***Official Squad Thread***

[sgavan]

Not noticed this game before, I enjoy Arma 3 but considering trying this out, just need to wait for the price to drop a bit or a free weekend.

 

[Xcept1]

I doubt it will drop in price any time soon but we are always featured in Steam sales (I guess the next one will be the summer sale).

There's always the 2 hour refund in Steam but I don't think you can really get a complete picture of the game within 2 hours.

If you enjoy the teamwork of Arma but want it a bit more user friendly then you will probably enjoy it.

 

[Damien.]

Am I missing something or is there a friends system?

If not are there plans to implement one? Had some good games last night but there was 4 of us and trying to get on the same team/same squad was an absolute nightmare!

Also, OCUK server?

 

[Psycho Sonny]

Yeah we need guys to play with only 4 of us on the ocuk discord server playing this.

 

[Xcept1]

In about an hour, two of our devs Chuc and Fuzzhead will be on twitch.tv/joinsquad talking about what they do on Squad, alpha 11 (and beyond), and taking questions. We hope you'll join us! (The chat will be archived if you can't make it.)

 

[Xcept1]

Couple of modding related updates for you guys if you've not yet seen them:

Modding Recap

The Wrench - April 2018

Hi Squaddies,
The last few weeks have been exciting in many ways! We received Alpha Version 11 and with it the introduction of a new faction and some new vehicles. Now we're all waiting on the Squad SDK update which will give us exciting new things to play around with. We'll be looking forward to seeing what you all can do with V11 as soon as it's out, but we've got some surprising goodies for you in the meantime. Get some tea and biscuits ready (Get it? It's because we have the British Army now -- haha.) and let's check out what happened this month.
Join us on the Community Modding Discord where you can join discussions and meet the modding community. It's a great place to share your ideas and passions with like-minded people that will happily help you create something awesome.

V11 SDK Update
We've got an update directly from modding developer StrangeZak on the status of the A11 SDK:As you may have noticed, the a11 SDK is not out yet. It is being worked on and it's almost good to go. With 11.1 right around the corner, all of those fixes will be incorporated into the SDK before releasing it to you all."Awesome to hear! Thanks, Zak!

Squad Battle Royale Mod by SquadBR Team



We've all been caught by surprise as this mod appeared so suddenly. Let's hear straight from the developers:
We are pleased to announce the development of a SquadBR mod. This is a 100 player Battle Royale mod coming to Squad that aims to bring the best of Squad to the Battle Royale scene. The mod began as a collaboration between Squad's in-house modding developers and mod developer Wasti, who is responsible for, among many other things, the inventory and search and destroy mods for Squad.


The collaboration started as a way to have our in-house modding developers spend time working directly with the tools to get familiar with some of the weaknesses of Squad's modding framework and help ensure that our Offworld Core framework is able to gracefully handle full conversion modding. The developers discussed what they would be most excited to work on for a full conversion mod, and they all immediately felt a Battle Royale mod would be the best testbed and would attract other mod developers to help.


Now that Wasti and our modding developers Zak and Bruno have been working to set the stage for a SquadBR mod team for the past month, we feel it's time to invite the modding community to get involved. As of today the team is accepting applications to join AND is opening up their Discord server to the modding community. If you'd like to help develop or just test out Squad BR, please join the SquadBR Discordand make yourself known! Updates for the Squad Battle Royale mod are posted very frequently in the Discord channel, we REALLY want feedback on what you guys think of this throughout development.


See you on the Battleground very Soon™.
Holy crap! We cannot wait to try this one out.

Finnish Defense Forces by FDFMod Team
Steady yet great progress is being made on the Finnish front. With some new goodies including the CV90 IFV, made by new team members and community tinker extraordinaire Pure Nexus and Irratium, it's great to see it in game. New updates on their now functional main service rifle and the Finnish version of the e-Tool are present as well. Exciting times are ahead in the North!

Battle of Umm Qasr by Blue_x

Umm Qasr is the place of the first military confrontation of the second Gulf War and it looks like a great setting for a British versus Insurgents Squad Map. Blue_xset himself the goal of recreating the area in an 8x8km map including dense towns, the port and multiple large roads and other areas of interest. We're looking forward to seeing future updates on this map!

Dalen by XanderDal

Dalen, one of the more cinematic looking maps being developed in the community, is receiving update after update. With some new lighting and steady work on pushing the edge, it is looking pretty spectacular! Dalen is a medium-sized level with lots of cover and vegetation which provides ample opportunity for close quarters combat. Check out the full image gallery here.

