Hi, friends. This is one of those diaries in which we report on the work done over the last couple of months. What kind of balance changes were made, what was added newly and how we are working on the game, which is worth waiting for. Read below about all these and some more.

We think of you. On these serene summer nights ...

Community required the option to hide healthbars and we are ready to provide it. Now in the game settings you can remove them over your, allied and enemy vehicles, permanently or until selection or aiming. And highlights, markers and almost all the elements of the interface also. So it's more difficult to understand what is happening, but we know that a truly hardcore player with a gentle soul might be scared of healthbars much more than the 1st of September :)
Worked with the trenches, so you could bent them and choose the distance between the shooting cells while building. We taught the infantry to use and treat them as a friend, because at first, units build their way avoiding trenches, preferring to die with proud head and clean boots. After visiting the lecture "Trench - my winding way into a happy tomorrow", the infantry learned to shoot, move, throw grenades, fight hand to hand, but not leave the shelter without unnecessary need. In case when enemy infiltrate the trench, the infantryman knows what to do without player’s orders. If enemy armored vehicles are approaching the trenches, a unit with a AT-rifle will stand for shooting. Same unit that didn’t stick out when his comrades fought with the infantry. Unfortunately, you can’t hide in the foxhole from all the sorrows of the world. The trenches can now be destroyed by drifting on them with your armored monsters, or in the old manner, - sending a land mine. We made a separate seismic wave so that we could set up the damage to the trenches for each projectile. Yeah, yeah, we made this for you!

’Some of this and that and everything else’.

We continue to work on the "Front Line" gamemode to make the fight more interesting, added several factors that affect the victory. Twice during the session there is an order for each team to attack on a certain section of the front line. For the breakthrough and seizure of this territory, the attacking party receives additional points, thereby bringing his victory nearer. Now the victory is also affected by killing enemy units. Even if you have little infantry and have nothing to capture the territory, you can stop the breakthroughs, blow up tanks, put mines. Sometimes it’s more useful to stop the enemy than to mindlessly attack. And we did some more…

• Set up machine guns, increasing their rate of fire to real indicators, but slightly reducing the damage and suppressing effect to keep their effectiveness at the same level and the infantry did not feel helpless.
• Changed the rules of armor piercing, so that shells with a caliber much larger than the thickness of the armor have more chances to pierce and less to ricochet.
• Set up the shell normalization, so now armor piercing projectile change it’s trajectory for 4.5 degrees.
• Did nonlinear aiming. At close ranges, cannon aiming is at the maximum value after the first shot. At longer ranges, the number of shots to aim and the minimum radius reduction both grow.
• We set up the noise mechanics, which we talked about earlier for snipers, and the aiming with time for riflemen, so that at long distances they have a clear advantage against the submachine gunners.
• We created a test polygon in which you can shoot from everything, and a marker that allows you to see the armor rate under the cursor. That helped a lot with finding bugs in models.
• Added new commanders with their unique style gameplay: light mechanized brigade and reconnaissance-sabotage battalion.
• Entered into the game new units, such as T-28 from the cover image, lend-lease Valentine to the USSR tree, elite snipers for each of the factions with self-loading rifles and camouflage, and others.

So good that I'm not afraid of death.

As always, fixed bugs, one of which we want to share with you, because it’s ... pretty creepy. We started work on creating bots for coop gamemodes. And we wanted the bot to win not by cheating, but by unpredictability, so that they went through many revisions and iterations, refinements, improvements, and sometimes worsening, disputes, anger and cats hecatombs, until one day the chosen ones rose up, that didn’t want to die. Well, you know that what is dead, may never die. We tested a new adaptive spawn system that adjusts to the situation on the battlefield and calls the units based on what is missing. At the time of the explosion of the gun, the crew sometimes flies up from the blast wave and the health of the infantrymen goes into minus, but they are dead only when they fall to the ground. As you may have guessed, the bot spawned these lucky ones with minus health, so that they took their places by the cannon. Hell, even death did not relieve the artillerymen from suffering! Over time, it turned out one more detail, complementing the picture of the zombie apocalypse - they could be killed only by snap-shooting on the head or by fire, as these actions cause the script to "die" regardless of the amount of current health. So even if you actually were not going to make a game about zombies, you still have no choice! This is all for today. Maybe a couple of questions more. Do you need other tasks like attack orders in the session? If so, which ones? Wish you the best!

[ 2017-08-24 23:36:48 CET ] [ Original post ]