PTE 0.7 is scheduled for today. The team is encountering some delays, but it's still going live today. Stay tuned for updates!
--- Update is now live! ---
Finally! We’ve got a 0.7 build that is stable enough and without critical issues, so we can start testing it. Bear in mind, that this is just after switching engine versions and rewriting how our netcode works (more information here), so expect it to crash a lot and to have bugs. The list of known issues is going to be shortened very soon, we’ve just added it so you don’t waste time on reporting bugs we’re already fixing.
We’ve got a lot of work to do to get 0.7 to a state that is playable enough to push to Live servers, so everyone that can should help us test this version, especially over the weekend. We’re going to gather a lot of data and we will also be playing to make sure all big issues are fixed next week and only smaller problems are left to iron out.
Thanks for being patient, but this change was the biggest one since 0.3, and we want to make absolutely sure that it will be at least as stable as 0.6, and preferably more.
Engine update doesn’t come with a lot of content, but it will let us improve the game a lot more in the long run.
Now, as for what is in the update, we’re adding daily challenges! It’s still a bit rough, but that’s why we have PTE. You can complete challenges every day and get rewards for them.
There’s also new lighting. It’s a lot more realistic and eye adaptation works properly now, but it might need tweaking. Let us know how you like it and what we should change.
We’ve also added new VOIP system, because the old one was not good enough. This is also something we need as much feedback on as possible.
As usual, send us your crash reports and make sure to leave your feedback on the forums, so we can get to it easily and plan changes accordingly.
Thanks for playing!
PTE 0.7 Patch Notes
KNOWN ISSUES
Packs (Ammo/Health/Equipment) randomly don’t spawn when tossed
UAVs mark dead enemies
Markers show up late sometimes
Players drop copies of their weapon at random
Taking leader by requesting orders is not working
Grenades spawn to the left of the camera
It takes a second to load the weapon into player hands
Crashing and performance issues
No Berlin TDM or Warzone for now (map issues)
FEATURES
Daily Challenges added - this is still an early version!
New VOIP system [Default: hold “~” (tilde - next to 1)]
New Unreal Engine version - 4.21
Replication Graph implemented
New lighting
New KIll Screen
New Vehicle HUDs - still Work in Progress
IMPROVEMENTS
Changed FPS counter to ON/OFF from Toggle (it will also persist between play sessions
Added VAB - a Mobile Spawn Point variant, so it’s different for each team
Added synchronization status on loading screen for debug purposes
Added location debug info on screen for better bug reporting (community suggestion)
Added Vehicle Kill Assist (community suggestion)
New Equipment meshes for UGVs
Added smoke for damaged vehicles, now every vehicle except Mini UGV and Mini Drone will smoke when HP is critical
A lot of adjustments and improvements
BALANCE
Increased Heli Drone Rockets Battlepoints cost
Decreased Heli Drone HP (600 to 450) - now it’s 1 tandem RPG hit
Decreased Heli Drone rocket PODs' ammo capacity
Vehicles speed, acceleration, turning and HP rebalance - now the differences between vehicles are more noticeable
Attachment prices have been adjusted to better fit the progression system
Attachment modifiers have been reworked to better reflect differences between individual attachments
Weight difference between barrels of different lengths has been increased
Weight difference between magazines of different capacity has been increased
Additional changes coming soon, including a horizontal recoil multiplier on grips
Moved resupply packs to between capture points
BUGFIXES
Fixed shooting between rounds on TDM,
Fixed rebinding X button
Fixed default ammo for all turrets - there should not be a situation where tank has only 1 shell
Fixed direction prioritization when exiting a vehicle
Hundreds of other bugfixes
Thanks guys,
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #25 - New Engine PTE update
Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
Let’s recap what’s been happening in World War 3 in the last week - and it’s been a busy one!
Armed Forces Day
Last Thursday, on the 15th of August in Katowice, Poland, we’ve had a parade of military assets, including helicopters, planes, armed personnel carriers, tanks and other hardware, as well as personnel for the national holiday of Armed Forces Day. World War 3 took part in the celebration by setting up a stand with Polish Territorial Defense Forces. We’ve had a lot of people visit and play World War 3, ranging from families with children to veterans. We’ve had a lot of fun talking to everyone and we hope to do more of this kind of cooperation in the future.