Training Grounds Mod by Victor Tenax

Providing a training ground for clans to do fire team drills, target practice, training missions, and all around improve their Squad skills was the goal for Victor Tenaxwith his new map. Multiple different ranges (e.g. Sniper, Breach & Clear, Suppression.) and a way to teach players to identify vehicles by their audio signature makes this the perfect organized training map to prepare for your next clan fight, or just go around and discover it on your own! You can do so on the Steam Workshop.

That's it for this month! We hope you enjoyed reading through our community modding recap. If you want to be a part of it next month, you can get into it right away by using this form and submit your work!
Squad Modding Hub Management Team Out.
Please note: Offworld Industries is not responsible for mod content. Please contact the creator for assistance.

 

[Xcept1]

DevBlog
Modding 2.0 Update #1
15-May-2018
Hey Squaddies!
It's time for a quick Modding 2.0 development update! Progress has been going well since the initial modding release, so we figured it was time to show off some of what's coming up next.
First off, the Modding SDK UI has been completely redone (by an actual designer this time!). With their help and a fresh copy of the PSD of the new SDK UI, we went straight into implementing the update. It turned out like this!



As you can tell, the tabs on the left the UI for the Modding SDK have all been moved to one window. No more multiple tabs on the top bar!



Every action you need for modding is now in one convenient window.
Sharing Mods
We've scratched the old Steam Uploader and wrote a whole new one from scratch. (This one gives more errors than "Something went wrong."). We've also removed the need to have to pick an "Output Directory" when you are cooking your mod. By default, the system will now pick a valid path for you!
We've also removed the need to have to click both the "Package" and "Upload" button. If you just click upload now it will perform the "Package" too. The "Package" button now is exclusively for people who don't want to upload their mod to the Steam Workshop.



Editing Mods



You are now able to edit your mod's information through the UI after creation. No more having to go through your modinfo info file and change all of the information and hoping you don't break anything!
This new UI is probably 90% done. All the work that is left to do is small but important: fixing button sizes, handling really long strings, handling edge cases, etc. This should definitely come out with Modding 2.0, or maybe even earlier!
Modding SDK Internals
SMI Files
Modinfo.smi files have been destroyed and replaced with your .mi files. No need to worry though, as soon as you load your mod in the Modding 2.0 SDK, your mod's SMI file will be upgraded to the new format.
The main reason for switching file formats is Modding 2.0 doesn't require nearly as much data to be stored locally as the previous method.
Steam Workshop Images
Your mod's Steam Workshop preview image now lives inside of your mod's project folder. This was changed to prevent this reference being lost and then not knowing why you can not upload to the Steam Workshop.
Cooking Mods
As mentioned above, you no longer need to pick a package location. The Modding 2.0 cooking system will by default pick a good path for you. The first place it tries is your mod's project folder. Sometimes this doesn't work due to various issues (No space available, The pathname is too long, etc...), so cooking will continue to walk up the Squad folder structure until it finds a valid path. If it can't find a valid path (which is unlikely), you can still specify a cooking directory.

Example Modding 2.0 Project Structure
In-Game Mod Downloads
Finally! This what you've all been waiting for, right? We're happy to report that progress is going well on getting in-game downloads working. This is proving to be a much larger task than originally thought, but steady progress is happening!
As you can see in the GIF, mods can now be downloaded while the game in running with no problems. This test case is performed during the game is booting up, since we are doing a lot of CPU heavy stuff then:

Current Work
Currently, work is focused on getting the mods that are being downloaded while the game is running to be recognized by the game. This is quite a bit of work and will be taking up most of my time for the rest of the month, as the engine is not set up to accept PAK files mounted in the middle of the game.

 

[Xcept1]

Alpha 11.1

It has been three weeks since Alpha 11 entered public testing. Because we didn't get around to fixing many of the bugs you reported right away, we decided to release A11 as it was and push more bugfixes in this minor patch. Some of the changes are intended to help with the balance of the game after closely observing gameplay these past weeks.

