This time we've got a bunch of Breakthrough changes, from the core gameplay to the visual information layer, to let you know better what's happening. It's mainly focused on changes to Breakthrough, but we also have some other changes, too, including some performance updates.
This one has two issues we're still working on, but there's no point in delaying it longer - we need more information on those two problems, so let us know if you see any pattern in when the server starts to lag and when packs disappear.
PTE 0.8.1 Patch Notes
[KNOWN ISSUES]
Invisible packs are back, we're aware of them and are working on this bug,
From time to time the server is starting to lag for a while, we need more info on this one,
After spawning on a Mobile Spawn Point you can get a low HP effect,
[GAMEPLAY]
Breakthrough: after a successful retreat, Defenders will gain points (10
seconds left),
Breakthrough: after a successful retreat, Attackers will gain the seconds left as additional time for next objective,
Breakthrough: attackers can no longer get to the next objective before the retreat is over,
Breakthrough: Radio Station will now blink and emit beeping when planted,
Breakthrough: added new statistics collection: bombs planted, defused, radio stations destroyed, longest attack, longest defence, fastest plant, successful retreats, retreating enemies killed (not available from the menu yet, but are being counted),
Breakthrough: moved point marker position up to no longer block visibility of the stations,
Breakthrough: reversed Berlin point order,
Disabled an option to skip Warmup on PTE for proper BRE testing,
Disabled not being allowed to join when the match is ending,
Napalm strike visual overhaul,
Allowed joining to server when match is ending,
Adding Leopard2 Gepard anti-air vehicle on all maps,
[IMPROVEMENTS]
Collimator glass is less dark now,
HUD: new in-game chat window,
HUD: new strike bar,
HUD: hiding armor status icons if armor is not present,
HUD: added current soldier weight class,
HUD: changed inventory status widget,
HUD: added laser/flashlight status icon,
HUD: improved kill feed,
HUD: added headshot indicator to kill feed,
HUD: destroyed vehicles will now show up on the kill feed,
HUD: changed icon resolution to sharpen them up,
HUD: added plant, defuse and destroy icon notification to the Breakhtrough HUD (still work in progress!),
[BUGFIXES]
Breakthrough: fixed missing status widget on Smolensk and Polyarny,
Breakthrough: fixed Radio Station collision,
Breakthrough: fixed improper marker text colors,
Audio attenuation and occlusion fixes,
Claymore spawning fix,
Fixed destroyable objects not having particles at the start of the round,
Fixed some minor issues with mudflaps and other addons,
Removed redundant markers on compass widget,
Fixed RPG Nets issues of Leopard 2A6 Body Armor,
Fixed wrong gib mesh in Commando turret,
[OPTIMIZATION]
Fixed OnVideoBasicSettingsChanged() hitches on the render thread,
Fixed hitches on the render thread when updating material scalar parameters,
Fixes for reloading assets that were already loaded (reduced hitching),
Disabled ticks on multiple actors,
Deleted empty skins to reduce hitching,
Disabled DoF calculations for remote vehicles.
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #38 - Last Week in World War 3
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Progress update
The development is going smoothly and without major problems since we’ve finally finished work on the engine switch. It’s mainly finishing up things, but also working on brand new stuff for 1.0, optimization and bug fixing.
Breakthrough
Our newest game mode is currently in internal testing after finishing up the required fixes and improvements. The main changes revolve around how Retreat works and the player HUD.
New retreat doesn’t let the attacking team advance until all defenders have left the previous zone. This means that the constant sprint towards next objective will be broken up with some hunting for marked enemies. Both teams want to retreat as fast as possible - but we know some people will be caught off guard deep into the enemy territory.
Rest of the changes are some point location switches, more pronounced information: big icon that lets you know about a bomb being planted, blinking red light on the Radio Station, a beeping sound and so on.
As soon as we’ve confirmed it working as expected, it will be released to the PTE and later to Live, once the community deems it good.
Progression 2.0
We’ve finalized design of the new progression system and started to implement it into the new customization menu. We’ll have more on how it works in future Reports, but for now let’s say it shouldn’t leave you with millions of dollars on your account and nothing to spend them on. It should also provide challenge and things to do for people that have unlocked everything already.
