Hello everyone!
We originally aimed for one update every month, but this update quickly grew out of control and we were not able to wrap things up within that time frame. Therefore, we just did more work.
This update is now the results of two months worth of daily work.
The focus with this update was reworking core systems to make the game more efficient and more stable.
This includes a TON of optimizations across the entire codebase to improve performances during long battles/engagements.
That is obviously not the only thing we've worked on and developed. As an example, one thing we've realized is that with gigantic procedural campaign maps, and with our target of having one unique 3D map for each hex, we were in need of a procedural map generator of some kind. Which has been developed and is part of this update. This is a first draft, do not expect it to have POIs or anything more than forest and plains, but it's a proof of solid concept! It works in multiplayer as well!
Currently, generating a 5 x 5 km map takes around 2 seconds on my MacBook Pro. Yes, you read that right! I told you the focus was optimization and performances!
Right before you guys read the changelog, I'd like to share a few screenshots of the highlights of this new update:
Campaign map new visual style.
Procedural map example, 5x5 km.
Over 80 unique, accurately recreated gun sights.
Procedural skybox with perfectly accurate stars positioning based on Yale Bright Star Catalogue, accurate celestial bodies trajectories, seasons, lighting, moon cycles, solar eclipses, and lunar eclipses, day and night cycles. The whole thing!
Procedural projectile impacts on tank armour. Round energy, type, and impact direction drive the shape and style of the decal.
Alright! That's it for the teasing! Changelog now! :D
ADDED:
● Procedural battle map generation, available for campaign and custom battles with multiplayer synchronization. This is still a rough, sparsely populated proof of concept; further work is planned to make campaign battlefields more varied and interesting.
● New procedural sky and volumetric clouds. The sky uses calendar dates, geographic coordinates, and UTC offsets to reproduce the paths of the sun, moon, and stars, with a 1:1 star map based on Yale's Bright Star Catalog v5 and support for solar eclipses. Yes, I got a little carried away building a solar system for a WW2 game!
● New campaigns now generate fully randomized, balanced maps. You can choose the map width and height.
● Campaign maps now include fields, roads, visible borders, and more NATO icons for armies.
● New German vehicles: StuG III G (early, mid, and late variants), StuH 42 G, and Panzer IV H.
● New German aircraft: Bf 109 F-4 and Bf 109 G-2.
● Added over 70 historically recreated gunsights, including proper aiming sights for anti-tank gun emplacements, the Telescope, Sighting, No. 22C and No. 24B 2x telescopic sight, and the Z.L.F. 2 hull machine-gun sight for German tanks.
● Added an undo-move action for campaign armies and an option to show or hide the campaign UI.
● Land vehicle crew members now have dedicated viewpoints and sights for observation and combat. For combined commander/gunner roles, selecting or deselecting the weapon switches between the gunsight and observation view. First-person tank sights also have a glass refraction effect.
● Kinetic projectiles now lose structural integrity according to the kinetic energy lost during impacts and penetration. A damaged round can become unable to penetrate armour even if it still has enough energy to do so in principle.
● Custom battles now let you choose the exact date and time. Tanks also have headlights for night battles.
● Rocks are now destructible.
● Players joining a battle in progress now receive the destruction state of trees, bushes, and rocks. The mid-game synchronization protocol has also been consolidated.
● Added four lifetime player statistics: distance walked, distance driven, distance flown, and number of jumps.
● Added an animation to the action wheel.
● Added a copilot to both Mosquito variants.
CHANGED:
● Rebuilt campaign maps around an optimized procedural mesh, with chunk-based rendering and culling, replacing the old Hex of Steel assets. Tiles now support combinations of features instead of being limited to one tile type.
● Campaign auto-resolve now uses more detailed calculations for more realistic results, including penalties for armoured vehicles fighting in wooded areas.
● Campaign calculations now use a shared hex size in kilometres for movement ranges and other distance-based rules. Time is tracked in hours, with each turn currently fixed at 24 hours.
● Reworked campaign saves: files are 10 times smaller, save and load faster, and use the .cmp extension. The save list now shows the most recently modified files first.
● Steam Cloud saving now uses Auto-Cloud and is always enabled, replacing the previous optional system.
● Reworked ballistics with realistic non-linear projectile drag, more realistic dispersion, and more accurate ricochets that behave more consistently across multiplayer clients.
● Vehicle camouflage must now be selected before spawning and cannot be changed while driving. AI detection takes camouflage into account: stationary vehicles are harder to spot when their camouflage matches the map's biome.
● AI tanks now build up evidence of an attacker's position as they receive fire. A few small-arms hits provide little information, but sustained fire makes you easier to locate. This reaction does not cancel the tank's current attack.
