Reimplemented custom battles into the 0.2 alpha in this one. Also updated the game engine version to Unity 2022.3.52f1, which was necessary to receive some fixes.
Engine update main features:
Decal CPU side rendering is much faster.
Fixes issues preventing DLSS from working in scope view.
Contact shadows are significantly improved and less noisy. Particularly noticeable in internal view.
Volumetric clouds look much better and react to the sun angle better, which was the reason time of day controls were removed from custom battles.
Fixes
Fixed the custom battles lockout issue, which prevented you from doing custom battles.
DLSS is no longer disabled in scope view.
Fixed slight view tilt when exiting scope view.
Fixed scope rotation starting tilted when the cannon is rotated around its forward axis.
Fixed dirt being height-based on track wheels.
Fixed new parts not having grime correctly synced with the rest of the vehicle.
Changes
Custom battles are now possible again. Team livery and weathering configuration hasn't been reimplemented.
The custom battle escape menu now has a "Reset" button in place of the greyed out "Return to editor". Allows you to reset the custom battle at any time.
Scenario select screen reimplemented.
Scope view overlay no longer increases size with the current zoom level.
Shell penetration marks now glow red-hot, cooling down over time.
Shell penetration mark holes are now darker.
Overlay see-through and select "Plate structure" filter separated into "Exterior" and "Interior". Allows plate structures to be made fully see-through.
Darkened armour overlay colour.
Made armour overlay modules more transparent.
Bringing more scenarios back next. With them, an option to remove the powertrain and tracks entirely and build stationary anti-tank (AT) guns. Scenarios can then be brought back with in-game built AT guns designed around the scenario.
The remaining tasks before 0.2 is feature complete and at feature parity with 0.127, in order of highest priority:
Better crew posture manipulation controls
Improved freeform selection tools
Saving and loading of individual parts
Radios, bot orders and formations
Turret and part decoupling
The scenarios will be returning over time when their respective tech is updated. After that, 0.2 enters beta. The beta will only receive fixes and iterations on existing features.
This update is for the 0.2 alpha branch. You'll need to opt-in to play it:
Armour Overlay Penetration Simulations
Clicking in the armour overlay will now simulate a shell impact from your current view and visualize it. This lets you see exactly how the damage model works and iterate on your armour layouts in response. In addition, this lets you provide much more useful feedback, speeding up development of the new damage model.
Shell settings can be configured in the new armour overlay config, updating the previously-ran simulation with any changes.
Additions
Added an overlay config panel, accessible by clicking the arrow to the right of the overlay buttons.
Added armour overlay penetration simulations.
Added a selection filter in the exterior overlay config. Allows you to toggle which types of parts are selectable.
Added a visibility filter in the interior overlay config. Allows you to control which types of parts are seethrough (making them unselectable).
Fixes
Fixed incorrect energy conservation in the 0.2 damage model. Results in less remaining penetration after a shell has goes though a plate.
Fixed rare case of shells/spalling teleporting through plates (quantum-tunnelling unrelated).
Improved spalling direction calculation. Fixing spall directions grouping together when shooting the vehicle from behind.
Fixed visual effects appearing in unexpected places when moving the camera.
In Dunes, tracks now throw off sand instead of mud.
Fixed 0.2.21.4 instability when exiting the editor after duplicating parts or modifying roadwheel/roller numbers.
Fixed 0.2.21.4 deleting parts created through the duplicate and drag action when exiting the editor.
Changes
Vehicle editor GUI tweaks.
Halved dirt intensity on downward facing surfaces.
Increased flameout effect intensity.
Wheel mount array interleaved/grouped/uniform spacing is now clearer and doesn't hide options from you.
The remaining tasks before 0.2 is feature complete and at feature parity with 0.127, in order of highest priority:
Custom battles
Improved freeform selection tools
Saving and loading of individual parts
Radios, bot orders and formations
Turret and part decoupling
The scenarios will be returning over time when their respective tech is updated. After that, 0.2 enters beta. The beta will only receive fixes and iterations on existing features.
- Hamish
0.2.21 - Fixes & Quality of Life (Geometrics Alpha)
Hi all,
Some fixes and quality of life features for the 0.2 alpha branch.
Additions
Paint job tint editing now supports HSV and hex.
Pressing delete will now delete all selected objects (including mirrors, if symmetry is enabled).