It’s designed to be fun for both new players and World War 3 veterans - which may sound weird when talking about a game that is yet to be released, but some people have played for over a thousand hours already. This is a great example of a system that will benefit greatly from the game’s time in Early Access, as we’ve seen all kinds of players and we have all kinds of data to base our decisions on.
This will hopefully lead to a progression that satisfies a new player by giving them new tools frequently, but not overwhelmingly so, and will give veteran players ways of still progressing years into the game’s life.
New progression is scheduled around the Customization 2.0, so we don’t have a date on that one yet.
Breakthrough Community Trailer
We’ve already received some submissions for our community-driven trailer for our community-driven game mode, but we want more! The more submissions we get, the higher chance the overall video will be of a higher quality, so make sure to grab some sweet actions and send it to us under contests@worldwar3.com - just remember that videos should be fairly short and of good enough quality; after all, it has to look sick!
The rewards have also been upped in a somewhat unusual way, so get to know more here: https://forum.worldwar3.com/index.php?/topic/10948-breakthrough-community-trailer-submissions-are-open/
We will see you in our next Weekly Report!
- World War 3 Team
Breakthrough Community Trailer Submissions are open!
Hello Soldiers,
As we've written in our last week's Weekly Report, we're now accepting submissions for our Breakthrough Trailer. We’ll create a montage of best clips we get and publish it alongside our internal Breakthrough trailer when the game mode is available for everyone.
Clips that make it into the trailer will be awarded World War 3 PC Steam keys, so there’s something to work for – and it’s so easy! Below you'll find the details on how to correctly send your videos.
Community Trailer Submission Details
Length
If you don’t want us to chop up your footage, keep the clips to as short as possible. If you can show what happened in 5 seconds, that would be the best. We realize sometimes the action needs some more time, but we want to include as many creators as possible.
Quality
Custom .ini settings and Low Quality settings will impact the chance of your submission to be included. It doesn’t mean there’s no chance, especially if the action is awesome, but try to make your footage look as good as possible.
Resolution
We’ll be taking footage with minimum resolution of 1080p, higher obviously preferable. Again, if you have some epic 10-man kill with artillery and you play 720p – send it in, just be aware of this limitation.
Upload
The best way to get the files to us will be to upload them to an online hosting service and send us an email with “Breakthrough Community Trailer” in the topic and links to the files in the message. The contest email address is contests@worldwar3.com. In the case of streaming footage, download it and do the same.
Please, don’t send us the files directly, there are limits to our inbox size and we will ignore those emails!
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #37 - Last week in World War 3
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
It’s been another week of hard work on World War 3, so let’s see what we’ve been up to since last week’s Report. We’ve talked about how 0.8 testing is going on the PTE, work on the new Infantry HUD, how the Breakthrough fixing is going, the optimization effort and other things.
Let’s give you an update on what changed and how we’ll proceed in the future.
0.7.2 Live Patch
We’ve updated the Live version with some improvements we’ve done for 0.8. Those are mainly bug fixes for some annoying bugs that were introduced with the engine switch and some optimization changes.
We’ve fixed most of the replication issues that were left, namely the problem with some players not having a team set properly. This resulted in people having no markers and not appearing on the scoreboard - this should be fixed now and work as intended.
Another big change were the optimization changes. We’ve changed how the player profiles and characters/weapons/strikes are loaded in to save on the load times and reduce stuttering caused by loading on the fly. It should smooth out the gameplay and make the game more enjoyable, especially on slower machines.
This is by no means the fix for all issues, but after the engine switch is complete, we can focus more on optimizing the game now. Further optimization changes will be coming in small batches - goal being having enough small fixes that make a huge difference for 1.0.
Optimization is not something you can do in an evening, it’s hours and hours of work for every tenth of a frame, every one stutter eliminated, so it will take some time and effort, but we know it’s worth it and we’re committed to delivering as smooth of a game as it’s possible.
Next on the list for this are more fixes for loading (which is the main reason for stutters) and continued work on all facets of the optimization.
