***Official Squad Thread***
- Thread starter Xcept1
- Start date
Got to say I'm not playing as much at the minute due to the UK/EU servers mostly being at 72 players for some bizarre reason. 64 slots is really the max you want to be running at this stage of development.
Too much of a performance hit for me to enjoy it with that player number.
Too much of a performance hit for me to enjoy it with that player number.
February 2016 Recap
February is the month of love.. for Squad.
Hi Squaddies,
After a very busy six weeks post EA launch the development team has spent the past month digging into more of our core game systems in an effort to get them closer to our final vision. We will show you some of the progress in this update and also push some of the finished content out with our Alpha v5 update which is going through a hardening phase currently before moving into release candidate testing.
Systems
Foliage Bending System
Our Lead Environment artist and foliage wizard GhostDance has been carefully plugging away at our next generation of foliage. Our next iteration will start to integrate vertex pivot bending allowing interaction of players and foliage. As well we will be adding more natural looking procedural wind system. Both of which we have examples of below!
UI and Quality of Life Improvements
Since the last update a lot of effort has been poured into the map, user interface and general quality of life by JrWebster and Motherdear. The ongoing improvements of our user interface systems has allowed the gameplay programmers to focus more on improving the look and feel of some of the core spawn and map features, as well as making the system leaner and easier to implement future features.
The main focus has been to move the map towards a C++ implementation and to fix any bugs that were plaguing 4.0, such as map and spawn menu switching back and forth, not being able to switch directly to the map from the spawn menu, roles not always being displayed as used etc.. Among these changes we now have a cleaner and more informative kit system, both for our menu and our ammo crates, as well as brand new map icons to improve map readability.
The spawn menu has been improved with new icons, better displaying which weapon the player will get with the kit, making each spawn menu unique for the faction, as well as better drawing the eyes to specialty kits. This also brings some improvements to squad management since the squad leader no longer is in doubt of what weapons are available in his squads arsenal.
The ammo crate kit icons now clearly display what role they are and what weapon will be your most important, the icons are now more unified with the spawn menu and less language dependent, both in art style and functionality, allowing the users to have the standard kit tooltips and readability of the spawn menu.
The players map icon now slowly pulses to allow you to easily find your own position, other players directions and important features, like medic and SLs are now easier to find on the map, and the mouse wheel and button zoom now functions much better than in earlier iterations.
Improvements have been made made for the way that we display the player inventory, there has been some frustration among players, and devs, that the inventory system did not give good enough feedback to user actions, which we will address in two phases.
Phase 1 will be a feature upgrade for the user interface of the inventory, we are adding expanding groups, which will give the player a better overview of equipment in a group, and we are adding fading to items that are not currently selected, making it much easier for the player to find the active weapon.
UI Artwork is still a WIP.
Phase 2 will be adding the ability to change away from weapons while they are still just being equipped, which will allow the player to traverse the inventory with much more confidence without being punished for a small miss-click.
Another quality of life improvement that has been long awaited and that we want to mention is name tag drawing reliability. We are now tracing from your camera location to the head, chest and feet of the other soldier, instead of the default Unreal Engine 4 method of tracing from waist to waist. This tracing method makes sure that you always get a name-tag when you can see your team members head, chest or feet, which solves a lot of issues for new and old players alike.
We have also made some minor improvements to the feel of scoped weapons, namely giving them a post process effect around the reticle when zoomed.
Lastly we have re-implemented the way that we handle jumping and stamina to allow for smoother traversal of walls and less frustration and stamina cost, while still stopping bunny-hopping and other game breakers. The system will now allow you to jump at full height with no stamina penalty, but with a loss of forward momentum and jump height for each consecutive jump. This allows you to be able to traverse walls with no worry of suddenly running out of stamina and reduces the frustration of the stamina cost.
