Operation: Harsh Doorstop
O:HD Playtest Session (Saturday, February 11th @ 4:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
O:HD Playtest Session (Friday, February 10th @ 5:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
We are holding a playtest for O:HD on Friday, February 10th @ 5:00PM EST over in the O:HD Community Discord.
We look forward to seeing you there!
O:HD Playtest Session (Saturday, February 4th @ 4:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
We are holding a playtest for O:HD on Saturday, February 4th @ 4:00PM EST over in the O:HD Community Discord.
We look forward to seeing you there!
O:HD Playtest Session (Friday, February 3rd @ 5:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
We are holding a playtest for O:HD on Friday, February 3rd @ 5:00PM EST over in the O:HD Community Discord.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Development Blog #29 [December 2022]
Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-ninth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of December 2022.
As a general reminder, we are now closing in on our official early access launch on February 15th! This will be the day that the base game experience will be available to everyone for free, and all of the supporter keys/perks will be redeemable since everyone will finally be able to acquire the base game (reminder that 0NCKC the Multiplayer Playtest build will be going away at that time, as will the demo). In addition, this will also be the day that Steam Workshop will become available, and everyone will be able to upload and download all of their mods through this one central source, which should drastically increase the ease of access for mods. Last but not least, this will also be the day that the game’s server files will be available to all, so anybody will be able to host a server anywhere in the world, running whatever mods/custom experiences that they/their community want. Our main focus and priority leading up to early access at this point is to just continue polishing and enhancing all of the currently existing content and features to the best of our ability, as well as throwing in a few bonuses that it’s looking like we will be able to include for early access (more on that later in the devblog).
Hopefully this should go without saying (although we know it won’t fully be communicated just because we are writing it here), but just to reiterate: please also remember that early access is just the start, and we still have a very long road ahead of us to bring O:HD as a project to the place that we hope for it to go. The game will still be in a very early alpha state, will be missing critical features and content, will have bugs/issues, not always have the best optimization, and so on, but releasing it and getting it into the public's hand at this stage is a critical step for us in this process, and one that we feel will bring great value in the long run (which is our ultimate goal).
Thank you to everyone that has been involved and contributed to the project thus far! While we still have a lot of work to do, we couldn’t have gotten this far without all of the members on the team, our Patreon supporters (and now Discord backers too), modders from all sorts of backgrounds and varying levels of experience tearing up the SDK and helping each other learn, and all of the other members in the community that have been watching the project, coming and having debates and discussions about things from game mechanics to the greater gaming industry at large, and so on KAI4G. We hope that everyone is pleased with what we have been able to achieve so far, and we hope that we will be able to deliver on everything else that we have set out to do and still have coming on the horizon.
On to December’s recap:
Maps
Saint Quentin
The level design team has begun working on the first official map for the Operation: Michael expansion: Saint Quentin. Saint Quentin is a 2x2km map located in France that will feature a lot of trench fighting, and mostly be a no man’s land where it will be tough to travel up top and out of the trenches. Ironically, this map does not actually feature the town of Saint Quentin itself (this area was part of the larger overall Battle of Saint Quentin), but rather an area just north of it in a large, open field that features many hills and uneven terrain.
The early stages 5LIZA of this map are currently available to Patreon supporters via the Itch.io page, so feel free to download it and check it out if you’d like.
Omaha Beach
The town locations on Omaha Beach have begun to be detailed as the team shifts away from blockout stages:
A reminder that Omaha Beach is currently 0NCY7 available to Patreon supporters via the Itch.io page, so just like Saint Quentin if you would like to check all of these updates out you can download it there.
Argonne
Landscape, foliage, and lighting updates were made to Argonne:
Monte Cassino
Monte Cassino received some temporary blockers to portions of the building that people would tend to get lost in in attempts to try and make the map a bit easier to navigate LRQ80 in this section. In addition, cluster meshes of grass and pebbles were made and used in order to further optimize the map.
Lam Dong
Landscape, foliage KPK28, and lighting updates were also made to Lam Dong:
Khafji
Cluster meshes of grass and pebbles were also placed into Khafji for further optimization and refinement.
