Hello everyone!
Welcome to the thirtieth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of January 2023.
O:HD is now officially released into early access, and can be acquired by everybody for completely free! A huge thank you to all of our past and continued supporters and community members, team members, and so on for helping to make this a reality and get the game out there for everybody to download and start playing—we couldn’t have done it without you all!
At the time of this devblog, we are now roughly two weeks out from the early access release date and, while there are certainly plenty of rough edges, issues that need to be addressed, and so on, we are quite pleased with the results so far and looking forward to the future of the project. On any given day, we appear to be averaging around anywhere from 1,000-1,500 concurrent players during peak hours, 55397 there are over 100 community ran servers currently being hosted, there are over 50 mods already on the Steam Workshop, and the modding section in the Discord has been extremely busy with community members learning how to use the SDK, teaching, working on projects, and more. Really awesome to see all this stuff, and we greatly appreciate all of the community members that have been coming together to make all of this happen!
Moving on to address some of the more pressing issues that the community is facing, and some of our plans and goals to attempt to provide solutions:
Cheating Situation and Our Plans
Yes, we are very aware that the cheating situation is quite bad for release, and the team is working very hard right now to shore up some of the vulnerabilities and exploits that we have been seeing cheaters taking advantage of that slipped through the cracks prior to release, as well as working on developing some expanded tools and server side options that server owners can take advantage of to help filter out cheaters and take some of the heavy moderation load off of their hands that comes with running large, open/public servers. The fact of the matter is, as a free game that heavily relies on community ran servers to provide spaces for people to play the game, this is a large issue that requires a lot of moving parts to fully address, and is one that is going ZMI80 to take some time and further work to achieve (not only on our side of things, but also on the server admin side of the community as well—something we will only fully achieve by working together).
Some of the things that you can expect to be coming as soon as they are ready (our top priority right now):
- Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) tools for server owners that wish to use them—this will be OPT-IN, meaning not all servers will be forced/required to run this. I also want to make a general reminder to everyone that anti cheat is NOT a magic bullet that will suddenly stop cheaters. Tools like EAC typically do not automatically ban cheaters, they simply flag them for server admins to see if there is actually cheating going on, however, server admins will still need to actively moderate their servers regardless. After spending a lot of time researching anti cheats, speaking with people in the industry who are familiar with how they work, and even speaking to cheat makers that have been coming forward to share information with us I gave a more full/comprehensive breakdown of this on a Steam discussions thread if anyone wants to hear my personal thoughts on the matters of anti cheat, and learn more about how these things work and the challenges that games face trying to resolve these issues.
- More advanced admin tools and settings—server owners will soon be able to restrict the types of accounts that are joining their server based on a variety of factors. This includes, but is not limited to, join restrictions based on whether or not the account in question has any VAC or game bans (most of the current bans we have been seeing shared in the admin chats usually have multiple of each), Steam account age (i.e. if 7Z3D0 the account is 1 day old, don’t allow to join), and so on (we are still exploring a few other similar options that we can include as well, such as restrictions based on hours in-game). These settings should allow server owners to set up a fairly granular filtration system that they can increase/decrease based on the issues they may be having, and find a nice balance between keeping out bad actors and granting entrance to legitimate players.
- Community made advanced RCON tools—thanks to the generous donation of time and resources from the AFO gaming community, there is already a lot of work in progress for a Battlemetrics-style RCON tool for server owners to help monitor and keep their communities clean. Their service will establish an RCON connection with the game servers, run regular automated tasks, and allow owners to assign fine tuned command access to their mod staff teams. In addition they are including Remote Ban Lists, which can be shared with other servers or even automatically added to a community ban list. Tools like this will be what help lighten the load and make the day-to-day moderation for server owners/admins much easier.
- Shoring up vulnerabilities and exploits that we simply did not catch until they were actually abused.
