1. Add an option in the settings to 'Display main window on startup.' Unchecking this option will allow showing only the desktop model without displaying the main window during startup.
   
2. Fixed the occasional issue of the character's greeting being too mechanical and awkward in the startup sequence.
   
3. Fixed several other minor issues."

Add New Game --> XO JUMP
Wish Everybody like it! tks!!!

* Event Period: 2nd August 2023 (9 AM) – 30th August 2023 (8:59 AM)

* Main Event

1. Find the Frost Hedgehog! (2nd August 2023 (9 AM) – 30th August 2023 (8:59 AM))

* Event Details

1. Find the Frost Hedgehog!

- During the event, a ‘Find the Frost Hedgehog’ icon will be displayed at the top of the screen. Click on the icon to take part in the event.

1) Process

a) Open the corresponding interface to see the radish farm where a Frost Hedgehog is hiding. Use a Spatula to receive a Radish or a Frost Hedgehog.

b) Click on the ‘Random’ button to use a Spatula and receive a Radish or a Frost Hedgehog.

c) The farm is reset once you receive a Frost Hedgehog.

d) If you don’t receive a Frost Hedgehog, you get a Radish instead.

e) You can exchange the Radishes and Frost Hedgehogs for an item of your choice from the reward list.

 

2) Receive Spatulas

a)     Buy in the item shop

A Spatula costs 70 El Coins in the item shop.

 

b)    Use Spatula

You can receive [CoBo] Spatula from the event quest. Using a Spatula automatically reduces the number by one.

 
3) Rewards

a)     Radish Exchange Reward

-       If you can’t find a Frost Hedgehog, you’ll receive a Radish instead. Radishes can be exchanged for the following rewards:
b)    Frost Hedgehog Reward

-       You receive one Frost Hedgehog each time you find one. Frost Hedgehogs can be exchanged for the following rewards:
-       To start with you can only get the rewards from groups 1, 2-1, and 2-2. The rewards from groups 3-1 and 3-2 are deactivated at first.

-       Each of the deactivated groups will activate once you have all the rewards of the previous group in the sequence (e.g. having all the 2-1 rewards will unlock group 3-1, and 2-2 will unlock group 3-2, and so on).

-       Once you’ve received every reward in a group, the starting group in the sequence (x-1 or x-2) will unlock again, e.g. once you complete 3-1, 2-1 will unlock and 3-1 will be deactivated.

-       If 3-1 is reset, only 2-1/3-1 will be reset. (2-2/3-2 remains unchanged)

-       The season buff for Ice Sculpture Heater [Ruler of the Darkness] (fiery red) is only valid in the following period: 2nd August 2023 (9 AM) – 13th September 2023 (8:59 AM).

 

* Note

Update mechanism: When the furnace burns, brightness is generated, and when swimming in water, oxygen value is reduced

In order to adjust and improve balance in battles, we have made a planned change of Battle Ratings for fleet and aviation - and in ground vehicles, we focused on a specific BR range from 7.0 to 9.7 - vehicles that are from the time when a qualitative transition has been made from one means and types of defense to other, more advanced ones. For example, ground vehicles abandoned homogeneous armor in favour of the active use of dynamic protection and with that, combined multi-defense armor. Regular kinetic ammunition has been replaced by HEAT-FS, fin-stabilized , and guided weaponry. Finally, laser rangefinders, stabilizers and thermal imagers have appeared.

Thanks to these changes, early era vehicles based on the principles of simple armor and simple sights will become even less common with vehicles more relevant to dynamic protection and advanced fire control systems. Intersections will remain of course as they were in reality but this is another step towards reducing them.

Click for table

With these changes we also continue to “pull up” the units of lower ranks following the increased maximum BR of top ranked vehicles. The announced changes are truly global: they affect more than 100 units! That is why, in the future, we will adjust BRs again but in a more precise way - following the statistics to see which units will become more or less effective under new conditions and your valuable feedback! In the future, we may also change not the BR of such vehicles but their characteristics: for example their fire rate or ammunition nomenclature.

