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Minor bugs fixed and improvements made!

Albion’s fourteenth Guild Season starts this weekend with a revamped structure and new features to make guild warfare more competitive and exciting than ever before. Most notably, this season marks the beginning of the Conqueror’s Challenge, which replaces the previous Guild Season reward system and allows a wider range of playstyles to pursue and profit from season goals. Alongside this, Season 14 sees the introduction of Might, Favor, Guild Might Levels, Energy Crystals, Power Cores, and Headquarters Hideouts.

The Conqueror’s Challenge allows individual players to earn season rewards throughout the course of the season without necessarily being part of a guild – though a successful guild will still benefit its members as it completes Guild Might Levels. Individual Conqueror’s Challenge rewards are as follows:



For a full breakdown of guild and personal season rewards, see this forum post.

As recently announced in this forum post, starting with Lands Awakened Patch 1, Headquarters Hideouts qualifications will apply as soon as they are earned within the current season. This means guilds who earn enough Season Points during Season 14 will be able to declare an HQ or upgrade to a higher tier/quality zone immediately, regardless of whether they qualified during the Energy Surge season. And of course, guilds who met the HQ Hideout requirements during the last season can already declare Headquarters in qualifying zones.

For details of Headquarters Hideouts and Power Cores, check out this Dev Talk:


The action starts on Saturday, November 27 and will be broadcast live on AlbionTV from 17:30 UTC, with hosts Shozen, Lewpac and Bogul bringing full coverage of Invasion Day.

At 18:00 UTC all territories will be reset for guilds to claim them and launch attacks. Those in the North and South American time zones can also tune in for the second round of territory resets on Sunday, November 28 at 00:30 UTC, when hosts Shozen, Robinhoodrs and Bogul will cover the next round of invasions from 01:00 UTC. All open-world fights are broadcast live with a 15-minute delay.

Check out AlbionTV's coverage of the second Energy Surge Invasion Day:


The next era of guild warfare in Albion starts Saturday - we'll see you then!

Hello Dispatchers!

Winter is nearly upon us, and what better way to celebrate than wrapping up warm, grabbing a mug of hot tea, and settling down to a nice, relaxing game of Rail Route? And, with our newly released tutorial, there’s never been a better time to start! (Trust us, Jozic’s soothing tones are enough to lighten anyone’s day.)

If you’re looking for a sneak-peak of what the Rail Route experience is like, look no further! We’ve got just the video for you:



And, of course, we can’t forget our new music collection - the perfect, melancholic tunes for a cold winter’s day. ‘Recollection’, created by the incredible @RupertCole, is a set of new tracks made exclusively for Rail Route. We think that they’re the perfect mix of nostalgia, whimsy and relaxation, and we hope that you do too!

Though they’re already in the game, we’ve got even more planned for our music - including layered, dynamic tracks. Got a lot of freight trains? Here's the big cello. A lot of commuters? Perhaps the smooth sound of a full-piano arrangement will accompany you. No matter the situation, the music will create the best atmosphere possible.

We hope that you enjoy, and feel free to join our Discord if you have any questions.

As always, happy dispatching.
- Aidan

Follow us:

• Discord
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook
  
• Homepage

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/

Hey! In this post I'll explain the what and why of the decisions behind the development of the Terrain and Detail systems of One Military Camp.

Just a disclaimer: the pictures included here may not represent the final quality of the product and are used with mere illustrative purposes.


At first we tried with the Unity Terrain, using its API for runtime modifications and our custom shaders for some extra features. It looked promising and we stuck with it for some time, but as development of One Military Camp progressed we realized we needed more.

What more? In particular we needed more resolution and speed (as always in game dev!) so we decided to go all-in with an in-house solution tailored for our use case. When you don't need all the features found in a generic solution it's often possible to achieve better results with a custom one.

So, our requirements? Being able to modify heights and textures of very specific areas of the terrain surface, while still being able to undo it and return to the original state. Since our users will be placing, moving and removing stuff on the terrain in real time it's important to do all that on the fly and in a non destructive way.




Our approach was the creation of specialized masks for later interpretation. A mask is simply a texture that contains information in one or more color channels (red, green, blue, alpha) that can then be retrieved as values in the range 0 to 1, e.g. in a shader. Our Terrain System renders two masks:

• Mask1: splats (red, green, blue) and holes (alpha).
  
• Mask2: heights (red) and tint (green).

When working with multilayer materials (such as a terrain in which we combine e.g. soil, grass, gravel and stone) we use a splat map that defines what textures to use in a particular spot. Because we use 3 channels (red, green and blue) we can mix up to 4 layers (since the absence of color is also accounted for).