● An error affecting one bot now skips that bot's processing instead of stopping the entire AI update, allowing the battle to continue.
● Turrets and guns now distinguish hydraulic/electric aiming drives from manual drives, with matching sounds that also change as the mechanism loses health. Powered drives cannot operate with the engine off unless a manual backup or dedicated battery is available, as on the Sherman. Manual backup aiming runs at 50% of normal speed when the engine is off.
● The aiming indicator now shows whether the gun is aligned with your aim point instead of predicting where the round will land. You must account for the projectile's trajectory yourself.
● First-person tank gunsight zoom is faster and more responsive, with greater magnification for guns with proper optics than for machine guns. Zooming while operating a static weapon now displays the binoculars overlay.
● Switching vehicle seats in first person only fades to black when entering an empty seat. Switching to a seat occupied by one of your aliases no longer triggers the fade.
● Anti-tank rifles can no longer be aimed down sights while standing or without the bipod. The Johnson M1941 LMG is no longer treated as a machine gun for these restrictions and can now be aimed while standing.
● Increased grenade throwing range to 30-33 metres, based on WW2 manuals.
● Quad flak guns now fire their barrels sequentially instead of all at once.
● British and American Bofors loadouts now carry 5 APC magazines (down from 10) and 15 HE magazines (up from 10).
● The 37 mm M1939 61-K now holds 10 loaded rounds instead of 6, using two five-round clips.
● Vehicles now destroy a bush only when they cover at least 50% of its area, rather than destroying it at the slightest touch.
● The Encyclopedia simulator now uses shared randomization logic and a shared seed for random calculations.
● Reduced the amount of battle data sent during synchronization. Updated the multiplayer API for fixes and performance improvements, and corrected additional Steamworks integration issues.
● Replaced firing sounds for all weapons and added new tank engine and track sounds. Sounds heard inside tanks in first person now have a subtle echo.
● Rebuilt projectile impact decals with procedural shapes instead of flat quads. On tanks, scratch shape and size depend on projectile calibre and impact angle, with a brief hot-to-cold colour transition. The new system renders decals in a single draw call without individual objects or memory allocations.
● Reworked small-arms muzzle flashes with improved procedural effects, and redesigned flak explosion effects.
● Reworked land vehicle exhaust particles to respond to engine RPM, and added engine exhaust heat distortion.
● Redesigned mortar smoke trails for much better performance when many rounds are in flight. Mortar rounds no longer show a plume in Realistic mode.
● Redesigned and optimized aircraft wingtip vortices. Damaged or destroyed control surfaces no longer emit smoke, except for wings.
● Revamped the T-34-76 M1943 and Panzer IV G models.
● Track and wheel animations now depend on the vehicle's size on screen rather than a fixed distance. They remain visible when viewing distant vehicles through binoculars.
● Reworked the tank compass, smoothed tank orbit-camera movement, and improved aircraft camera tracking for a smoother, more responsive feel.
● Improved online chat readability and added timestamps to lobby messages.
● Completed the first of two projectile-processing rewrites, simplifying the system with performance improvements expected. Also rebuilt most of the object pool for simpler code and better performance, and optimized explosion processing.
● Optimized bushes by removing individual objects from their generation and physics workflow. Land vehicle antennas now use mathematical simulation instead of the physics engine.
● Rewrote sniper-scope and aircraft-gunsight shaders for better performance and modularity, and improved translucent UI performance.
● Optimized physical machine-gun ammunition belts and visual-effect culling. Distant ammunition clips now use 12-triangle models, and ejected casings no longer cast shadows, reducing rendering cost with little visible difference.
● Airplanes speed modifier/penalty has been removed and they now fly at 1:1 real life speed.
FIXED:
● Fixed player data and statistics resetting on every game launch.
● Fixed multiplayer security flaws involving malicious data and payloads that could execute on clients.
● Campaign armies now reference units by stable UUIDs, preventing units from turning into different types after a game-data update.
● Restored tank destroyer and self-propelled anti-aircraft gun categories in the campaign store, and fixed completed campaigns displaying defeat after a victory.
● Fixed projectile dispersion getting out of sync between players, which could cause damage without a visible projectile hit.
● Fixed a selected-magazine mix-up that could cause shots to be missing on other clients, and AI vehicles firing extra projectiles per barrel on those clients.
● Fixed multiplayer RPC actions running twice locally on the host.
● Fixed engine shutdown synchronization in multiplayer: turning an engine off could previously turn it back on remotely.
● Fixed multiplayer grenade synchronization and throwback issues.
● Fixed simultaneous attempts to pick up the same ground object. Ammo crates now use proper transactions when distributing ammunition to nearby players.
● Improved safeguards against vehicles overlapping when two players use the same spawn point. Also fixed players exiting a vehicle into another nearby vehicle.