Animations
Polishing the Leaning Animations
The animator spent some time refining and improving some of the existing leaning animations and poses. We 0NGMF will eventually be completely replacing these, so this is more of an attempt to improve upon what we already have in place—they aren’t the best in the world, but they should at least be some measure of improvement over the old ones.
Upcoming and WIP Features
Bullet and Magazine Vertex Shaders
Bullets inside magazines/belts are now animated using a “material vertex shader”. Each bullet now has an assigned vertex color value ranging from 0-1. As you deplete your ammunition, the 6VA8T percentage of bullets in your magazine is sent to the shader, and then all bullets with vertex color values lower than the ammo percentage in your magazine will be hidden by collapsing the vertices in the vertex shader—this results in a more realistic depiction of bullets in magazines, belts, and so on, as they are being depleted upon the weapon being fired and cycling rounds. Using this technique, we can also hide objects without using opacity. Last but not least, springs inside the magazine are also animated using the vertex shader by rotating the vertices around an axis.
Nametags
That’s right, we are finally going to be reintroducing nametags back into the game just in time for early access. The following images are part of the prototype system, and we are still doing some additional work to make it so that there is less clutter and overabundance of text on screen at once, but this should give everyone a pretty good picture of what it will more or less look like for its first iteration back into the game:
As you can see, we are attempting to create a simple and clean nametag UI that gives you the minimum critical information that you would really need to see and identify friendlies (up to a certain distance of course), and be able to tell whether or not they are in your squad or just another member of the team. At various distances, not only will nametags scale in size to portray their relative distance to you, but they will also fade out into simple dots/markers further reducing onscreen UI elements when they aren’t really necessary (we are still feeling these distances out to see what feels best). This L3QTE means that, at distance, you will be able to identify friendlies, however you will need to either use your map or communicate with other players to figure out what specific squads and/or players you are looking at.
Map Markers
On top of nametags, we are also doing some much needed polish and improvements to our map markers so that they will provide important and relevant information to players when they look at the map:
Players will now be able to see their fellow squad members, as well as the squad leaders for each of the other squads.
Bots/AI
Work on the AI covered in the past few devblogs has continued, and the AI programmer was heavily focused on his overhaul and refactoring process throughout the month. His first phase of changes is more or less complete, and just requires some more testing before it can be implemented. With this update, now when bots enter a combat state, they will alternate between a “safe” spot (whether that is concealment or hardcover), and an open location where they can attack from (thus paving the way for bounding overwatch where a portion of the bots in a squad will be able to effectively seek cover or concealment, while the remaining portion is able to acquire a sight line to provide covering firing during their movement). Once the enemy is either dispatched or moves away the bots will leave their combat state and continue working towards their objective as normal. We are not sure when this update will be coming to the game, but this should start to be the point at which we are able to start getting the bots to do more interesting and nuanced behaviors that will spice up their interactions some more compared to what they currently are capable of doing (which as many of you know is simply capture flags and shoot at enemies when they see them).
Critical Bug Fixes
Some of the more long standing and critical bugs that we have had for a while should now be fixed. This includes, but is not limited to, having to reload kits when you pick them up, needing to “reload” your bandages and grenades, scope bugs, certain situations in which you would not be able to use any items in your kit, and more.
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Thank you to everyone that checked out the 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
Website
Discord
Youtube
Discord
Website
O:HD Playtest Session (Saturday, January 21st @ 4:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
We are holding a playtest for O:HD on Saturday, January 21st @ 4:00PM EST over in the O:HD Community Discord.
We look forward to seeing you there!
O:HD Playtest Session (Friday, January 13th @ 5:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
We are holding a playtest for O:HD on Friday, January 13th @ 5:00PM EST over in the O:HD Community Discord.
We look forward to seeing you there!
O:HD Playtest Session (Friday, December 30th @ 5:00PM EST)
Hi everyone,
We are holding a playtest for O:HD on Friday, December 30th @ 5:00PM EST over in the O:HD Community Discord.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Development Blog #28 [November 2022]
Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-eighth devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of November 2022.
