Hello everyone,

Currently we have an unknown outbreak on our EU master server. We are working with our hosting service to diagnose the issue and develop a quick fix.


We do apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you,



UPDATE: We've temporarily forwarded EU master requests to a backup machine, it will mean that you can't access your profiles, but you will still be able to play. The issue is a hardware failure, we've got hands on site to fix it, but there's no ETA at this time.


Please restart Steam if you still encounter issues,

Thank you for your patience,

- Captain Price

Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR

The time has come to reveal a bit of information on our plans regarding the promised community game mode. We’ve been bombarded by requests and ideas for new game modes since even before the game launched into Early Access, which is understandable - everyone has their personal favourite and wants to see it realized in as many games as possible. Some game modes fit World War 3 better, some worse, but since we are only choosing one of them, we had to make sure it’s both heavily requested and actually works well with what World War 3 is and will be in the future.

We’d love to include every idea we can, but there are some problems with that. Obviously, we don’t have infinite time or resources to devote to making more game modes, but that’s not the main reason we’re trying to limit how many there are - we just don’t want to have 20 game modes that nobody plays, and we feel like limiting the number and playing to the strengths of the game is a much better approach.

When deciding on what game mode to add, we’ve had a few criteria to take into account, so let’s talk a bit about them.

Very early on we’ve noticed that the game is the most fun and works best when players create front lines between points, so it was instantly in our minds when thinking about next steps and how to handle adding more game modes to the game.

Right now, we’ve got two game modes: Team Deathmatch and Warzone. Both of them are vastly different and offer different experiences and we wanted to add something that’s somewhere in between - a bit more dynamic than Warzone, but a bit more tactical than TDM.

Those are the most important deciding factors of the game mode we wanted to add. Having that in mind, let’s take a look at what the community wanted - after all, this is the community game mode.

At the beginning of April, some community members came to us with a question: “Can you guys give us a password protected server to test a game mode we think would be cool?”. We talked about it a bit and decided that it could be fun to test something like this on the Public Test Environment with our community.

We set it up, and on the 19th, the first Breakthrough event was announced by and for the community. Check out the forums for the original post, but the idea was simple: create a popular Rush variant for World War 3 and see how it works with our mechanics and gunplay, inviting only people that know what the rules are and are willing to take the time to set it up and see how it plays.

It was great fun and it seemed to flow well and work with our game splendidly, but there were some problems, mainly with spawns and the rules that were decided at first. We changed them, went through the second and third iteration and each time it was more fun and was getting closer to the right idea.

At this point, there’s not much more that we can do without starting to change the game itself to facilitate the idea, so we had to decide if this was the game mode we wanted to go with. We don’t think there’s anything that can be called more of a community game mode than a game mode that came straight from our players. Moreover, in some polls that were held by the players on our forums, this type of game mode was also winning.

It fits our ideas of what the game needs and should be a good addition to the game mode roster, with TDM being a simple and dynamic one, Breakthrough going up in tactics, but still being fast paced and fun, Warzone - teamplay oriented and more complex and finally Recon - the one for tactical players.

We wanted to share with you what our players that started this initiative think and why they decided that a Rush-like was a good idea:

We’ve talked with the guys that World War 3 would be ideal for something like a Rush game mode and as avid players of this kind of mode, me and DareQQ decided to test how it would work. First iteration took over 2 weeks to prepare, thinking about how it would work and how to set it up. As it seems - it worked, and gave us a lot of fun and inspired us to organize more of the Breakthrough events. - Lugresky

So, what is it?

If you’re not familiar with how this type of game mode works, in Breakthrough, the players are divided into two teams: attacking and defending. Defending team has control of all of the areas on the map and all points and they can spawn on any of the points. The attacking team’s goal is to destroy the radio stations that are placed on each of the points, giving them control over the area and letting them push the front line further. They have to do it before the time runs out - if it does, defenders win.

Radio stations can be destroyed in two ways: by planting an explosive on them or by other explosives, like tank shells, C4 or grenades - it just takes a lot of them. Once the explosive has been planted, it can be defused by the defenders. If it’s not, it destroys the station and pushes the defenders further into their territory. All damage done to the station is permanent and it cannot be repaired.

Each region can have one or two stations and is converted to attackers after all stations are destroyed in it. Taking a region adds time to the game, making it a quick one in case of a steamroll and longer one if the game is evenly matched.

For now that’s all we are sharing about the game mode, but rest assured we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, just make it work with our game. It can still change, so we will share more details as they come up.

What is the current progress?

At this point we’ve got a working prototype and we’ve already tested our version a few times, with very positive feedback coming from the playtesting. Breakthrough will come the Public Test Environment at first and will be evolved there with community feedback and suggestions. We don’t have an ETA yet, because we’re still hard at work with the engine change, but the work is progressing as expected.

Let us know what you think on our social media, Discord server and on the forums.

Have a great week,

- World War 3 Team

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!

Good luck, soldiers!

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.

Just before we end the report, here’s how the character looks in game after final touches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incPt0CGNoc

As usual, see you next week for our weekly update!

- World War 3 Team

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.

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.

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!

Hey there, this time it's just a tiny patch to celebrate 4th of July with our community!

• Added Military & Veteran Gamers patch,
  
• Added Military & Veteran Gamers weapon emblem,
  
• Added 4th of July M4 MWS skin,
  
• Added 4th of July MCS skin.

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.

Want to be up to date? Sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and VK, talk to us on the official forums and Discord server!

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):

Top daily unique players: 22 411
Avg. daily unique players: 18 350
Peak online: 2 513
Game launches: 170 906
Automated cheater bans: 4
Steam store visits: 4 631 020
Peak Twitch viewers: 1 393

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!

Want to be up to date? Sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and VK, talk to us on the official forums and Discord server!

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!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/674020/World_War_3/


If you have issues loading the store, check back in a bit! Steam is having some server difficulties.


Enjoy the Steam Summersale and World War 3!


- Captain Price

Here we go! Thanks to the free weekend, we've found some fixes that should (in theory) improve performance. Let's test those!

PTE 0.6.11 Patch Notes

• Allowed async net loading, should reduce stuttering caused by server performance.
  
• Streaming improvements to reduce streaming issues (mainly Smolensk).
  
• Adjustments of neutral packs positioning on Warzone maps.
  
• Improved skins for Defender chest.
  
• Improved textures for M417 additional sights.

• Vaultfixes on Polarnyj.
  
• Minor bullet penetration fixes.
  
• Destroy Packs fixes on Warsaw, Berlin and Polarnyj.
  
• Leader star wasn't disappearing after Barracuda scan.

Thank you everyone,

- Captain Price