November was a busy month! I worked on a ton of different things, getting stuff ready for the alpha to start with family and friends in just 90 days (fingers crossed!):\n

PLAYER COUNTS AND ALLIANCES

Some parts of the game were limiting the maximum number of potential players to 4, which was my original intention with the game (to keep armies large enough to feel like a general), but there was no technical reason to actually limit this, so I removed those limitations, allowing me to support more than 4 players in the future too. I also implemented alliances support, so that players can share their spotted units information, and units obviously don\'t attack each other if they are allied.

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/00a90b87b732907abb27444dde6a1df46aa037bb.jpg\"][/img]

LINE OF SIGHT

I implemented a new line of sight system that is much faster and more precise than before, taking into account partial obstructions, unit distances, sizes and speed and camo levels. This is a debugging view of spotted and blocked unit visibilities using the new system, which allows pretty long spotting distances under the right conditions. This system will allows spotted units to remain in memory for a while after they are not visible anymore, instead of instantly being ignored.

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/94703b7b37f6f73b5bb0d9f6c546760202cfc1ae.jpg\"][/img]

MULTIPLE WEAPONS PER UNIT

Up to this moment each unit had just one weapon, now I finally got the time to implement multiple weapons per vehicle, switching between them, and displaying their available/selected weapons and ammo when controlling units in first/third person.

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/8157c05f587524962a833abebea0b132489757b4.png\"][/img]

UNIT INDICATORS IMPROVEMENTS

I am now calculating the location of each group in the hierarchy in a better way, and separating the indicators based on their distance from that positions, so to give an example: a platoon position will be determined by where its most important (and numerous) units are, and the game will display unit indicators for any other squad that is further away from the overall platoon position.

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/30fba2bd94bf58d2fa46c65b0ea7f1f3aedb54cc.png\"][/img]

COVER POSITIONS AND NAVMESH PATHFINDING

I implemented a more efficient and precise system to find cover positions when under fire, and to find paths between any map points. The previous systems had a lot of edge cases that didn\'t provide optimal results, so I replaced them with a better one utilizing physics colliders geometry directly for efficient voxelization of the world (which is then used to calculate the cover positions really fast, or to generate a navmesh for pathfinding). This is what the obstacle voxelization results look like in the step before generating the navmesh (in debug mode, this is not visible in the game of course):

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/ea0a026f8b482184c8c78fa782cc86e5b57cf9cb.png\"][/img]

KEY BINDINGS / REMAPPING, JOYSTICK, HOTAS AND CONTROLLERS SUPPORT

Getting stuff ready for the alpha, I did some work on the main menu, single player menu, credits screen and settings screen, including key remapping, which effectively also added support for joysticks, HOTAS and controllers support. Then I spent some hours flying helicopters and fighter jets using my HOTAS, it\'s just too much fun.\n

\nFILE SIZE\nI dropped the file size of the game from 12GB to just 4GB, after discovering that building the game to the same folder over and over generated a bunch of garbage that didn\'t get replaced as I expected. Obviously this wouldn\'t have happened in the actual uploaded builds because those would be clean builds, but it\'s nice to know that the game is 1/3rd of the size I thought!\n

\nTLG GETTING BIG! This week TLG surpassed 95000 wishlists and got into the top 500 most wishlisted games on Steam (#463 now). Thank you for this! I didn\'t even imagine something like this could happen when I started working on the game almost 3 years ago.

\nJOIN DISCORD AND SOCIAL MEDIA!

With the alpha just around the corner, remember to join the other 3500 generals in the Official Discord to be able to try the game for free! Also please join the social media channels to help TLG grow and get to more players: Youtube , TikTok , Instagram , Facebook , X / Twitter \n

Hi! Here I am reporting for another monthly update! \n\nLast month I added direct control for all vehicles in the game (yes, that includes helicopters, airplanes, tanks, APCs, AAs, IFVs, Transport vehicles, trucks, everything!). I also implemented some new systems for camera placement, allowing players to aim vehicle weapons basically in first person!\n\nHere is a video showing all that:

\nOther news since the last update is that TLG has now over 90000 wishlists, and almost 50000 subscribers on Youtube! And I also had a great interview with \"NoiceGuy\" also known as \"The Autistic Armchair General\", here it is if you want to hear a lot more details about The Last General:\n\n

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After working on performance optimizations for a while and learning a ton of new stuff. I took the leap and worked on my own water and terrain shaders, which enable much better performance and support a lot of extra features I couldn\'t implement with the previous out of the box solutions I was using.