Some of our buildings have features like swimming pools that go deeper below ground level. So, instead of lowering the terrain vertices (which could result in unwanted displacements in their neighbourhood) we simply discard (don't draw) the terrain pixels under this holes mask. The value is inverse to what is common in transparency alpha, i.e. 0 means no hole, 1 means hole.


This may look as the most obvious one, but with a caveat. Commonly in terrain systems the height information would define how high a vertex has to go (effectively defining a height map). In our case, it instead defines how deep the vertex goes, so it's not really a height map for us and we could call it a depth map if you want. Specifically, 0 means highest, 1 means lowest.


This one defines how to mix the colors when drawing the detail objects like grass or rocks. More on this later.

It's no coincidence that there are two masks separated like this: Mask1 (splats and holes) is applied to pixels, while Mask2 (heights and tint) is applied to vertices. That way we can optimize and access these masks only when needed.

Ok, so we have our masks defined, but how do we generate them? Sometimes simple is best. The Terrain System has two cameras, one for each mask, and they only see mask objects. What is a mask object? Every road, building, etc. in the game has a couple quads attached. These quads could be seen as funny colors, but these colors are really defining their part of the whole mask. Now imagine we draw all these mask objects together from a cenital orthographic point of view. The result would be something like this:


Actual render of Mask1.


Mask1 viewed from an ingame perspective.

You may be wondering why some of the values have been reversed from what is common in the industry. I'll explain. The way we composite the mask colors is additive (clamped to 1). In other words: if two mask objects overlap, the resulting value is never lower than the greatest one. For example: suppose Object_A and Object_B share some space and both are defining a hole. As stated above, 0 means no hole and 1 means hole. There will be parts where Object_A wants to draw 0 and Object_B wants to draw 1. The resulting value after compositing will be 0 + 1 = 1 (which means the hole prevails). That way we can place masks without fear of unwanted overrides. I leave it as an exercise for you to deduct what will happen when other values overlap and how this applies to the height map as well.


Illustrative overlap of hole masks.

And you would ask: "But how can you render and apply a huge mask like this to a huge terrain, keep updating it every frame, and still achieve good frame rates?" That's why we again leverage our particular use case: the game doesn't allow the camera to go very far back and it never shows a big portion of the terrain. Thanks to this, instead of having huge masks covering the whole terrain, we use very small ones that cover only the visible area and act like a window through which we see the complete masks. This means we can benefit from it and increase the perceived resolution of the splats, holes, etc. for free!


But a terrain system isn't complete until you can add some vegetation and rocks to it, right? The main challenge for this is how can we draw a massive bunch of objects, complete with wind effects and whatnot, and stay above 60fps. The way to achieve it is using what is called GPU instancing. The technique frees the CPU almost completely while the GPU draws the same one mesh over and over at different locations. Not surprisingly, GPUs are really fast at drawing meshes, and turns out this works wonderfully for drawing vegetation and repeating objects.


Friendly drawing of GPU instancing concept.

So we created a Detail System that would work along the Terrain System. With it we can define (via a custom tool) as many detail object locations as needed. But it's internally that it's most interesting. First it takes the terrain and subdivides its area into a hierarchy of smaller regions. For every region it determines what detail object locations fall inside. Thanks to this, during gameplay, the system is able to pick only the locations whose region is visible by the camera. That's called culling. Finally a drawcall is issued for all of the locations of every visible regions. As a result, all the detail drawing is really fast.

The next step involves our above friends, the masks. While drawing each detail object we know where it is and what values the masks have there. So we can use this information to:

• Displace the vertices based on the height value.
  
• Hide grass based on the splat values.
  
• Change the color based on the tint mix value.

And roughly that's all! We hope you found this interesting and don't forget to wishlist One Military Camp.

Thanks for reading!

-----
Written by David Corominas (Programmer at Abylight Barcelona)

Changelist:

- Added checkpoint in room number "12"
- Reduced speed of dentures
- Fixed some bugs

Black Friday Live Stream Tomorrow!🖤⛄ Ines and Lily will show you around the NEW End of the Year event, and will keep you updated of the latest in-game deals and news, are you going to miss it?🎄 Join live for a chance to get FREE Piggy Tokens and Coupon Codes!🎟️🐷💰

📺 Watch the Live Stream on Youtube, Twitch, Facebook or here on Steam.

The Governor of Poker 3 Team

The last Pre-Season of the year - Adaptation - has arrived, and besides all the bugs the team has crushed (which can be read in full below), there are also significant balance changes and not one but TWO new toys to play with when you turn the white snow red with Dinosaur blood.

