoid each other in-game).



A downvote towards you only counts for as long as the player who downvoted you is on the server (it doesn’t matter which team he is on for his vote to count). He can leave the server and the downvote will be removed but once he rejoins the server it will be in effect again. Eventually we hope to have persistence between servers (at least official ones) so that this is not only tied to a single server, but either persistent to all official WoR servers or all WoR servers, period.

Once you reach a set percentage of downvotes of the entire server population (it could be 15% server population resulting in a full 150 player populated server requiring 22,5 downvotes towards you) you will be demoted.

Your name on the tab view will get an added “demoted” type icon next to it and the total downvotes you have. This icon will also be shown under your in-game nametag (next to the speaker icon).

A demotion message will be shown to you at the center of your screen. It will inform you that you have been demoted and of the restrictions that apply to being demoted.

It will then run a hidden timer of about 10 seconds before slaying you.

A demotion ends when (on a 150 player populated server) you have less than 22,5 (15% total server population) downvotes against you (this can happen either when the players having downvoted you have left the server, or retracted their downvotes or simply due to the server becoming more populated and so because of the percentage rule it will require more downvotes for you to reach the 15% threshold).


Upon being slain moments after the demotion has been triggered, you will be greeted by the infantry regimental/class selection screen.

When demoted, you can only ever pick the Infantry Private class to spawn as. All other classes: NCO’s, Officers, Flag Bearers & all of the artillery branch classes will not be selectable.

After having spawned in as an Infantry Private you will notice a red “Demoted” next to your class name “Private - Demoted” in the lower right corner when you press T to bring up the tactical overview.

You cannot pick up dropped flags as a demoted player. Upon trying to pick up a flag you will be shown a user interface message in the center of the screen stating that you can’t do so as a demoted player.

The infraction decay timer (for team damage inflicted by you) is greatly increased from the normal non-demoted rate for demoted players, resulting in much less teamkill trolling being possible for you compared to non-demoted players.


Once the above demotion system is integrated we will be able to use some of the downvoting features to expand our VoIP & text chat muting system (pressing the little speaker icon next to players on the tab view) to trigger a server wide (both VoIP & text chat) mute to any player that has been muted by more than 15% of the server population (the exact same mechanic as the downvote demotion system).

Upon reaching this, the server wide muted player will be shown an on-screen message informing him that he has been muted server wide in both VoIP & text chat and a muted icon will be shown under his nametag in-game (the VoIP speaker icon with a red cross over it), letting everyone know why the player they try to communicate with is unable to answer them.

The normal speaker icon next to his name on the tab view will also be changed to one that stands out to indicate that the player in question has been muted server wide.


The goal of this additional minor demotion system is to give smaller, often isolated, units on non-admined servers a way to sort their own, often very local, issues out amongst themselves instead of having to use the main (major demotion) system and convince 15% of the server population to vote to demote whatever player they may be having issues with.

For example: If a particular artillery battery is facing a pestering troll that keeps turning the cannons the wrong way/blocking the crew from pushing the wheels in the direction they desire, etc. Using the minor demotion system all that is required for the troll in question to be demoted is more than half of the members of his unit to have downvoted him. If this is done the minor demotion is triggered even though the downvote of the 15% of the total server population is not reached.

A minor demotion comes with the exact same restrictions as a major demotion but it only lasts for 30 minutes (the major demotion lasting until there are no longer more than 15% of a server population that has voted to demote you). Once the 30 minutes of the minor demotion are up the system will check if there are still more than 50% of his unit that has voted to demote him. If so, it will be activated for another 30 minutes, etc, etc.


An easy to use in-game popup menu when looking at a specific other player and pressing a key to bring it up to quickly downvote/mute them without having to find them on the tab screen to greatly help players be able to vote/mute when the new systems are implemented.

The demotion system is expected to be implemented and released shortly after the introduction of the inter-skirmish area flow updates to the game.


It has come to our attention that a much liked community member and long time WoR player as well as crowdfunding backer has recently passed away at a much too young an age. It has been incredibly moving to the dev team to see how the community has banded together to support the people most affected by this tragic loss as well as having shared memories that have been had with the departed.

This is not the first War of Rights community member we have lost nor will it sadly be the last. Because of this we feel obliged to let you all know how we have decided to conduct ourselves as a company when such tragedies occur so as to avoid misunderstandings as to our intentions:

We have decided not to mention any lost community members by name nor create in-game memorials for them out of respect for the loved ones left behind. We do not wish to possibly be seen as riding a goodwill PR wave in order to maximize profits, or by pulling at the heartstrings of our players by exclusively honoring some of the most well known lost members within the community. We do not wish to make the distinction between who is worthy of remembrance via an official announcement and/or memorial piece added in-game by us and who isn’t. To us, every single lost community member is worth honoring and remembering.

We hope our, now very, official stance regarding the matter is, if not satisfactory to the community members currently in grief, then hopefully understandable in the long run.

