Thank you to everyone who entered - now we have to sort through through your amazing creations. We will contact and announce the winners in the next couple of days!
Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
Last week we talked about how engine change will impact our game, how it impacts development and what replication is and how it can improve our game. A lot of you expressed your love for our characters and how detailed they look, so this week we want to shed some light on how our characters are made and what makes them stand out!
Contrary to popular opinion, we are not utilizing photogrammetry in our game, that’s the Get Even and Chernobylite’s team domain. In World War 3, in the character department, we use something that’s called structured light scanners.
3D scanning is a process that analyzes an actual object to collect data about its shape and texture in order to reconstruct said object in a digital environment. There are few ways to go about that, few technologies with each having some pros and cons, but we chose structured light, as we feel it suits our needs the best.
To put it bluntly, you can point a scanner at an object and move around it (or move the object) to create its virtual equivalent. Structured light helps the process by projecting grid pattern on an object, telling the scanner how far or close it is from it. That way you can reconstruct that object, like in our example case, a British military vest, and preserve its shape and all tiny imperfections and dents, as well as its colors, that make it look and feel realistic.
Some objects require more or less detail than the others to give them a feeling of realism and accuracy. For example, the British military vest is a large object, so we are using a scanner that has a bigger working area, but leaves a bit of details out of the scan. The vest doesn’t really require that much detail because it is treated more as a “background” for various attachments and items on it. While scanning boots, knee pads, knives and items that are similar in size we utilize a scanner that has much more accuracy, but has a smaller working area. This helps with bringing out all the imperfections and smaller details that would otherwise not be visible. It takes considerably more time to calculate the mesh, but still makes it worthwhile to scan the object.
That’s why we have a couple of 3D scanners, to cover both big and small subjects. Currently we have access to three Artec 3D scanners, having Leo, Spider and Eva at our disposal - though we are not using Eva lately, mainly because it was replaced in our workflow by Leo; it is the newest scanner in our arsenal. Spider is used for the smaller objects. Its working distance - how far from an object it has to be to capture the detail and shape- fits between 0.2m and 0.3m and the volume it can scan (which means how big an object can be) is up to 2,000 cm³. It works flawlessly with boots, smaller pouches, helmets and objects of similar size. Smaller working area and volume allows Spider to scan with the most accuracy, up to 0.05mm. It captures the most detail, but it comes at a cost - it captures frames at ~8fps. In comparison, Leo, our newest scanner, has working distance between 0.35m to 1.2m and volume of 160,000cm³, which means that if we wanted, we could easily scan a car and still have a great scan quality. This scanner can work with a lot bigger objects, but has a point accuracy up to 0.1mm, which is still amazing, though not as detailed as Spider. It also scans much quicker than Spider and Eva, capturing frames at 44fps. The scanner it replaced, Eva, has the same 3D point accuracy as Leo, at 0.1mm, but has a working distance between 0.4m and 1m with volume capture zone of 61,000cm³. Also it only captured frames at 16fps, so we had to scan really carefully with it. Key difference between the three machines is the connectivity. Both Spider and Eva require constant connection to a PC/laptop for it to work, Leo is completely wireless. Which technically means we could just go out and scan whatever we wanted, but it being fragile and really useful to us, we would rather not!
All Artec scanners can also capture textures, though here at World War 3 we are doing textures by hand. It just looks better and gives 3D artists more freedom.
Using structured light helps cut down the time it would take to make the 3D model by hand and helps bringing down the production time of a High Poly version of an object from a couple of days to just a few hours, and sometimes even shorter.
After scanning and first pass of cleanup of the model, such scan goes further down the rabbit hole into the hands of a character artist.
