***Official Squad Thread***

Agree with Xcept. My advice, play medic until you get comfortable with the game :) The specialist kits including sniper are generally reserved for those who know what they are doing and to be honest medic is one of the best classes in the game right now to play since they gave us grenades :)
 
Just picked up Squad in the sale, only played about 30 minutes last night but really like it.

Not as dumbed down as cod or bf, and not quite as complex as Arma. Seems to have a good balance between other shooters.

Will follow the advice given for new players
 
1kiwi said:
Thats true - It's a marksman but you may as well label it as sniper as the same type of player who channels Chris Kyle try's but mostly fails to play this class every time
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How does it compare to BF4 for sniping?

Always amused me in BF4 - I'd just wing it and out-snipe the guys that were doing the wannabe Bob Lee Swagger thing and range finding, doping, etc. etc. heh - only time I struggled was the 3000 yard shots on Paracel if people got onto the islands on the outside of the map as the hit detection and representation of terrain at that range was dodgy.
 
Rroff said:
How does it compare to BF4 for sniping?

Always amused me in BF4 - I'd just wing it and out-snipe the guys that were doing the wannabe Bob Lee Swagger thing and range finding, doping, etc. etc. heh - only time I struggled was the 3000 yard shots on Paracel if people got onto the islands on the outside of the map as the hit detection and representation of terrain at that range was dodgy.
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This game is totally different to BF4 so it's hard to describe. It has similar gun mechanics but in general Squad is allot slower paced than BF4 so when playing in this role you are expected to act as a scout providing information to your SL such as enemy movements and potential fob locations. Unfortunately you need to give up a fire support role with the kit so often an SL will tell you to switch to GL or LAT as they are arguably more valuable

I hit 800 hours the other day - you should get the game while it's on sale!
 
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Squad has become increasingly frustrating to play over the steam sale period, hopefully it'll go back to normal soon. Seems every squad I join has 3 'marksmen' running around trying to clear buildings on their own like they're playing COD, SL's with no comms pratting about in vehicles, medics who run head first into firefights and people driving Logi's straight into known firefights and jumping out, random squad members that bugger off over the other side of the map to do their own thing.
 
L33 said:
Squad has become increasingly frustrating to play over the steam sale period, hopefully it'll go back to normal soon. Seems every squad I join has 3 'marksmen' running around trying to clear buildings on their own like they're playing COD, SL's with no comms pratting about in vehicles, medics who run head first into firefights and people driving Logi's straight into known firefights and jumping out, random squad members that bugger off over the other side of the map to do their own thing.
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I learnt along time ago that it's easier to take a break from Squad over the sale periods than play through them. It will settle down soon.
 
The best option is to play on the servers that have active admins on and enforce the rule that all SL's use their microphones. Unfortunately it's the nature of the beast.
 
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Monthly Recap
June 2017


Hi Squaddies,
Welcome to your monthly update! We're kicking this one off with an eye to the future before we dig into the June goodies. As we race into the second half of 2017, we felt it was important to give the community a comprehensive update of the road ahead and the what the future holds for Squad and Offworld Industries. Spoilers: It's going to be a good year.

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Squad Development Update

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There's no shortage of action behind the scenes, marching ever closer toward release! As the Unreal Engine has developed in parallel with Squad, we’ve worked hard to make sure to keep the engine up-to-date and include new features as they become available. This has netted us some great improvements, but also cost us some development time when fundamental changes have to be made. As we come into the final cycle of the alpha portion of the development, we have decided to move quickly toward version 4.16 of the engine. We will absolutely continue to pull in relevant features into Squad as we go forward, but we want to dedicate more resources to performance and stability in an effort to bring everyone a better playing experience.
As a result of this, we have readjusted our near-term development plan to get the engine upgrade and the stability pass completed before finishing up our core systems. Everyone in the community should start to see the benefits of this stabilization over the course of the summer, culminating in our release of both the new animation system and core inventory.
Also, the success of Squad (thanks to you!) has allowed us to start to substantially increasing the capacity of our team. In particular, the programming team will be growing by an additional four members beginning in the next several weeks. This should dramatically increase our ability to handle a wider breadth of development and break up many of our bottlenecks. Expect to meet and greet the these talented people in future updates!


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Offworld Industries' Future
Speaking of growing, with nearly 40 full-time developers, Squad maturing, and the studio becoming more financially stable, planning for the future becomes more critical. With roots in modding, we are always on the lookout for talented individuals or teams that we can help with getting a foothold in the industry. Several members of our current team were found right here in this community.
We are pleased to give the OWI community an update on our plans to extend and strengthen this connection in the years ahead.

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Modding and the Community



As part of our early commitment to a community driven project we released the Squad SDK soon after our Steam release and are continuing to plan for full mod support. In May of this year, we transitioned two developers, StrangeZak (Zak Strange) and Irontaxi (Chris Greig) into planning and implementation of the modding platform for a complete release to launch around the end of September.



Our modding platform now includes the ability to Create, Load, and Share Mods from the Squad SDK straight to the Steam Workshop with plans to add custom multiplayer maps from the Steam Workshop before the release.





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"Offworld Core" and Indie Developers
From the humble days of a couple of guys working from their living rooms on Skype, the Offworld team has had a strong desire to make our FPS platform a template for future games on the Unreal 4 engine. As part of our long term plannings, we have been working on creating a stripped down feature framework that both indie teams and Offworld can use as a base for their games. This would include carrying over many of the gameplay features and teamwork oriented structures that make Squad unique, such as squads and voip, in the hope that these things start to set a new standard for Multiplayer games. This framework is known as the "Offworld Core," and we look forward to seeking out teams interested in making everything from sci-fi ship combat to zombie post-apocalyptic shooters.
As part of the first steps in this effort, Offworld Industries is proud to announce our partnership with Periscope Games who have been diligently working on "Post Scriptum," a WW2 multiplayer FPS with a focus on historical accuracy. Set in the 9 day long Operation Market Garden campaign of 1944,, Post Scriptum will depict British paratroopers fighting Tiger tanks amongst the fields, villages and towns of the Netherlands, all the way to Arnhem! In our opinion it looks fantastic, is set in a unique operation from WW2 and is well worthy of being a standalone game. Periscope plans to take their project to a complete commercial release scheduled for 2018.
We welcome them to the Offworld family, and you can find more information about their project at their website, on Twitter, or in these videos:



And after all of that... Let's get on with the update!

