Hello mercenaries!
It's been three months since Argo released out of Bohemia Incubator, and we've continued to collect your feedback and reactions to the game. Using your response, together with our in-game analytics data, we've made a couple of decisions to help us improve many areas of the game. One of these parts, however, remained in a sub-optimal state: the respawn system.
To go back the beginning, let us explain what was wrong with the original respawn system. Basically, you might have been experiencing some of these unexpected issues while playing Argo: you were suddenly 'naked' instead of wearing your loadout, or you started a match completely outside of the game area, or you even did not respawn at all in the Link game mode. All of these issues were closely related to Argo's existing respawn system. Fortunately, I'm happy to report that this old system is now replaced, and with the introduction of our new respawn system, much of this problematic behavior seems to have disappeared as well. In case you wonder what took us this long to improve the situation, it comes down to a combination of many small parts. Let us explain a bit further.
The original respawn system was made by Borivoj "Druid" Hlava some time ago, and was designed to be used for Arma 3. That meant that the system needed to be highly moddable and was pretty complex overall. While that worked for Arma 3, considering the fact that the game is very much based on community creations and supporting various game modes, it did not fit Argo that well. A custom-tailored system would be much better. So that's what we did. We spent the last few months rewriting the system for Argo with all the functionality necessary for its gameplay. That said, it's important for us to point out that we're also still keeping the old respawn system available for the various community creations (and our own Combat Patrol co-op mode), where it shines without any issues.
In any case, as the re-worked system was mostly done by Druid himself, he was able to use the experience from working on the previous system, and managed to build one with even better performance. That means optimizations across the board, and various use cases are now handled better. Ideally, you shouldn't be able to notice any difference if the system works correctly. As is common with supporting systems such as these, they should be rather invisible unless there is some imprecision. Still, there's a lot going on under the hood, and one of the bigger changes was to limit the dependency on user name space for getting the correct equipment and locations. The old system keeps all the information stored in local cache that may become corrupted by other systems, while the new one uses a specialized inventory function for that.
Of course, there were some funny moments while testing the new system. For example, our Quality Assurance crew suffered many spawn kills at one time because of two persons spawning in the same place. This was because, even though our game engine has a nice function to check for a safe spot to respawn, this was run on the client machine, which sometimes resulted in same results for two different clients. To solve this, we managed to create a new functionality to synchronize the respawn positions across players, which provides everyone with a nice feature as a collateral fix.
Hopefully, our testing of the new respawn system has caught most of the possible imperfections. However, as experience has taught us, only the full scale use will truly show us how the system performs in public. Therefore, we're calling all Argo mercenaries to try it out right now. We look forward to your feedback and we hope you will enjoy many more great matches in Argo.
See you on Malden!
Changelog:
Size of the update: 365.3 MB
General News:
Largest change in this update is that we have completely reworked the respawn system!
Known Issues:
Tooltips on respawn points (info about assigned players) are missing.
Selection (respawn point + loadout) is not remebered by game and is set to first item in the list every opening of respawn screen.
Scenarios:
Added: Reworked respawn system for all scenarios except Combat Patrol.
Changed: Damage model tweaks aimed at improving internal clarity and levelling out some inconsistencies while preserving the overall feeling. Arms and legs hits are slightly less impactful, Cyrus and MAR-10 damage slightly lowered (still preserving their hits to kill ratio).
UI:
Added: Inactive players are now kicked from lobby as well as from the scenarios.
Bugfixes:
Fixed: Clash - Sector flag would not be properly animated if a round ended by elimination of one team.
Fixed: Editor entries for "I went to Cologne and all I got was this DLC pack" caps are now properly localized.
Fixed: With the large rework of respawn system, lot of the bugs related to it should be also fixed. If you encounter some again, please report them to our feedback tracker.
Fixed: Message 'commited suicide' in kill cam when player bleed to death in Combat Patrol.