3D artists, using specialistic 3D sculpting software create a High Poly model from received scan file. Such model is then processed and worked on by hand to eliminate any errors and mistakes that made it through the first pass of cleaning up. Its form and silhouette is fixed to match the general guides we use, so it works with different models. For example, when new boots are added to the game, artist has to make sure it fits into the pants, so there would not be as few parts sticking outside of the model as possible. Next step is to create a simplified model - the less polygons there are, the better for the overall performance of the game. Such model does not have all the details that got preserved during the scanning process, it is it’s simplified form, but using the High Poly model as a reference and a source, the artist is able to “bake” normal textures onto the Low Poly version, so it looks like all the details are still there, even though they’re not.
Then, the model is basically ready for texturing. Texturing process, which basically means painting all the colors and how an item shows up in the game, helps with defining the look of the surface of the model. It also encompasses assigning physical materials to the object. Last part of the process is to create various customization options for the model, and currently (as of 0.6 Warzone Giga-Patch Update) each item that can be changed in our game has more than 20 unique camouflages and color variants.
Available in following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
We wanted to bring to you a bit more technical overview of what does it mean to change Unreal Engine version to a newer one and how the optimization is done and what it consists of. This one is going to be a bit more technical, but we’ll try to keep it understandable.
First of all, a bit of news from last week! We celebrated the 4th of July with our American friends the best way possible - by helping Military and Veteran Gamers with their 24-hour holiday stream. We’ve added their patch and weapon emblem to the game to support their cause. You can see them and the new 4th of July skins in the game right now. We as a company are working with various charities and we have in the past supported veterans and their families.
Engine Update
Currently, the game is using Unreal Engine 4.19 and has been for over a year. We’ve updated the engine multiple times in the past, but as the full release comes closer and we have a live game to support, big changes like this are more and more dangerous. Game engines are insanely complicated and take years and years of work not only to make, but also to understand, so it’s not a small task to switch engine version - it’s not a one-button click and done - a lot of base systems change from version to version, which means a lot of work and sometimes redoing some parts of the game to better utilize new technology or even to get it to work properly.
To add to that, we’ve made some changes to the engine to suit our needs and those also have to be taken into account when making the switch. Our team has to be careful and test a lot between steps to know which part is problematic and fix it immediately.
This all is intentionally a bit vague to not get bogged down in details, but for completeness sake, we’ll take a look at one of the biggest changes coming in 4.21 for us, which means the Replication Graph.
Replication is a term used to describe how game and server talk to each other - how player position, rotation, state and all variables are moved between game and the server and other games in a match. In 4.20, Epic Games added the Replication Graph which can decide which information from which parts of the level are most important to you and how to get to them the fastest. Remember: the server has to calculate positions and rotations of dozens of players, their movement, health, ammo, hits, it has to simulate vehicles and bullets, calculate wall penetration and ricochets. We do some clever tricks to lower the amount of data that is transferred between players, but the Replication Graph helps with this a lot, freeing up the CPU time on both the server and the client.
Now, it all sounds pretty great, but the challenge is that everything in the game is relying on this data being reliably transferred between players and most bugs in multiplayer games are related to this data being lost or corrupted.
If you would just update the engine and do nothing more, the Replication Graph wouldn’t even do anything. We have to change how our netcode works to use this new, awesome feature to its fullest potential. This means changing a lot under the hood and a lot of testing, to make sure it works faster and more reliably than before. Additionally, other teams also have to take this into account - animation states, weapon data, vehicles - everything is being moved between players and has to synchronize well.
So, to summarize: while the basic engine update itself is not very hard and can be done in a day or two by one person, it’s the work that comes after that’s the challenge - making sure everything works and doesn’t crash, with hundreds of thousands of lines of code written over the years by us and Epic Games.
Optimization
The other big part of the 0.7 preparations is taking another deep look into the performance of the game. In 0.6 we’ve made major strides, speeding the game up by a lot and making it perform vastly better than before, but we’re still not satisfied completely with the result.
Optimization is not only done by technical staff, though - it’s a team effort, starting on designing features and mechanics that are not requiring a lot of processing power, through level design that takes into account sight lines and level streaming, going through the assets that have to be prepared in a certain way to perform the best they can, down to the technical side of optimizing code and calculations, as well as rendering, creating clever tricks to only render what is absolutely necessary.