What server owners and players can be doing right now in the meantime while they wait for these tools/features:
The most prominent place that we are seeing cheaters is in the big, wide open public servers that are not being regularly moderated/monitored. If you as a server owner are unable to monitor your server 24/7 (which is definitely a lot of work, and is obviously not realistic for everyone who just wants to provide a fun place for people to play the game), we recommend stopping/starting your server when you know that you will have somebody around that players can contact if they run into a cheater, start thinking about regular members in your community that you can also bring onto your admin team, or perhaps even consider hosting more private/whitelisted groups of players that you know will not cause trouble on your server.
For the regular players, finding communities of other players that fit/match your playstyle and what you are looking for are going to be a big part of O:HD, so we highly recommend that players attempt to group up and work on this together—if you spend all of your time attempting to play on those big, wide open public servers that are not being regularly moderated/monitored, you have a much higher likelihood of running into this, and you are probably best to avoid those servers and try to focus on the ones where you know you can get in touch with an admin when you need them. There are 5GJP7 already a handful of units/clans being started and doing outreach in our Discord that are looking for people to play with and fight against other clans with, so those might be worth checking out too (see our #unit_listings channel in the Discord)! In other words, you do not HAVE to subject yourself to playing with cheaters right now, it just takes a bit more legwork to identify and find the groups of people who are having fun with the game in other ways, and that are actively doing good work moderating and keeping their play spaces clean.
Addressing Some Rumors
I would also like to take this opportunity to briefly address a couple of the rumors that we have been seeing floating around, namely related to how modding works in O:HD, and our intention of focusing so heavily on this aspect of the project. A lot of our messaging and wording seems to have been twisted and misconstrued, so I wish to provide some clarity.
“Modders are supposed to fix the game”: We have never said this. We are still working on the game and the framework, which takes time. We are not relying on modders to fix/make anything, they are simply provided the tools to create the experience that they want and if they wish to make certain features or content before we do, or alter something that might not be working the greatest on our side of things, they have the full ability to do so however it is not required. That said, we are not asking or relying on them to do this for us—nobody is forced to be here working on any mods, they are doing this on their own free will.
“Modders are supposed to make the game for us”: Again, never said this. This is the thirtieth devblog that I have personally written, and there is an IMMENSE amount of content that we have released here and in other places outlining our plans and the things that we are working on behind the scenes (not to mention all of the content and systems we have already made so far, which might not be the best/greatest ever made, but I do not feel like this can just be ignored). We also have plenty of upcoming content that we are working on (see below), so really not sure where this idea that we are relying on modders to “make the game for us” came from. Offering/providing modding tools is an extremely important aspect of this project for us, but once again as mentioned above, we are not relying on modders to make/fix anything (at least no more than they would be in other games with similar modding options like Arma or Garry’s Mod). They are simply provided the tools to create the experience that they want, and if they wish to make certain features or content before we do, they can, but we are not asking them to do anything in particular—sure, we might offer them an opportunity to work with us on some of these things and making mods is a great way to be onboarded to the team in a more official capacity, but that is a far jump from RELYING on them to do things for us. Again, nobody is forced to be here working on mods, they are doing this on their own free will.
For a game to have solid modding support, it is vital that we bake this into the cake as early as possible so that it never feels like the modding is just tacked on, or half done—as with many things that we do, this is a long term plan and the work that we are doing to support this right now is laying the foundation for making the modding support as solid as possible for the future and as the game matures and grows/develops. Allowing people to come in and make mods right now is a great way for us to understand sooner rather than later some of the things that we must be prioritizing to help support them and their own personal goals for mod creation. If you are still confused about this, and you genuinely care/have a real concern about these people, perhaps spend some time down in the modding section and ask some of the people working with the mod tools themselves to see what they have to say about it. There wouldn’t be 0J0DD multiple channels with people teaching and learning day in and day out if they felt that we were exploiting them in these ways.
Now that we have all of that out of the way, let’s move on to the work that was completed last month in January:
Maps
Carentan
Carentan is the next official map for the Operation: Overlord expansion. It is a 2x2km map that will heavily feature urban/city-based combat. We started on a small showcase area for art testing and will expand on the town from there.
