Beasts of Steel · build 26329461 · published
● Battle regions for procedurally generated maps: Normandy (default), Ardennes and Russia. Each region has its own terrain generation settings, tuned to match its real landscape. Each one is also placed at a real town's latitude, longitude and time zone (Caen, Bastogne and Kharkov), so sunrises, sunsets and the sky look as they would there.
● New optional map generation setting: rivers.
● New German tank: Panther G.
● New Soviet anti-tank rifle: PTRS-41.
● New German buildable heavy anti-tank rifle: 2.8 cm sPzB 41.
● Map codes: share a procedurally generated map with your friends as a single line of text. Copy or paste it right from the map generation menu. The code (about 30 characters) holds every setting needed to generate the exact same map, and uses only letters and digits, so it can be posted anywhere.
● Temperature system. Each region (Normandy, Ardennes, Russia) has its own temperatures throughout the year. Snowfall and snow on the ground now depend on the temperature and on how much snow fell in the previous days. Temperature also changes the air density, which affects projectile ballistics and aircraft performance.
● Morning haze and mist, based on each region's real humidity and dew points.
● Weather conditions are now shown on the loading screen.
● Bird ambience sounds.
● Jump/land sounds: soldiers now grunt when they jump/land.
● Pain sounds: soldiers now grunt when they are hurt without being killed.
● Wind now affects projectiles in flight.
● Reduced the shell shock from hits taken inside a tank.
● Fall damage is now gradual instead of all or nothing: falls over about 3 m hurt more the higher they are, and only falls of about 13 m or more kill outright (a soldier finished off by a lesser fall can be revived).
● Completely revamped the track and tyre marks that land vehicles leave on the ground. They look much better, cost far less performance, and now last up to 30 minutes.
● Revamped the projectile impact decals. They now have a parallax (depth) effect and look better overall.
● Remodelled every small-arms casing to its real dimensions (C.I.P. standards).
● Updated the model of the Soviet PTRD-41.
● The strategic map's color palette is much more readable.
● When the hedgerows option is on, hedgerows now also line roads that run between fields.
● AI engineers now pick better-concealed positions to build static weapons (such as forest edges).
● Overcast weather now has randomized cloud cover and density, the same for every player.
● Reworked the spawn camera motion. It feels much more polished now.
● The HUD now shows more clearly whether your vehicle is locked or unlocked.
● The end-of-game scoreboard now clearly marks human players who left the session.
● Wind now applies to parachutes.
● Headlights now fade in and out instead of popping on and off.
● Procedural decals now look identical on all peers (same seed).
● Optimized the hell out of terrain painting (craters, foxholes).
● Optimized vegetation removal (craters, etc.).
● Small UI performance optimizations.
● General code cleanup and fewer memory allocations.
● MipMap Streaming is now ON by default.
● Textures now load much faster after spawning or a camera change, and no longer start out very blurry. Loading them also causes far fewer stutters.
● Texture streaming now sets its video memory budget from your graphics card's memory instead of a fixed amount.
● The 'Texture streaming' setting now applies immediately, also from the main menu.
● Farmland fields on procedurally generated maps now each have their own look: some lighter or darker, some with rougher or smoother ground. The countryside now looks like a patchwork of fields instead of one repeated texture, especially from the air.
● Slightly lower memory use: vegetation textures no longer keep a second copy in RAM.
● Distant vehicles, weapons and buildings no longer shimmer.
● Many infantry classes had no substitutes for some of their secondary weapons (such as grenades), and one unavailable weapon locked the whole loadout. For example, in 1942 the Soviet engineer class only had access to the Mosin-Nagant, because the RPG-43 grenade was not available yet. Unavailable secondary weapons are now replaced by earlier ones (the F1 grenade, for example) instead of locking the loadout.
● The American 57 mm M1 AT gun could not be built.
● Sniper scopes did not render rocks.
● Sniper scopes did not render decals properly.
● AI snipers became more and more accurate over time (their random aim offset shrank with every new target they picked).
● AI infantry did not account for gravity when shooting.
● AI tank crew members could fire weapons that require peeking out, without actually peeking out.
● Stamina kept draining when you opened a UI menu while sprinting, even though you were no longer moving.
● Ju 87 B-2 sirens stopped working for good once the plane's engine had been turned off.
● StuG III E had the wrong ammunition.
● PTRD-41 was available from January 1939 instead of October 1941.
● Markers sometimes stayed stuck at a fixed place on the screen (mostly when manning static weapons).
● Armour Preview mode showed the wrong colliders on tracked vehicles.
● The crater under a crashed aircraft was often misplaced.
● Cloud drift was not synced between players. Everyone now sees the same clouds in the same place at the same time.
● Cloud shadows on the ground did not match the clouds casting them.
● Clouds did not get a new random pattern each day.
● Clouds were not shown during rain or snow.
● Clouds were not affected by atmospheric haze.
● Visual artefacts when flying inside clouds.
● Several dust and smoke effects ignored cloud shadows, so they looked too bright under heavy cloud cover.
● Land vehicles' engine-destroyed effect still used the old VFX instead of the new one.
● Headlights appeared pink instead of yellow in X-Ray mode.
● Black lines in tank dust.
● Shadow glitch while the camera travels to your spawn location.
● Visual glitch on felled trees seen from below.
● Pak 36 had the wrong distant (impostor) model.
● Small arms switched to their low-detail models too close, and not at the same distance for every weapon.
● Jet engine sound clipped each time its loop restarted.
● Various localization issues.
● Various lag spikes.
● Possible CPU hitch the first time any sound was played. Sounds are now loaded off the main thread.
● Log spam from AI pilots landing outside the playable area.
● MipMaps broken on vegetation items.
● Tank tracks were blurry up close with texture streaming on.
● Rocks, and the distant billboards of trees, bushes and grass, were very blurry with texture streaming on.
● Some textures had no mipmaps and shimmered at a distance (Sd.Kfz. 231 8-Rad, several wheels, aircraft gunsights).
● Campaign: the airbase action icons were blurry with texture streaming on.
● The metal ring around gun sights ignored cloud shadows, so it looked too bright and warm under heavy cloud cover.
● The metal ring around gun sights would not have its metallic texture loaded when playing with the setting 'texture streaming' ON.
● Several minor problems with gunsights effect/housing (VRAM wasted and other stuff).s
● Fixed AI aiming with its rockets with aircrafts. Often it would enter a strafe phase but not release its payload.
● HVAR rocket (GP Mk 6 Mod 0) had the wrong amount of explosive charge (4.52kg instead of 3.45kg).
● AI aicrafts on mixed loadout (bombs+rockets) would fail to perform bombing runs every time.