With the latest update to all of the builds of the game we have now begun letting in people who have signed up for the Multiplayer Playtest sessions! It has been awesome the past week getting into the servers and playing with everyone, and we are very grateful for all of the feedback and bug reports that we have been receiving—all of this information is invaluable to us, and will greatly help improve the overall experience. We plan on continuing to regularly admit people who have signed up leading all the way up to our early access release in February 2023. If you would like to skip that wait, remember that the Patreon and now Discord support are both options—please consider supporting the team and the project! Every little bit goes a long way, and makes a huge difference towards the speed at which we can make O:HD the experience that we know it can be for everyone in the community!
Our plan at this point (moving forward to early access) is to eliminate some of the peskier and long standing bugs that have been in the game for a while, such as being unable to utilize certain parts of your kit (bandage “reloads”, 0V08M, etc.), animation bugs (like the SKS double reload), scope issues (actually basically already done on Dev Build), rare instances where you pick up a kit and are unable to use anything (all items red/inaccessible), and so on. We are also doing some optimization and polish passes, and QoL changes as well to try and get the current experience as solid as possible, and give us a good basis to pivot off of and continue on with our next batch of features that we will be focusing on (namely some of the other items that we have discussed in prior devblogs that we wanted to get done around release).
Moving on to the November recap:
Maps
Omaha Beach
Work continued on adding in buildings and walls to the Omaha Beach map:
Risala
The embassy 5LMPL building in Risala has now been replaced with a shipping container yard. This is temporary as the embassy building will eventually wind up being remade—the current version that we have is simply too unoptimized for the map, so we decided to replace it to help improve performance:
In addition, some 5M7CJ of the landscape for the map was improved.
Lam Dong
More work was done to experiment with and improve upon the lighting on Lam Dong:
Upcoming and WIP Features
Steam Workshop Support
Steam Workshop is now 0V26Z complete and ready for day 1 of early access! Once we release, everyone will be able to upload and download mods from the Workshop tab like you are used to seeing with other Workshop supported games on Steam. Until then, the O:HD website will still be the main location to get mods (unfortunately we are unable to implement Workshop to things like the playtest or demo).
Audio Overhaul
This task has been in progress for quite some time, and many of you have likely already heard many (if not all) of the new gun/explosion sounds that we have implemented. That said, I wanted to wait until we were up to about this point before really talking about the work that was done here in the T9AXT devblog since audio is a bit harder to portray here in text format, and there is a lot going on underneath the hood, so I felt it is better to tackle this when a more significant amount of work had been completed that we can actually show alongside these explanations for better context.
In order to better showcase this, we consulted with our sound designer to get some more in-depth information on how his work is set up and what you are actually hearing when a gun is firing, rockets are exploding, etc.
What was O:HD using before for gun sounds?
The problem with the previous sounds is that the stereo channels were too wide for the shooting of the gun, which made the gunshots sound unnatural and not coming from the gun itself
There were IK0ZW also problems with inconsistencies between different weapon sounds and lack of sound spatialization.
Some footage of the old audio:
https://youtu.be/ME2DGXCwjpk
How was this improved?
The most notable improvement is on the overall soundscape—gunfights sound more dynamic because the loudness and distortion of the gunshots come from the gun itself, while the echo and tails are playing on both stereo channels, which makes the gunshot sound more natural and it gives the illusion that the sound is actually traveling through the environment.
What is the difference between “core sounds” and “reflections”?
As mentioned before, most sounds are made with two layers—the core and the reflection. The core is a mono sound effect that has the transient, kick, distortion and mechanics of the firearm. The core itself is spatialized, which means that the panning is always directed towards the weapon itself. Meanwhile, the reflection is a stereo sound effect that has the tail of the gunshot representing a specific environment, which is not spatialized on “close” and “close-distant” distances 0V4DP and makes the sound on both sides of your headphones (as in the gunshot is reverberating and echoing through the environment around you while you are receiving it on both ears). In the case of Medium and Far distances, the sound has a "wider" stereo separation compared to the core sound file, which also makes it sound more realistic. These two layers are mixed together and crossfaded by distance and then go through the output.
The potential with this new "system", is that we can more easily add environmental variations, since all you need to change on each gunshot to represent a different environment is the reflection sound effects, so that way you can have tons of different reflection sets for forest environments, urban environments, open fields, mountains, indoor rooms, etc.
How does the explosion audio work?