We would like to send our condolences to every community member who has lost a friend or acquaintance within our community.


Lastly, we would like to say our goodbyes to two, now former, team members at Campfire Games:

Philipp, a key part of our programming team who has decided to leave us to join Crytek in order to continue working on improving CRYENGINE directly. We are very sorry to see him go as he has been an integral part of the technical development of the game for many years and we wish him the best over at Crytek.

Hinkel, a part-time community manager that has been with us since the very early days when the project was little more than a vision. Hinkel is leaving the team due to creative differences. We wish him the best for the future and would like to thank him for the many hours he has poured into the project, mostly unpaid, during the years he has been with us.

To end on a high-note instead of a gloomy farewell we are very happy to welcome Aleksi from Finland to the team as a new full time programmer at Campfire Games!

While he has only been part of CG for a few weeks, Aleksi has already achieved some excellent results which we’re excited to release in the next game update, particularly in relation to increases in client & server CPU performance (up to 30% CPU performance improvements (depending on your setup) compared to the live build with more optimizations on their way!). He has also greatly sped up the overhaul of the transport system (the system which artillery and cavalry is built upon) so expect to see some of those improvements soon as well.

That’s about it for this field report. We look forward to reading your feedback!

Hello everyone,

We have just released a new alpha update to War of Rights. This update is primarily a maintenance update while we work towards revamping the victory/defeat screen shown at the end of the match while also aiming to do a better job at presenting the historical, geographical & situational relation each skirmish area has to the many other skirmish areas on the battlefield.

Expect to hear/see more from us regarding this matter in the not too distant future.

Below are the patch notes of update 173:

- Fixed a bug causing some of the regiments in the game to be unable to pick up dropped flags.
- Fixed the text chat not showing admin messages.
- Reduced the amount of visible corpse frame spawning (sometimes reported as teleporting players). This is not entirely fixed but it is much improved.
- Possibly fixed the stretching corpse visual issue.
- Fixed a terrain hole that would sometimes trap players at River Crossing, Harpers Ferry.
- Detail work done on all levels of the game.
- Work on all cornfield borders in the game.
- Updated the 114th Pennsylvania regimental flag.
- Added some key backend systems for future features.

Hello everyone,

We have just pushed a new alpha update.

Alpha update 172 is smaller update primarily focusing on fixing several bugs within the game.

- Possibly fixed overly stretched corpses.
- Prevented a bug with the desertion areas where it was possible to exit the skirmish area without deserting.
- Fixed the formation status always showing as Out of Line after having left and joined a server in the same play session.
- Fixed a couple of crashes when leaving a server.
- Fixed inconsistent teamkiller names in the teamkill messages.
- Fixed a bug where other players would not be moving after having joined a server. The only way for these players to start moving on your screen would be if they performed a character action, Enter Ready, Enter Melee Mode etc.
- Fixed a bug where the spectate camera couldnt be rotated and the spectated player could not be changed when spectating during the Last Stand endgame event.
- Various minor level detail updates.
- Slightly optimized the cornfields of the game.
- Fixed a bug that prevented union soldiers from being able to capture Lane's Battery at Colquitt's Defence, South Mountain.
- Fixed several broken ledges not allowing players to vault some of the fences at Pry House, Antietam.
- Updates to flag material settings.

Hello everyone,

Today we’re happy to be bringing you alpha update 171 of War of Rights, bringing in some much needed optimization upgrades, resulting in quite a performance boost for a number of hardware configurations running the game!

The CPU is the primary benefactor of this update. This means that any system that might be having a slower CPU (processor) than GPU (graphics card) is likely to see a performance increase due to the bottleneck of the CPU. The improvements come from a fairly wide range of changes that all work together to improve the performance:

- Updating various subsystems of characters are now being started earlier in the frame in one big batch for all characters. Previously, the updating of each character was scattered all across the entire frame. This helps significantly reduce the overhead of starting each subsequent threaded job related to character processing and thus helps significantly improve the performance.

- Characters are now skipping animation updates when they are far away from the camera. The amount of frames the animations skip, depends on the characters distance to the camera. This in effect means that at a distance, the animations on characters might look like they are lagging, it has been set up to first take effect at a fairly long range where it’s really difficult to actually notice the animation lag while still contributing a fair amount to improved performance.

- We now hide various character parts at various distances. The distance at which we hide a particular part depends on the size of the part. For instance the small brass belt buckle gets hidden fairly close to the camera where the backpack is one of the very last things we hide at long range. The character’s trousers, jacket and head will always remain visible. This helps significantly reduce the amount of drawcalls each character adds to the overall rendered scene as well as reduce the amount of transforms that constantly needs to be updated for every little part of each character.

- Player characters are now being hidden when they are not visible on the screen. This allows the engine to stop updating a lot of unnecessary elements on the players that are off screen and as you rarely have every single player visible in your current view, this helps improve the performance.