0.8 on the PTE
We’re continuing to get a lot of valuable feedback and support from the community, which we’re grateful for and we are listening. The testing has been doing great, we can see the game mode is a big hit with the community, with some things that need to be fixed, which brings us to the next point.
Breakthrough Progress
Breakthrough is being fixed up according to our observations and community feedback. We’ve improved the information layer available for the player, so you’ll be notified about charges being planted and defused much more clearly. We’ve changed spawns around, shuffled some point locations and polished the mode a bit overall. You’ll have a chance to test the changes as soon as we’ve made sure thy work as intended and they’re ready for PTE.
Other improvements
We’re also working on a lot of other changes and features, like making sure spawning works well once and for all, fixing armor bugs in vehicles, taking a look at balancing and player progression, more HUD changes and bug fixing and so on. There’s a noticeable increase in how quickly we’re able to work after 0.7 was finally released and that bodes well for the future.
Breakthrough Community Trailer
We’re opening up the email address that you can send your clips to! A few weeks back we’ve announced the contest for creators and players alike, to record the best Breakthrough clips and send them our way. We’ll create a montage of best clips we get and publish it alongside our internal Breakthrough trailer when the game mode is available for everyone.
Clips that make it into the trailer will be awarded World War 3 PC Steam keys, so there’s something to work for - and it’s so easy!
Community Trailer Submission Details
Length If you don’t want us to chop up your footage, keep the clips to as short as possible. If you can show what happened in 5 seconds, that would be the best. We realize sometimes the action needs some more time, but we want to include as many creators as possible.
Quality Custom .ini settings and Low Quality settings will impact the chance of your submission to be included. It doesn’t mean there’s no chance, especially if the action is awesome, but try to make your footage look as good as possible.
Resolution We’ll be taking footage with minimum resolution of 1080p, higher obviously preferable. Again, if you have some epic 10-man kill with artillery and you play 720p - send it in, just be aware of this limitation.
Upload The best way to get the files to us will be to upload them to an online hosting service and send us an email with “Breakthrough Community Trailer” in the topic and links to the files in the message. The contest email address is contests@worldwar3.com. In the case of streaming footage, download it and do the same.
Please, don’t send us the files directly, there are limits to our inbox size and we will ignore those emails!
That’s it for this week, we hope to see you in the next Weekly Report.
- World War 3 Team
Update 0.7.2 Patch Notes
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers! We're currently working on 0.8 patch on the PTE, with our newest Breakthrough game mode, but there are some things that the current live version could benefit from, namely fixing the problems with replication of players (resulting in missing markers or having wrong marker color) and, of course, performance. We have a few fixes coming your way, so let's dig in.
Update 0.7.2 Patch Notes
[DEBUG]
Added TeamManager debug printing on server and client side to find more problems,
[BUGFIXES]
Multiple fixes for team replication (missing markers, wrong team colors),
Changed how actors replicate to reduce server crashing,
Fixed a server crash related to debugging data,
Fixes for audio occlusion and spatialization,
Fixed destructible objects not having particles at the start of the match,
[OPTIMIZATION]
Fixed OnVideoBasicSettingsChanged() hitches on the render thread,
Fixed hitches on the render thread when updating material scalar parameters,
Fixes for reloading assets that were already loaded (reduced hitching),
Disabled ticks on multiple actors,
Disabled DoF calculations for remote vehicles.
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #36 - Last week in World War 3
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
This week we wanted to let you know how things are going and what the current development tasks are going on. It can be pretty obvious for us involved with the game on a daily basis, but it’s easy to forget not everyone spends 50 hours a week working on World War 3, so letting you know what we’re doing from time to time is a good thing.
0.8 Testing
0.8 has been in public testing for a while and the newest gamemode, Breakthrough, has gotten a fair share of feedback. We’re very happy to see that people love the game mode in general, but also see some problems worth addressing. We agree with this wholeheartedly and we’ve started fixing some things.
For starters, the plant/defuse visibility will be increased, so you really know when they happen. Secondly, as we wrote last week, the Retreat mechanic is now fleshed out further: the attacking team won’t be able to rush the next objective until the retreat is finished. We will rebalance the points that attackers and defenders get, move some stations around and fix some bugs that make Breakthrough a bit less enjoyable.