Currently we’re working very hard on three major areas: level (asset) optimization, RAM usage and stuttering related to server performance. All of those areas are working together in a big way, because optimizing levels will increase the average FPS, but eliminating stutters and freezes will make those FPS feel a lot better. Having more free memory to load textures and objects will also reduce the number of loading stutters and will speed up the loading.
The good news is that we know what needs to be done to make sure the game performs as good as we can. We’re constantly testing things internally and sometimes even externally with the community (like we did last week on the PTE), looking for ways to increase the game’s performance and from this research come plans on how to make it awesome.
We estimate that since the release of the Early Access version in October last year, we’ve increased the average FPS 200-300% for most players and reduced stuttering by more than 75%. There’s still a lot of things we can make better and this work is progressing nicely - it just takes time, but rest assured, optimization is something we’re really focusing on.
Please let us know if a bit more technical Reports are something you’re interested in, join our forums and subscribe to the newsletter if you aren’t already!
Available in following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
We hope you’ve had as fun of a week as we did. Last week saw us going back to work on 0.7 after the Free Weekend battles.This week’s Report is focused on the 0.7 update we’re getting ready for PTE testing right now. We wanted to let you know what to expect and how to help us with the testing so the next update is even better than 0.6.
Before we get to the meat of this week’s Report, there are two news items we’d like to share with you. First, World War 3 is still 40% off for the rest of the Steam Summer Sale, so make sure to grab it before it ends on the 9th of July. We’ve just reached Mostly Positive reviews, so it seems that the Free Weekend and our hard work paid off.
Second, we’re looking for content creators to take part in a contest. The rules are simple: create an awesome video: gameplay, fragmovie, tips & tricks or funny montage about World War 3. The most creative videos will win World War 3 Special Edition* sets or Steam keys! You can submit only one video per creator. Send you submission to contests@worldwar3.com before Friday, July 19th.
* Special Edition is a unique collection of World War 3 gadgets: T-shirt, dog-tag, WW3 Steam key, poster, WW3 badge, "Sprzymierzeni z GROM" sew-on badge and a metal pin with our logo packed into a solid Helikon Tex backpack.
As we wrote in last week’s Report, we’ve had a lot of feedback and data collected, and this week we’ve taken some of it to make big strides in making the game better. Starting on Monday, we had a small, but important update hit the Public Test Environment servers. Thanks to community tests, we can now report that those fixes worked and we’ve been able to remove most stuttering issues we had come up during the increased server stress. Performance is going to improve with 0.7 noticeably, especially in regard to sudden frame drops.
The main part of this update is the new engine version we’ll be using for the foreseeable future. Right now we’re on 4.19, which was released over a year ago, on March 14th, 2018. This means that on one hand it’s been tested well, but on the other hand, we’re missing some cool new features Epic Games added to Unreal Engine. The biggest of those features is Replication Graph, which will alleviate some of the CPU stress on the servers increasing their stability and lowering overall latency - it should be a noticeable improvement over 4.19. There’s also some animation optimizations and backend improvements. You can read up on all of that on Unreal Engine website.
Work on 4.21 integration is progressing well, we’re on schedule and it seems that the work is nearing completion. The most important thing for us is, however, to keep the game stable and find as many crashes and other issues before we release the patch to Live servers. This is most likely not the last time we’re updating the engine either.
Changing the engine version is not everything we’ve got planned for 0.7, though. We’ll be introducing first iteration if the brand new challenge system. At first it will be limited in its function, but it will be expanded and improved over time. For now, expect daily challenges and rewards for doing them.
There’s a lot more to come with 0.7, from the new squad manager, that will let us make the party system more robust in the future and fix some spawning issues, new vehicle HUDs and other HUD improvements down to attachment rebalance and more information for new players on how to play well.