At the Studio
We’ve had a busy week at the studio, with preparation of the first PTE build of 0.7 being almost ready. We’ve discovered an instability in the game on tuesday that caused it to crash a lot when loading into a match which pushed the release of PTE patch to next week. We’re anxious to get the new engine into your hands and we really can’t wait to see how it performs, but at the same time, we want to give it enough time to be a good testing tool, not just something to show. We’re still making the game and the more solid information we get, the better the end result will be.
Apart from the instability (which is already fixed), there are only a few minor issues that could get omitted in the first iteration of the PTE version, so we’re pretty sure you will see PTE on 0.7 this week. Of course, if something unpredictable happens, things might change.
The version of 0.7 you will get is going to include almost everything that is planned in 0.7, with further stability, content and - most importantly - performance upgrades coming in during the duration of PTE testing. We want 0.7 to be at least as good as 0.6 was, so it will take a few weeks of testing and improving to finally get 0.7 to Live in a satisfactory state.
To get you up to speed on what’s in 0.7, let us recap the changes and new features we’re going to have, according to our Roadmap.
Challenges
We’re implementing the first pass of the Challenge System. It consists of daily challenges randomized every 24 hours. Everyone gets the same ones, so you can have fun with friends completing those in a party. Completing a challenge will net you a reward - those can be some cash, XP or even items like weapons, skins or attachments.
This system is a precursor to something much bigger - an expanded progression for players and more complex challenges. We also have a few surprises related to this, but we are not sharing them at this time. Let us know what doesn’t work and how would you change it - and your ideas for more challenges, too!
New Squad Manager
The new squad manager is mostly an “under the hood” feature, but this doesn’t mean it’s not exciting. If we did our job right, you shouldn’t notice much change, but this new tool lets us expand how squads work greatly and was a necessary change to making the party system work as intended. It will make the party system a lot less unpredictable and fun to use and fixes a lot of old bugs we had no way of fixing without changing it.
HUD Improvements
We’re starting to upgrade all of our HUD elements closer to their final versions. We’ve learned a lot about how people interact with the game and where the UI has its shortcomings and we feel like there’s a lot of good changes to be done with the HUD. 0.7 marks the beginning of this change, and we’re starting off with the new Kill Screen and strike HUDs. New Kill Screen will now show you an approximate direction the kill shot got you from via a small minimap and will provide you with much more information on what you were killed by - including how much HP you enemy has left, too! It’s not a 100% final version, but it will be more useful.
Another HUD change are the vehicle HUDs.
They are much more clear and should work much better than the old ones, while looking a lot better.
Information Layer Improvements
This is an umbrella term for a lot of small changes we’re making to the way information is presented in the game. Starting with new challenge progress UI elements and new widgets, with new information in the customization (you will be able to see how the sight looks in-game without having to equip it or even buy it!), new HUDs are also part of this initiative. It will continue after 0.7 up until 1.0 release.
Attachment Rebalance
We’re taking a look at attachments and how to make them more of a cool choice and less of a ‘take X because it’s best’ that we see happening with some parts right now. The rebalance will also impact weight, so some builds that were impossible to do earlier will now be viable. We’ll see how it turns out during the PTE testing and update the values accordingly.
New VOIP
We haven’t been satisfied with our previous implementation of the VOIP system, so we’ve decided to make it a lot better. It will now let you choose between Open Mic and Push-To-Talk, choose your own bindings and has a lot more options for the players. You can disable it altogether with a volume slider or mute people from the scoreboard or deployment screen.
Remember - VOIP in World War 3 lets you communicate with your Squad only. This is done for a number of reasons, one of them being the performance of decompressing audio from a lot of people, but also the vision of your squad being a self-contained unit that can change a lot in the game. We feel like playing with your squad is the best way to play World War 3 both because it helps your team the most and because it’s the most fun.
This new VOIP mimicks how a radio could sound as well and is really adding to the ambiance of the conflict. It sounds a lot better and will improve team communication a lot.
Other improvements
You will get a more detailed list of changes once the Patch Notes are out, but we have taken some time to introduce some quality-of-life changes and fix some small, but annoying bugs like adding Vehicle Assists or the inability to rebind X. The list is long and will take a while to compose, but for now - rest assured there’s a lot of small changes as well.