Art
Animation Update
With the refactoring of our Animation System going underway there is a need to update almost all our animations to a newer and better standard. We recently brought aboard a new addition to the team, Kab, to help out in creating new animations for weapons and equipment new and old. Heres a few friendly Gifs to sate your appetite!
https://zippy.gfycat.com/LegalSilkyComet.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/MixedGrotesqueAntelopegroundsquirrel.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/BasicHandyIndochinahogdeer.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/NarrowOrdinaryBasil.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/NiceDismalGalapagosmockingbird.webm
G3A3
The G3A3 is a German 7.62x51mm NATO battle rifle developed in the 1950s, produced by license around the world. Still a very reliable platform, the rifle has seen many wars and conflicts around the world and is still in use by second-world militaries and insurgent groups to this day.
Tunnels
Adding tunnel systems has always been a big wish list item for us and the latest Fools Road release gave us a quick crash course on how our game mechanics and code would react to them. Guided greatly by the things we have learned in the last month our environment artist Drav has begun formally working on a modular underground system that would allow our mappers to create more elaborate functional tunnel networks and create a whole extra dimension for Squad environments.
Doors
Another exciting system that we're working on is one for Doors, which will allow players to dynamically open and close passages, and further down the track, breach or even lock them. For now the system is in its infancy and we will be iterating on them well into the future.
Mapping
Yehorivka
Continuing to push the envelope of map sizes we're beginning work on a new map called Yehorivka, featuring large open expanses and a total 8km x 8km terrain size letting us open up the full expanses of the 4km x 4km base terrain and provide a real sandbox for vehicle based combat coming over the horizon. In its infancy but we will keep you guys posted!
Gorodok
More work has been done on Gorodok since our last feature, here is featured a unique elevated rail system used to break up the landscape and present an interesting tactical obstacle for squads moving on foot. Bear in mind in these early stages that the lighting and detailing has not been done yet and will look dramatically different the closer we get to release.
Operation First Light
Operation First Light has been polished up to a near finished stage. (after popular request it not be scrapped!). Removal of the train wreck allows for the addition of an additional small village and fields. Over all the map has also gotten a good treatment of micro details of debris and trash to make it feel a little more lived in.
Sumari Bala
The expansion of the play area continues, and with the addition of numerous crop fields around the city edges, provides ample concealment for squads seeking to flank hardened positions.
Chora
Chora continues to snake its way across the valley floor expanding both ways down the river and opening up some new combat areas. We expect another month to finish up the base compound layouts and then 2-3 months of detail polish and tweaking before this map finally gets close to a finished stage. We are also planning to integrate Truesky and some new terrain materials in this time frame as well.
Thats all for this update but as ever we are furiously pounding away at the new content, squashing bugs and iterating till our fingers are raw. We appreciate everyone's continued support and look forward to getting this content out to you as soon as possible in our Squad 5.0 update. Onward and upward!
Offworld Out.
February is the month of love.. for Squad.
Hi Squaddies,
After a very busy six weeks post EA launch the development team has spent the past month digging into more of our core game systems in an effort to get them closer to our final vision. We will show you some of the progress in this update and also push some of the finished content out with our Alpha v5 update which is going through a hardening phase currently before moving into release candidate testing.
Systems
Foliage Bending System
Our Lead Environment artist and foliage wizard GhostDance has been carefully plugging away at our next generation of foliage. Our next iteration will start to integrate vertex pivot bending allowing interaction of players and foliage. As well we will be adding more natural looking procedural wind system. Both of which we have examples of below!
UI and Quality of Life Improvements
Since the last update a lot of effort has been poured into the map, user interface and general quality of life by JrWebster and Motherdear. The ongoing improvements of our user interface systems has allowed the gameplay programmers to focus more on improving the look and feel of some of the core spawn and map features, as well as making the system leaner and easier to implement future features.
The main focus has been to move the map towards a C++ implementation and to fix any bugs that were plaguing 4.0, such as map and spawn menu switching back and forth, not being able to switch directly to the map from the spawn menu, roles not always being displayed as used etc.. Among these changes we now have a cleaner and more informative kit system, both for our menu and our ammo crates, as well as brand new map icons to improve map readability.
The spawn menu has been improved with new icons, better displaying which weapon the player will get with the kit, making each spawn menu unique for the faction, as well as better drawing the eyes to specialty kits. This also brings some improvements to squad management since the squad leader no longer is in doubt of what weapons are available in his squads arsenal.