Fixes
Addon structures are now mirrored correctly. You can no longer edit the mirrored copy. This shouldn't break any existing structures.
Fixed powertrain parts being able to be selected through other objects if a powertrain part is currently selected.
Fixed powertrain parts being selected if they're under the cursor when selecting the tracks.
Fixed turrets not aiming correctly when rotated.
Fixed northern map border being too far out.
Fixed Dunes track trails not applying in certain areas.
Fixed paintjob editing GUI not appearing if switching to the paint tab with a part selected.
Destroying a part now recalculates part obstructions.
Fixed duplicating ammo racks not copying the rack size correctly.
Fixed rotation snap toggle hotkey not working.
Turret rings now provide armour.
Fixed plate structures not creating a plane to allow selection after deleting all edges.
Fixed plate structures being unselectable when 2 dimensional.
Fixed out of editor view offset being too low when zoomed out.
Changes
Breech loading space length reduced from 100% of total shell length to 75%.
Two-piece and crane loading techniques now reduce the breech loading area size. Using the largest of the projectile and propellant length, instead of the length of the entire shell.
Exhaust visual effects are now more transparent when idling.
Dirt is now more present on downward facing surfaces, cracks, and crevices. Regardless of height from the ground.
Disabled roadwheel wheel height changing using the positioning tool. This didn't work well due to the entire vehicle shifting with the changes.
Raised the hard limits on wheel array forward/height offsets to (+-)10m, with the slider limit being raised to (+-)1m. They were at (+-)0.1m before.
Known issues
Part repositioning isn't correct on the mirrored copy when editing addon structures.
File editing
Added a crew member speed multiplier in design save files.
Continuing on with quality of life next patch.
- Hamish
0.2.20 - Dunes Scenario Return (Geometrics Alpha)
Hi all,
This patch reintroduces Dunes as the first functional scenario.
AI Changes
Bots now gather information more similarly to humans, resulting in fairer gameplay and more human reactions. Vehicles no longer use set conditions which determine whether they're alive or not, which the bots would base their behaviour around. Instead, bots estimate whether a vehicle is knocked out based on visual information like movement or flames.
If you survive a penetration and then stay perfectly still, bots will think you've been knocked out and continue on with their lives.
If a bot isn't expecting any enemies in a direction, they'll need to see a larger portion of your vehicle to recognize you as an enemy (more than 50%). Upon being recognized as an enemy, bots will be more alert towards vehicles in your direction and need to see much less of your vehicle to target you. This lets ambushes work, as you'll be able to get the first shot off before the enemies know you're there.
Scenario Derandomization
Randomization in scenarios was added to improve their replayability, with the spawn positions and enemies being different each time you play. As it turns out, this works against the goal of the game. That is, iterating on your design to improve its performance. It became very difficult to notice the effects of your changes when the challenges it faced kept changing.
In 0.2, scenarios will be a constant experience, with the only variation being your design. From now on, enemies will be designed specifically for each scenario and placed in the exact same spot every time you exit the editor. All of your allies will spawn in the same position each time you hit play.
Changes
Reworked Dunes scenario reimplemented. It's now more of an ambush, attacking a superior force with a strategic advantage.
Doubled the amount of spalling from shell penetrations.
Significantly increased the damage that shells and spalling do to internals.
Engine and transmission hit points increased by 500%.
Damaged engines will now output less torque.
Allies in scenarios no longer have randomized spawn positions.
The armour overlay is no longer colour coded (The colour coding was very incorrect in 0.2).
Visual effects are now affected by wind.
Flameouts now build up their intensity, instead of starting instantly.
Cannon fires now have a slight random pitch variation on each fire, to reduce repetitiveness.
Engine fires now inherit the velocity of the vehicle emitting them.
Exhaust effects no longer play in the vehicle editor.
Post penetration-spalling cones are now 5x wider.
Fixes
Fixed vehicle renaming not applying correctly if only one character was edited/changed.
Bots no longer shoot vehicles which are obviously knocked out.
Significantly increased the allowed complexity of post-penetration simulations. Stops spaced armour being invulnerable.
Fixed post-penetration spalling not applying any damage when the simulation hit a certain complexity. Made higher calibre guns do basically no damage unless they had a simple result (e.g. overpenetration).
Fixed a cause of poor performance in the editor after converting pre-0.2 vehicles.
Fixed vehicle save preview icons being raised with the vehicle's ground clearance, cutting off the bottom of the vehicle.