One more thing - if you are at Gamescom 2019, make sure to find us and have a chat - we’ll be there!
Weekly Report #24 - 0.7 Progress and Gameplay Secrets
Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
This week we wanted to bring some light to some of the hidden or not obvious mechanics we have implemented in World War 3 over the years. Some things are simple and don’t change a lot in the gameplay, though they can be used to optimize your play, but some are crucial to understanding how to play well and be a good teammate. We’ve compiled things you should know about World War 3 Warzone scoring for this week and if people like this type of content, we have tons of other interesting information about our game.
We’ll get to the secrets of gameplay, but first let’s update you on how the engine switch is coming along and what is the 0.7 progress.
Engine Switch
We’re still working on the 4.21 Engine switch, since last week we’re regularly testing the game and making sure the version that will drop on the PTE is at least stable and doesn’t have critical bugs. It’s not going to be perfect, this is why the PTE is there, but we want for it to at least be fully playable and bring
fun.
The switch is almost complete, we’ve got all replication changes implemented and working, crashing related to the engine switch is under control and the issues that are left are relatively minor: markers not displaying or flickering, vehicles driving too fast or too slow due to some physics changes that happened under the hood, weapons loading a bit too late in player hands, some lighting changes that have to be set up - overall, pretty minor issues that will require some time to fix, but are not blocking us from other work.
0.7 will first be tested on the PTE, so if you can spare the disk space, downloading it now will mean much less downloading later, the patch shouldn’t be much bigger than normal patches. PTE helps us a lot with testing and catching problems early, so be ready! It’s around 50GB unpacked, so you need some space for it, but it will help us a lot with the testing.
Now, for the secrets!
Gameplay Secrets - Squad Scoring on Warzone
A lot of people don’t realize they’re a leader and that being one gives them a lot of awesome perks, for the low cost of pressing X every few minutes. Also, a lot of people don’t realize how working together with your squad will make a massive difference to your personal BP gain and score. This doesn’t even include the big benefit for your team you will provide by coordinating together with others and working on gathering Battlepoints to support the team with deadly strikes or vehicles. And remember, if you win, you get more money after the match is over!
First, a quick refresher on Warzone scoring. Your team only gains score when you have linked points together (notice the line connecting those two points):
Having both parts of a capture area will net your team 1 point per second. Having more will increase that further. The best way to win is to hold more links than your opponent and making sure to break their links as quick as possible to starve them of points while keeping at least one link yourself.
Being a leader gives you the tools you need to guide your squad and win Warzone matches by utilizing this knowledge. You can spawn on your teammates, you spawn a lot faster than them and they can use you as their spawn point as well. A good leader is crucial to winning in Warzone and having one good squad that’s working together is frequently all it takes to turn the tides in your favor.
To unlock this gameplay secret you only need to use one button: X. It will mark objectives for attack or defense, mark enemy infantry and vehicles on the map and double tapping it will place a marker in the world letting your squad know where the danger is or just inform them about something like ammo pack or rally point.
You can also mark objectives by right-clicking them on the deployment screen!
Very early on we decided to make World War 3 a squad-oriented game and move away from running around a map and capping point after point mindlessly. With how our squads work, you can really optimize your score gain and use Strikes as fast as they come off cooldown or summon a fully kitted out tank after less than 10 minutes. This is why:
We’ve got a lot of bonus points for working together. A simple example is getting a kill. When playing a lone wolf it’s 150 Battlepoints: 50 for the kill and 100 for doing 100 damage to the enemy, if they were at full health.
When playing with a squad and being near to the objective set by the squad leader, it’s 350 (150 base + 200 bonus). But! If you are a leader as well, every time someone under your command gets a kill on an objective, that’s free points for you.
You can mark enemies or use UAVs - assists on marked enemies also get you additional BPs.
The same goes for capturing points. It’s taking a long time when you are alone for two main reasons: first, to make coming back and defending possible: if you’re on the next point over and someone starts to take an objective, we want you to have enough time to stop them if they are playing alone. Secondly, if you are with your squad, it takes a lot less time. It’s much more beneficial to you and your squad to take 5 people and cap a point quickly than it is to cap 5 points at the same time, risking being easily killed and stopping your offensive altogether. It also doesn’t give you nearly enough Battlepoints and is putting you and your team in a BP disadvantage situation.
