Greetings!

We are now in what we consider the final stages of the Unreal Engine upgrade to Post Scriptum, this process has been a long one and involved mostly coding and fixing up stuff that inevitably got broken in the transfer.

The new version also allowed us to make use of some of the latest tech available to us, this is a major step in making Post Scriptum the best and most optimized experience it can be while also moving towards our eventual 100 player server goal.

But for this devblog, we want to cover some of the smaller and more general improvements, most of which come directly from community feedback. This mostly revolves around level design and gameplay design.

We are also running another playtest tonight. Details are at the end of the devblog.

The first topic we want to cover is the Staging Phase. This is a period before the match starts in which you are given the opportunity to get organized into sections, make plans both strategically with the team, but also for your individual section. It also allows a generous period for players to load into the server and get set up with their section before the round starts.

During the staging phase, the players are not able to leave a certain area until the phase ends, this means that players have a chance to get into vehicles, get their kits and so forth before the initial roll-out. The first 10 minutes of gameplay is always very important and the more organized your team is the better.

While staging isn’t anything new, it has been for years very inconsistent with seemingly random numbers between layers, sometimes not even any staging phase even existing. This was obviously a problem for coordination and we’ve addressed these issues with this update and going forward there will be a standardized time for all maps and layers.

The first problem was to figure out which layers had or didn’t have a staging phase and figuring out what is a reasonable time for the staging phase. We settled on giving all layers and maps a 3.5 minute (210 seconds) staging phase to allow adequate time for all players to get ready.

This has been standardized across all the gamemodes we have available.

Another place we’ve realized some improvements were needed was the Mines Ahead warning when approaching the edge of the level, while not authentic it is a common way to keep players restricted without the need of a wall to block players.





With the Armour Overhaul we standardized the timer for the out of bound minefield. With this update we will be making some slight improvements to the UI to better inform players that they are at risk, in the past we used a simple piece of text with a timer and this could easily be overseen, so you end up meeting a very explosive end. The UI is now much more clear at telling you that you need to return to the battlefield.

Aside from direct gameplay improvements, we’ve spent time looking at our levels, feedback on them and how we can improve the gameplay for our players.

A big complaint especially with Chapter 3 was that the main bases were usually place far too close to a capture zone making it almost impossible to avoid some kind of spawn camping or main base camping. This was especially so on St Mere Eglise and Carentan, both of which has main bases that were less than 400 meters from a capture point.


Example of the improvements made to Carentan Offensive 01.

On the maps our community has given us feedback and communicated their problems, we’ve looked at and addressed as many of those issues as we could while we worked away on the engine upgrade, and we encourage our players to be vocal with issues and feedback on how we can improve, we are always keen to learn from the people who play our game how we can ensure you get the best game experience.


With a new engine and the benefits it brings to the table, we were also able to invest more time into improving our foliage in the game. We have the ability to make use of the large catalog of assets available to us not only from Epic but also make our own foliage tailored towards Post Scriptum.




The new foliage is just the beginning of what is a large plan to update and improve the overall look and feel of the game without impacting the game performance for clients.


On top of all the improvements, we’ve obviously been fixing bugs and issues along the way. With more than 300 level design bugs alone fixed since the upgrade to the new engine, and we will be continuing these large bug fixes along with more content as we move further into 2022.


With all of those changes covered, we are excited to announce a new public playtest on the new 4.27 Engine version and all the improvements made. We want to ensure the game is stable and works for everyone, but also to give people a chance to see what is new, help give their feedback on what we have ready.

This test primarily offers us an opportunity for us to profile the server and bug hunt for issues that we can’t normally look for because it needs a full server.

We will be running a public playtest on the new 4.27 Engine version this weekend. The test is set to start today May 25th @ 11 AM Pacific | 2 PM Eastern | 6 PM UTC | 8 PM CET!