You can catch up on the BRE feedback in this topic and throw your two cents in - we encourage you to do so! The overall 0.8 feedback topic is here.
Some of those changes are already done or are being done, so keep training on PTE so you can help new players once 0.8 hits Live. Yes, help. Not crush.
Vehicle armor poll
Our design team asked the players about the current armor system. The main idea behind this is to know what makes sense for the players and what is still not explained well enough. Because the time for balancing is coming soon, we want to be prepared and know what our players want and need, so we can make better decisions, so log in and let us know where you stand! https://forum.worldwar3.com/index.php?/topic/10826-poll-vehicle-armors-system/
HUD Improvements
We’re also working on the new HUD a lot, with changes to the strike bar on the bottom, some icon redesigns and implementing feedback we got on it from you. It seems to be a big hit in general, with a few points of contention, which we’re addressing.
Optimization
On the optimization front, we’re starting to move more and more resources into making the game smoother as we’re nearing the 1.0 slowly. This will ramp up greatly before release and we’re expecting big changes in the last patch or two. Right now we’re optimizing the loading order of things (especially levels) and moving more and more things to be loaded asynchronously (or “on-the-fly”), so the freezing related to loading assets when playing (streaming, player or vehicle customization etc.) should be reduced. It requires some changes to the item database, so there’s no ETA, but we’re constantly working on optimizing the game and making it work better.
Movement system
We’re currently still in the process of merging the movement system into the newest version of the game. It will take some time, because since we started working on it, the game changed a lot and we have to make sure we’re not breaking anything and the system works as intended once merged together. It’s more of a tedious and repetitive work, so it takes some time. It’s getting close, and we can’t stress how excited we all are to show it to you. Remember - we can’t wait as much as you do!
Other work
The other work is progressing as always: more vehicles, more attachments, more weapons, more maps, the new UI is progressing nicely - we’re also working on a firing range in tandem. There’s some cool things coming to the player progression, constant bug fixing and so on - there’s a lot of cool stuff coming to World War 3 in the coming weeks and months.
We won an award!
We've also received another award for our game - this time from a polish magazine. The award took a bit to get here, but it finally arrived and now we can present it to you. World War 3 is the Best Polish Game, as voted during the IThardware for Gamers 2019 plebiscite! Thank you for the recognition - the coming year will be even more exciting!
Next Week
As we wrote in last week’s report, we’ll be creating a community trailer for Breakthrough game mode. Keep recording, make sure you’re ready when we open the submissions up!
One more small thing: November 11th is a national holiday in Poland, so the Weekly Report will be late by about 24 hours, so don’t be alarmed, when the report is not out on Monday.
See you then and thanks for reading!
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #35 - 0.8 on PTE
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
Last Friday we’ve pushed the 0.8 update to the Public Test Environment. It includes the brand new community game mode and a new player HUD. Both those are still being worked on, so this is the perfect time to submit your suggestions and bug reports to our forums!
Breakthrough has been a game mode that our community wanted to have in the game for a long time. It was you, the players, that came to us with a request for a password protected server to test a game mode. You organized the testing, got everyone on the same page, we all got together and played a number of matches, slowly finding problems and strong points of the gameplay. After that, we took what we learned during playtesting and here we are a few months later - with a brand new game mode, directly influenced by the players.
It’s playable on all current Warzone maps, features a 20 player cap, full strike support and some intense firefights and rushes for the bomb plants. Some of you might see the 20 player cap as low, but it can get pretty insane when all of those 20 players are on a single point. We want to try a larger versions as well, but first we want to see how it plays out with you!
With 0.8 now on the PTE, we’ll be refining the gameplay and HUD elements further, going into future patches. For now, what you can see on your screen is a work in progress.
Finally, there’s also the Napalm Strike we showed a few weeks ago together with Artillery Smoke. We wanted to keep it in a bit longer for performance reasons. It’s still not 100% there, but it’s working well enough to start testing its gameplay viability and usage in the war zone.