We have monitored a number of in-house systems as well as user feedback from the public test branch running the performance upgrades these past few weeks and have generally seen gains ranging from excellent to hardly any at all (due to whether the CPU is a bottleneck of the particular system or not).

One of our machines consisting of a 2080ti GPU and an i9 9900K CPU running the game with “very high” settings in 1080p saw a benchmark average frame rate increase from 52,5 to 66,2 running the new performance upgrades. That’s a 34,8% performance increase.

Some of the changes for the performance improvements have however been quite invasive and did result in a few bugs of which most have been fixed. Expect fixes for the remaining issues in the upcoming updates.

We have added an initial implementation of Playfab which will later be used to integrate the Company Tool into the game itself. For the foreseeable future the features it will add will be of the behind the scenes type of features. For instance, it will post an entry in the database whenever a game client gets involuntarily disconnected from the server and what the cause for the disconnect was. It will also post the benchmark results as well as a very basic listing of the graphics settings and current hardware setup.

The update also includes a number of other needed bug fixes to issues primarily introduced in the platform system update as well as a few new content additions as well. You can read the patch notes below:

- Reworked Miller’s Cornfield, Antietam. You will notice a new layout of pockets of trampled corn compared to the old area’s setup. It is also no longer possible to trick the corn stalks to vanish in order to gain a clear view of the enemy.
- Fixed an issue with the artillery spawn points on Miller’s Cornfield, Antietam.
- Updated the Saint Peter’s Church model, Harpers Ferry.
- Updates to all skirmish area boundary logic in an effort to reduce or remove various desertion issues upon spawning in.
- Made corpses display at longer distances.
- Fixed the stamina breathing sounds sometimes playing in the main menu after having left a server.
- Fixed the sprint button sometimes getting stuck ON when vaulting.
- Players can now freelook and chat during the vaulting animation.
- Allowed the artillery to set their fuze timer to half a second instead of clamping it at 1 second which helps them make the shell explode at closer targets.
- Fixed a miscalculation with the fuze timer when aiming at a very close target.
- Fixed a single frame A pose when a character starts aiming with the revolver when moving.
- Optimized the remaining cornfields of the game.
- Cox’s Push skirmish area, South Mountain detail work updates.
- The underwater bloodpool particle effect now correctly spawns once again.
- Added cornfield footstep sounds.
- Removed initial delay on third person gunshot sounds in an effort to debug why some of the gunshot sounds seem to be triggering at a delayed fashion.
- School House Ridge, Maryland Heights & Bolivar Heights camp, Harpers Ferry detail work.
- Removed the regimental flag of the 42nd PA as our studies indicate that the unit was unlikely to field such a flag during the Maryland Campaign of 1862.
- Added or updated the following new battle flags to the game:

• 8th Alabama national
  
• 65th Illinois regimental
  
• 1st Maryland PHB national
  
• 1st Maryland PHB regimental
  
• 3rd Maryland PHB national
  
• 3rd Maryland PHB regimental
  
• 114th Pennsylvania regimental

- Added a darker, varnished flag pole variant into the mix.
- Added the first implementation of specific specular maps for the battle flags depending on whether they are silk or a wool-cotton blend to better visually differ their materials. In the future this will be expanded in order to make the specular qualities of the paint on the silken flags appear different (much flatter) than the non-painted silken parts (much more shiny).
- The flags raised at the infantry drill camps are now dynamic. They will change to the battle flags of whichever regiment most players in the level have spawned as soldiers of. Note that all sizes of battle flags displayed at the flagpoles of the infantry drill camps from our many featured regiments will currently default to a rectangular shape for the time being.
- Detail work to the fields where the union spawns at the Garland’s Stand skirmish area, South Mountain. The stonewall separating the field from forest now has more holes in order for the union artillery pieces to be easier pushed towards the enemy.
- Fixed the missing CSA flag texture projected above the top of the players when spectating.
- Minor stonewall work, Anderson’s Counterattack skirmish area, South Mountain.
- Artillery crews & their officers can now no longer pick up fallen infantry flags.




War of Rights is currently on offer at a 50% discount at the Steam Lunar New Year Sale! With today’s performance updates & sale there has never been a better time for new players to give the alpha a try. You can grab a copy for yourself or your friends at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/424030/War_of_Rights/
We hope you’ll all welcome the fresh recruits in the ranks and we look forward to seeing you all on the fields of glory!

That’s all for now. Until next time, have a good one!

Hello everyone,

The main focus of update 170 is to fix up some of the anti trolling features left exposed following the platform system integration as well as expand them.

