Dear Tankers!
Welcome to our 85th Development Status.
new year, new development status and new goals. We set some plans already with the team for this year but to make it possible we have to make some changes in the project itself.
For example switching to the new multiplayer system Fusion 2 that will enable better stability and more possibilities or making some overhauls in UI like in the main menu.
UI overhaul
Let me tell you what we have been doing during the last days and nights.
Watch on YouTube
Info: Button sounds click/hover are just placeholders, we are testing them so they are about to be changed.
Why "new" UI. We would not call it new but rather improved. We have to make some adjustments here and there to be able to add features like matchmaking, workshop support or in future better organised battle maps with the whole map on a screen like in other tactical games that could include adding waypoints, orders on a map essentially more tactical tools - but that is melody for next months. Let's go back to the main menu…
On a matchmaking screen you will be able to find desired sessions playing specifying campaigns or skirmishes. Also you will be able to find sessions playing arcade or simulation modes enabled.
Rest of the menus are also here, like Session Browser, options to host sessions or play campaign / skirmishes alone as a “single player”.
Another UI that needs to be improved is Battle Summary. Currently its a bit of a mess. Imagine having a mission with like 20 objectives and having to see every objective summary progress one after another during the mission summary. We have to change and actually we have a plan for it.
To summarize the new Battle Summary - it will be more simplified. It will show of course all important information, score, statistics but on a single page/single animation. More user friendly - at least we hope so.
Also having a new UI in the game gives some more freedom to create things in different ways. That should do the trick for next QoL improvements in the game.
Optimization progress
We are rewriting our networking system to be more optimized as we’ve upgraded from Fusion 1 to Fusion 2. This brings us new options to implement, such as host migration, match making etc. but we’re still very busy with making all of the game work as it was + work better/load faster etc.
Another part we wanted to overhaul was vehicle physics as this was the biggest CPU drain during battles. We tried two new approaches, both failed, they did not bring any optimization. In the end, we’ve switched and tracked down other optimization problems and we have good results here, with stress test scene set up for 30 tanks, 200 infantry and 30 static guns (so totally 440 infantry as 150 tank crewman (30 tigers, each 5 crewman) and 90 static guns crewman (each 3).
With very simple optimizations we managed to decrease the animator cpu requirement from around 6-8 ms to manage idle soldiers to about 2 ms. There’s still room for more but these are very recent changes.
The same goes for vehicle physics, we managed to find different and this time working optimization methods that help the situation - but do not yet totally solve it. We still have a lot to do here.
Thank you and have a good weekend!
DeGenerals