Now we have much better water and rivers shaders which don\'t impact CPU performance at all, nicer screen space reflections and way more detailed terrain, including road lanes markings, side markings, crosswalks, farm patterns, sidewalk textures and wet or dirty roads near the curbs. The visual impact is pretty cool and it\'s only getting started!\n\nI also did some tests for realtime terrain modification and performance was good enough, which will enable impact terrain deformation (craters) and also proper trenches!

\nLastly, I worked on some visual effects improvements, navigation, AI and added a new unit too (the Charly IFV!)\n\nHere are some images I have been posting in the Discord progress updates! There are also 2 videos over there but can\'t post them here without uploading them to Youtube.\n\nSee you soon for the October update! Hopefully less delayed than this one! \n\n[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/0aaa681a4f466b8f516b06aecd7df28a84b54b9a.png\"][/img]

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/747bd0894a67a39d2cb70097131ee305df7a34e1.png\"][/img]

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/956b4e58220788182ae6f01d1fdbf8ce3e3c30c2.png\"][/img]

August was a fun month for my nerdy and performance obsessed side. \nSpent days after days profiling, finding the worst offenders and optimizing them, reorganizing systems, read/write dependencies, parallelizing some more things, unparallelizing some other things, caching a ton of calculations, applying spatial partitioning, rearranging entities and prefabs, compounding physics bodies, etc, and the resulting performance improvements were epic.\n\nNow the game runs about three times faster than at the end of July, and got a long list of future performance improvements to implement too in future optimization months. Dedicating the whole month only to performance was really nice and productive compared to optimizing smaller things here and there while developing features, so I will probably repeat it with another 2 performance months next year, before the demo and then before early access.\n\nAs I didn\'t work on any features the whole month, there isn\'t anything new to show, but here is a video of the largest island size, that I captured in 1440p while stress testing some rendering optimizations. OBS studio was setup horribly so it doesn\'t look as smooth as it really is, but it gives an idea of the scale anyway:

July is over and completely forgot to post my monthly update, so here I am!!\n\nBefore recapping what happened in July, the big news are that The Last General just hit 75,000 wishlists on Steam yesterday!! Thanks everyone for that, it\'s incredible!!\n\nOk, back to July!

The month started with the aftermath of the last trailer video going viral, so I spent a lot time answering comments and messages all over the place until things calmed down a bit.

\nIn the first few days I also implemented and improved some gameplay features around the dominant force criteria for conquering towns and cities, making it much more robust and enabling small forces to hold a city for a while against a surrounding larger enemy force.

I also worked on the consequences of towns/cities changing hands, and the population support for the different nations changing over time and affecting production levels for factories nearby.\n\nAfter that I took a little break to get married (yay!) and hang out with my family that traveled 7000 miles from Argentina for it!\n\nAfter that little staycation I was back in full force and did a ton of work optimizing particles and reorganizing systems for better CPU performance, clearing up job dependencies and utilizing all threads way better than before. For particle improvements I switched most of the heaviest particles to be processed on the GPU in one gigantic VFX Graph system, which also enables proper particle sorting by distance which doesn\'t work nicely with individual VFX systems (performance is also way better).

With those changes done, I was also able to make dust and smoke last much longer after explosions and strong impacts. Leading to this new and much dustier TLG:\n\n\n[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/bd7af6e69d58e22300383dc03de72065eb55025f.png\"][/img]

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/b584e6a0992bd182bcfda407db8c9a6bd1576b3f.png\"][/img]

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/e394be4b80f3d2c44fa77f5c678bae21366cd060.png\"][/img]

In the last couple of days (in August already) I also worked on some rendering improvements for high count objects (like fences, grass or bushes) which drastically improve performance on the largest 400km2 islands, and also physics improvements for the terrain colliders which cut physics time almost in half.