- Added artillery teamkill ban support. Firing a poorly aimed shot that ends up killing a bunch of friendlies will not get you immediately banned. The player pulling the lanyard will get notified of each teamkill comitted. A popup warning will also be displayed to the player pulling the lanyard when the teamkill limit is getting close to the ban threshold.
- Fixed past teamkills expiring sooner than they should.
- Improved the performance of characters by hiding small character objects when viewed from a distance.
- Fixed a bug where the player couldnt aim with the revolver or zoom in with the binoculars if the player had unselected the sword while being in melee mode.
- Removed various interact labels such as Open Door when spectating.
- Added the name of the banned player to the banlist.json file on servers.
- Players can now be unbanned in the admin menu by entering the players SteamID.
- Players currently not connected to a server can now be permanently banned by entering their SteamID in the admin menu.
- Fixed a couple of crashes.
- Prevented players from posting super long messages in the ingame chat.
- The boundary desertion system has been completely reworked to much more easily support desertion behavior for entities that are not necessarily players.
- Artillery and Limber Carts will now automatically be teleported to their starting position if they are left outside of the play area.
- Flags will now automatically be removed if they get dropped outside of the play area or in the enemys spawn area. This will allow a new flagbearer to immediately spawn with the flag.
- A custom player name can now be entered inside the Gameplay Options menu. To prevent name exploits, changing this name when already connected to a server will not come into effect until the player leaves the server and joins again.
- Servers without passwords can now be joined via Steam friends. Joining passworded servers via Steam friends will likely be added in the next update.
- Allowed the spectator camera to fly higher on all skirmish areas.
- Made the head sit higher for a better view when aiming the Parrot Rifle artillery.
- Added vaultable ledges to the artillery pieces at the bolivar heights camp skirmish area to counter the players using the arty pieces as a wall around the capture point, Harpers Ferry.
- Fixed some issues where certain character animations on the artillery could look very funny, in patricular when holding the trail spike if the artillery was moving.
- Improved the performance of the cornfields and reduced the stuttering they cause with rapid camera movements.
- Removed the floating blood cloud.

Hello everyone,

As part of the Steam Winter Sale War of Rights is currently 50% off!

You can get the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/424030/War_of_Rights/
We look forward to welcoming you as much as the player-driven company recruiters (okay, maybe not as much but still a lot!) who will be keen on inviting you to join the many excellent player-driven organizations in the game known as companies.


Today we are releasing another hotfix to the recently deployed platform system game update.

The hotfix primarily includes several UI fixes & upgrades but also brings in new features such as being able to click on any player name in the tab screen to be taken to the steam profile of said player, new flag additions, NCO updates to the 5th New York. The in-game nametag system has also been redone to be more efficient. This update also contains the first iteration of the Steam rich presence integration. Though very basic at this point. You will notice in your Steam friends window that it now says you are playing War of Rights and that you are in the Menu. Our intent is to greatly expand this in the following updates with it being able to display information such as, current battlefield, current skirmish area, current class, current regiment, did you just win or lose a round, which server are you playing on and whatever other fun and useful things we can come up with.

You can find the hotfix patch notes below:

- Fixed a bug where the in-game menu would sometimes move to the upper left corner.
- Fixed a bug where the Gameplay Options menu would not change the settings properly if the options menu was opened and the user immediately clicked the Gameplay button and then proceeded to change gameplay settings.
- Added debug logging options to the gameplay section of the options menu. Excessive logging can have a negative impact on performance and the new default logging level is now much lower than it was in the previous versions of the game. The debug log level can now manually be increased by the player out of personal interest or if requested by the developers.
- Fixed and reenabled the benchmark which can be accessed from the options menu in the main menu.
- Servers can now be joined directly from the Steam client’s server browser.
- Players in the Tab menu can now be clicked on which will open their Steam profile in the Steam overlay.
- Added an additional action “Player Info” when having selected a player in the admin menu. Clicking this will open the Steam profile of the selected player in the Steam overlay.
- Several Harpers Ferry level updates.
- Optimized the river & canal wall models found in Harpers Ferry.
- Fixed several minor animation issues found in the kneel, short rifle reload and fence vaulting animations.
- Adjusted the sight on the 10pdr Parrott rifled cannon.
- Updated several of the NCO’s of the 5th New York to be using gold trimmed jackets & insignias.
- Remade the in-game player name tag system in order to have a more efficient setup. This should slightly improve performance as well as reduce bugs.
- Reworded some of the ban messages to be easier understood by the players.
- Random players should no longer appear as developers when typing in the chat.
- Sent text chat messages should no longer sometimes be posted twice.
- Player names should now be consistent throughout all aspects of the game.
- Added or updated the following battle flags:

CSA

• 8th Alabama national
  
• 13th Alabama regimental
  
• 2nd North Carolina national
  
• 4th North Carolina national

USA

• 39th New York regimental
  
• 2nd Wisconsin regimental
  
• 6th Wisconsin national
  
• 6th Wisconsin regimental

As 2020 draws to an end we thought it a good idea to recap the year – it has been a special one for sure and while it can’t end quickly enough due to obvious reasons it has also been a hugely important year from a WoR standpoint.