We expect the test to run for a couple of hours, but this may be cut short or extended depending on how much data our developers need. To stay up to date with information, you should join us on our Official Discord or follow us on our socials at Twitter and Facebook

The public playtest will run on a special Public Testing application in your library titled Post Scriptum - Public Testing, so make sure to download this ahead of time, you will not need to use any special branches for this, just make sure to download the application, and we will make the update available for you when we are closer to the start time.



NOTE: If you do not see the server yet, it has either not gone live yet, or you need to restart Steam, to ensure you have the update.


Sincerely,
Periscope Games

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Greetings!

It's time for us to once again sit down and check in with the development progress and see where we are in terms of our plans with the ongoing Unreal Engine upgrade, our new Ardennes map and a small devblog from our Third-Party Developers at Mercury Arts.



Let's kick off this devblog with a status report on where the team are currently with the upgrade to Unreal Engine version 4.27 which is a major undertaking for the team.

If you have been following our news over the past few weeks you will certainly have noticed the frequency of playtests have increased and this is also indicative of where we are in terms of progress. Our work with upgrading Post Scriptum from Unreal Engine 4.21 to 4.27 is near completion and we have made significant progress in terms of getting it all ready for release with only minor issues and polishing remaining before release.

In addition, we have recently launched our Public Playtest application which will facilitate future playtesting with our community as well as separating the game from the testing environment, going forward you can expect more regular testing and involvement with our community with regard to upcoming content and feedback to this content.

We expect to be making an announcement regarding the release date for the engine upgrade very soon, so keep your eyes out on our news page for that. We understand that some players may feel frustrated with the lack of content as of recently, and we certainly did not anticipate the development time for the upgrade to be as long as it is, but that doesn't mean we have not made any progress towards future content.


The public playtest will run on a special Public Testing application in your library titled Post Scriptum - Public Testing, so make sure to download this ahead of time, you will not need to use any special branches for this, just make sure to download the application and we will make the update available for you when we are closer to the start time.



NOTE: If you do not see the server yet, the server has not yet been started, or you need to restart Steam, to ensure you have the correct update.

So with that, let's go take a look at a new map that will join Post Scriptum this year.



As outlined on our roadmap, we have been working on a new armoured focused map similar to the Proving Grounds map with the overall theme set around the Ardennes region, which was infamous for being considered impenetrable by armoured vehicles.



This map offers a great opportunity to play with a more wide variety of foliage and denser woodlands for tanks to play in and around. With the centerpiece of the map being a small rural town for those wishing to engage in close quarter tank combat or as a good way to escape and disappear from sight.



While Ardennes is an armoured focused map it is also optimized as a map that can be played with infantry, in particular as a "seeding" map which refers to a low population map that is better suited for a server that is not yet running at full capacity.



This map is not meant to feature as a part of any particular chapter, but rather to work as padding for our already large list of maps, going forward we will look at the possibility to return to our previous chapters to pad out more content in existing maps as well as new maps and you can be certain that we will keep you updated should these plans move ahead.



And I am sure many of you are keen to hear more about Chapter 4 and the upcoming content, and you can be certain we will cover Chapter 4 more extensively very soon.




Now it's time for us to give the word to our Third-Party partner Mercury Arts who is responsible for the development of their "Chapter Mercury" community content. So with that I give the word to Katz the Project Lead at Mercury Arts.



Before we begin this update I would like to thank the whole community for all the support they have given the Mercury Arts team following the successful release of “Maleme”. Seeing our first map being played on repeat over the release weekend and then subsequently in the rotations of many servers has been humbling for us and we are extremely grateful to all those who facilitated this.

Moving forward from “Maleme”, our team has spent the last few months hard at work on the next phases of our roadmap. Significant progress has been made here in the production of several new factions and the creation of our next map “Rethymno” and we want to share that with you.

Firstly we will start with the surprise addition to our roadmap, the 5. Gebirgs Division faction. This unit was assigned in actuality to reinforce the Fallschirmjäger on Crete following the initial landings. As such we have decided to incorporate the 5. Gebirgs Division on the Axis defensive layers of “Maleme”, taking over the duty from the Gruppe West faction. This means that in future you can expect to see the Gebirgsjäger on “Maleme Offensive 02, 04 and 06” and we expect this update to drop shortly after we have amended “Maleme” to accommodate the upcoming official engine upgrade.