The ammo crate kit icons now clearly display what role they are and what weapon will be your most important, the icons are now more unified with the spawn menu and less language dependent, both in art style and functionality, allowing the users to have the standard kit tooltips and readability of the spawn menu.
The players map icon now slowly pulses to allow you to easily find your own position, other players directions and important features, like medic and SLs are now easier to find on the map, and the mouse wheel and button zoom now functions much better than in earlier iterations.
Improvements have been made made for the way that we display the player inventory, there has been some frustration among players, and devs, that the inventory system did not give good enough feedback to user actions, which we will address in two phases.
Phase 1 will be a feature upgrade for the user interface of the inventory, we are adding expanding groups, which will give the player a better overview of equipment in a group, and we are adding fading to items that are not currently selected, making it much easier for the player to find the active weapon.
UI Artwork is still a WIP.
Phase 2 will be adding the ability to change away from weapons while they are still just being equipped, which will allow the player to traverse the inventory with much more confidence without being punished for a small miss-click.
Another quality of life improvement that has been long awaited and that we want to mention is name tag drawing reliability. We are now tracing from your camera location to the head, chest and feet of the other soldier, instead of the default Unreal Engine 4 method of tracing from waist to waist. This tracing method makes sure that you always get a name-tag when you can see your team members head, chest or feet, which solves a lot of issues for new and old players alike.
We have also made some minor improvements to the feel of scoped weapons, namely giving them a post process effect around the reticle when zoomed.
Lastly we have re-implemented the way that we handle jumping and stamina to allow for smoother traversal of walls and less frustration and stamina cost, while still stopping bunny-hopping and other game breakers. The system will now allow you to jump at full height with no stamina penalty, but with a loss of forward momentum and jump height for each consecutive jump. This allows you to be able to traverse walls with no worry of suddenly running out of stamina and reduces the frustration of the stamina cost.
Art
Animation Update
With the refactoring of our Animation System going underway there is a need to update almost all our animations to a newer and better standard. We recently brought aboard a new addition to the team, Kab, to help out in creating new animations for weapons and equipment new and old. Heres a few friendly Gifs to sate your appetite!
https://zippy.gfycat.com/LegalSilkyComet.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/MixedGrotesqueAntelopegroundsquirrel.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/BasicHandyIndochinahogdeer.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/NarrowOrdinaryBasil.webm
https://zippy.gfycat.com/NiceDismalGalapagosmockingbird.webm
G3A3
The G3A3 is a German 7.62x51mm NATO battle rifle developed in the 1950s, produced by license around the world. Still a very reliable platform, the rifle has seen many wars and conflicts around the world and is still in use by second-world militaries and insurgent groups to this day.
Tunnels
Adding tunnel systems has always been a big wish list item for us and the latest Fools Road release gave us a quick crash course on how our game mechanics and code would react to them. Guided greatly by the things we have learned in the last month our environment artist Drav has begun formally working on a modular underground system that would allow our mappers to create more elaborate functional tunnel networks and create a whole extra dimension for Squad environments.
Doors
Another exciting system that we're working on is one for Doors, which will allow players to dynamically open and close passages, and further down the track, breach or even lock them. For now the system is in its infancy and we will be iterating on them well into the future.
Mapping
Yehorivka
Continuing to push the envelope of map sizes we're beginning work on a new map called Yehorivka, featuring large open expanses and a total 8km x 8km terrain size letting us open up the full expanses of the 4km x 4km base terrain and provide a real sandbox for vehicle based combat coming over the horizon. In its infancy but we will keep you guys posted!
Gorodok
More work has been done on Gorodok since our last feature, here is featured a unique elevated rail system used to break up the landscape and present an interesting tactical obstacle for squads moving on foot. Bear in mind in these early stages that the lighting and detailing has not been done yet and will look dramatically different the closer we get to release.
Operation First Light
Operation First Light has been polished up to a near finished stage. (after popular request it not be scrapped!). Removal of the train wreck allows for the addition of an additional small village and fields. Over all the map has also gotten a good treatment of micro details of debris and trash to make it feel a little more lived in.