If you are not aware of how to join the PTE, you can find it as a separate game in your Steam library named World War 3 PTE.
When it comes to the HUD, the last week at the office was filled with Breakthrough testing and information layer improvements. We’ve added on screen messages about defuses and plants, all the timers and a few additional things to let people know better what is happening around.
We have a few more things we’d like to add, but we’re waiting for you feedback, since there are a few ways we could go about it. We want to show the current contested area on the map better and direct people more into the proper place. Also, the retreat mechanic will get some additional features, like bonuses for defenders if they retreat successfully and for attackers if they stop the retreat.
Movement
One of the questions you might have is about the movement overhaul. Next big milestone on our Roadmap is the Movement Overhaul - this is still the case, but we decided to not wait until it’s 100% done and release the Breakthrough patch in the meantime. Its release is somewhere in-between the milestones. This is why we’ve decided to not put numbers on them knowing we could have something like this happen.
We figured that it’s better to give the players something that’s nearly done right now rather than make you all wait for the movement and bunch it all together. This is mainly why we were able to release 0.8 to the PTE so soon after 0.7 hit Live - it’s only been a little over 2 weeks!
Breakthrough Community Trailer
While we’re working on an internal trailer for Breakthrough, we had an idea, that since it’s a community game mode and a lot of you took your time to help us make it, we want to give you an opportunity to have your gameplay in an official trailer. For now this is not set in stone, nothing is concrete, but this is how we would see it happening:
The trailer would be a montage of cool stuff from the Breakthrough PTE testing - clips of great actions and all that fun things you can do in this game mode. There are way more of you than us at the studio, so there’s a good chance you can record more of the sweet destruction than we do. We would also take stream footage, if the compression won’t abysmal. We’ll tell you more about this in the coming weeks.
We are currently planning to keep 0.8 on the PTE for a few weeks to refine it and make sure there are no big exploits and problems and to release it to the Live servers soon.
See you in the next Weekly Report!
-World War 3 Team
PTE 0.8 Patch Notes
Here we go again! After the 0.7 technical update, we can now start sharing content we've been working on during the technical work on the engine. Easily the biggest one is the new Breakthrough game mode, about which you can read more here. It's a very dynamic, quick-paced mode, with no time to stand around. Your split second decisions matter and one soldier can win the game with a good plant or last second defuse. It's available on all Warzone maps, some of them in the Large variant - so you'll be fighting in places that are normally not available in Warzone - like the school and train station on Warsaw or shopping mall on Moscow.
Important: Breakthrough is going to have the Retreat mechanic expanded in the coming weeks to make it something unique and cool.
Supporting this game mode is the new infantry HUD. It's not finished yet, the Strike Bar, Chat, Kill Feed and Score Feed are going to be refreshed as well, but it works a lot better and has a couple new features, like markers on the compass and animated icons with progress bars for gadgets.
The respawns are also a lot better finally, but bear in mind that there's a few things coming to the respawning system during the time in PTE that will make this a lot better (like marking people that you can't spawn on and possibly people under fire being marked as dangerous spawns).
Let's all test the new game mode, especially when it comes to spawn placement, station placement, possible exploits and overall balance for attackers and defenders.
Be sure to post the feedback in the comments or on our forum : https://forum.worldwar3.com/index.php?/topic/10797-feedback-on-update-08/
PTE 0.8 Patch Notes
[KNOWN ISSUES]
There's no warmup on PTE (so testing is easier) - this means that Breakthrough match balance will be skewed, If clicking Deploy on another player doesn't do anything, keep trying - this means that the game didn't find a suitable spawn for around them. If this happens on a point, report!
[CONTENT]
New game mode: Breakthrough,
New Infantry HUD (WIP),
Napalm Strike is in,
[BUGFIXES]
Fixed spawning in a wrong place when there's no space to spawn around selected player,
Fixed being able to look inside a building with Mini Done gadget,
Fixed lasers staying while throwing grenades,
Other bugfixes.
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #34 - Gameplay Secrets #3
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE |
Hello, Soldiers!