For the explosions you have the previous "core" layer, and "reflection" layer, but you also have an extra layer called "LFE" which stands for Low Frequency Effect. This layer is also not spatialized, which means that it will sound on both sides of your headphones and it consists of very low frequency kicks and bassy impacts. The point of this layer is to have a very low frequency 98333 rumble playing on both stereo channels when an explosion happens, which makes it sound more deep and have a stronger impact, which also makes sense from a realism standpoint, as you can physically feel the explosions both in your body and in the ground, so low frequencies can get very close to this effect.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/FvVp7c2rogc
Currently, we only have the field reflections implemented, so all of the audio you are hearing right now is as if everyone was fighting in a big open field. We also have some preliminary work started on some of the other reflection layers, such as indoors, urban, etc., however, in order to properly implement them this will require the lead programmer to make an actual coded function that will switch the reflection layer based upon where the sound is being generated, and then from there the level designers can place these switchers in the appropriate areas when designing maps.
For example, shooting your rifle in a big open field will get you the sounds you hear now, and then when you walk into a building and continue firing the reflection layer would then switch upon entering the building and your gunshots would now sound like they are being shot indoors where the sound wave itself will come to a rather abrupt end vs. traveling far and wide. In this sense, in the future, you will not only be able to know where a gunfight is happening relative to you, but also what sort of environment they are in (i.e. “I hear a bunch of gunfire to my north and it sounds like that is indoors—there must be a squad holding down a building over there). Without the switcher, we can only implement one layer at a time, so eventually this will be the next natural evolution of our sound design as a whole.
Last but not least, the sound designer has also recently implemented a lot of new bullet impact noises for all sorts of materials (woods, metals, 8AGRH, concrete, etc.), impacts on players getting shot, etc.
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That’s all for November, thank you everyone for checking out the 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
Website
Discord
Youtube
Discord
Website
Development Blog #27 [October 2022]
Hello Drakelings!
Welcome to the twenty-seventh devblog for Operation: Harsh Doorstop. In this update, we will be reviewing the work that the team completed in the month of October 2022.
Maps
Omaha Beach
Omaha Beach is now ZWFKZ starting to move past its blockout phase, and will start to receive more final improvements to the terrain, buildings, world props/environment assets, and so on:
Current versions of Omaha Beach can already be played by Patreon supporters of the relevant tier, and is obtained directly from our Itch.io page, so if you want to check it out DFC28 be sure to grab it there.
Argonne
Argonne also received a few updates to the hardcover (more of it), foliage, and improved lighting layers:
Upcoming and WIP Features
Steam Workshop Support
The lead programmer HMRZE has now begun working on Steam Workshop support/integration, which will be the primary mod delivery method for O:HD once we go to early access. Workshop will likely not be available prior to this point (at least not for the Demo and Playtest builds), however, our intention is to hit early access with full Steam Workshop support day 1, and we are already well on the way to having this ready to go—at the time of this devblog we are roughly 70% complete with ZWGDQ this task.
Third Person Animation Improvements
Work continued on overhauling our third person animations. We redid the aiming offsets for third person resulting in a more natural pose, especially while prone:
We redid most of the layering of the locomotion third person and first person arm weapon poses. This has RREJY resulted in a far more fluid result, especially while sprinting, moving, or in the prone stance:
We also created new aiming transitions, as well as firing animations for third person to add some extra subtle details:
We have set up prone alignment nodes to match the angle of the surface the character is laying on, as well as leg IK surface displacement to match the character's leg pose to irregular terrain or slopes:
Last but not least, we added some basic/first pass first person animations for the vaulting system:
Additional Server Management Tools
We have added the ability to issue server commands in-game with basic admin management. In addition, we have manually defined a "one-time password", and supporters-only server whitelist capabilities for communities that wish to provide a more exclusive/closed experience.
Bots/AI
As mentioned last month, the AI programmer is now currently working on breaking contact/peeling behavior, the ability to understand and take advantage of hard cover, and the ability to conduct bounding overwatch. In order to accomplish this, he is doing a large overhaul of the existing systems and strategies Y2XXL, and refactoring a lot of the existing code to allow for a more dynamic and robust system to be in place for these more complex behaviors (as well as for future planned AI behaviors).
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That’s it for this month, thank you to everyone who read the 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
Website
Discord
Youtube
Discord
Website