Sumari Bala
The expansion of the play area continues, and with the addition of numerous crop fields around the city edges, provides ample concealment for squads seeking to flank hardened positions.
Chora
Chora continues to snake its way across the valley floor expanding both ways down the river and opening up some new combat areas. We expect another month to finish up the base compound layouts and then 2-3 months of detail polish and tweaking before this map finally gets close to a finished stage. We are also planning to integrate Truesky and some new terrain materials in this time frame as well.
Thats all for this update but as ever we are furiously pounding away at the new content, squashing bugs and iterating till our fingers are raw. We appreciate everyone's continued support and look forward to getting this content out to you as soon as possible in our Squad 5.0 update. Onward and upward!
Offworld Out.
I can't tell you why it was set to the waist. We were a bit surprised when we saw it!
That was just an update of what is being worked on, not what is going to be in the next patch
Yup, everyone will be able to drag a downed friendly.
No plans to go on sale any time soon. We're aiming for Squad to fill the ground in-between the more "casual" shooters and Arma.
I'm a huge RO2/RS and Arma fan but not so much Insurgency, well not any more. RO2/RS is a very single player multi-player game if that makes sense. You're in a squad but when was the last time you heard people talking together in squad voip/chat? It's all in team/public. You can run around on your own after spawning on your SL and it doesn't really hinder you. Not bashing the game, I still play it regularly and love it. Really looking forward to RS2.
In Squad, if you don't communicate with the squad you're in and the squad leaders fail to communicate then 9/10 your team will get ruined. You can't just run about doing your own thing and expect to get anywhere with it.
Stick to the clan/community servers and you'll soon find regulars you enjoy playing with. You can always jump on the Squad League discord and join the "i-wanna-squad" channel. People jumping on in groups from there quite regularly.
Had the first proper session on this since release with a buddy. Once I got my bearings and slowed down a little I started to enjoy it. Role playing over the comms is a must for comedy value
Couple of questions though, load times a re pretty brutal, is my machine showing its age or is it known?
When I pull the map up is it possible to use the mouse cursor to mouse over squad mates to find their names?
We're sure the increased load times are to do with the EAC file checking. We're trying out new techniques which seems to improve them. We did some testing last night and people say they saw an improvement. I've got Squad on an SSD so it's pretty fast for me, I'm guessing you're running it off a HDD?
Press Enter so you get the spawn map up and if you mouse over players it will show their name. It's a bit temperamental currently if players are close to each other however.
There's some good info from our programmers that are working on vehicles here - http://forums.joinsquad.com/topic/15059-helping-with-vehicle-code-in-ue4/page-1
If you are in a game with a cheater/tk'er then join the Squad Discord channel and PM me. They won't be in game for much longer
https://discord.gg/0VcFH6sxVnnN3hfj
https://discord.gg/0VcFH6sxVnnN3hfj
Whats up with Vehicles? Part 1
From Nothing to Something
Hi Folks,
I'm Garrett, a Senior Programmer here at OWI. You guys probably know me as RoyAwesome on the forums and Reddit. I've been working on Squad for almost a year now, implementing a variety of features you guys play with every day, like the Deployable system, the Gamemode system, AAS gamemode, flags, scoring and so on. One of my main tasks for the last several months has been implementing one of our headlining features: Vehicles.
I started working on Vehicles in September 2015. At this point we had done two proof-of-concept prototypes, both in Blueprint (Unreal Engines scripting system). You saw one of these with the Kickstarter Humvee trailer. I quickly discovered that both prototypes had some fatal flaws, which prompted my decision to simply start from scratch with our vehicle implementation. This proved to be the correct decision, as it allowed us to create a very robust system that can create some really unique vehicles.
A Vehicle on the Test Map
However, before I could write a single line of code, I needed to know what exactly did we want to do with vehicles. What kind of actions could you take? What happens if a vehicle gets shot by a rifle? A rocket? A tank shell? What do we want passengers to be able to do? Gunners? Drivers? I had a lot of questions I needed answers to, so I turned to our awesome designers Z-Trooper and SgtRoss to help brainstorm up some ideas for what they wanted Vehicles to look like in their final form. That simple question set off a massive round of design discussions, ending up with a huge design document with all kinds of cool ideas and features to add. With a design in hand, I had work to do.