Much of the first half of the year was spent on getting our artillery branch ready for public testing. Due to the complexity of the systems, and the visuals and authenticity we were going for this process took longer than we expected. We hope, however, that you would agree that the time was well spent in the end.

When we did open for public artillery testing in the summer, we saw the biggest surge of new players we have seen since the release on Steam Early Access and a half year prior. It was very exciting to see all of the new faces in the midst of cannon mayhem.

Later on, we expanded the artillery release to feature not only the 3 inch ordnance rifle but also the 12pdr Napoleon and the 10pdr Parrot guns. The transport system (the system which is the main supporting factor of artillery) is currently being overhauled in order to get ready for the first implementation of horses into War of Rights. The animations required for this to happen are currently in production as well.

2020 was also the year in which we had the pleasure of welcoming Bradley to our little team. He’s been hard at work at recreating the battle flags flown in September, 1862 to the utmost of his ability ever since – we hope you enjoy his work as much as we do!

At the tail end of 2020 (just a few weeks ago actually) came the Platform System release – the single biggest programming task done for WoR so far. It has already brought an end to several long lasting bugs and issues such as player mass booting, lack of proper messaging to players, unified player naming and it will continue to bring in more new features and fixes going forward.

Lastly, we’d like to thank all of our crowdfunding backers and early access customers for sticking with us for yet another year and we can’t wait to see what 2021 brings as we continue to push on for the ultimate immersive and teamwork-centric period shooter.

Stay safe everyone and happy holidays!

Hello everyone,

Today marks yet another major milestone in the development of War of Rights as the long awaited platform system is released as part of update 169!


The platform system, having been in the works since January of 2018 is one of the biggest programming updates to the alpha we’ve ever done. It is bound to change how a lot of the game features function on the backend due to its complexity and thus bugs should be expected in this very first deployment of it on the live alpha branch.

Here to give you all a brief rundown on the details regarding what exactly the platform system is, why we’ve decided to spend the time required to create it, what today’s implementation of the initial platform system version brings to the alpha and what to expect coming from later additions going forward, is Philipp, one half of our programming team & creator of the platform system:

With the release of the platform system in its first iteration it's time to talk about its purpose again.

As mentioned in an earlier field report, the goal of the platform system is to replace the old system that handles all “social” and platform related functionality and allow us to expand functionality in that area as well as make it far easier to diagnose and fix problems.

At its core, the Platform System is a data driven collection and management system, built around the entity component system framework EnTT. This means it collects information from various sources, like steam, aggregates it, filters it and then has other subsystems operate on it depending on their needs. As a result, all sub-systems and “information” providers are completely disconnected from each other and can operate only on the data they need, or not at all if the required data combination is not available. Furthermore, data collection can be deferred so that systems only start using it when it's available, without blocking any work while waiting for it.

As with the old system, the networking functionalities provided by platforms like steam are also included in their own modules to facilitate direct connections between clients and servers.

For the user this replaces the back end to the current connection and matchmaking systems, so visually there will not be any changes for this release, but probably some improvement in responsiveness.

Since the matchmaking and connection handling is now completely separate from game systems, we were already able to identify the cause of some major issues that have eluded us for quite a while with just two public test sessions. One of them is the famous “mass booting” issue, which, as it turns out, was caused by the basic steam P2P system timing out a large number of users seemingly at random. This has now been replaced with a lower level system that also resulted in some connection speedups.

The intent for all this is to serve as a base for future features, like the integration of the company tool, and potential expansion into other platforms as well. For the near future I am planning to add in a few steam social features like friend/server joining and currently playing information which did not quite make it into this release. But with all the work that has been put into the platform system, this has become a far less complicated and much, much quicker task, which was the core of the problem in the first place.


Today’s update contains quite a bit of changes and additions (some are tied to the platform system’s introduction while others are not). Below is a complete list of what update 169 brings to the alpha.

- Implemented the first iteration of the platform system, resulting in added features such as better messaging to players when issues or unexpected things happen, possible fixes for long-lasting alpha major issues such as servers mass booting players and drastically increasing the rate at which we can locate and thus work on fixing bugs in the future.
- Added or updated the following battle flags in our continued effort to bring you the most beautiful & accurate battle flags in any game:

CSA

• 1st Virginia Infantry national

• 18th Virginia regimental
  
• 4th Alabama regimental
  
• 27th North Carolina national
  
• 3rd South Carolina national
  
• 17th South Carolina national

USA

• 1st Maryland regimental
  
• 20th Maine regimental
  
• 5th New York national
  
• 5th New York regimental
  
• 20th New York regimental
  
• 39th New York regimental
  
• 126th New York regimental
  
• 30th Ohio regimental
  
• 32nd Ohio regimental
  
• 4th Rhode Island regimental
  
• 1st Delaware national
  
• 1st Delaware regimental
  
• 51st Pennsylvania national
  
• 51st Pennsylvania regimental
  
• 72nd Pennsylvania national
  
• 9th Vermont national
  
• 9th Vermont regimental

- Added the 5th New York “Duryee’s Zouaves” Infantry regiment to the game, playable on the fictitious Pry House skirmish area.