As an additional bonus, capping a point marked as an objective gives you bonus score, and the more squadmates there are, the more points you get. The leader also gets +100 bonus for each objective completed by their squad mates.
You can also use X to request gadget use on your team mates if you require healing or ammo - just hover over an ally and press X. It will appear in the objective log like all other objectives:
There’s also one more thing. Whenever you mark an objective on the map, every other squad leader gets an information about it in the form of text under the point, telling them how many squads are currently attacking or defending the point.
This might not seem like much, but if you see enemy starting to take a point, but also see that someone else marked it as defense objective, you can focus your squad on a different objective to get an advantage.
But what if you are not the squad leader and your leader doesn’t know about all of it and ignores the power vested in them? You can request orders by also using the X button. If they don’t give any orders in 60 seconds, you will become the new leader automatically.
We hope you are now much better equipped to fight with your enemies. Let us know if this kind of content is interesting to you and we’ll make more Gameplay Secrets!
Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DEFR
Hello Soldiers!
Last week the Content Creators contest came to a conclusion. As we said previously, it was an enormous fun watching your creations and watching how much fun you have with our game and we can't stress enough how much positive energy that gave us to work even harder to deliver you the best possible experience! We had a hard time picking the winners ourselves, so we let the community voice their opinion, which you had time to do until last friday, 3pm CEST. Here's the three winners of World War 3 Special Editions, as voted by you!
1st Place: Atway - World War 3. Spare no one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR_ABDwLgrw
2nd Place: Большой Ти - WORLD WAR 3 - ТРЕТЬЯ МИРОВАЯ ВОЙНА
https://youtu.be/zua3vxXkk-o
3rd Place: AiRJacobs - World War 3 BEST GAMEPLAY & FUNNY MOMENTS #1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6djYWwi44k
The winners will be contacted shortly and will soon receive their World War 3 Special Editions. Of course we cannot forget about the four other creators that made the final list - TactiGamer, RuTaiN, Alekks and Skibbehify - who will receive World War 3 Steam keys for their efforts! So if you didn't have a chance to vote or watch them during the previous week, enjoy:
TactiGamer - Surviving Warsaw - World War 3 (Creator Contest)
https://youtu.be/TRshhTlsgEY
RuTaiN - SiG MPX WORLD WAR 3 Loud Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn9YANsnA-Y
Alekks - world war 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fwfXfIQ1ec
Skibbehify - Free Weekend Madness!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNovs1ialiQ
Once more: Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone that participated in our video contest!
On the technical side of things, we know you’re all very curious to see how the new engine will impact the game and just to have something new in the game - we are as well. Unfortunately, it requires time and effort to be sure we did it well and there are no game breaking issues still in the code and content that would require long downtimes once we start with the testing.
To make sure the testing process is as efficient as possible, we have to eliminate as many obvious and common issues as possible, to not waste your time with finding stuff we already know about.
We can, however, let you know how the progress has been and what are the current challenges we’re facing.
We’re almost done with all the big bugs we’ve uncovered when switching the engine, we’re now starting to get into optimizing the patch. With changes to how replication works came a few critical issues that had to be resolved before we could let you play the game.
Why are we doing it now? We have to take a close look at optimization before every big update, because changes in the game often introduce new stutters and framerate issues - this is why optimization is generally done as one of the last things in a production of a game. In our case, we want to provide you with playable experience during the development, which requires additional work every few months to keep on top of the performance as well as the ongoing work to keep framerates up and RAM usage low.
While we’re not giving you and solid dates, we are happy to report that things are progressing as predicted and the switch went off without any major issues and we’re coming really close to having a playable version of the new, shiny engine.
For those that don’t know, switching engine version should improve server stability and performance the most, while also providing some limited performance increase on the client side. It will also let us use a few new tools and should make the game more stable in the future.
We know it’s taking some time, but to make sure you’re getting the best version of World War 3 possible, we all have to work through the drought - it will be a much better game in the long run!
As usual, keep up with our socials and don’t forget to join the discussion on our official forums and Discord!
Have a great week,
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #22 - Last Week At The Studio
Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, soldiers!