Starting with an empty code file, I had to decide where to start. The previous prototypes had focused on the Physics and movement portion of Vehicles, and since I was starting from scratch, I figured I'd start with the part that neither of those prototypes ever tackled& Getting into the vehicle and how seats work. How seats work and what you can do in them was a major focus of the design, so I figured I'd start there but implement a simplified version for now. As an added bonus, this also meant that we could leverage this code for Emplaced Weapons, as getting in and out of the weapon was something we needed to do to make them work.
The initial implementation of Seats and interacting with them went by pretty quick, and by the end of September I had a working prototype of a static Vehicle that could have any number of seats. I encountered a serious issue testing it though& the game crashed every time I would get into the Vehicle. After some quick investigation, I discovered that parts of our code assumed that PlayerController (what you are) always controlled a Soldier (your person in the game). Oh simple , I thought, Ill just fix those assumptions . Yeah, It wasnt that simple.
Configuring the Seats for a Technical
To understand the problem a bit more, Unreal Engine has a few important objects. Players are represented by the PlayerController. The PlayerControllers job is to handle all input from players, as well as track their state across the game. They dont exist in the world, but they can Possess objects called Pawns, which are objects in the world that can be controlled. From the beginning of development until now, we have only had one type of Pawn: The Soldier. Because of that, some very core systems such as weapons and damage only really worked when a PlayerController was controlling a Soldier. If the PlayerController was controlling something else (lets say, a Vehicle), those systems just broke.
How you actually get into a vehicle
Breaking these assumptions and fixing them took me quite a bit of time, from October into most of November. Some of them were easy to fix, such as instances where our code would cast a Pawn into a Soldier and not check if the cast failed, but some of them were not. I figured, around the start of October, we could get these issues fixed and released Emplaced Weapons in November. However, I discovered that our Weapons assumed that our PlayerController controlled a soldier in a big way. Progress on fixing Weapons was very slow. Weapons needed to be inside of an Inventory, which was part of the Soldier. I had to split that off into a component (horribly breaking it in the process). October slipped into November, and I was still changing things like instances where the weapon was playing Soldier Animations on any Pawn that was controlled (which obviously didn't work with vehicles).
Setting up a 50cals Inventory
Luckily, while I was busy fixing these issues Kory, another programmer, finished up his tasks and started working on Vehicles with me. At this point we had blown vehicles for the November patch, but we were still trying to get them out for Early Access. I asked Kory to look into getting physics working with the vehicles, getting the Humvee drivable. At this point, I had fixed all the simple soldier-only assumptions so driving the vehicle was possible. We figured we could at least have transport vehicles. Kory set to work integrating the UE4 vehicle system into the multiplayer Vehicle system I had built.
By Thanksgiving, Kory and I were driving Humvees around our test map. However, after turning on fake lag we started to notice some odd behavior, with the Humvees and Technicals rubber banding and desyncing when driven. We needed to do some more investigation, but with Alpha 3 right around the corner it would have to wait.
Vehicles on the Test Map
Around this exact same time, I finally fixed the last few issues with weapons, and successfully fired an Emplaced .50 cal. However, due to how buggy the Alpha 3 release was looking in testing, like Kory, I tabled working on Vehicles to focus on Alpha 3 and making the Early Access release awesome. I did add a method of spawning vehicles in any map so that post-EA we could spawn vehicles on full servers and see how they performed.
After the Early Access release, we did a number of tests, spawning Humvees and Technicals on full servers and seeing how they performed. The results were not promising. The issues we saw with desyncing and rubber banding were much worse in full servers. I took a short break from firefighting post-release bugs to investigate, and I discovered that the default vehicle code didn't really have netcode or lag correction. Vehicles were warping around because the drivers inputs were sent to every client and the server, but only the servers position was Correct . Due to the nature of physics engines, every client had small but compounding errors in positions and velocity, causing every client to see vehicles in different positions. When the server sent the Correct positions, the vehicle was teleported to the proper position, giving a very ugly warping and rubber banding effect.