Organized under the command of Col. Abram Duryee at Fort Schuyler at New York harbor in April of 1861, the regiment soon became renowned as the efficient and disciplined “Duryee’s Zouaves.” However, they would also quickly prove their mettle and coolness under fire over the course of their regiment’s brief career, including their first fight at Big Bethel in June, and in the Peninsula Campaign a year later. After several charges into Rebel lines, their ranks were already depleted by the time they met their foe again at Second Bull Run. Joined by the equally small 10th NY Zouaves, the 5th NY barely mustered 490 men when a Confederate division 30,000 strong under James Longstreet crashed against them. The Zouave lines were literally ripped to shreds by the Rebel volleys, leaving only 200 to stagger back. As such, the 5th NY was left in reserve for several months while the ranks were reestablished, while a final engagement at Chancellorsville heralded the end of their two-year enlistment, where several hundred reenlisted into the 146th NY Infantry.

- Added 10pdr Parrott rifled cannons and their matching limbers to various batteries throughout the game.




Robert Parrott of New Hampshire, who graduated third of his class with honors from the US Military Academy in 1824, was the inventor of the famous line of Parrott guns in 1860. The 10-lb Parrott Rifle was one of the most common rifled guns to be found on both sides, but was often shunned by artillerymen as being a gun prone to bursting. However, perhaps due to a low production cost compared to other guns, it could be found in many sizes, the largest being the 300-lb Parrott Siege Rifle used against Confederate held Fort Sumter in August of 1863. Parrotts continued to be used in coastal defense roles until phased out in 1900 with the Endicott Fort Reforms.

- Updated the 2nd & 6th Wisconsin uniforms to better portray the uniformity & discipline of the units during the Maryland Campaign of 1862.



- Added several worn Hardee hat models.
- Added a short-brimmed beehive hat model.
- Added a tin bullseye canteen model.
- Reduced the complexity of the setup of every first person animation resulting in slightly different looking first person animations in the game.
- Improved the hand poses when carrying a flag.
- Improved the hand poses when kneeling with a rifle.
- Added different animation variants of entering aiming with a musket.
- Improved the revolver first person recoil animation when firing.
- Updated the two-banded rifle reload animation.
- Updated the double quick animation when carrying an artillery round.
- Added a sword order arms emote (F6 by default).
- Added a sword parade rest emote (F7 by default).

- Made the union cannons & limbers on the River Crossing skirmish area vaultable in order to lessen the blocking strategy as seen often used at the area after the introduction of artillery.
- Fixed a game-breaking bug that would cause counter-attackers to not be able to spawn when they entered final push.
- Added the burned down Wager Hotel, replacing the placeholder model at River Crossing, Harpers Ferry.





- Updated the canal wall models on the Maryland Heights side of the Potomac, Harpers Ferry.
- Added shale roof as a variant to the townhouses of Harpers Ferry.
- Added a St. John's Church model, replacing the generic town house placeholder structure in Harpers Ferry.





- Made the options menu way more reliable by recreating its backend functionality from scratch.
- Improved the usability of the options menu, now featuring tooltips, instant changes to settings (no need to press save settings anymore) & several bug fixes.
- Added a fullscreen and borderless setting to the options menu as well as settings for screen space reflections and ambient occlusion.
- Overhauled the keybindings menu, now allowing the user to change keybindings of every single action in the game.
- Overhauled the in-game controls screen (activated by pressing F2) to display every single action in the game (scroll your mouse wheel to view the entire list).
- Updated the admin menu in order for it to work with the new platform system and generally make it easier to use (now with F3 as its new default activation key).
- Added varying heights to all the characters in the game, resulting in a more realistic look when in tight and large formations.