In addition to the coming 5. Gebirgs faction, we have also made huge strides in the creation of our new Greek faction, the 5th Cretan Division. With weapons having been supplied from a wide variety of sources to the remnants of the Greek army in Crete, we have been able to include French, British, Italian and even German weaponry in their order of battle. This means that various existing weapons in game, alongside five new unique weapons from our development will arm the faction, offering a unique gameplay experience. When complete, we will be including this faction on various layers across both “Maleme” and “Rethymno” to represent the role Greek forces played on both battlefields.




Finally I’d like to give you an update on our second map “Rethymno”. Here again progress has been swift, with the map “Geo” nearing completion, ready for gameplay layers to soon be built and tested this summer. “Rethymno” is a large and beautiful map, spanning approximately 4km x 4km, it will be one of the larger maps in the game and offer many new and unique gameplay environments both above and below ground for players to experience fighting in. Whether it’s fighting over rolling hills, assaulting underground mines or paradropping into Arkadi Monastery, “Rethymno” will offer something different for everyone. At the link below you will find a preview of the map. We hope you like what you see.

Please do continue to support us on our Discord Server and on our YouTube channel, where you can keep track of all our future updates.



Sincerely,
Periscope Games

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Greetings!

We are getting really close to a final version of the 4.27 Engine version and we need to do some more stability and performance check with our community, we have also taken in your feedback about our process of testing and understand that having to download a branch that prevents you playing the game is annoying.

To solve this we have made a new application titled Post Scriptum - Public Testing which you an download to partake in any future testing, this means you can continue playing the game, but also help us test when needed.


This test primarily offers us an opportunity for us to profile the server and bug hunt for issues that we can’t normally look for because it needs a full server. We might even try out 100 player capability again to see where we sit with server-side performance now that we have upgraded.

We will be running a public playtest on the new 4.27 Engine version this weekend. The test is set to start May 1st @ 11:30 AM Pacific | 2:30 PM Eastern | 6:30 PM UTC!

The public playtest will run on a special Public Testing application in your library titled Post Scriptum - Public Testing, so make sure to download this ahead of time, you will not need to use any special branches for this, just make sure to download the application and we will make the update available for you when we are closer to the start time.



NOTE: If you do not see the server yet, it has either not gone live yet, or you need to restart Steam, to ensure you have the update.


Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD

Greetings!

Welcome back to our second modding spotlight, it is time for us to take a look at some more mods created by our community!

If you are a modder with a burning passion and a mod you want to tell the world about, you can submit your mod to the modding spotlight here.

If you want to get into modding in Post Scriptum, share your mods with other modders, or maybe you just want to chat with us and other modders, then you can do so via our Official Modding Hub Discord.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2477584168


Our first submission is a nice looking map from modder McDuckSauce titled Longues-sur-Mer.

Once a quiet town in Normandy, France, it played host to part of the infamous Atlantic wall. This Gun battery housed 4 x 150 mm cannons capable of hitting ships out at sea as well as having the beaches carefully dialed in for maximum devastation.

The battery itself was heavily bombarded from both sea and air during the days leading up to D-Day, which can be seen recreated in game using multiple photo reconnaissance photos for accuracy. The surround area is also mapped as good as I possibly could in terms of walls, fields, tree's, buildings, roads and so on.



D-Day +1 the battery was taken by C Company of the 2nd Devonshire Regiment at midday on June 7th after only firing a few hundred rounds on D-Day itself with little effect due to the intense bombardment the day prior and the day itself.



The map itself offers a mix of all three chapters, ranging from long distance combat to the up close and personal, whilst also catering towards the tankers among us. So far the feedback has been excellent, which I attempt to update as soon as possible. I hope the effort was worth it in the long run, and I cannot wait to see it played on a larger scale.