● Fixed objective captured/lost audio and UI notifications playing for players who had not selected a team, including players joining mid-battle.
● Fixed AI spawning more units than the available quantities allowed.
● Fixed AI tanks failing to acquire visible targets and continuing to move after losing a track if movement input was already active.
● Fixed AI tank performance issues and pathfinding-related lag spikes.
● Potential fix for dead infantry remaining upright.
● Projectiles fired from moving vehicles now inherit the vehicle's velocity, correcting their launch speed, particularly on fast-moving aircraft. Rounds passing through a vehicle hull now also account for penetration when exiting it.
● Fixed flak projectile behaviour and the reliability of firing, target leading, and fuzes.
● Fixed aircraft gun convergence occurring too close to the aircraft.
● Fixed autocannons above 20 mm creating terrain craters with HE rounds.
● Fixed uneven static-weapon aiming and conflicts between horizontal and vertical aiming axes that caused jerky diagonal movement on vehicles and guns.
● The Encyclopedia simulator now compensates for gravity so shots hit the point you click, regardless of firing distance.
● Corrected turret traverse and gun elevation speeds and movement limits on numerous tanks.
● Fixed the Tiger I E commander and Tiger II H gunner being exposed to damage while inside their vehicles.
● Fixed crew members remaining hidden or disabled when peeking out: the Hetzer, SU-122, and Matilda II loaders, and the IS-2 gunner.
● Closed the T-60's turret-to-hull gap that let small-arms fire reach the crew, restored the extra armour thickness on the T-34-76 M1942 driver's hatch, and corrected other vehicle armour layouts.
● Restored missing first-person views for the Churchill Mk. II driver and radio operator, and missing gunner sights on the Churchill Mk. II, Mk. III, and Mk. VII, Cromwell Mk. V, and Cromwell Mk. V CS.
● Corrected commander/gunner positions and restored missing first-person gunner sights on the Valentine Mk. III and Mk. IX. The Mk. IX commander now has the loader role instead of the gunner role.
● Corrected the BA-10M commander's first-person sight and stopped the Sd. Kfz. 222 gunner's sight from moving with barrel recoil.
● Corrected turret crew layouts in the T-26 M1933 and T-26 M1939.
● Corrected hull machine-gun ball-mount traverse and elevation limits, and coaxial machine-gun magazine capacities, across all Panzer IV variants.
● Reduced excessive gun recoil on the Panzer IV E, Panzer IV G, Panzer III E, and Panzer III J, and corrected recoil interpolation on the M36 Jackson.
● Corrected the projectile and visual-effect spawn positions for the StuG IV's external machine gun.
● Corrected the Bf 109 F-2's main weapon from the 20 mm MG 151/20 to the 15 mm MG 151/15.
● Corrected colliders on all aircraft to accurately match their models.
● Corrected insufficient lift on the B-17F Flying Fortress and incorrect Jumo 211J engine specifications.
● Corrected propeller rotation: the Hs 129 B2/3's left propeller now rotates inward, and both P-38J Lightning propellers rotate outward.
● Corrected the Ju-88 A-4's frontal machine-gun and radio-operator positions. Added missing radio operators to the B-17F, B-25B, B-25J, and B-26C.
● Corrected missing or incorrect ballistic data for the Pak 38's APHEBC round, rifle-grenade specifications, and the PIAT's explosive filler amount.
● Corrected tank track animation speeds that did not match the wheels, and Panther tracks scrolling in the wrong direction.
● Corrected the colour space of ambient-occlusion maps across all models, fixing overly dark shadows and incorrect reflections. Also corrected the AO map on parts of the Hurricane Mk. IId.
● Corrected vehicle levels of detail and grenade LOD crossfading and culling distances.
● Improved door collider accuracy.
● Corrected the T-34-85 engine's non-uniform scale.
● Corrected the helmets worn by Panther D crew members.
● Corrected vehicle names: Gloster Meteor is now Gloster Meteor F3, and Sd. Kfz. 233 is now Sd. Kfz. 234/3.
● Corrected the after-shot sound on 75 mm tank guns and incorrectly muffled exterior sounds for buttoned-down Flakpanzer IV turret crews.
● Fixed misplaced off-screen aircraft spawn indicators.
● Fixed chat colours failing to update after changing teams mid-match.
● Corrected the font used in leaderboard entries.
● Smoke draw order (being drawn on top of other VFXs).
● Poor audio emitter recycling rule leading to audio voice starvation for nearby gunshots when lots of low volume explosions happened in the background.
REMOVED:
● Replaced several third-party assets with in-house systems tailored to the game.
● OpenGL rendering support on Linux. Vulkan is now the only supported rendering mode.