- Flags now won’t as quickly get dirty when dropped as they did before (the speed at which bullet holes are added has not been changed).
- Updated the small arms projectile impact particle effect on dirt and grass surfaces.
- Increased the max amount of dismembered body parts a player killed by an artillery round might turn into.
- Fixed the bug where players might spawn inside one of the bush models when spawning on the flag bearer.
- Increased the CSA starting morale amount on the Pry House skirmish area by roughly 10% as one in four enlisted men of the newly added 5th New York regiment will be issued with a Sharps rifle.
- Made the canister balls spread out a bit more when fired from the Napoleon cannon.
- Updated the cooking implements of the cook tents featured throughout the game.
- Various level detail work.
- Updated the setup of all of the flags of the drill camps to make them less rubbery and more predictable.
- Wall tents are now enterable.
- Fixed several NCO characters spawning without a weapon selected, requiring the player to spam 1 in order to get a weapon.
- Weapon selection when having several weapons no longer requires the user to cycle through them sequentially. Instead, key 1 will select the primary weapon, key 2 will select the secondary weapon and key 3 will select binoculars. Switching cartridge type on the Springfield M1842 has now been moved to key 5 as its default key.
- Fixed the third person microstutters when in at the ready or in the rifle club melee mode.
- Fixed a bug where the dynamic depth of field didn’t always calculate the proper distance to what you were looking at and thus sometimes blurred the image incorrectly.
- Fixed most occurrences of a bug where an artillery shell hitting a wooden surface, like the roof of a building, would spawn the brick impact effect instead of the wood effect.
- The amount of dark red tint added when wounded now scales based on the time of day, resulting in players not going blind when wounded at night.
- Added a popup warning that the user is going to be killed when enabling the spectator camera (sorry, no more “press F9 for a scoreboard/godmode/fully automatic musket” trolling!).
- Added a lock icon next to passworded servers in the serverbrowser.
- The correct loading screen should now be shown when you’re joining a server.
- Added a “Tutorials” entry to the main menu. Pressing this will open a website containing tutorial videos created by the community & Campfire Games alike which explain most of the current features of the alpha.
- The War of Rights error reporter found at: https://warofrights.com/errorreporter has been updated to support the platform system.

That’s all for now. We look forward to partaking in playtesting the patch with all of you as well as gathering your feedback, especially in regards to the platform system, in order to iron out the bugs almost certainly introduced in its initial implementation as well as to be utilizing the additional data provided by the system to help us improve the stability of the game on a quicker, continuous basis going forward.

See you on the fields of glory!

War of Rights is currently 30% off as part of the Halloween sale!

You can purchase the game at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/424030/War_of_Rights/

We look forward to be greeting the fresh recruits in-game.

Happy Halloween!

Hello everyone

We have just opened the public test branch of the game for stress testing the initial implementation of the platform system, a major core code replacement created to combat several alpha issues such as connectivity ones that have long been part of the game. In short this will mean us being able to deliver a better working game at a quicker rate going forward, resulting in less stuck at establishing context and mass player drop issues, better game-to-player communication in terms of messages sent based on whether you were kicked, banned or lost connection to a server and more.

The public test branch can be joined by all owners of War of Rights. In order to locate it, simply navigate to War of Rights in your steam library, right click and enter properties. Once there head into the beta tab, open the dropdown menu and select publictest-platform.

Steam will now download the public test client. Once downloaded you'll be able to join the public test server. Should you wish to return to the live version of the game you'll be able to opt out of the test in the same dropdown menu as you used to opt into it via.

The public test branch will also include a few other additions for you to test out such as an updated options menu and the next cannon in line to be released; the 10 pounder Parrott. It can be found throughout many of the available batteries in the game.


We hope you will join us in the very first stress tests of the platform system, arguably one of the core systems to better the development of the game going forward.

We're currently aware of at least two scheduled mass testing events on the public test branch server this weekend:

Friday (tonight) 23rd of October - 8 PM EST / 2 AM CET
Saturday 24th of October - 8 PM EST / 2 AM CET

We invite everyone willing to help us out stress testing the platform system prior to it headed to the live build to join in!

Thank you for your help - we look forward to be seeing you on the fields of glory!

42nd Pennsylvania national & 1st Georgia regimental


Today, we’re pleased to be releasing our biggest update to the infantry battle flags of the game yet as part of alpha update 168. We’ll also be giving you a fresh progress report about the much anticipated “Platform System” - a core system for War of Rights going forward.

First thing’s first, however. Let’s talk about the massive flag addition featured in update 168. It’s my pleasure to pass the word on to our newest team member at Campfire Games, Bradley.


My name is Bradley and I am the Historical Texture Artist for Campfire Games, as well as a Graduate Student concentrating in the American Civil War with special interests in Confederate Chaplains, the Siege of Vicksburg, small arms and artillery, and vexillology in the Civil War (the study of flags).


19th indiana regimental & 18th Mississippi national

One of the most important material objects of the Civil War is without question the battle flag. The battle flag was more than just a signal to communicate a regiment’s identification to other units on the chaotic and smoke-filled battlefield, although the “colors” were vitally necessary in serving this practical purpose—the battle flag was also an important symbol to the men that fought under it. For many enlisted men, their regimental standard was a piece of their past and a reminder of home. Not infrequently, ladies back home had sewn the regimental colors and sometimes even constructed the standard from their own wedding dresses, as silk was a precious wartime commodity. The soldiers themselves carefully stitched or painted Battle Honors such as “SEVEN PINES” and “WILLIAMSBURG” onto their banners. These were more than names where gallant fighting happened, these were the final resting places of brothers-in-arms, many dear friends and family members killed hundreds of miles from home.