The map comes currently with eight layers, including both daytime and night, with a Para-drop for extra atmosphere as you drop in and watch the battle commence below you. On another note, the map is currently 2.8 km by 2.8 km, which puts it on the larger scale of modded maps available.



At both main spawns, there is a small Infantry and tank shooting range to practice them shots while waiting for friends to join or a vehicle to spawn.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2576634813



Our next submission is another "Chapter" style mod. The Richelieu Chapter is a project which aims to bring new battles for the liberation of France to Post Scriptum. The team is made up of members of the PS community, which aims to authentically recreate these battles and the places where they took place.



This mod is still in active development, with several operations planned for the future. Its first operation, titled "Deadstick" aims to feature 3 maps, including the infamous Pegasus Bridge (formerly Benouville Bridge), where the 6th Airborne Division of the UK attacked the German defenders. Operation Deadstick was the overall plan to capture bridges crossing the River Orne and Caen canal in preparation for the British landing at Sword beach.



If you want to follow development, you can find their Discord here: https://discord.gg/6G3Y2zueva

This chapter will feature several other operations with their own maps, layers, custom assets and modified vehicles to suit the battle itself. Below you can find the Roadmap for upcoming content.



https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2316622964



Our last entry covers some of the largest maps ever produced for Post Scriptum an astonishing 64 km pack. From the Ardennes Team, they present the Ardennes Map Pack. You can find their discord community here: https://discord.gg/wmCjvTnkGt

Now the word is given to Cpt72Bug from the Ardennes Team.

Our map pack is a 64 km, highly accurate recreation of Northern Luxembourg. It follows the retreat of the 28ths infantry after their strategic loss of Clervaux Castle during the start of the Battle of the Bulge.

As it stands right now, this is the largest map in the Squad/Post Scriptum engine at a whopping 8 km x 8 km. It is larger than Squad's Skorpo by a large margin. It has taken 1000 manpower hours to recreate and required some of the highest end enthusiast hardware to work-on in the SDK. We are currently taking applications to help with its progress.



Currently, it is in a playable state, with several "maps" being offered as zones of the master “Northern Luxembourg Map”. In the current release, you can find two game-play layers, Clervaux and Munchhausen.

Both are strategic representations of the “bulge” with the 5th Panzer Army playing as the offensive team while remaining elements of the 110th regiment of the 28th acting as defenders. In the future this offering will be expanded with several other map zones, gameplay layers and the introduction of the full 64 km (8 km x 8 km) armored map.

We also hope to continue a relationship with the Realism Mod Team to get offerings of this map supported within or separate of the main Realism Mod. This map-pack contains a lot of area to explore. It also has a lot of meatgrinder defensive positions, which require team-wide coordination and mastery of offensive tactics.

Most experienced logi squads can significantly make a difference with the provided winterized weather, allowing for added visibility cover and secrecy to FOB locations. Furthermore, the sheer size of the layers requires logi squads to actively contribute to both the defenders and the offensive team to ensure spawns and resources are available to each team.



Most of the assets have been retextured to really allow the user to experience the winter weather of Northern Luxembourg. Improved weather including low visibility will allow for tank ambushes and easy infantry flanking maneuvers to be implemented by experienced squad leaders. With these changes, it is highly recommended to “Flank” defensive positions and to set up tank ambushes in some of the only clear drivable routes around the region. The map-packs ability to suit majorly different play-styles creates endless opportunities for gameplay shenanigans.

We take pride in our project and are currently working on the third layer as well as finalizing implemented assets. This map pack truly represents the first of the “winter” maps and we anticipate the pack getting better as more and more winterized assets are offered by Periscope Games. One aspect we hope to improve on in future releases is the inclusion of more covered terrain. The map seems quite flat, and this poses challenges to defending and assaulting positions.



With this we have come the end of this modding spotlight and we can't wait to see what more our community comes up with.

If you are a modder with a burning passion and a mod you want to tell the world about, you can submit your mod to the modding spotlight here.