Last week has been really busy for us at the company. We have talked about the community game mode, Breakthrough, and the response from our community has been great. You, our players, seem to like the idea of having a Rush-like type of mode in World War 3. It shows that not only developers can impact the game they’re creating, and that’s what we always wanted - to create the game both us at the studio, and our players would enjoy playing.
Some of you were asking about whether Breakthrough means that we won’t be finishing Recon game mode. We just wanted to quickly address that concern: no, working on another game mode doesn’t mean that we are abandoning the tactical-oriented one. Our team understands that not everyone wants to play every single game mode, and some players wait for one more than the other - after all, even we, developers, have preferences between TDM or Warzone and some want to play Recon more than Breakthrough (and the other way around, as well).. Rest assured: we have different teams working on different modes, so making one doesn’t impact the other. Work on Recon hasn’t stopped and we are fully determined to bring both types into World War 3.
Talking about our community impacting things, we also ended the Content Creator Contest submissions. Between the 21st of June and the 19th of July we’ve asked you to submit your video creations. We received a lot of videos and we cannot thank you enough for showing us your love for World War 3. The response has been great and we had a lot of fun watching your creations for the past couple of days. Watching how our players have fun in our game makes us appreciate the joy we’re giving you by working hard everyday!
We’ve narrowed down the submissions to the best ones and now it’s in your hands. We had our picks, now it’s time to let the players speak - choose however you like, the one that’s the most funny, one that represents World War 3 the best or just one that looks like it took a lot of effort to make. Help us pick the winner and who’s going to get the Special Edition of World War 3 - here’s a quick reminder of what’s in it:
On the technical side of things, we are still working on the new animation system. We are getting there, but we still have to make sure everything works properly before we can test it on the PTE, before we can release it on Live servers. It all progresses as we have anticipated, so it shouldn’t be that long before we can finally announce when the next patch will finally be released.
We’ve already switched to the Unreal Engine 4.21 internally, but as we expected, it created a few small issues. Nothing that should be alarming - introducing new tech into an existing system always creates small frictions. It also progressess as it should, and we should be done fairly soon as well.
As we have stated numerous times, we have set a great example with Warzone Giga-Patch and we want to continue this streak with 0.7, which means that even if it takes a couple of weeks more to deliver the update, it would still be in a great state and without any major issues.
Talking about technical stuff, unfortunately we also had an issue on Thursday night that made the game inaccessible for our European players. Our server provider’s team quickly jumped onto the issue and while they were repairing what needed, our team has temporarily switched DNS servers, so a portion of the players was able to play regardless of what happened. The issue has been swiftly repaired and players could log into the game. We apologize to those who wanted to play World War 3 and couldn’t, but it shouldn’t happen again.
As usual, see you next week! Follow our social media for newest information and join the discussion on both our official forums and Discord.
Thank you,
- World War 3 Team
Status On EU Master Server
Hello everyone,
Currently we have an unknown outbreak on our EU master server. We are working with our hosting service to diagnose the issue and develop a quick fix.
We do apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you,
UPDATE:We've temporarily forwarded EU master requests to a backup machine, it will mean that you can't access your profiles, but you will still be able to play. The issue is a hardware failure, we've got hands on site to fix it, but there's no ETA at this time.
EU master server is back up and working again. No profiles have been interrupted during the hardware failure.
Please restart Steam if you still encounter issues,
Thank you for your patience,
- Captain Price
Weekly Report #21 - Community Game Mode
Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
The time has come to reveal a bit of information on our plans regarding the promised community game mode. We’ve been bombarded by requests and ideas for new game modes since even before the game launched into Early Access, which is understandable - everyone has their personal favourite and wants to see it realized in as many games as possible. Some game modes fit World War 3 better, some worse, but since we are only choosing one of them, we had to make sure it’s both heavily requested and actually works well with what World War 3 is and will be in the future.
We’d love to include every idea we can, but there are some problems with that. Obviously, we don’t have infinite time or resources to devote to making more game modes, but that’s not the main reason we’re trying to limit how many there are - we just don’t want to have 20 game modes that nobody plays, and we feel like limiting the number and playing to the strengths of the game is a much better approach.
When deciding on what game mode to add, we’ve had a few criteria to take into account, so let’s talk a bit about them.