69th New York regimental & 5th Texas national

My great-great-grandfather, his brother, and their brother-in-law fought at Sharpsburg with the 8th Florida Infantry, some eight hundred miles from their homes in Nassau County, Florida. At Bloody Lane, their under-strength and relatively untested brigade suffered fifty percent casualties. A Chaplain in the Florida Brigade witnessed, "Five times our colors fell." The flag staff was shot in two and the final bearer was killed as the Confederate center abandoned the sunken road. In October 1862, Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan posed for photographer Alexander Gardner in the general's tent at Antietam. At the bottom left hand corner of this famous image is a crumpled Confederate battle flag that some have identified as the battle flag of the 8th Florida Infantry. So it was, this particular rebel flag continued to serve an important symbolic purpose even in Union possession.


Lincoln & McClellan next to what is probably the captured battle flag of the 8th Florida

With this update, most of the flags in-game have been rescaled to historically accurate proportions, and we are proud to introduce over fifty new battle flags based on months of meticulous research. War of Rights players, whether on the battlefield or in drill camp, will encounter flags nearly identical to surviving artifacts, down to the tilt of stars and placing of text. Where no artifacts survived for us to follow, we strove for authenticity. We expect future findings may require some flags to be revisited.


32nd Pennsylvania national & 1st Texas regimental


- Added or updated the following battle flags:

CSA

• CSA 2nd Bunting
  
• CSA 7 star national
  
• 3rd Arkansas regimental
  
• 3rd Alabama regimental
  
• 6th Alabama regimental
  
• 8th Alabama national
  
• 8th Florida regimental
  
• 1st Georgia regimental
  
• 1st Georgia national
  
• 18th Georgia regimental
  
• 1st Louisiana regimental
  
• 6th Louisiana regimental
  
• 9th Louisiana regimental
  
• 18th Mississippi national
  
• 4th North Carolina regimental
  
• 14th North Carolina regimental
  
• 27th North Carolina regimental
  
• Hamptons Legion South Carolina national
  
• Palmetto Sharpshooters South Carolina regimental
  
• 1st Texas national
  
• 1st Texas regimental
  
• 4th Texas regimental
  
• 5th Texas national
  
• 13th Virginia regimental
  
• 30th Virginia regimental
  
• 33rd Virginia national

USA

• USA 32 star national
  
• 14th Indiana national
  
• 19th Indiana regimental
  
• 19th Indiana national
  
• 15th Massachusetts national
  
• 28th Massachusetts national
  
• 1st Maryland national
  
• 7th Michigan national
  
• 17th Michigan national
  
• 1st Minnesota national
  
• 1st Minnesota regimental
  
• 9th New York national
  
• 9th New York regimental
  
• 20th New York national
  
• 69th New York national
  
• 69th New York regimental
  
• 8th Ohio national
  
• 87th Ohio regimental
  
• 28th Pennsylvania national
  
• 32nd Pennsylvania national
  
• 42nd Pennsylvania national
  
• 114th Pennsylvania national
  
• 2nd US Regulars national
  
• 10th US Regulars national
  
• 1st US Sharpshooters national
  
• 1st US Sharpshooters regimental
  
• 2nd US Sharpshooters national
  
• 2nd US Sharpshooters regimental
  
• 2nd Wisconsin national

- Added 4x4, 6x6.5 and 8x6 feet flag models in order to support the historically correct sizes of battle flags.
- Overhauled the corpse manager: corpses are now divided into sectors of the skirmish area. A sector is able to spawn in as many corpses as the corpse count in the game options allow for. By moving the corpse count setting from being global to being sector based you will now be able to see many more corpses spread out across the entirety of the skirmish area with no change in performance.
- Added a ringing noise following discharging to all bronze cannons in the game.
- Fixed the sponge clipping through the barrel of the cannon when sponged while the barrel is elevated.
- Made all artillery pieces and limbercarts produce sounds when hit by small arms fire.
- Improved the enter bayonet melee mode from shoulder arms animation.
- Fixed a bug where most weapons in first person when aiming were not aligned properly to the direction they would shoot.
- Detail work, North Woods, Antietam.
- Pry Grist Mill skirmish area vegetation work, Antietam.
- Bolivar Heights detail work, Harpers Ferry.
- Drill Camp level detail work.




Given it’s been a while since the last time we spoke of the upcoming platform system (which can be read here) we thought it might be a good idea to give you all a fresh progress report. We’re happy to announce that internal testing has begun and we’re making steady progress towards being able to bring it to a public test branch available to every War of Rights owner very soon indeed.

The goal of the public test branch is to stress test the platform system as much as possible - this means to fully populate the test server and leaving and joining it multiple times, possibly even causing it to crash or mass boot everyone on it. At the core of the platform system is clearer information available to us developers when things do go wrong which is going to massively help us increase alpha stability (client and server alike) going forward so we’re extremely excited to be seeing what sort of new information we can get our hands on during the initial stress test. We hope many of you will join in on the testing when we soon announce the details of the public test branch launch.

That’s all for now. Until next time, have a good one!