Another little gift awaits you. A small compensation package will be given to players when you log in due to an issue with the reward packages not working correctly during the Pre-Season 6 update.

We hope you enjoy Pre-Season 7, and if you find any bugs, please report them directly to support via support@secondextinctiongame.com. If you have any questions or feedback to share, join our Discord server - the best place to get in touch with the team and become part of the community!

New additions

• The Auto Turret is now available as a new Equipment option
  - Available to use for all heroes from level 11
  
• There’s a new Secondary Weapon - the Hand Cannon
  
• New Seasonal Contracts and Rewards
  
• New Cosmetics added to the pool of reward package drops

Balance Changes

• Significant rebalance of all player equipment (throwables and payloads)
  - All player explosions give (non-damaging) friendly-fire feedback, and hit reaction if applicable.
  
  - Frag grenade - Slight increase in damage, a significant increase in AoE radius. However, damage falloff is more aggressive (and reliable), the effectiveness of breaking bone plates is slightly reduced.
  
  - Bouncer mine - Base damage increase, AoE radius decrease (which is very significant for the mine-seeding). Sends small dinos flying further.
  
  - Cluster grenade - Number of clusters reduced from 12 to 10, damage reduced for each cluster, but the range of explosions increased (allows for more damage consistency).
  
  - Shock grenade - Significantly reduced shock affliction damage (prevention of easy Rex stun-locking). No longer deals (minor) base damage on its explosion, just affliction damage. The explosion draws less attention from unaware and non-aggro’d dinos.
  
  - Sticky firecrackers - Slightly reduced base damage of individual explosions. 
  
  - Healing station - Healing duration is up from 30 to 45 seconds. A massive increase in healing effectiveness, healing is delivered in separate pulses to improve its presentation. Reduced ability recharge rate.
  
  - Thumper - Thumper can take damage now and can be prematurely disabled by enough dinosaur attacks (limits its over-powered potential on certain occasions). The falloff has been introduced to its AoE so that it has milder effects on dinos further from it. Pulses are now effective against bone plates. 
  
  - Mine seeding - With the reduced radius of the Bouncer Mine there is less overlapping of explosions which causes multiplicative damage. 
  
  - Air Strike - Applies damage with less variance on each missile. As with Mine Seeding, a reduced AoE of each missile also means less multiplying of damage from overlapping explosions.
  
  
• The star threshold has been changed
  - The amount of Research points players need to receive stars has been reduced
  
• Rebalanced Reinforcements: the number of Dinosaurs during activities is now based on the number of players in the session: fewer players = fewer dinos

Other Changes

• Basic Training is now the first mission new players have to play
  
• Horde Mode: Extraction is possible now from level 4 🔺
  
• The ‘Find Player’ buttons size has been increased
  
• Mode selection buttons in the lobby have been rearranged and resized

Bug fixes

Characters

• The Necrosis Augment is now possible to get ⭐

Contracts

• An issue with the Wild West contract requirements has been fixed ⭐
  
• Fixed issues when contract progress was not saved when starting the next mission

Enemies

• Multiple issues when enemies could not attack players in specific places has been fixed
  
• Dinosaurs are no longer allowed to bring +1’s in Horde Mode, so no extra dinos should be found

Gameworld

• Multiple object collision issues when the Dinosaurs would get stuck in man-made structures or level geometry has been solved
  
• Fixed several issues when the player could get stuck in level geometry or the Drop Pod ⭐

Graphics

• Issues with randomly flickering textures have been fixed
  
• Windowed mode should now work correctly

Menu, HUD, UI, etc.

• Players should no longer receive ‘Dropship abandoned’ message when the dropship already has arrived ⭐
  
• Fixed issue when new players got stuck in the sign-in screen and couldn’t reach the lobby ⭐
  
• The UI icons size should no longer be too small for Xbox Series X/S ⭐
  
• Issues where the turret ammo UI always showed 0% has been solved
  
• The Rex-Treme! nameplate is now rewarded as intended
  
• The FPS drops when entering mission select on 4K monitors should no longer be an issue

Missions

• Progression in the Vestige mission should no longer be blocked if another player strays too far away ⭐
  
• Issues where players couldn’t see personal points or timer when rejoining has been fixed
  
• Players should now always be able to find the cargo containers in the Charged Extraction mission
  
• Players can no longer lock themselves out of the final main objective in the Black Site Mission
  
• Fixed issue where players could not call the carriers in the Black Site mission
  
• An issue where the extraction timer changed to zero but the dropship never arrived has been fixed
  
• The overmutated eggs in Nova Ridge are now destroyable and spawning correctly ⭐