I also spent a few hours to create a new collaborative Wiki, that will be hosted at https://thelastgeneral.wiki.gg and will go public in just a few days. Anyone can contribute to that wiki, adding or updating content, so if you want to help let me know here or in the Discord.

[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44545418/136e106fe574593c406b068a6ef806d57a1a42e1.png\"][/img]

Overall everything is going really well and making progress to have a pretty optimized alpha test, remember to join the Discord to be in that alpha around the end of this year!\n\n

What a month!
After releasing the new trailer video it went a little viral (170k views so far!) and a lot of new players got to know about TLG! It recently hit the 60000 wishlists and 2000 discord members milestones!

I want to thank you all for all the kind messages about it, it's been really motivating!
In case you missed it, here is that trailer video again!

The video also shows many of the features I worked on at the beginning of the month, like soldiers boarding/unboarding vehicles or garrisoning into buildings, and direct control of soldiers and vehicles.

Now that this video is out and the TLG family is growing way faster, all my efforts are going into the next big step in the development: the alpha test!

My focus in the next few months will be mostly on AI (for both NPCs and your own troops) and performance work.
My goal is to have a nice single player alpha around the end of this year, to start testing the game in more devices than just mine, and get some early feedback to incorporate before the demo.

The alpha test will start with a small group of Discord users (moderators and some of the most active users) and then expand every couple weeks to more and more discord members, as I fix and improve things and confirm everything is working well and stable.
To join that alpha test, get on the discord! https://discord.gg/thelastgeneral
Once the alpha is working nicely for a lot of people, I will drop it as a demo on Steam for anyone to try!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aa5SAbrrF0

Another month went by and we reached another great milestone: The Last General has hit 45,000 wishlists!
It was a pretty busy month with a ton of nice progress, and rounding up some stuff for the new official video that will be coming out in about two weeks!

Here are some of the new features and improvements:

FIGHTER JETS

GUIDED MISSILES

UNIT PRODUCTION

UNIT PATHS VISUALIZATIONS

DESTRUCTION

CRATERS

PROJECTILE IMPACTS

LARGER COMPANIES

Hi everyone! April was a crazy month, with The Last General reaching 40,000 wishlists and 4,000 followers on Steam. Thanks a lot to everyone for supporting my dream project, it really means a lot to me!

Here is a small recap of what happened in The Last General since the last month's progress update:

APRIL FOOLS GAMEPLAY VIDEO
I started the month with a joke gameplay video for April Fools showing some of the progress I made in March (mostly related to some basic soldier animations, truck logistics and strategic actions). If you haven't watched it yet, I recommend it!

CONSTRUCTION
I developed a new construction system that animates the construction process while they are being built, in addition to the placement system to select where they should be constructed, and the construction panel with all the options (for now, will change a lot).

You can watch a video of the animated construction system in action here .


DEFENSES

As part of the construction system, many new objects can be places for defensive purposes, like fortifications, trenches, barriers, sandbags and C-RAM. Some of them will be built by the troops themselves (even automatically when they are assigned to a defensive area or defensive line with that behavior enabled), others will be transported into the selected place.




DRONE MECHANICS
I also worked a bit on the drone mechanics, that will be used for doing recon on enemy territory. Infantry will also have smaller drones available for FPV strikes. You can watch a video about it here


ANIMATIONS AND RAGDOLLS
Lastly, I worked on migrating all animations into DOTS for way better performance, implemented inertial blending, inverse kinematics and ragdolling soldiers when they die (hit by bullets or powerful explosions nearby). You can see a video of this here



NEXT STEPS

This month I will continue adding features and polishing some others, and hopefully release a new official trailer video with more focus on gameplay than the last one.

If you haven't, please join the discord to see all this updates as they happen, give me feedback and get into the early playtests this year. You are all making this game much better!

After 2 years of development and 6 months since the last trailer video I recorded for the game, let's go over all the new stuff I've been busy working on!

UPDATED VISUALS

NEW VEHICLES

AIR SUPPORT

UNIT HIERARCHY

STRATEGIC ACTIONS

RIVERS AND BRIDGES

AI IMPROVEMENTS

LIGHTS AND AUDIO

IMPROVED ONLINE PRESENCE

NEXT STEPS