If you want to get into modding in Post Scriptum, share your mods with other modders, or maybe you just want to chat with us and other modders, then you can do so via our Official Modding Hub Discord.


Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD

Greetings!

We are making amazing progress on the engine upgrade and now we are ready for another round of testing. This time we have put more focus on the server side optimization in the hope that we can get closer to our 100 player goal as part of our 2022 roadmap.


This test primarily offers us an opportunity for us to profile the server and bug hunt for issues that we can’t normally look for because it needs a full server. We might even try out 100 player capability again to see where we sit with server-side performance now that we have upgraded.

We will be running a second public playtest on the new 4.27 Engine version this weekend. The test is set to start April 2nd @ 10 AM Pacific | 1 PM Eastern | 5 PM UTC!

The public playtest will run on a special Beta branch that you can access starting April 1st @ 2 PM Pacific | 4 PM Eastern | 9 PM UTC by following the small guide below:

NOTE: If you do not see the validation-branch yet, it has either not gone live yet, or you need to restart Steam.

HOW TO OPT INTO BETA BRANCHES

1. Right-click Post Scriptum in your library.
   
2. Press the “Properties” button and navigate to the “BETAS” tab.
   
3. Select the dropdown and opt into “Validation-Branch”

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD

Greetings!

The build that we will be using tonight is available to download now. If you are not familiar with the playtest or what it's about you can read the news post here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/736220/view/3103549965093796787

The server will be started up about an hour before the test itself.

Important Information & Known Issues:
- DLSS is not compatible with any Anti-Aliasing or Super-Sampling modes.
- NIS is not compatible with any Super-Sampling modes.
- If rapidly tap firing weapons on Fully Automatic sometimes audio will play over each other.
- DLSS on Quality and Balanced has some black graining artifacting when standing still for a while.
- Admin commands do not work in local / offline
- UI for players speaking in Local, Squad or Command chat may not be visible.

PLEASE READ
We also highly recommend you reset your cache manually, since this is a new engine version.

If you do not know how to do so, we have an article for this here:
https://offworldindustries.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052332231-How-to-clear-your-user-cache



The build we will be using during our playtest today is now available for download via Steam.

The public playtest will run on a special Beta branch that you can access starting now!

The test itself is scheduled to run from March 27th @ 10 AM Pacific | 1 PM Eastern | 5 PM UTC until March 27th @ 3 PM Pacific | 6 PM Eastern | 10 PM UTC

You can take part by following the small guide below:

NOTE: If you do not see the validation-branch yet, you need to restart Steam.

HOW TO OPT INTO BETA BRANCHES

1. Right-click Post Scriptum in your library.
   
2. Press the “Properties” button and navigate to the “BETAS” tab.
   
3. Select the dropdown and opt into “Validation-Branch”

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD

Greetings!

A couple of weeks back we ran our first Public Playtest using the new engine version, this build ran with the expected amount of issues and problems that avoided small scale testing. We have since then focused on bug fixes, improvements and performance.

We are now ready to try again with another playtest and we invite you to come help us once more so that we can get the necessary data as more eyes usually means there is a bigger chance issues are caught before release to avoid any complications.


This test primarily offers us an opportunity for us to profile the server and bug hunt for issues that we can’t normally look for because it needs a full server. We might even try out 100 player capability again to see where we sit with server-side performance now that we have upgraded.

The public playtest will run on a special Beta branch that you can access starting March 27th @ 10 AM Pacific | 1 PM Eastern | 5 PM UTC until March 27th @ 3 PM Pacific | 6 PM Eastern | 10 PM UTC by following the small guide below:

NOTE: If you do not see the validation-branch yet, it has either not gone live yet, or you need to restart Steam.

HOW TO OPT INTO BETA BRANCHES

1. Right-click Post Scriptum in your library.
   
2. Press the “Properties” button and navigate to the “BETAS” tab.
   
3. Select the dropdown and opt into “Validation-Branch”

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD

Greetings!

