link Hi, friends. While the Best Way programmers take Soldiers: Arena from the darkness of unoptimization into a stable bright future, the rest of us also have something to do. In today's issue of DevFeedback, we'll talk about some of the minor (and not so minor) fixes, changes and settings that Soldiers: Arena has been subjected to in the last few months. Also we’ll tell some about logic and behavior of AI that did not fit into the previous diary. Over the past few months, AI has grown strongly and moved from the phase of children's entertaining to the phase of teenage rude AI, and we just had to send it to military school to correct its behavior.

There he passed the young fighter’s course and learned how to:

• Choose the right targets. The threat factor of the enemy and the distance to it are both taken into account. For example, an SPG is much more dangerous for a tank than a grenade launcher or another tank. But, what if the SPG is on the other end of the map, and the grenade launcher is ten steps behind and reloading his weapon? Now the units know what to do in this situation. Machine gun crews know that a car moving straight towards you is a bad sign, and anti-aircraft gun crews know that no ordinary bird can cast such a big shadow.
• Use weapons on the right situation. Against infantry in a shelter or on a hill, anti-infantry grenades are preferable to small arms, a moving car is better to hit with a HE-shell, and the smoke grenade used in time has a positive effect on the survival rate of the entire squad. And of course they know a few things about the importance of a precision lobbing of a sapper’s shovel - If the shovel of death is in the hand, and the enemy has come close enough - the AI ​​knows what to do!
• Manage units. And not only how to play with the rushing tank, but also how to play guardedly with howitzers, how to support the allied infantry with fire from light cannons, to withstand the balance between sitting in the rear and breakthroughs of the front line with SPG-s. He learned some tricks about the game with situational and complex units. For example, Willys with bazookas will patrol the territory until enemy tanks go on a breakthrough, and only then will he go into a head-on.

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While AI learned the tricks of military art, we:

• Have worked on interfaces. Including updated metagame interface, which we will show in the future. Have made templates for commanders, so that in the tests you can start the game in two clicks.
• Have set up and deepened shooting mechanics. At medium and long distances, precision was increased for rifles and aiming for mortars. We set up a different radius of auto attacks for cannons and vehicles armed with armor-piercing shells to reduce the amount of random and ineffective shooting and avoid the situation when the AI ​​attacked without even a chance to pierce. For example Pak-35/36 will start shooting only from the distance of guaranteed penetration of the armored car, and BS-3 from the distance with which it will be able to precisely penetrate a medium tank. Fine tuning of each gun in the game continues.
• Have conducted tests. Including the intensity and duration of the session. Have increased the session time, the number of points needed to win, reduced the limit of units and so on.
• Have fixed game mechanics. For example, we fixed the ability to dig or not dig trenches on each individual type of terrain to avoid underwater and above-asphalt trenches in the game. With the help of smoke grenades, you can now hide the tank or SPG, but only in the case that it does not create much noise from the shooting and is not spotted on the minimap.
• Have added new units and replaced the some old models. Amongst which we can find the leFH 18 from the render and Pak 43.

link And as always we fought with bugs. The last two months have passed under the sign of a Drifting Stug. Because of the bug in the settings of the new Stug III Ausf. G and StuH 42 Ausf. G, suspension worked incorrectly, so they moved as if they came from a new part of The Fast and the Furious. At the same time the infantry was forced to cross the swamps of the map of Polesie only by swimming, which greatly complicated the infantry battle, especially in combination with the underwater trenches. And you could go inside almost any object on the map using Direct Control. Imagine a floating infantryman in a freshly dug trench in the middle of a swamp. Add a tank hiding inside the stone and decorate this with the drifting Stug. This rare sight is only comparable in it’s madness with the The Last Judgment by Bosch. Fortunately, all this you are not destined to see.
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We're part of the same place We're part of the same time (c)

In the development tree, F-22 and Pak 36 (r) cannons have made a sudden appearance. As you know, these two are essentially the same cannon fought for both sides. F-22 was a successful implementation of an unsuccessful concept of a universal anti-aircraft-divisional gun. Although it was created just fine and with the use of the latest technologies, it did not cope with the tasks set. By 1941-42 more than 1250 guns were captured by the Wehrmacht. After studying being conducted by German engineers, it turned out that the F-22 has a good safety margin and is excellent for upgrading to an anti-tank one. That was very useful, because the existing AT-devices could not cope with the Soviet T-34 and KV-1, and the production of Pak-40 had yet to be adjusted. So Pak 36 (r) appeared on the battlefield, for a penny modernized from the F-22 and became formidable only in battles against the side that created it.
link In Soldiers: Arena this sad story is reflected. F-22 is a universal, but in all respects a weak second-level gun in the USSR tree, which has a weak penetration and low rate of fire, and is the predecessor of the ZIS-3 divisional gun. Pak 36 (r) is an anti-tank third-level gun in the German technology tree, successfully coping with Soviet medium tanks and precedes the Pak-40. With such an elegant solution we filled in the gaps in the technology trees, upgraded the Pak-40 level to the fourth (it was too strong for the third one) and saved work on modeling. Isn’t it great?
link Friends, what units that fought for the several parties would you like to see in the game? Preferably, not those that were bespoke designs. Write in the comments and we still wish you all the best.

[ 2018-07-13 19:19:28 CET ] [ Original post ]