We’ve been heavily focused on performance improvements lately, but of course our non-coding team members haven’t been idle, so we have some fun teasers for you today alongside the coding talk ;)

New Weapons In Progress!

A little weapon teaser today, with this fine example of a gun: the Russian S&W No.3. Firing a .44 cartridge, this revolver offers greater firepower and a faster reload (as you can see below), but the downside is that you need to manually work the hammer each time you want to fire. Smith and Wesson produced these revolvers for Russia by special order, and incorporated design requests from the Russian Ordnance Inspector following Models 1 and 2, leading to the Model 3. However, the Russian government then reverse-engineered the gun, and started producing their own version and even contracting production out to other European countries. These copies were good quality, and cheaper than the S&W version. Although this was somewhat common at the time, it still almost bankrupted Smith and Wesson when the Russian government cancelled orders and delayed or refused payment for shipments of the S&W produced revolvers.

Unity Engine Update

If you didn’t know, Verdun and Tannenberg are made in Unity. This means that when Unity releases updates, both good and bad things can happen with our code - luckily, this time it’s all good! In short, the latest Unity update fixes some issues and makes some improvements which should have a big impact on performance. Combined with work we’ve been doing on how ragdolls are handled, we’re looking at perhaps a 20-25% improvement in performance - this will depend on the exact combination of hardware you’re using, of course. There is still more work to be done to get everything ship-shape, but we’re hoping to be able to roll out this update soon!

Sound System

We have talked before about the new sounds that we’re working on, but the sound system itself will also be getting an update. The main thing this means in practical terms is that the audio gives a better sense of distance and of being in a large environment, though it also just makes things sound *nicer*. Check out the video below for a little teaser with five of the new weapon sounds (some for Verdun, some for Tannenberg, some for both). These are recorded from real weapons! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNODFxU7YHw&feature=youtu.be

Online Questionnaire

After the last Frontline News we had a lot of useful feedback, so thanks to everyone who spoke up. That said, forum debates aren’t for everyone. So, we’ve put together an online survey focusing on our (and your) main topics of interest - you can fill out the survey now. Please do take a few minutes for the survey even if you’ve already expressed your thoughts on the forums or elsewhere, since it’s especially useful for us to have some hard data to work with when planning for the future.

Steam Live Stream!

This Friday at 4:00 PM CET we are going to be trying out a new feature on Steam - live streaming from our Steam Store page! If you’re interested in watching us play and chat about Verdun, just visit the Verdun Store Page. Both through a web browser or inside the Steam app itself will work fine. We hope you found this Frontline News interesting, and we’ll see you next time! Keep an eye on our Steam news (follow us if you like) or watch for our announcements on Facebook or Twitter to hear about our next Frontline News post.

[ 2018-02-23 12:54:40 CET ] [ Original post ]