• T-54 (1947) — Fire rate has been changed from 7 to 8 shots per minute.
  
• ZTZ59D1 — Fire rate has been changed from 7 to 8 shots per minute.
  
• Type 69 — Fire rate has been changed from 7 to 8 shots per minute.
  
• ZTZ88B — Fire rate has been changed from 8.4 to 8 shots per minute.

Leave your BR feedback here

Hello soldiers!

The devblog is arriving early this time! And besides meeting another member of the devteam, we have exciting news!



Yes that’s right, Isonzo now has Steam Trading Cards & Point Shop Items! We know many of you have been asking for it, and we’re happy to finally share this with you. Time to Isonzo-fy your Steam profile!




In the previous devblog, we’ve asked you all to fill in our player survey. This is to make sure that we’re putting our development focus in the right areas, and to keep our fingers on the pulse of the WW1 Game Series community.

Many of you have already done so, thank you very much! This is a reminder for the people who might’ve missed it (or forgot it). You can click here to be redirected to the survey.

We’ve heard some of you struggling to fill in the survey due to the Google login requirements. This is a safety precaution. We’ll look into other alternatives for future surveys.

Now let’s meet another programmer in our team!


Hello! Could you introduce yourself

Hi, my name is Nico, I’m 39 years of age and I live in Utrecht, right in the middle of The Netherlands. I studied Computer Science at the University of Groningen and moved here to Utrecht in 2012 to work at a game company. After moving back and forth between different fields of software development for a few years, in late 2015 I decided to start a freelance career.

I was introduced to the WW1 team on literally the first day of being a freelancer, and worked with them on Verdun for a few months initially. I didn’t become a full-fledged member of the team until the end of 2017 though, when Tannenberg was in development.

What is your role in BlackMill Games and for the games?

“Officially”, I’m no longer a member of the BlackMill team! I left at the end of last year and rejoined on a consultancy basis to work on the FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 (FSR2) implementation and to help out in other areas that I have knowledge of.

Before that though, I was primarily responsible for the console ports of the WW1 games. This started with just technical work: integrating various console features, optimization work and producing builds. Over the years, I’ve taken on more responsibilities including QA, release management and managing communications with Sony and Microsoft.

Where did your passion come from?

From playing games as a kid back in the ‘90s, as trite as it may sound. I was an impressionable child and anytime I saw someone make or do something cool, I’d be like “I wanna do that too!”. Computers, games and programming are what stuck around long enough to become a career and I can’t complain about it. If I had pursued a career in music, comic book drawing or operating drawbridges, I probably would have struggled a lot more in life.

Playing other people’s games and seeing how they were made is what made me passionate about creating games myself. Fortunately, I had a knack for programming and I learned a lot from modding existing games while still in middle school. Throughout my studies, I kept up-to-date with what was happening in graphics technology, worked on hobby game projects of my own, and tried to make choices with the idea of someday working in game development in mind. I’m glad that that worked out in the end, even if it took me a while to get there.

What was the first thing you made in Isonzo?

The first thing I did for Isonzo was to make it run on the Xbox One console. This was shortly after the console release of Tannenberg in mid-2020, so the production of Isonzo was already well underway by then. It was not a pretty sight. The game ran at barely 10 fps on the Xbox One X and that was despite the maps still being very basic and missing a lot of the details that made it into the final release. A lot of work has been done to whip the game into shape since then.



What is a memorable moment in the development of Isonzo?

Very recently, the moment FSR 2.2 first started working in Isonzo and I could see the potential of what it would bring to the game. It felt like I was looking at an offline render, rather than something that was being drawn in real-time. Everything looked sharp with clean edges, distant objects were displayed with perfect clarity and details popped like never before. It was at that moment that I knew my gamble to work on this research project had paid off.



Of course, a still shot like this is a bit flattering and there were plenty of problems yet to solve once things started moving around, but this gave me the motivation to promote the feature to the team and to really push for its inclusion in the game. Fortunately, it was not too hard to convince them of its value and I’m very happy with the way they supported me to get FSR2 across the finish line.