The build that we will be using tonight is available to download now. If you are not familiar with the playtest or what it's about you can read the news post here:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/736220/announcements/detail/4689941763322221342

We have started up EU 2 with no password so that you can play around until the test. Once the test starts server will be restarted.

Important Information & Known Issues:
- DLSS is not compatible with any Anti-Aliasing or Super-Sampling modes.
- NIS is not compatible with any Super-Sampling modes.
- If rapidly tap firing weapons on Fully Automatic sometimes audio will play over each other.
- Some weapons have delayed animation, this can be fixed by looking down using freelook.
- When leaving a section in an MSP your kit might disappear when leaving the vehicle.
- DLSS on Quality and Balanced has some black graining artifacting when standing still for a while.
- Wounded players may experience issues where the world around is muffled and section / command voice is muted.

PLEASE READ
We also highly recommend you reset your cache manually, since this is a new engine version.

If you do not know how to do so, we have an article for this here:
https://offworldindustries.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052332231-How-to-clear-your-user-cache



The build we will be using during our playtest today is now available for download via Steam.

The public playtest will run on a special Beta branch that you can access starting now!

The test itself is scheduled to run from March 13th @ 10 AM Pacific | 1 PM Eastern | 5 PM UTC until March 13th @ 3 PM Pacific | 6 PM Eastern | 10 PM UTC

You can take part by following the small guide below:

NOTE: If you do not see the validation-branch yet, you need to restart Steam.

HOW TO OPT INTO BETA BRANCHES

1. Right-click Post Scriptum in your library.
   
2. Press the “Properties” button and navigate to the “BETAS” tab.
   
3. Select the dropdown and opt into “Validation-Branch”

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD

Greetings!

We are super excited to finally be able to talk and show you what we have been up to since the start of the year, our big focus after the Armour Overhaul late last year has been on reaching 100 players and improving performance as well as stability with the game. To that end, we decided to push forward our Engine Upgrade plans and as such we have spent the last few months upgrading Unreal Engine to the latest version.

With the latest version of Unreal Engine, we had the capability to explore and make use of new technology.

Since Mercury Arts released the first Third-Party Content for Post Scriptum in January with their new Maleme map, since then focus for Mercury Arts has been to bugfix and improve upon their release as well as their next phase of content.




Since we released the Armour Overhaul last year, we made the decision to push for testing of 100 player capability, testing showed us that in order to reach the numbers we want, an engine upgrade was likely required and as such, we made the decision to push forward the upgrade and started working on this not long after the Armoured update released.

Unlike the last time we upgraded our engine we decided to not commit to an OWI Core upgrade as this would save us a lot of time on the upgrade. At the beginning of February, we began internal testing with our Community QA team with regular testing involving our Community Testing team.




One aspect of the engine upgrade was that it gives us some native improvements graphically, one such aspect is the visual one, with Unreal Engine 4.27 we have new and improved lighting, as you navigate the fields, forests and cities, you’ll notice that lighting is much warmer, brighter and lifelike, something we hope will be received well amongst our players.



In addition, we have made significant improvements in how objects such as houses, trees and various foliage are rendered for the game, while we don’t expect to see huge improvements in performance this helps us bring the performance closer to where we would like it to be.



There are many more changes that we are looking into for the visual aspect of the game and how it performs and as we move forward we’ll be exploring and implementing these where it makes sense.




The Spawn Menu is a vital tool for all players regardless of roles and function. Over the years we have made some changes to our spawn menu in order to streamline it and make the experience better, we spent a lot of time reading and discussing player feedback and suggestions, with the many changes already being made to the game in various ways thanks to our community, it would only make sense for us to see where we can improve the interaction with the spawn menu.

We identified a few key areas that we wanted to improve upon

• The number of pages players have to navigate in order to select roles, kits and teams.
  
• Better streamlined experience to ensure that going from Joining a team to selecting a kit, a role and a place to spawn is set up in a more intuitive way for players.
  
• Rework various items that aren’t on the spawn menu, or take up unnecessary space.

To address these we started out by outlining that going from joining a server to spawning should consist of no more than 2 pages, to achieve this we merged the Section and Loadout pages into one seamless page.