Changenotes

• Reworked bandage / medic bag code for better responsiveness
• Fixed mods not loading if a clean installation of Squad was performed
• Fixed vehicles desyncing between client and server
• Increased speed of nametags fading in
• Fixed a vehicle seat state that exposed soldiers
• Fixed emplacement scope overlays not disappearing when the emplacement gets destroyed
• Fixed scopes on heavy weapons automatically unzooming and other bugs with these scopes
• Fixed being able to freelook while ADSing on scoped emplaced weapons
• Improved INS player models
• Updated AG 36 texture
• Fixed LOD meshes on the M240 and M249
• Several improvements on weapon animations
• Fixed wheel dirt effects on US truck
• Fixed a rare server crash that happened when a soldier was hit directly by a mortar smoke round
• Fixed squad-members not being able to force others out of vehicle their squad owned by entering the vehicle from the outside
• Fixed driving collisions on BTRs and the British truck
• Fixed desert BTRs having green woodland periscope meshes
• Fixed mines sometimes not triggering for some trucks
• Updated Insurgent deployable razor wire to be double stack
• Fixed collisions on a bush
• Updated localization
• Removed tracers from Militia and INS infantry weapons
• Changed INS HAT to SKS as primary weapon
• Adjusted cost of several deployables. TOWs are now 600 construction points
• TOW rearm cost increased to 500 points
• Changed ticket cost of vehicles:
  • IFVs (FV510, M2) - 25
  • Heavy APCs (30mm RUS APCs) - 20
  • Medium APCs (M1126, 14.5mm RUS APCs) - 15
  • Light APCs, MRAPs, AA vehicles, SPG Techi - 10
  • Trucks, Technicals - 5
  • Motorbikes - 1
• Changed Kamdesh AAS v1 to Invasion v3 and added a new AAS v1 layer
• On Chora Conquest v1 - replaced the INS faction with the Russian faction for balance
• Added Kamdesh INS v2, Narva Invasion v2
• Added Firing Range v2 with US/RU factions
• Fixes on the following map layers:
  • Albasrah Invasion v1, v2, PAAS v1, v2
  • Belaya AAS v1, v2, v3, Invasion v1, v2, PAAS v1
  • Chora AAS v1, v2, PAAS v1, v2, Invasion v1, CQ v1
  • Fool's Road AAS v1, v2, v3, v4, Skirmish
  • Gorodok AAS v1, v2, v3, v4, Invasion V1, v2
  • Kamdesh AAS v1, Inf, INS v1, Invasion v1, v2, v3
  • Kohat AAS v1, v2, Invasion v1
  • Kokan AAS v1, v2, PAAS v1
  • Logar AAS v1, PAAS v1
  • Mestia AAS v1, v2, Invasion v1, v2, PAAS v1
  • Narva AAS v1, v2, v3, Invasion v1, v2, PAAS v1, v2
  • OPFL AAS v1
  • Sumari AAS v1, v2, v3, Inf
  • Yehorivka AAS v3, Invasion v1, v2

 

[Conscript]

Cracking. Alpha 11 was already feeling like a big step on, even this soon after Alpha 10. Glad to see more regular updates...just wish I had more time to play nowadays. Had a few good games this weekend, but I can easily lose hours to it. Especially happy to see refinements to medic bags, they've felt a bit clunky since A10.

 

[Xcept1]

Cracking. Alpha 11 was already feeling like a big step on, even this soon after Alpha 10. Glad to see more regular updates...just wish I had more time to play nowadays. Had a few good games this weekend, but I can easily lose hours to it. Especially happy to see refinements to medic bags, they've felt a bit clunky since A10.

Unfortunately medics are actually a little broken in 11.1. Issue is fixed and we are testing and will deploy another hotfix asap!

 

[Conscript]

You've shouldn't have said anything, I wouldn't be able to play until the weekend anyway

 

[Xcept1]

You've shouldn't have said anything, I wouldn't be able to play until the weekend anyway

issue should be fixed now

 

[Xcept1]

 

[Xcept1]

Not sure if many people play on that discord. It's not really their cup of tea lets say haha!

Just jump on a clan server and join a squad

 

[Xcept1]

Any you recommend mate?

Most of the low ping clan servers in Europe are pretty decent. As long as you tell the SL you're new then the majority of the time they will help you out.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

Not sure if many people play on that discord. It's not really their cup of tea lets say haha!

Just jump on a clan server and join a squad

there is 4 of us. but it's hard for all of us to be on at the same time

 

[Xcept1]

Recap
May 2018
01-Jun-2018


Hey Squaddies,
Welcome to June! With the Alpha 11 patch released, we're back in the trenches hard at work on the next batch of updates for you. We're not the only ones that have been hard at work, though: the Post Scriptum weekend playtests have begun and, by all reports, your participation was invaluable! Check out this footage captured by Khaos during the first weekend:
Back in modern combat news, we've got some more details on game modes, systems, and some new weapons platforms for you. On with the Recap!