Very early on we’ve noticed that the game is the most fun and works best when players create front lines between points, so it was instantly in our minds when thinking about next steps and how to handle adding more game modes to the game.
Right now, we’ve got two game modes: Team Deathmatch and Warzone. Both of them are vastly different and offer different experiences and we wanted to add something that’s somewhere in between - a bit more dynamic than Warzone, but a bit more tactical than TDM.
Those are the most important deciding factors of the game mode we wanted to add. Having that in mind, let’s take a look at what the community wanted - after all, this is the community game mode.
At the beginning of April, some community members came to us with a question: “Can you guys give us a password protected server to test a game mode we think would be cool?”. We talked about it a bit and decided that it could be fun to test something like this on the Public Test Environment with our community.
We set it up, and on the 19th, the first Breakthrough event was announced by and for the community. Check out the forums for the original post, but the idea was simple: create a popular Rush variant for World War 3 and see how it works with our mechanics and gunplay, inviting only people that know what the rules are and are willing to take the time to set it up and see how it plays.
It was great fun and it seemed to flow well and work with our game splendidly, but there were some problems, mainly with spawns and the rules that were decided at first. We changed them, went through the second and third iteration and each time it was more fun and was getting closer to the right idea.
At this point, there’s not much more that we can do without starting to change the game itself to facilitate the idea, so we had to decide if this was the game mode we wanted to go with. We don’t think there’s anything that can be called more of a community game mode than a game mode that came straight from our players. Moreover, in some polls that were held by the players on our forums, this type of game mode was also winning.
It fits our ideas of what the game needs and should be a good addition to the game mode roster, with TDM being a simple and dynamic one, Breakthrough going up in tactics, but still being fast paced and fun, Warzone - teamplay oriented and more complex and finally Recon - the one for tactical players.
We wanted to share with you what our players that started this initiative think and why they decided that a Rush-like was a good idea:
We’ve talked with the guys that World War 3 would be ideal for something like a Rush game mode and as avid players of this kind of mode, me and DareQQ decided to test how it would work. First iteration took over 2 weeks to prepare, thinking about how it would work and how to set it up. As it seems - it worked, and gave us a lot of fun and inspired us to organize more of the Breakthrough events. - Lugresky
So, what is it?
If you’re not familiar with how this type of game mode works, in Breakthrough, the players are divided into two teams: attacking and defending. Defending team has control of all of the areas on the map and all points and they can spawn on any of the points. The attacking team’s goal is to destroy the radio stations that are placed on each of the points, giving them control over the area and letting them push the front line further. They have to do it before the time runs out - if it does, defenders win.
Radio stations can be destroyed in two ways: by planting an explosive on them or by other explosives, like tank shells, C4 or grenades - it just takes a lot of them. Once the explosive has been planted, it can be defused by the defenders. If it’s not, it destroys the station and pushes the defenders further into their territory. All damage done to the station is permanent and it cannot be repaired.
Each region can have one or two stations and is converted to attackers after all stations are destroyed in it. Taking a region adds time to the game, making it a quick one in case of a steamroll and longer one if the game is evenly matched.
For now that’s all we are sharing about the game mode, but rest assured we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, just make it work with our game. It can still change, so we will share more details as they come up.
What is the current progress?
At this point we’ve got a working prototype and we’ve already tested our version a few times, with very positive feedback coming from the playtesting. Breakthrough will come the Public Test Environment at first and will be evolved there with community feedback and suggestions. We don’t have an ETA yet, because we’re still hard at work with the engine change, but the work is progressing as expected.
Let us know what you think on our social media, Discord server and on the forums.
Have a great week,
- World War 3 Team
The Content Creators Contest is now closed for submissions!
Thank you to everyone who entered - now we have to sort through through your amazing creations. We will contact and announce the winners in the next couple of days!
Good luck, soldiers!
Weekly Report #20 - Character Pipeline
Available in the following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
Last week we talked about how engine change will impact our game, how it impacts development and what replication is and how it can improve our game. A lot of you expressed your love for our characters and how detailed they look, so this week we want to shed some light on how our characters are made and what makes them stand out!
Contrary to popular opinion, we are not utilizing photogrammetry in our game, that’s the Get Even and Chernobylite’s team domain. In World War 3, in the character department, we use something that’s called structured light scanners.