The netcode for Vehicles had to be redone.
In Part 2, I'll talk about the process of rewriting the Netcode for Vehicles, putting the last few pieces together for vehicles, and talk a bit about how to mod them. For now, I hope you enjoyed this look into the development process of Vehicles. If you have any questions, you can follow me on Twitter, @RoyAwesome.
Offworld Out.
From Nothing to Something
Hi Folks,
I'm Garrett, a Senior Programmer here at OWI. You guys probably know me as RoyAwesome on the forums and Reddit. I've been working on Squad for almost a year now, implementing a variety of features you guys play with every day, like the Deployable system, the Gamemode system, AAS gamemode, flags, scoring and so on. One of my main tasks for the last several months has been implementing one of our headlining features: Vehicles.
I started working on Vehicles in September 2015. At this point we had done two proof-of-concept prototypes, both in Blueprint (Unreal Engines scripting system). You saw one of these with the Kickstarter Humvee trailer. I quickly discovered that both prototypes had some fatal flaws, which prompted my decision to simply start from scratch with our vehicle implementation. This proved to be the correct decision, as it allowed us to create a very robust system that can create some really unique vehicles.
A Vehicle on the Test Map
However, before I could write a single line of code, I needed to know what exactly did we want to do with vehicles. What kind of actions could you take? What happens if a vehicle gets shot by a rifle? A rocket? A tank shell? What do we want passengers to be able to do? Gunners? Drivers? I had a lot of questions I needed answers to, so I turned to our awesome designers Z-Trooper and SgtRoss to help brainstorm up some ideas for what they wanted Vehicles to look like in their final form. That simple question set off a massive round of design discussions, ending up with a huge design document with all kinds of cool ideas and features to add. With a design in hand, I had work to do.
Starting with an empty code file, I had to decide where to start. The previous prototypes had focused on the Physics and movement portion of Vehicles, and since I was starting from scratch, I figured I'd start with the part that neither of those prototypes ever tackled& Getting into the vehicle and how seats work. How seats work and what you can do in them was a major focus of the design, so I figured I'd start there but implement a simplified version for now. As an added bonus, this also meant that we could leverage this code for Emplaced Weapons, as getting in and out of the weapon was something we needed to do to make them work.
The initial implementation of Seats and interacting with them went by pretty quick, and by the end of September I had a working prototype of a static Vehicle that could have any number of seats. I encountered a serious issue testing it though& the game crashed every time I would get into the Vehicle. After some quick investigation, I discovered that parts of our code assumed that PlayerController (what you are) always controlled a Soldier (your person in the game). Oh simple , I thought, Ill just fix those assumptions . Yeah, It wasnt that simple.
Configuring the Seats for a Technical
To understand the problem a bit more, Unreal Engine has a few important objects. Players are represented by the PlayerController. The PlayerControllers job is to handle all input from players, as well as track their state across the game. They dont exist in the world, but they can Possess objects called Pawns, which are objects in the world that can be controlled. From the beginning of development until now, we have only had one type of Pawn: The Soldier. Because of that, some very core systems such as weapons and damage only really worked when a PlayerController was controlling a Soldier. If the PlayerController was controlling something else (lets say, a Vehicle), those systems just broke.
How you actually get into a vehicle
Breaking these assumptions and fixing them took me quite a bit of time, from October into most of November. Some of them were easy to fix, such as instances where our code would cast a Pawn into a Soldier and not check if the cast failed, but some of them were not. I figured, around the start of October, we could get these issues fixed and released Emplaced Weapons in November. However, I discovered that our Weapons assumed that our PlayerController controlled a soldier in a big way. Progress on fixing Weapons was very slow. Weapons needed to be inside of an Inventory, which was part of the Soldier. I had to split that off into a component (horribly breaking it in the process). October slipped into November, and I was still changing things like instances where the weapon was playing Soldier Animations on any Pawn that was controlled (which obviously didn't work with vehicles).