On top of those changes, you can expect new content as usual, some balancing changes, loads of bug fixes and other improvements in sound, interface and so on.
So when is it coming out? We can’t tell you yet, unfortunately. It will first hit PTE servers and will stay there until it’s ready for Live. We think the PTE update will come fairly soon, but as usual - no dates on that, just keep an eye on our social media and forums for the freshest information. This strategy has worked exceptionally well for 0.6 and we intend on sticking with this way of updating the game - this way our players get higher quality updates that minimize problems and let more people have more fun in the game - and that’s how it should be.
Available in following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Greetings, Soldiers!
This week’s Report is a bit later than normal, but there’s a good reason for it - we wanted to sum up the Free Weekend and to do that - it had to end. We’ve got some cool stats for you as well as our summary of what happened and what we learned.
The most important thing for us was to keep the systems stable and make sure the Master Servers are not slowing down and crashing. This was a resounding success, as there was just a minor incident that rendered one of the login servers inoperable for less than 1 minute at 2:54 am local time on Friday. The automated recovery worked as it should and the system came back without human interference in about 50 seconds.
We’ve had a lot of new players join us in testing the game and making sure we’re doing the right things. We’ve had a lot of new feedback from new players, which is invaluable - while veterans can generally provide better quality bug reports and feedback, new players have a unique perspective on the game that seasoned players can’t have - and that’s very important for us. Thanks to the feedback we got we can now make the new player experience better and make sure more and more players are happy with the game in those critical first few hours of playing.
We’ve also gathered a lot of data, bugreports and we learned a lot about both how the game works with the influx of new players, how our systems work and how to handle the communication on social media, forums and Discord.
Of course, there were some problems, crashes and server instability, but that’s to be expected - we are still far away from release. One very encouraging thing that came out of the negative part of the feedback and comments is this though: in general, our players are happy with the game design and how the game plays - it’s the technical issues that are preventing some people from enjoying the game. And technical issues are a lot easier to fix than core game design.
We’ve learned and tested so much during this Free Weekend, that it’s a no-brainer to do more of them. We don’t know when yet, but for now, let’s take a look at some stats (for a more visual version, check out the image at the end of this Report):
Overall we see this Free Weekend as a big success. We’ve learned a lot, tested a lot, got heaps of feedback and introduced the game to a lot of new players. Even our Steam review score went up for the last 30 days, which means that it’s not only us that think the game is getting better and better.
Now it’s time to get back to work on 0.7 and the Engine Update. This update should improve server stability and performance, reduce stuttering and make the game more stable. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff slated for 0.7, so make sure to check future Weekly Reports for more information.
Thank you for playing with us over the weekend and see you in the next Report!
The discount season is not over - we're joining the Steam Summer Sale! Starting now, until 9th of July you can grab a copy of the game with a 40% discount! If you had a chance to play this past weekend and you've been on the fence about getting World War 3, now is a great time to do so!
Here is a big, "Thank you!" from us over at World War 3! We appreciate you taking the time to try WW3 and we hope you enjoyed it! We'll continue to update and implement new changes to the game in the coming weeks and months of 2019. The game will remain on sale for a little over three hours, be sure to grab it if you're interested!
As for our Weekly Report, it will be postponed to Wednesday(June 26th).
The Free Weekend is here and Warzone Giga Patch has arrived a few weeks ago, so we have a crazy idea for a video contest for content creators around the world! We have three special limited edition World War 3 sets and a batch of Steam keys for winners. To win, you just have to create an awesome - gameplay, action montage, tips & tricks, funny etc - video about World War 3. The most creative videos will win the limited edition sets or steam keys! Deadline for submissions is Friday, July 19th, noon CEST. We're waiting for your videos at contests@worldwar3.com!
Special Edition is a unique collection of World War 3 gadgets: T-shirt, dog-tag, WW3 Steam key, poster, WW3 badge, "Sprzymierzeni z GROM" sew-on badge and a metal pin with our logo packed into a solid Helikon Tex backpack.