Fixed AI vehicles firing after their gunner has been knocked out.
Dunes grime is now sandy, rather than dirty.
Engine fires no longer cause ammo rack detonations.
Flameouts now go out.
All effects now correctly disappear when returning to the editor.
Fixed invisible exhaust in eras before Latewar.
Vehicle cycling is now limited to vehicles on your team.
Track trails are now cleared when returning to the editor.
Track trails are now disabled correctly by the graphics settings.
Fixed bots shooting before they were even remotely aimed.
Fixed sprocket wheels clipping their teeth through mark IV track belt segments.
Fixed cannon mirroring not working.
Fixed 0.2 design conversion not converting part mirroring correctly. Prevented you from picking up mirrored objects or incorrect parts being mirrored. For designs previously migrated to 0.2, this wont fix incorrect mirror conversions but it will fix the game stability issues caused by them.
Fixed machinegun port placement not automatically rotating to match surface direction during placement.
Optimizations
Lowered detail of some vehicle parts when outside of the editor.
The new damage model now utilizes additional CPU cores in hit detection.
Disabled texture streaming. Unnecessarily exchanged CPU power for VRAM.
Significantly optimized CPU side vehicle rendering.
Fixed crew members not having their detail lowered at distances.
Halved the VRAM required by track trails.
Removed physics quality settings. The suspension physics changes in 0.2.15 make the higher settings deliver little quality improvement while using much more CPU power.
Known issues
Vehicles still don't collide with each other.
Bots don't check for ally vehicles in their firing paths.
Pausing work on scenarios here, with focus shifting back to the tank editor to fix some major issues and add some important quality of life features to make 0.2 more enjoyable to build in.
Once that's done, the other scenarios should follow a bit quicker than this one due to fewer systems needing an update to work in 0.2.
This patch allows pre-0.2 designs to be loaded in 0.2. A lot has changed between 0.127 and 0.2 so the conversion isn't perfect and will require a minute or two of manual updates.
How it loads After a minute of manual tweaks
If one of your blueprints isn't loading, saving it in 0.126 or 0.127 (experimental branch) before loading it in 0.2 might fix it.
Fixes
Fixed tracks not syncing rolling resistance with the current time-period.
Fixed vehicles not loading if they use a custom decal which is no longer in the custom decal folder.
Fixed audio volume not matching current mixing settings on non-editor vehicles.
Wooden trim vanes now show ingame again.
Disabled hull shape edit part repositioning for vehicle powertrains (this caused the tracks to move as well).
Changes
Reworked track movement sound effects over the weekend. Now blending between multiple samples at different speeds, instead of changing the tempo of a single sample. It's also much louder at low speeds.
Normalized audio volume of effects. Generally lowered across the board so you may need to raise your effect volume in the audio settings.
The Dunes map is now temporarily playable as the sandbox map.
Backwards compatibility issues
These will need manual updating:
Some parts will have wildly off rotations.
Cannon placement couldn't be feasibly preserved. All cannons on 0.127 vehicles will be loaded in next to the vehicle, allowing you to place them again.
Plates use up to x6 the number of vertices in 0.2. There's a limit of 32,767 vertices per structure, so if your pre-0.2 design has a compartment with more than 5,461 vertices, it might not be able to load in 0.2. This is only really an issue if you've used external tools to load detailed models into the game.
Lost data
Spare tracks
Spare wheels
Part flip state
Generated fenders
Rivets
Cannon placement
Paint job tint
Laying drive setups
Turret-addon structure conversion
Since some people often used turrets in place of addon structures, turrets will be converted to 0.2 if either of the following conditions are met:
The basket volume is set to 0 and the torque is handcranked or set to minimum motor torque.
The min and max constraints are both set to 0, preventing all turret rotation.
Should this generate a false positive, you can place the addon structure on a new turret base and it should function the same.
Once any issues with this patch are fixed, work starts on bringing scenarios back to 0.2.
- Hamish
0.2.18d - Hotfix (Geometrics Alpha)
Fixes for crashes introduced last patch (0.2.18c) when loading into the sandbox and opening the vehicle load screen
Stability improvements
0.2.18 - Era Reimplementation (Geometrics Alpha)
Hi all,
This patch reimplements eras to the 0.2 alpha branch.
Changes
Reimplemented eras.
WWI now has a fixed suspension arm length of 50mm.