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Art

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Motion Capture



Our team in the very last few days of the month went to the motion capture labs at Animatrik in Vancouver to do performance capture for Squad, with the intention of improving the visual fidelity of our third person animations. Look forward to a future article detailing what we did over the day as well as video!





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UGL Transitions
Our animation team has been hard at work integrating core weapon features and one of them is having a smooth transition between your Rifle and Underbarrel Grenade Launcher. In addition we’ve ran a first practical iteration on Weapon Zeroing, beginning with the weapons where they’ll see the most impact, mainly UGLs and Rocket Launchers.


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Shotgun Animations
Having been shelved for quite a while due to scheduling and technical constraints, we finally are able to put shotguns back into the production pipeline! We’ve managed to do a first pass on the M1014 shotgun and the KS-23 shotgun. Take a look at some of the Work-in-Progress:

https://media.joinsquad.com/2017/June/JuneRecap/shotgun9.mp4

Beautiful. So smooth and you can almost feel the "ka-chunk" during the reload.

https://media.joinsquad.com/2017/June/JuneRecap/ks23shotgun2.mov

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TOW Launcher and RPG-26 Renders
It took some doing, but we managed to sneak some renders out from the art team. Don't let them know we found some of the most recent renders of the TOW launcher, as well as the RPG, soon to be featured making very fine explosions on the battlefield near you.







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New Reanimated Vehicle Weapon Animations
As part of the new animation system overhaul, we’ve had to reanimate all the vehicle related animations, including turret-based guns and emplacements. It does give the animators a chance to iterate on what we did in the past, as well as a chance to experiment with a moving camera during the animated sequences. The result? Making the animated work pop even more.

https://media.joinsquad.com/2017/June/JuneRecap/dshk_deploy.mov

https://media.joinsquad.com/2017/June/JuneRecap/spg9_emplaced_3preload3.mov

https://media.joinsquad.com/2017/June/JuneRecap/m2_reloaddry.mov

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Mapping

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Fallujah
We are excited to announce that production on Fallujah is in full force. We took some time revisiting our workflow and production pipeline before jumping into this map and we really think it will pay off. As you can see we are planning to pay homage to the original map from Project Reality, created by Duckhunt. Production is underway and we will have more to show you in an upcoming dev blog series called "The Road to Fallujah" which will give you a look into our workflow and thought process.





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New Narva Screenshots
Fallujah isn't the only map being worked on, as you know. Good progress is being made on bringing the battle to Narva. Featuring a cityscape complete with industrial areas, railway access, and plenty of deadly choke points, Narva brings players to Eastern Europe. Coming along nicely, we're looking forward to players getting their hands on the historic castle!









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And there you have it, Squaddies. The future's so bright, we've gotta wear shades, but we're not letting that get in the way of progress. Stay tuned for more updates from us and the community.
Offworld Out.

Join the Discussion >>
 
Shame I'm not upto speed on Unreal Engine level creation these days - modern battlefields always one of my more favourite themes for level editing.
 
Rroff said:
Shame I'm not upto speed on Unreal Engine level creation these days - modern battlefields always one of my more favourite themes for level editing.
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It's all rather simple actually. We already have our SDK in the UE4 Editor which contains most of our assets. You can sculpt the terrain in the editor or use a 3rd party program such as World Machine then import it into the engine.

There's also the Squad Modding Discord channel with lots of people in making maps/3d assets etc. Plenty of tutorials in there too - https://discord.gg/0jXt1Y2dpl99CpD9
 
Squad is the first game I have been a part of that has embraced mods from the ground up. Im really excited to play BillNyes map and for future mods as you guys push these out to the wild using steam workshop
 
Thanks for the kind comments guys. Glad you're enjoying it. We're in the pretty boring phase of development at the min with some big systems like animation and inventory still being rewritten. Once these are finished we can really start putting out the new content at a much faster rate than we have been.

1kiwi said:
Squad is the first game I have been a part of that has embraced mods from the ground up. Im really excited to play BillNyes map and for future mods as you guys push these out to the wild using steam workshop
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Most of the guys involved in Squad started from creating mods themselves so they see it's only fair we offer the same chance to other people. We're looking forward to seeing what you creative chaps come up with. We've already put in a few things the community has made into the game.

jonneymendoza said:
Just purchased this in steam and wow i am impressed. The animation and sound effects are amazing. Its like Arma 3 and Bf4 mixed together
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That is pretty much exactly the place we want to be. Offering the scale of Arma and the "ease" of being able to jump into a game and play like the BF series (but actually with team work and people using their mics :P)
TheBrooder said:
I played a few rounds last night and I really enjoyed the tense gameplay. I love the realistic radio and bullet sounds - very immersive!
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It can be frustrating at first and it really does seem like the enemy are coming out of nowhere. Once you get a few more rounds under your belt you will find it much easier to spot enemies. Having a good SL is a crucial factor to enjoyment especially during sale times as there are a lot of people coming in and trying the SL with no experience. Join one of the clan servers try to join their squad and tell them you're new. As long as you use your mic and follow the SLs instructions then 9 times out of 10 they will help you learn the game.
 
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