Setting up a 50cals Inventory
Luckily, while I was busy fixing these issues Kory, another programmer, finished up his tasks and started working on Vehicles with me. At this point we had blown vehicles for the November patch, but we were still trying to get them out for Early Access. I asked Kory to look into getting physics working with the vehicles, getting the Humvee drivable. At this point, I had fixed all the simple soldier-only assumptions so driving the vehicle was possible. We figured we could at least have transport vehicles. Kory set to work integrating the UE4 vehicle system into the multiplayer Vehicle system I had built.
By Thanksgiving, Kory and I were driving Humvees around our test map. However, after turning on fake lag we started to notice some odd behavior, with the Humvees and Technicals rubber banding and desyncing when driven. We needed to do some more investigation, but with Alpha 3 right around the corner it would have to wait.
Vehicles on the Test Map
Around this exact same time, I finally fixed the last few issues with weapons, and successfully fired an Emplaced .50 cal. However, due to how buggy the Alpha 3 release was looking in testing, like Kory, I tabled working on Vehicles to focus on Alpha 3 and making the Early Access release awesome. I did add a method of spawning vehicles in any map so that post-EA we could spawn vehicles on full servers and see how they performed.
After the Early Access release, we did a number of tests, spawning Humvees and Technicals on full servers and seeing how they performed. The results were not promising. The issues we saw with desyncing and rubber banding were much worse in full servers. I took a short break from firefighting post-release bugs to investigate, and I discovered that the default vehicle code didn't really have netcode or lag correction. Vehicles were warping around because the drivers inputs were sent to every client and the server, but only the servers position was Correct . Due to the nature of physics engines, every client had small but compounding errors in positions and velocity, causing every client to see vehicles in different positions. When the server sent the Correct positions, the vehicle was teleported to the proper position, giving a very ugly warping and rubber banding effect.
The netcode for Vehicles had to be redone.
In Part 2, I'll talk about the process of rewriting the Netcode for Vehicles, putting the last few pieces together for vehicles, and talk a bit about how to mod them. For now, I hope you enjoyed this look into the development process of Vehicles. If you have any questions, you can follow me on Twitter, @RoyAwesome.
Offworld Out.
Hello chaps!
The QA team will be hosting a public pre-release playtest tomorrow (Friday, March 11th) at 20.00 UTC. The purpose will be to do a stress test of the Alpha 5 release prior to it's launch, to help us catch any leftover crashes, bugs or issues we might have missed.
Please note that we will only have one server up, and access will be on a first come first serve basis. If the server fills up, we apologize in advance!
The testing will be done on a public-testing beta branch. We will be announcing the password for the test two hours prior to it.
The password will be provided in the newly created "prerelease-testing" channel on our community discord, in order to join use this link: https://discord.gg/0VcFH6sxVnrYWz9g
We kindly ask two things of those interested in testing:
1. Be sure to follow what is going on in the prerelease-testing discord channel before and during the test, in case we need to provide information or instructions.
2. If the devs or members of the QA channel broadcast anything in game, please be sure to follow their lead, as we may need to test or check certain things during the games.
Thanks, and we look forward to seeing some of you during the test!
Offworld out...
The QA team will be hosting a public pre-release playtest tomorrow (Friday, March 11th) at 20.00 UTC. The purpose will be to do a stress test of the Alpha 5 release prior to it's launch, to help us catch any leftover crashes, bugs or issues we might have missed.
Please note that we will only have one server up, and access will be on a first come first serve basis. If the server fills up, we apologize in advance!
The testing will be done on a public-testing beta branch. We will be announcing the password for the test two hours prior to it.
The password will be provided in the newly created "prerelease-testing" channel on our community discord, in order to join use this link: https://discord.gg/0VcFH6sxVnrYWz9g
We kindly ask two things of those interested in testing:
1. Be sure to follow what is going on in the prerelease-testing discord channel before and during the test, in case we need to provide information or instructions.
2. If the devs or members of the QA channel broadcast anything in game, please be sure to follow their lead, as we may need to test or check certain things during the games.
Thanks, and we look forward to seeing some of you during the test!
Offworld out...