Systems
Mode: Randomised AAS



A massive improvement we're making to the AAS mode is the introduction of a randomised system for flag layouts. This will allow our designers to heavily consolidate the multitude of map layers we currently have in-game (which are difficult to manage and QA), while also giving variety in the capture chains depending on the map and designer's intent.


For example, a map could be tuned such that the first flags from the main base are always the same, but as the chain goes on, there is more variety to the second or third flags in the chain. Or it could all consolidate back into one middle flag. This will give our designers a more powerful tool in creating more variety per round for much less stress.

Vehicle Component Damage System
Stage 2 of our improvements to our vehicle damage model is the ability to damage individual components on vehicles, both externally and internally. The final goal of this will be to greatly lessen the ability for weapons to outright destroy vehicles and focus more on disabling key components like movement (disabling the engine), mobility (taking out wheels or tracks), turret traverse functions, or weapons functions.
Critical hit locations can also be implemented. Examples include ammunition compartments, rewarding accurate gunnery. Our intent is also to help balance the currently extremely strong anti-tank weaponry by preventing them from delivering the killing blow every time.

Turret Stabilization
One feature we're working on that features heavily for a lot of modern turrets is a stabilisation system that allows the user to focus on a particular direction for the main gun with a keypress, then the turret will attempt to stabilise the gun by counteracting the movements of the vehicle.
This will help greatly in allowing such vehicles to fire on the move, improving the pace and style of vehicular combat and giving it a different flavour to the World War 2 style of, "stop, shoot, & move." This system is still in its early prototyping stage, but we find it a necessary component in preparation to introduce main battle tanks to the game.

Modding 2.0 - Mods for Linux Servers
Over the last few weeks, a lot of quality of life work has been done on Modding 2.0. First thing: mods are now WAY smaller than they used to be! "Operation Silver," a popular modded Squad map, went from 3.3gb down to 1.03gb when cooked against the Modding 2.0 framework. Another big thing that people have been asking for is also done - Mods for Linux! With Modding 2.0 mods will now just run on Linux servers; you will no longer need have a Windows Server to a run Modded server.

Art and Environment
FV432 APC


Currently in the works, we have an addition to the British vehicle arsenal in the form of the FV432 Armored Personnel Carrier. Having undergone a series of upgrades on top of an older model, it will give the British a vehicle that is more than capable of ferrying more troops around the battlefield, but without the stand-off capabilities of the FV510 IFV.

M1A1 Abrams


We've teased you with this iconic beast of American military might for a while now, but we are entering a phase where the systems we are developing for vehicles will feed into how best we can represent the capabilities of main battle tanks. While we accidentally leek'ed an in-game version to you a little prematurely, let that be a sign that we're getting closer to making the tank dream a reality.


These vehicles come equipped with a 120mm smoothbore cannon firing anti-tank sabot rounds or high-explosive ammunition, making it the most formidable opponent on the battlefield when it comes to raw firepower.

T72B3


Also in the works is the answer to the American Abrams: the Russian T72B3 series of main battle tanks. Packing a larger gun and considerably lighter than the Abrams, this tank is one of the more widely produced and exported tanks since the 1970s.


This particular asset has been in production for a fair while now, and is the first asset constructed from a 3D scan reference. There are still a number of missing components like the machine gun mount, but rest assured once it makes it in-game it will certainly make a huge impact.

9M133 Kornet ATGM


To compliment the BGM-71 TOW missile released in the previous alpha version, we have the Russian equivalent in the 9M133 "Kornet" in production. It is equivalent in power to the TOW in that it will be able to defeat heavy armor, however, it uses a laser beam to guide the missile while in flight.

Belaya Update


Belaya has been undergoing a bit of an upgrade since it was released in Alpha 10 back in February. Some changes include lessening the snow coverage, more foliage adding more concealment when maneuvering between flags, and also roughening the terrain to give more opportunities for cover when crossing ground.

We can't wait to get Randomised AAS into the hands of testers, but we might be a little more excited about that Abrams hitting the field. So how about it, Squaddies, what are you most looking forward to this month? Hit the discussion link below and let us know. Thanks for reading the Recap!