3D scanning is a process that analyzes an actual object to collect data about its shape and texture in order to reconstruct said object in a digital environment. There are few ways to go about that, few technologies with each having some pros and cons, but we chose structured light, as we feel it suits our needs the best.
To put it bluntly, you can point a scanner at an object and move around it (or move the object) to create its virtual equivalent. Structured light helps the process by projecting grid pattern on an object, telling the scanner how far or close it is from it. That way you can reconstruct that object, like in our example case, a British military vest, and preserve its shape and all tiny imperfections and dents, as well as its colors, that make it look and feel realistic.
Some objects require more or less detail than the others to give them a feeling of realism and accuracy. For example, the British military vest is a large object, so we are using a scanner that has a bigger working area, but leaves a bit of details out of the scan. The vest doesn’t really require that much detail because it is treated more as a “background” for various attachments and items on it. While scanning boots, knee pads, knives and items that are similar in size we utilize a scanner that has much more accuracy, but has a smaller working area. This helps with bringing out all the imperfections and smaller details that would otherwise not be visible. It takes considerably more time to calculate the mesh, but still makes it worthwhile to scan the object.
That’s why we have a couple of 3D scanners, to cover both big and small subjects. Currently we have access to three Artec 3D scanners, having Leo, Spider and Eva at our disposal - though we are not using Eva lately, mainly because it was replaced in our workflow by Leo; it is the newest scanner in our arsenal. Spider is used for the smaller objects. Its working distance - how far from an object it has to be to capture the detail and shape- fits between 0.2m and 0.3m and the volume it can scan (which means how big an object can be) is up to 2,000 cm³. It works flawlessly with boots, smaller pouches, helmets and objects of similar size. Smaller working area and volume allows Spider to scan with the most accuracy, up to 0.05mm. It captures the most detail, but it comes at a cost - it captures frames at ~8fps. In comparison, Leo, our newest scanner, has working distance between 0.35m to 1.2m and volume of 160,000cm³, which means that if we wanted, we could easily scan a car and still have a great scan quality. This scanner can work with a lot bigger objects, but has a point accuracy up to 0.1mm, which is still amazing, though not as detailed as Spider. It also scans much quicker than Spider and Eva, capturing frames at 44fps. The scanner it replaced, Eva, has the same 3D point accuracy as Leo, at 0.1mm, but has a working distance between 0.4m and 1m with volume capture zone of 61,000cm³. Also it only captured frames at 16fps, so we had to scan really carefully with it. Key difference between the three machines is the connectivity. Both Spider and Eva require constant connection to a PC/laptop for it to work, Leo is completely wireless. Which technically means we could just go out and scan whatever we wanted, but it being fragile and really useful to us, we would rather not!
All Artec scanners can also capture textures, though here at World War 3 we are doing textures by hand. It just looks better and gives 3D artists more freedom.
Using structured light helps cut down the time it would take to make the 3D model by hand and helps bringing down the production time of a High Poly version of an object from a couple of days to just a few hours, and sometimes even shorter.
After scanning and first pass of cleanup of the model, such scan goes further down the rabbit hole into the hands of a character artist.
3D artists, using specialistic 3D sculpting software create a High Poly model from received scan file. Such model is then processed and worked on by hand to eliminate any errors and mistakes that made it through the first pass of cleaning up. Its form and silhouette is fixed to match the general guides we use, so it works with different models. For example, when new boots are added to the game, artist has to make sure it fits into the pants, so there would not be as few parts sticking outside of the model as possible. Next step is to create a simplified model - the less polygons there are, the better for the overall performance of the game. Such model does not have all the details that got preserved during the scanning process, it is it’s simplified form, but using the High Poly model as a reference and a source, the artist is able to “bake” normal textures onto the Low Poly version, so it looks like all the details are still there, even though they’re not.
Then, the model is basically ready for texturing. Texturing process, which basically means painting all the colors and how an item shows up in the game, helps with defining the look of the surface of the model. It also encompasses assigning physical materials to the object. Last part of the process is to create various customization options for the model, and currently (as of 0.6 Warzone Giga-Patch Update) each item that can be changed in our game has more than 20 unique camouflages and color variants.
Just before we end the report, here’s how the character looks in game after final touches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incPt0CGNoc
As usual, see you next week for our weekly update!