Multiplayer

• Fixed issue when voice chat became inaudible
  
• An issue where T-Rex was located in different places for different players in the Contact mission has been fixed

Performance

• Several crashes that occurred during missions have been fixed
  
• A crash that happened when a player was trying to connect to another player's lobby has been solved
  
• A crash that occurred during the selection of a character in the Multiplayer lobby is now fixed
  
• The framerate drops that were experienced from wave 9 in Horde Mode has been fixed

Weapons

• Unused upgrade tokens do no longer disappear if a player spends several hours in a game session
  
• The “Extended mag” perk for the Artillery Cannon is now functional
  
• The SMG Perk "Holster helper" is now working as designed ⭐
  
• The "Idle Hands" perk is now working as intended ⭐

⭐ = Changes made from community feedback and reports.
🔺 = Changes that worth special highlighting

Commanders!

On April 29, 2021, World of Tanks began its journey on Steam. Since then, we have launched many great events and held lots of Community activities. We have introduced various features to make the game even more enjoyable and enticing for you: Trading Cards, Achievements, GFN support, and the ability to activate Bonus and Invite Codes. We have received thousands of reviews, and literally each of those has been carefully read by our team because we value your feedback and want to be on the same page as you, developing our game in such a way that corresponds with your expectations and desires.

But the most important of our achievements has been getting to know all of you. We have gathered an amazing Community of players who are just as passionate about the game as we are. We are happy to see you participating in discussions, making guides for newcomers, searching for battle friends, and providing us with feedback about our project. We thank you for being awesome and we want to give you a gift to celebrate what can be described as “a successful start of a long journey of World of Tanks on Steam.”



You will find more detailed information on the gift at the end of this post, as we have another surprise for you right now! We have collected and unified the data on all your accomplishments since World of Tanks launched in Steam. We found these figures to be quite fascinating and wanted to share them with all of you, so take a look at how cool you are!

NOTE: The statistics below are Steam-only, meaning that the numbers you see have been achieved solely by our Steam players. The statistics were counted in Random Battles only.

Now that you’ve studied the infographics, you should clearly understand that calling all of you “awesome” is not an exaggeration. We are extremely impressed with your achievements during our first half-year on Steam, and you have surely earned good rewards for your efforts! There will be two packs of goodies that you can get simply by logging in to the game.

For starters, there is a regular reward for years of service that can be received by anyone who created an account in World of Tanks before November 23, 2021. For our players, this reward contains the following:

• 10 missions for x5 XP
  
• 1 Universal Manual (250,000 XP for every crew member)
  
• 10 Personal Reserves: +50% to Combat XP for 1 hour
  
• 10 Personal Reserves: +50% to credits for 1 hour
  
• 1 day of WoT Premium Account

You can grab this gift anytime you want up to November 2022.

The reward for years of service is given once a year, and the contents become progressively more valuable the more you play the game. You can find more information about this event on our official website.

Now on to the main course. We have an exclusive gift for all our Steam players! We want to thank you for playing the game on Steam and contributing to all those remarkable numbers you just saw above. The gift will be credited to everyone who logged in to the game from November 25, 2021, through December 6, 2021. It includes the following:

• 11 rental days of Tier VI Premium French Bretagne Panther medium tank (100% trained crew + commander with Sixth Sense)
  
• 7 days of WoT Premium Account
  
• A special set of missions with useful rewards

These missions can be completed only in vehicles of Tier VI and higher and are available for completion until December 6, 2021. Don’t skip them—if you complete all the additional missions, you will get even more useful goodies:

• 3 more days of WoT Premium Account
  
• 6 Demounting Kits
  
• 3 Garage slots
  
• 1,000,000 credits

And, of course, feel free to use the rental Tier VI Premium French Bretagne Panther to progress in our upcoming Legend of the Hunter event which will last from November 26, 2021, through December 6, 2021. Don’t miss the chance to get a Premium tank for free or with an impressive discount!


Our first half a year on Steam has been packed with lots of exciting events and activities, and we aren’t stopping here! We have many plans for the future of our game as we want it to be even more fun and enjoyable to play.

Thank you again for being with us on this wonderful journey and remember: This is just the beginning.

Good luck on the battlefield, Commanders!

Spirits, the Steam Awards 2021 are HERE and YOU have the opportunity to help and support your favourite game!

We’re asking the community for your help in nominating Rogue Spirit for the Best Game You Suck At award - we think it fits nicely ːsteamthumbsupː



Our journey through Midra is just starting and we’re so lucky to have you all fighting with us!

Nominations are open from November 24 - Dec 1