Omaha Beach
Omaha Beach received more updates to the props around the trenches, and more cliff rocks along the bluffs H7DZ8. More areas beyond the beach also started to receive more detail passes as the level design team continues to move past the blockout phases.
Saint Quentin
Saint Quentin received updates to the ground clutter, as well as distant artillery shell impacts that were added for additional atmosphere. The rest of 639KJ the trenches running through the whole map are now outlined as well.
Risala, Argonne, Monte Cassino, and Lam Dong
Risala, Argonne, Monte Cassino, and Lam Dong all received a few updates to the foliage and lighting layers.
Vehicles
Driver and Passenger Animations
The animator has been working on setting up the animations for our vehicle prototype, including animations DZ36Y for both the driver and passenger. The driver animations have been designed with advanced handling features, and showcase a range of poses for holding the wheel.
For those wondering, yes it will be possible to shoot from vehicles within the vehicle framework—from a base game perspective, we will probably just keep this to vehicles that are open top or that have some form of shooting position that makes sense to be able to shoot from, however, we will of course keep this open ended and extensible for modders to take it and apply it to some other format or setup.
We will soon also begin working on static and mounted weapons as well, which should be what allows us to begin NDKE4 getting the first iteration of basic ground vehicles out.
Animations
Crawling Animations
Crawling animations for first person were made (finally)!
Sprint Impulse and Reloading Tweaks
The animator has also been fine-tuning the sprint animations and implementing a “smooth sprint impulse system” to enhance the natural start motion of a sprint. He has also made improvements to the reload animations for a more seamless blend with sprinting.
Leaning Tweaks
He also touched up the leaning system by slightly shifting the camera while leaning to prevent the gun 6A842 from obstructing the player's view, which was a common issue with the previous point aim system.
Before:
After:
Spring Arm Tweaks
Last but not least he also made some tweaks to the spring arm, which relates to how the arms and weapon move when moving the camera around.
Before:
After:
Upcoming and WIP Features
Bots/AI
The AI programmer has been spending the past few months working on a complete refactor to the WR63H current AI system, cleaning up a lot of the code, and working on some new systems that will be more helpful in allowing us to achieve some of the behaviors that we would like to implement with the AI.
The following video showcases a new behavior that the AI will soon have—the ability to seek cover and/or concealment by utilizing their line of sight in order to essentially “determine” where to take cover. This behavior will be the basis for which we will move on to teaching them how to perform more “advanced” tactics, such as bounding overwatch (where squads will be able to establish set piece and move piece positions to push or peel an enemy that they are engaged with).
Here is a video of one of the tests showing the basic functionality of their ability to move in and out of cover by breaking line of sight to an enemy threat:
Our goal with making a system like this is to create something that is extensible and flexible across a wide range of maps by not focusing too much on what specific objects in the world they think to take cover behind, but rather they are able to use anything in the world that allows them to break that line of sight, thus making the system more dynamic and flexible (and hopefully more intuitive in the long run).
Ragdoll Optimizations
We also did some optimization work to the current ragdolls, which should help improve performance for some. Ragdolls have the potential to be quite taxing when there are a lot of them, as each one becomes a physics object as the ragdoll is triggered, which is data that your computer and the server need to process. To further optimize these we reduced the amount of physics capsules the ragdoll need to function, reduced the amount of constraints (Joints) the ragdolls need to function, adjusted the twist and swing variables to give the ragdoll a more “lifelike” look when a character is killed, and finally we adjusted the Dampening to add more stiffness so the physics 0R8EA capsules go into a resting state faster to reduce physics overhead.
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Thank you for checking out this month’s devblog!
Make sure to join the O:HD Discord, and/or follow our Steam announcements to track updates, and if you would like to support us early on in development and grab a Multiplayer Playtest key don’t forget you can do so on our Patreon! See you all next time!
-Goomes, Lead Community Manager
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