Last week we’ve told you a bit about how to repair vehicles in World War 3 and how our Hunter/Killer system works. We want to continue the streak and tell you a little more about some of the systems we have implemented in our game, so let’s dive into another set of gameplay secrets. As we said previously: there’s a lot you might not know about our game, but we’re here to help you out!
Vehicles in World War 3
We wanted to strike a balance between complexity and ease of use with our vehicles. They’re easy to control and operate on a base level, but also have a lot of quirks and features - and we think some of them will interest even people that think they know everything about vehicular combat in the game.
We’ve decided to bring those to the spotlight and let everyone know about what and how to use in WW3.
Weight and centre of mass
First, the most obvious part is the customization. Our vehicles, just like characters and weapons, are created by combining lots of attachments. Each attachment has not only its cost in Battlepoints, but also weight and other properties. Attachments can, and some do, change the weight and centre of gravity of the whole vehicle. For example, a heavy turret can make a vehicle unstable by raising it’s centre of mass and make it drive slower due to the added weight.
Armor
Second important part of customization is armor. It’s heavy, yes, but also can really help with those pesky RPGs. Since 0.7 you can check how good your armor is against RPGs in the customization menu:
Those values (Front, side and rear armor) are representing the number of normal RPGs you need to destroy an armored vehicle by shooting it in any particular armor section. As you can see, the difference is huge - shooting tanks in the front armor is going to take a long time.
Conversely, a well placed Tandem (which deals around twice the normal RPG damage) can take down even a well armored vehicle in a couple of shots.
As a tank driver, you have to be conscious of this weakness and position your vehicle in a way that prevents enemies from surrounding you. Your vehicle is well armored and can take a lot of punishment before being destroyed, but if you’re outsmarted - that’s it. The slow and unwieldy beasts are no match against a swarm of little guys with well placed grenades to the back of your machine.
This is why the best squads will protect their vehicles and take down any RPG carrying enemy soldiers before they can take the vehicle down and won’t let anyone get behind. It’s called “combined arms” for a reason - even the most armored tank is weak when operating alone.
Below you can see a rough approximation of damage zones you can expect on vehicles in World War 3.
Weapons
Some vehicles can carry more than one weapon. With MBTs and some other vehicles having the main cannon, the auxiliary machine gun and RCWS possibly having 3 different ways of defending and attacking. You can change between weapons by pressing [1], [2] or [3] depending on your customization. A small tip for everyone not familiar with this: if the main cannon is reloading: you can switch to the other gun while the main is reloading and switch back to continue firing.
Vehicle Locking
Another rarely used feature is vehicle locking. You can toggle between the states by using [L] key. This is useful when you’re trying to give your vehicle to your team or lock your team out of using your vehicle, because you want to fit all your squad members in.
The values this can be set to are:
Locked (Only the owner can get in),
Squad (Only squad can get in),
Team (anyone from your team can get in).
Additional subsystems
We’ve also got a few additional attachments you can equip your vehicle with. Depending on the platform, there’s smoke grenades (default [G]) to potentially cover your escape or smoke up a street to help your team cross it under fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmajcTFcM9U There’s APS - automatic protection that triggers when a missile, grenade or tank shell is coming your direction, shooting it down and going into cooldown.
CEEGA 2019
As we said in the last Weekly Report, we’ve been nominated in Visual Art category for CEEGA 2019. We didn’t win that one, but we got different award - China’s Choice! Thank you for the recognition!
That’s it for this week, we really hope this helps you out during fights against the enemy. See you in the next report, soldier!
- World War 3 Team
Update 0.7.1
Just a small update while we're working on the bigger issues, to make the game just a bit better. It also includes a lot of debug additions that will help us hone in on the problems better.
Update 0.7.1 Patch Notes
[BUGFIXES]
Fixed mesh for US ARMY uniform,
Fixed camos for US ARMY uniform,
Unlocked skins for US ARMY chest,
Fixed a crash related to Steam Platform Manager,
Probable crash fix for Movie Streamer,
Fixed crash on player logout,
Fixed community emblems not working properly,
Fixed potential crash with challenges initialization,
Fixed some serialization issues (for network transfer),
More fixes for map rotation sending people to the main menu,