We also made the requirement for the map, section & kit selection as well as role information to be displayed in such a way that it's more intuitive to switch from one column to another.



We then looked at any items on the spawn menu that were not necessary or were missing from the players and we realised that players have no intuitive way to respawn when necessary, this is especially true for new players who aren’t familiar with the command line and the respawn command.

We have now added the ability to respawn directly from the spawn menu when you are spawned in, this also gives you a warning that respawning comes at a cost in tickets and spawn time. It is still possible to respawn using a command, but we encourage players to make use of the new respawn button as eventually the command could be removed.



The biggest one for us was the spawn list which would show you the spawns on a list rather than making use of the map, we decided to remove this feature as it really only doubled as a way to spawn and most players make use of the map when deciding where to spawn in.

We also learned that most players prefer to have the largest map possible so that navigating and placing markers is easy. Because of the new layout, the map was made smaller in the overall UI and this was something that we very quickly learned was offputting, to counter this we made it so that when players hover over the map, it will now scale up over the rest of the spawn menu, allowing you to make better use of the map. This we call “Dynamic Map Scaling” and it can be turned on or off based on player preferences from the game settings.

The chat was another point in which we saw a lot of unnecessary space being taken up, the chat is something players rarely use on the spawn menu itself, but we couldn’t remove it instead we now allow players to collapse and uncollapse the chat, by default its collapsed and only displays the last message from the chat.





With Unreal Engine 4.27, we had the chance to experiment with the implementation of brand new tech that has changed how we play video games quite heavily, one such technology is Nvidia DLSS.

Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an AI-based technology developed by Nvidia to improve performance using Tensor cores on their special hardware, particularly the RTX series of graphics cards. DLSS uses AI deep learning neural networks to upscale images from lower resolutions to higher resolution using the AI Tensor cores available on their RTX series of graphics cards. The performance improvements come at virtually no cost to visual fidelity.

With 4.27 Post Scriptum will also feature the ability for players with RTX graphics cards to make use of DLSS to improve their performance in the game. Players can expect to see as big as a 50% performance boost to their game performance using DLSS.



Because DLSS requires an RTX series card from Nvidia there is a limit to who can make use of this technology, but Nvidia recently released NIS (Nvidia Image Scaling) which uses the same principles of upscaling lower-resolution images to achieve better performance.

NIS is essentially Nvidia's version of AMD FSR and it works in the same way and this means that it is not required to have a Nvidia graphics card as this technology works with cards from other manufacturers like AMD, Intel and so on.

Unlike DLSS, NIS does not make use of any AI deep learning or neural network to upscale, but rather relies on an upscaling algorithm and sharpening to achieve a similar result.

Performance improvements here aren’t as high as they are using DLSS, but on the other hand, NIS is driver based and does not require any particular type of graphics cards, as such even older Nvidia or AMD series cards can make use of this feature.


With Unreal Engine 4.21, we had an issue in which 10th, 11th and 12th gen Intel CPUs were unable to start due to a bug in OpenSSH that Unreal Engine uses which caused a game crash on startup, we were unable to deploy a fix manually and had to resort to a temporary workaround in the form of “Safe Mode”, but with the new version of the engine this issue should be resolved.


We are also currently working through all our APCR, HVAP and APDS shells to ensure they behave correctly, we were made aware that these shells have a tendency to penetrate extreme angles when they shouldn’t.

APCR, HVAP and APDS especially those deployed during WW2 had a tendency to ricochet off high impact angles, this wasn’t very well represented due to the curves that were initially created. We have gone through each and every one of these shells to ensure they behave more correctly to their real-life counterpart.



With all of those changes covered we are excited to announce a public playtest on the new 4.27 Engine version and all the improvements made. We want to ensure the game is stable and works for everyone, but also to give people a chance to see what is new, help give their feedback on what we have ready.

It’s also an opportunity for us to profile the server and bug hunt for issues that we can’t normally look for because it needs a full server. We might even try out 100 player capability again to see where we sit with server-side performance now that we have upgraded.