Parts can now have an invention date, limiting them to certain time periods.
HVSS can no longer be used in WWI.
Scenarios (when they're back) now let you switch the editor to any of the time periods before the scenario's time period.
Added 2 decimal places to suspension damping %.
Modding
Editor limits and many default blueprint values are now loaded from external files under "Sprocket_Data\Streaming Assets\Technology\...". These files, loaded in on launch, will override properties of other files of the same type with an earlier date. This is done for all technologies up until the current date in the editor. Era boundaries are defined in files under "Sprocket_Data\Streaming Assets\Eras\...". These show up in the editor if "playable" is set to true. The mass boundaries are used for determining which enemies to spawn in scenarios.
Combined, you can now modify existing eras with different limits or create entirely new ones.
Starting work on 0.2 backwards compatibility now.
Backwards compatibility expectations
0.127 designs wont be perfectly convertible to 0.2.
Here are the perfect conversion goals:
Hull/turret shapes and locations
Paint and decals
Attached parts
Cannons
Engine setups
Transmission setups
Track setups
These will be lost/require manual updating:
Crew positioning
Crew role assignment
Fuel tanks
Powertrain positioning
Rivets
Scenarios following that.
- Hamish
0.2.17 - Clutch Braking (Geometrics Alpha)
Hi all,
This patch reimplements the clutch braking powertrain on the 0.2 alpha branch.
This system uses a transverse transmission block, similar to the one used on the Soviet T-34.
And yes, there's plans to let you use the other (longitudinal) transmission block with clutch braking in the future.
Changes
Improved visual connection of transmission output flanges.
Up next is the return of eras. This is the final feature needed before 0.2 backwards compatibility can be worked on.
- Hamish
0.2.16 - Rivet Generation (Geometrics Alpha)
Hi all,
Reimplemented rivets in this one, with a new system that's integrated with the new freeform.
This update is for the 0.2 alpha branch, you'll need to opt-in to test it:
Features
Rivets can now be automatically generated. Hitting the generate button will create rivets along all welded edges. If you have faces selected in freeform, rivets will only be generated for those faces.
The generated rivets can then be repositioned and deleted as desired.
Rivet lines can be drawn manually.
You've got full control over rivet diameter, height and spacing, affecting all currently placed rivets.
Rivets will adjust themselves with changes to the underlying structure.
Added three new rivet types along with the standard rivet:
Optimizations
Halved the work required for armour plate tessellation. May have a noticeable CPU performance increase when modifying complex plate structures.
The rendering of these rivets is much less CPU intensive than the old ones.
The rivet tools lack support for mirroring and each structure is limited to one rivet type/size at the moment, which isn't ideal and will be worked on. This implementation is enough for the coming 0.127 backwards compatibility, so I'm leaving it here for now.
Bringing the clutch braking steering system over to 0.2 next week.
- Hamish
0.2.15 - HVSS (Geometrics Alpha)
Hi all,
Reimplemented horizontal volute spring suspension (HVSS) in this one.
Fixes
Fixed wheel mass not being applied in the physics simulation. (Introduced in 0.2.x)
A broken angle slider for the roadwheels is no longer shown.
Fixed overly large antenna hitbox.
Fixed laying drives losing all torque when not manned by a crewman. This caused the gun to lower between shots if the gun layer was also assigned to loading.
Fixed model selection (track belts, wheels, muzzle brakes, etc) not supporting undo/redo.
Fixed the default vehicle's tracks not being selectable until the tracks have their first change made.
Changes
Increased suspension physics simulation accuracy for all physics quality settings. The CPU impact shouldn't be noticeable, but let me know if you notice anything.
Suspension damping now has more of an effect on the vehicle.
HVSS is now always perfectly centred on the track belt.
HVSS now spreads wheels across either side of its axle. Instead of having one inside one, then putting the rest on the outside. So [][]-[][] instead of []-[][][].
Disabling "Length Sync" on track wheel arrays now shows a "Count" instead of a "Length" slider. Letting you set the exact number of suspension units you want.
Increased the exposure on the loading screen.
Up next is the new rivetting system. The goal is to integrate rivet placement with freeform, allowing placement to be automated. After the initial automation, you'll be able to go in and adjust the individual rivets yourself.
Once that's done, reimplementation of all missing parts from the 0.2 alpha will be complete. Then work on backwards compatibility can begin to allow 0.127 designs to be loaded.