Another memorable moment is an older one, when I was first testing builds of Isonzo on PS5. That console is quite a bit different from the Windows and DirectX environments that we’re so used to, so it often has a lot of unique issues that crop up. Initially, all of the shaders were completely broken, causing all sorts of bogus pixel values to be drawn and together with bloom and other post-processing effects, it made the entire map light up like a Christmas tree. I affectionately called this glitch ‘Disco Isonzo.’



In general, I look back fondly at the last few months of development before release and witnessing the game gradually come together thanks to the hard work from everyone on the team. Getting Isonzo to run, look and play decently well on consoles felt like an impossible task at times and I would not have been able to do that on my own without everyone pulling together and making it work.

Can you show off some of your work process and tell us what you’re doing?

A lot of my time is spent looking at code, which is not the most visually exciting thing to be showing off. Lately though, I have been doing a lot of performance analysis and bug fixing using GPU profilers, so I can show some of that.
Below is a GPU timing snapshot of a typical single frame on Xbox One S



When I first ran tests of FSR 2.2 on Xbox One, I was very sceptical whether it was going to be worth it. 6 milliseconds of GPU time to run FSR2 on a budget of 33 ms (to hit 30 fps), with nearly 8 ms spent on post-processing in total. No way would that ever be compensated by rendering the game at a lower resolution internally.

But I was wrong. In fact, the game ran considerably better with FSR2 enabled, even on the least capable consoles. On some maps, for example Fior, the frame rate jumped from the mid-20’s to the low 40’s while walking around in the forest. Not only that, using FSR2 also helped to smooth out the performance spikes in more graphically demanding areas. It was a true game changer!

Just a few weeks before we were going to launch FSR 2.2 on consoles, I received a report that players were able to see ghost images of each other through walls on PS5. It was pretty bad.



This was clearly an issue with motion vector rendering, and it’s something that had plagued us before, but we never figured out what caused it. I was mindful of this problem when I worked on FSR2 and specifically checked for it, but as it turns out, it only happens on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S and nowhere else.

It’s crucial for FSR 2.2 that motion vectors are correct, so this time I had to really dig into this problem and find out why it was happening. A GPU capture confirmed that indeed, all was not well with the motion vectors:



The color buffer on the left is perfectly fine: the other player is obscured by the rock and not drawn, as you would expect. However, the motion vector buffer on the right clearly shows the other player. This causes FSR2’s image reconstruction to think those pixels should be moving, and so it will make a ghost image appear on the rock.

It took me almost a full day and a lot of pouring through GPU data to finally figure out that Unity was for some reason adding an arbitrary offset to meshes when drawing motion vectors for moving objects, which drew them closer to the camera. In this case, close enough that the player model was considered to be in front of the rock and its motion vectors were drawn. Just a small change to the motion vector shader code fixed this and FSR2 was good to go again.

At the moment I am still working on further refining and improving our FSR 2.2 implementation. One often-heard complaint is that scopes have become blurry and smeary, making them hard to use. This is because the scope’s zoomed-in view isn’t a proper part of the main scene, and so FSR2 doesn’t really know what to do with it. The correct solution for this problem isn’t super obvious, so it took us a while to understand what we needed to do here.



What you want in this case is for the scope image to be composited into the scene, that is, for it to just get glued into the final picture without any further modifications. Fortunately for this, FSR2 has the ability to take a composition mask as an input, which tells it which pixels should be left alone. So, the challenge for us was to isolate the scope lens and draw it to a separate composition mask. The above image shows the result of that. We’re also doing the same for water surfaces as those too are animated texture effects and require special treatment by FSR2.

Which other game dev/studio inspires you?

Historically, id Software has been a great source of inspiration for me. They were always at the forefront of PC gaming technology. Their Doom and Quake games allowed me to get a start in modding and game programming. Their generous open sourcing of their engines allowed millions of aspiring game developers, myself included, to learn and understand how games work under the hood. Without them, I don’t think I would be working in game development today.