The public playtest will run on a special Beta branch that you can access starting March 13th @ 10 AM Pacific | 1 PM Eastern | 5 PM UTC until March 13th @ 3 PM Pacific | 6 PM Eastern | 10 PM UTC by following the small guide below:

NOTE: If you do not see the validation-branch yet, it has either not gone live yet, or you need to restart Steam.

HOW TO OPT INTO BETA BRANCHES

1. Right-click Post Scriptum in your library.
   
2. Press the “Properties” button and navigate to the “BETAS” tab.
   
3. Select the dropdown and opt into “Validation-Branch”

Sincerely,
Periscope Games

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Greetings!

While we have been hard at work, getting Post Scriptum running on the latest version of Unreal Engine, we have continued to make fixes and changes to the current version of the game, as have our Third-Party developers. This Update is mainly focused on bug fixes and changes related to the recently released Maleme map.

We expect to be able to talk about the changes and improvements that you can expect to come with the updated version of the engine, playtesting is scheduled to start this week with a public playtest not very far behind, we are excited to see what this can bring and our aim for 2022 outside of the Chapter 4 release is to reach 100 player servers as have become mostly standard for this genre.


As per usual you can find the changelog for this update below.

- Fixed a game start parameter exploit.

Level Design Changes
- Moved start screen camera actor
- New minimap of Maleme added with greater detail
- Maleme Offensive 4 capture points changed to align to map flow
- Maleme Offensive 4 is now a day layer
- Added night layer to every Maleme Offensive layer
- Added two Maleme event layers without flags
- Changed collision on barbed wire splines around the airfield
- Changed various shutters to different colours on Maleme
- Numerous small level design fixes to floating map furniture etc
- Change lightings on layers:
-- Maleme Off 01 = Dawn Clear
-- Maleme Off 02 = Sunset Clear
-- Maleme Off 03 = Noon Clear
-- Maleme Off 04 = Afternoon Sunny
-- Maleme Off 05 = Dawn Clear
-- Maleme Off 06 = Afternoon Sunny

Performance & Optimisation
- Updated LODs to all new Characters
- Updated LODs to all new Vehicles
- Updated LODs to all new Weapons
- Cobblestone road LODs amended
- Removed collision from various small stone meshes
- Fixed physics settings for Thompson and No76 grenade
- Fixed lightning creating bad performance for many low hardware players

Gameplay Mechanics
- Increased number of para jump JU52 aircraft to allow up to 18 players to spawn
- Increased Gruppe West Glider cool down to 15 minutes (balancing)
- Change DFS-230 glider MSP health system (destroyable by every projectile starting from rifles)
- Reduced cooldown times for ANZAC air support (balancing).
- Added 1x additional Matilda and 1x additional Vickers Mk6 to ANZAC tank deck (balancing/historical)
- Removed historically inaccurate QF6 pdr anti-tank gun

General Bug Fixes
- Fixed ANZAC Cdr Mortar call in - reduced time to action to 20 seconds
- Fixed ANZAC Cdr Blenheim call in (bomb hits)
- Fixed ANZAC tank crew lacking fire extinguishers
- Change Morris physic and driving behaviour
- Fixed Morris logistic crates clip through the bottom
- Fixed Morris internal col parts are sticking out
- Change Vickers physic and driving behaviour
- Fixed Gruppe West goremat
- Fixed Gruppe West Radioman sound cue location
- Added corrected Gruppe West gore system
- Added corrected Gruppe West gore limbs
- Added ANZAC goremat
- Added ANZAC gore system
- Fixed ANZAC "ping" sound by hitting not the head
- Fixed broken Lee Enfield scope
- Added No.76 smoke UI icon
- Added JU-52 paradrop and logistic UI icon
- Changed Kettenkrad tracks
- Bugfixed seat positions on Morris CS8 transports



Sincerely,
Periscope Games

JOIN THE DISCUSSION ON DISCORD