Hello hello hello generals! May was a really cool month with a ton of progress. TLG hit 133.333 wishlists on Steam and the alpha finally starting expanding beyond my family and friends to some of the most active Discord members! Here is some of the stuff I worked on during May:
A long time ago I made a very efficient road based pathfinding to let units navigate the islands taking advantage of the roads network. About 6 months ago I also implemented a detailed navigation mesh based pathfinding algorithm based on Polyanya. Now I finally combined both, letting units navigate complex obstacles nearby and then continue their journey using the road system for longer distances.
Besides hand drawing strategic orders which acts like a very detailed queue of orders for companies, now you can also queue specific orders for units and they will execute those orders sequentially. I display the extra queued orders using dashed lines.
The PC controlled enemies can now send some really huge convoys rushing towards your cities.
Now destroying a vehicle damages their wheel suspension and will cause them to tilt to a side as it usually happens in real life.
Now unguided artillery rockets will create barrages saturating a whole area, and their impacts and explosions will affect infantry and vehicles nearby, making them way more effective than before.
The game was looking way too dark at night and made it really hard to spot any enemies. Now I improved lighting and increased moon brightness to get much better visibility while still looking like night time. I also fixed some issues with lamp posts and made lights show up in the entire island while also improving performance in the process. Now lamp posts also turn off when broken by impacts.
Now the ghost previews you see while placing a new building will stay during construction or while waiting for a deliverable object to be delivered, so you know where your new buildings will be. It will also properly prevent you from building objects where some other object is going to be soon.
Added FSR4 frame generation support. Disabled by default, toggleable in the graphics settings tab. This doubles the frame rate but also has some CPU cost so if the game logic was running at 60fps, now it may run at 50fps, but with the generated frames in between it looks as smooth as 100fps. I thought frame generation was a terrible thing, but I am actually pretty surprised by the quality of the generated frames. Now it will be up to each player to enable/disable this for their preferences and hardware limitations.
Spawning infantry squads including special weapons (AT/AA) in training centers and have them join existing companies and travel to get closer to them.
Displaying the number of units inside vehicles.
When giving strategic orders now you can choose the size and composition of the company that will follow those orders at platoon level (for example 5 armored platoons, 3 mechanized, 1 recon, 1AA)
Added the factory panel to show what they are producing (unit types or resource types), their progress, their production rate (taking into account productivity factors like combat in the city, support for each player, population, etc) and how much resources are being stored in that factory. With these changes, it will also allow me to add squad customization when producing infantry later.
Produced soldiers are now spawned directly as a squad and those squads join platoons that need them as a whole. The squads also request a vehicle to join them, for transportation and to become a mechanized infantry squad.
Added victory/defeat screens, with their respective songs! No stats displayed for now, but left some layout to do so.
Optimized the Wwise audio system with voice limits and voice virtualization based on volume, priorities and distances (in addition to the audio culling I already do myself inside the game)
Added sounds for chainlink fences and other metallic objects being toppled over or fractured.
Improved physics object sleeping for better performance. Some cells in the physics grid weren't going to sleep as expected because of a single object shaking or bouncing slightly, registering as movement. Now cells require more movement to stay awake, and I double checked that a lot more objects are going to sleep now. I still have a few more optimizations to do with this but will probably do it when I replace the buildings with fully destructible ones, as that will add a TON of extra physics objects.
Allowed attacks on any building by holding CTRL and then right clicking on the building. Normal right clicks will make units enter the building instead.
Improved fog so days can also be super clear and without fog, and it looks better in the distance.
Improved city sizes, distances and densities in different map sizes.
Added proximity fuses so missiles that are barely missing an aircraft can still detonate and damage it with the airburst.
Nearby explosions can now fully destroy vehicles if the blast is strong and close enough.
Made unguided rocket launchers also aim to the predicted positions of units when they are moving instead of current one, although the rocket itself obviously doesn't follow or steer towards the units.
Improve anti-air missiles maneuverability to chase jets better.
Added guided missile target locking time.
Started working on an early version of a damage shader and linked them to the fires, so things actually look damaged and destroyed after some time of being on fire.
Improved damage decals sizes to avoid weird overflows affecting other objects. This will eventually go away completely and use damage shaders for each object.
Improved armor and penetration calculations so units with light armor can be destroyed by heavy machine guns as expected.
Made build panel more compact.
Made artillery split their time between bombing strategic areas and bombing any spotted enemy unit. Later you will be able to choose the balance between those, and companies will request those arty strikes on enemy positions instead of attacking any of them randomly.
Improved camera exposure using a small range, and made some indirect illumination and tonemapping improvements to improve contrast.
Settings screen now has 4 tabs: general, graphics, audio and controls. The new “Audio” tab has a ton of sliders to control the volume of different things in the game. The “Controls” tab only shows the keys but won't allow control remapping like it did before until I migrate the old system into the new UI Toolkit I am using.
Planes physics were not using velocity squared for drag. Adjusted all drag forces and engine forces. Improved throttle handling with keyboard. It’s a bit wobbly right now but I will improve it over time.
Added platoon selection panels to the strategic orders for defend area, defend line and arty emplacement, so you can configure which platoons should be part of it.
Now you can actually draw the areas for the arty emplacements.
Showing relationships between orders and companies.
Showing relationships between an echelon and its members.
Reduced shadow shaking/flickering because of sun movement. Improved shadow quality when close to the ground.
Improved AI jets maneuvers.
Made crosshairs always point vertically for the camera during unit rolls.
Started translating the game to 42 languages with the help of a ton of volunteers from the Discord and already reached 75% translated, with 50% already reviewed by other translators and approved.