A bit closer to home, I’ve always had a deep respect for Nixxes and the quality of the conversion work they’re doing. From all the way back in the Dreamcast days up until today, whenever Nixxes ports a game to another platform you know that a lot of care and attention will have been put into it. I look at their work as a reference for the quality I should be striving for.

Favourite game atm?

The last two years I have been captivated by Soulsborne games. I keep coming back to Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Dark Souls III. Last year’s Elden Ring was an amazing experience. Lies of P which comes out later this year is looking very promising too.

Whenever I want to hang out and chat with my friends, PUBG is still my game of choice. Paradoxically, despite being a rather hardcore and deeply unforgiving game, it offers a lot of quiet moments too where you can just chill and have fun together.

While everyone else is being hyped by the shiny new Final Fantasy XVI right now, I’ve been intrigued by the Pixel Remasters of the classic Final Fantasy titles. Currently I’m playing through Final Fantasy V for the first time and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Finally, recently me and my friends discovered Placid Plastic Duck Simulator which is extremely silly, as you’re literally doing nothing but watching rubber ducks bob around in a pool. However, it is strangely fascinating and I’ve already spent way more hours on it than is sensible.

Anything else you want to share?

For anyone who may be dreaming of working in game development someday, the best I can say is: be proactive, be curious, and make things! Even if you’re repeating what someone else has already done before you, the best way to learn is by doing and then showing other people what you’re capable of. Never stop being curious.
Thank you everyone for reading and I hope you found it interesting to see some of what went on behind the scenes on the console side of Isonzo and what we’ve been doing lately to further improve the game.


Don’t forget that the Film Memoir mode is available for free until August 4 for all our games. You can enable this by going to Settings -> Graphics. We hope you enjoy this special feature and create some fun & interesting footage.



Additionally, Verdun & Isonzo are currently both discounted.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/242860/Verdun/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556790/Isonzo/

See you next time soldiers o7

Add New Game --> XO JUMP
Wish Everybody like it! tks!!!

Thank you all so much for your support!
Sales have now surpassed 10,000 units!
A new one is currently in the works, and we'll be adding more fun gameplay!
More exciting H-sessions!

We are thrilled to announce that we'll be hosting the first The Perfect Tower 1 live stream on the 3rd of August (this Thursday)!
On the same day we're also hosting a Q&A (Questions and Answers) event, where you will have the chance to get your burning questions answered, and gain insight into the future of the series.

Date: 03.08.2023

Q&A
Time: 18:00 CEST / 09:00 PT
Location: https://discord.gg/fireswordstudios

Live Stream
Time: 19:00 CEST / 10:00 PT
Location: https://www.twitch.tv/fireswordstudios



During the Q&A, XmmmX and SpeedyBrain will tell you a bit about the next steps for The Perfect Tower II and you'll have the chance to ask any questions you have regarding The Perfect Tower 1 or 2!
Whether you're curious about our design process, want to know more about upcoming updates, or simply wish to engage in a friendly chat, we are here to connect with you!

How to Participate:

• Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/fireswordstudios
  
• Head over to the "AMA" stage channel at the scheduled time.
  
• Ask your questions in the text chat or use the raise your hand function to ask via voice.

Even if you can't make it to the live event, we encourage you to drop your questions in the text chat of the "AMA" stage channel ahead of time. We'll make sure to address as many questions as possible during the Q&A and provide a summary afterward for those who missed it.

You can also subscribe to this Discord event, if you need a reminder when the event starts:
https://discord.gg/DjscZqD7?event=1135545909585903706



In this Stream we'll be taking a look at the survey results of The Perfect Tower I community survey, brainstorming a few ideas with you and rediscover the game by playing it on stream.
This is the first step towards deciding what The Perfect Tower 1 remake should look like.


You missed the announcement about the remake?

You can read more about it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1197260/view/5519774550394756562

And don't forget to wishlist the game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2515620/The_Perfect_Tower/



Thank you for being an integral part of The Perfect Tower series. ːdreamheartː
We hope to see many of you at the Q&A and Stream!

Bug camera fixed