Virtual Warfighter
360 Room scale and Oculus
Just to clarify, right now VWF requires 360 tracking to be playable. Steam are working on adding a flag for this so its visible before you decide to purchase the game. You can get OK 360-tracking with 2 cameras but its not supported by Oculus. We recommend 3 cameras. We will look at adding a button that can snap turn you in a fixed amount of degrees.
But VWF was always designed for 360 tracking and we strongly believe you will not get the full experience from this game without it. We are also working on some updates for the control scheme when using Touch after feedback from the community on Youtube and ours testers. Stay tuned!
Over and out
The Oculus Update
It's finally time to bring out some initial support for Oculus Touch from us at Virtual Warfighter, and we hope you'll like it!
As we are using SteamVR as a platform, both Oculus and Vive players can play with each other. The work has mainly been about making sure the virtual buttons we use work with oculus touch, and rigging certain items to match the oculus controller better
Since we use the joystick to move, we needed some way to differentiate from moving and using the controller buttons. This means that to press the right virtual button, you press the thumbstick, move it to the right, and release.
We hope to do some more work on the oculus integration before long, such as rigging a few items better.
As a heads up, the next release will focus on adding weapons, most likely a sniper rifle.
Update: Some players have reported on our Youtube channel that they have problems with stuttering and flickering. This could relate to a problem in OpenVR/SteamVR coupled with ASW, until Steam addresses this it could be an idea to disable ASW
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/56af3t/detailed_stepbystep_guide_to_enabling_asw_through/
Update #2.5 released!
We have gotten plenty of feedback on movement from you guys, and we decided to do something about it, so the main focus of this mini-update is delivering strafing to you.
The thumbpad now allows you to strafe, and the direction that the strafing is relative to is either the direction of the controller or the estimated heading, depending on your settings.
Plenty of effort was put into making the animations look more natural, and we think this actually paid of, even if animations isn't our forte. Check the video below for a quick demo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIb-k4SGdl8
Update #2
For a long time we we're forced to put our efforts into writing our own networking solution, but finally we have been able to get some content out to you guys.
The focus for this release was introducing game modes, and the first one out in addition to deathmatch is team deathmatch. Paired with the new radio functionality that allows you to communicate with your teammates, some truly tactical scenarios are now possible.
Included in this release is a work-in-progress version of our second map, the subway. It features open platforms connected by long hallways, which showcase our networked doors, as well as an exterior area.
In addition to this many dozens of smaller stability fixes and other improvements are included. Stay tuned for information on what's planned for the next update!
See the video below for some gameplay footage recorded during our testing phase
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNViOO04IRw
Update #2 Teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYPfUi67NCw
Mid sprint progress report
Wanted to take the time to give you a quick update on the progress of this sprint. We have taken our time with implementing TDM, instead of hard coding TDM into the game we have totally rewritten map handling and map cycle handling which means it will be alot easier to jack in and config new game modes in the future. This work is basically done and we have an early version of TDM that we will release to our testers later today.
We are also working on rigging the bravo teams avatar model and completing the next map. We have begun to reduce draw calls on the new map which will dramatically increase performance, we might release a WIP without these performance fixes though. We will also start working on team radio communication which should be pretty simple to implement.
Stay tuned for the next update!
Update #1
Our first major update is here, Update #1. We wished it would have been an update full with content, but as you probably have heard we have had problems with network stability. Most of those problems originated from our Network SDK which is sprinkled with bugs and memory leaks.
So this last month we have been working on our own inhouse network engine, and its a huge difference, as a start its completely reliable unlike the old SDK, this means there will be no more strange side effects like players going invisible or other game breaking bugs. As a bonus our own network code is highly optimized and there is virtually no allocation of memory that can lead to GC spikes (CPU spikes). We have also optimized the invocation of remote calls (RPCs) with several magnitudes. We have also switched to Steams lobby matchmaking which supports NAT punchthrough and makes it easier for people to host games no UPnP support or port forwarding needed.
As a bonus we have also added some new content and features.
- VOIP - Voice activated, room positional, high quality, low latency speech with OPUS codec directly jacked into our custom network SDK
- Decoupled movement - Uncheck "Est.heading" in settings, this is WIP and will be improved upon in future updates
- Dual wielding - Check "Touch move" in settings. You can now dual wield weapons and move at the same time
- Bullet impact effects - WIP only dust effects, bullet holes will be added later
We will now start working on completing the next map, and also implementing map cycles and TDM.
Network rewrite progress report
The last week has been hectic, its not every day you get the task of completely rewrite an entire network SDK on a biweekly time schedule :D
All functions have been implemented so the game is now completely playable on the new code base as of yesterday. However there is a bit of work still to be done before we can move the code over to our testers.
After the initial playtests we have a better chance of giving you a release date, but we work very hard on getting this out to you!
Best regards
Stability problems and moving forward
So we have decided to throw the SDK out, keep its public interface because its actually pretty nice and totally rewrite its internal code.
We are really sorry that we have to delay the update even further, we really, really want to start deliver cool content, but we will never get a stable product on this platform. We hope you understand. The additional content that we have produced (mainly VoIP and a new map) will be released after we have replaced the networking SDK, since new content won't be fun when the game platform isn't stable enough.
Edit: To those of you that have experience with this sort of thing are surely thinking that this will take months, but we hope (and feel) that this shouldn't take too long. Since we are basically keeping our code the same and working against the same programming interface as before, the amount of work is drastically reduced. In addition, Steam p2p networking has already done some of the heavy lifting for us. So, keep your fingers crossed for us and we'll do our best to deliver the game (and stability) you all deserve!
Need connectivity testers
We are sorry that we delay a update yet again, but we feel this is even more important than new features. We will try to get these networking changes out to you as fast as possible.
To speed things up, we need more testers around the globe, so please mail us at info@virtual-warfighter.com if you feel you can help us out with testing.
Best regards, Anders