- World War 3 Team
Weekly Report #19 - Engine Upgrade and Optimization
Available in following languages:PL | RU | DE | FR
Hello, Soldiers!
We wanted to bring to you a bit more technical overview of what does it mean to change Unreal Engine version to a newer one and how the optimization is done and what it consists of. This one is going to be a bit more technical, but we’ll try to keep it understandable.
First of all, a bit of news from last week! We celebrated the 4th of July with our American friends the best way possible - by helping Military and Veteran Gamers with their 24-hour holiday stream. We’ve added their patch and weapon emblem to the game to support their cause. You can see them and the new 4th of July skins in the game right now. We as a company are working with various charities and we have in the past supported veterans and their families.
Engine Update
Currently, the game is using Unreal Engine 4.19 and has been for over a year. We’ve updated the engine multiple times in the past, but as the full release comes closer and we have a live game to support, big changes like this are more and more dangerous. Game engines are insanely complicated and take years and years of work not only to make, but also to understand, so it’s not a small task to switch engine version - it’s not a one-button click and done - a lot of base systems change from version to version, which means a lot of work and sometimes redoing some parts of the game to better utilize new technology or even to get it to work properly.
To add to that, we’ve made some changes to the engine to suit our needs and those also have to be taken into account when making the switch. Our team has to be careful and test a lot between steps to know which part is problematic and fix it immediately.
This all is intentionally a bit vague to not get bogged down in details, but for completeness sake, we’ll take a look at one of the biggest changes coming in 4.21 for us, which means the Replication Graph.
Replication is a term used to describe how game and server talk to each other - how player position, rotation, state and all variables are moved between game and the server and other games in a match. In 4.20, Epic Games added the Replication Graph which can decide which information from which parts of the level are most important to you and how to get to them the fastest. Remember: the server has to calculate positions and rotations of dozens of players, their movement, health, ammo, hits, it has to simulate vehicles and bullets, calculate wall penetration and ricochets. We do some clever tricks to lower the amount of data that is transferred between players, but the Replication Graph helps with this a lot, freeing up the CPU time on both the server and the client.
Now, it all sounds pretty great, but the challenge is that everything in the game is relying on this data being reliably transferred between players and most bugs in multiplayer games are related to this data being lost or corrupted.
If you would just update the engine and do nothing more, the Replication Graph wouldn’t even do anything. We have to change how our netcode works to use this new, awesome feature to its fullest potential. This means changing a lot under the hood and a lot of testing, to make sure it works faster and more reliably than before. Additionally, other teams also have to take this into account - animation states, weapon data, vehicles - everything is being moved between players and has to synchronize well.
So, to summarize: while the basic engine update itself is not very hard and can be done in a day or two by one person, it’s the work that comes after that’s the challenge - making sure everything works and doesn’t crash, with hundreds of thousands of lines of code written over the years by us and Epic Games.
Optimization
The other big part of the 0.7 preparations is taking another deep look into the performance of the game. In 0.6 we’ve made major strides, speeding the game up by a lot and making it perform vastly better than before, but we’re still not satisfied completely with the result.
Optimization is not only done by technical staff, though - it’s a team effort, starting on designing features and mechanics that are not requiring a lot of processing power, through level design that takes into account sight lines and level streaming, going through the assets that have to be prepared in a certain way to perform the best they can, down to the technical side of optimizing code and calculations, as well as rendering, creating clever tricks to only render what is absolutely necessary.
Currently we’re working very hard on three major areas: level (asset) optimization, RAM usage and stuttering related to server performance. All of those areas are working together in a big way, because optimizing levels will increase the average FPS, but eliminating stutters and freezes will make those FPS feel a lot better. Having more free memory to load textures and objects will also reduce the number of loading stutters and will speed up the loading.
The good news is that we know what needs to be done to make sure the game performs as good as we can. We’re constantly testing things internally and sometimes even externally with the community (like we did last week on the PTE), looking for ways to increase the game’s performance and from this research come plans on how to make it awesome.
We estimate that since the release of the Early Access version in October last year, we’ve increased the average FPS 200-300% for most players and reduced stuttering by more than 75%. There’s still a lot of things we can make better and this work is progressing nicely - it just takes time, but rest assured, optimization is something we’re really focusing on.
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