Hooray TO4, 1st anniversary

Almost a year underway from our launch on 19th december 2019. During this year we have had at least a patch once every month. Patches filled with some impressive updates and content. New weapons, new maps, new animations on weapons, an insane amount of bugfixes on maps and gameplay elements. Really not too bad for such a small team, making this game as a hobby. Yes, we still do that.

This newspost serves three purposes.

First: Nominate TO4 for the "Better with Friends" award on Steam! Second: we want to show you a little bit about the road ahead for the game. What are our plans, what are priorities and what is specificly not on our agenda. And Third: we want to inform you that we are still very actively working on the game, but.. Yes, here is the but: we need some extra time to release the upcoming patch. Why? This has to do with the engine update we are working on. More of that below, first a little applause to our community!

Community

Thanks to our small community we were able to fleshen out the game into the state it currently is. We have had great discussions, test sessions, players pointing out bugs with pictures and videos (and web translators) and most of all: a great faithful small group of testers who spend hundreds of hours (some thousand) into helping us out. This all on our open TO4 Bugtracker and Discord server Thank you. THANK YOU. THANK YOU!! Apart from this great little community, we are as developpers really proud of our game and very much involved with it (as much as our time let's us). So yes: we really read those reviews you guys place on Steam, Discord, etc. We have had conversations with players and people with the nickname: 'yes-i-want-to-play-but-there-is-noone-on-the-servers'. We know this. The current community is centered mostly on the European continent. On top of that: most our active players are there in the evening hours. This is due to the fact that we have a somewhat older community, who are not able to play the game during the day ("hello work, hello families"). Nonetheless; five of the seven evenings in the week, there are mixwars going on. Feel free to jump in our Discord and join those mixwars if you like, we are happy to help out new players! All you need is the game and a headset and a free 1,5 hours playtime. Besides the mixwar we have European and North-American public servers up and running where people can freely play. Again; this is mostly during the evenings (European time). Be aware new players: the game is optimized enough to play on both continent servers. You don't need that ping 19 to actually hit people, feel free to jump on an EU or NA server if there are people playing! A Little call-out to everyone who supports our game: - Nominate TO4 for the "Better with Friends" award on Steam! - Feel free to leave behind an honest review of our game on Steam. The more traffic the game gets, the more attention

The route forwards and Unreal Engine 4.25

We are working now on a stable new patch, based on the unreal engine 4.25. This is a small sentence to write, but an enourmous amount of work to realise for us as a development team. This results in us not bringing a new patch before (at least) half of December 2020. To be clear: we currently can't hotfix a few (smaller) problems that are known (in especially maps), we must first get that 4.25 engine stable. The current patch (UE 4.22) is running on all servers is very stable and performs as we hoped. Great fun!

Upcoming patches (Short to medium long term)

• Most important: the game will remain free to play! We have the servers, the players, the game... now you play it and have fun! It is also good to mention: the system requirements for the game will not change with this engine switch (we actually hope for a little increase in performance).
• We removed the Wwise audio engine we used. We go back to the original Unreal Engine 4 Audio engine (which we already used for ambient sounds in maps). This engine will add for us binaural panning (hrtf) and reverb on sounds. An important topic on the more competitive setting of the game. Initially we already included some new weapon sounds that were in mono on the old engine. We will also get Voicechat reimplemented using UE4's voice chat module
• The maps we currently have will get updates on this new sound engine over time. Don't expect this directly, it's a time consuming job to finish per map.
• Redo the grenade projectile movement and physics (this will also include throwing knives). Also redo the smoke grenade which currently has a bug on longer distance with playermodels.
• Redo some User Interface elements (complete menu's, structures, etc.). Yes this also includes the key binding menu and the strangly positioned Leave Game when playing
• We will further flesh out the UE4 online subsystem, the Steam backend tools and our own to4st sytem, which allows player statistics, game achievements, better admin controls and a lot more potential for the future.
• When we have tackled a few of the above points and deliver a new stable patch, we want to start working a little more on gaining more attention and thus players. Feel free to contact us if you think you can help us out here!
• We will remove the current CTF and Team Deathmatch maps for now. We still have the game mode included, but we want to create dedictated maps for it. We have found out that you need a 100% fitting and great map to complement a game mode. So this will be pushed towards the future.
• Besides our normal game mode there will be an experimental new game mode. We call this one Sabotage. In short: both team rush for one bomb in the middle. First team to pick it up will plant it on teambased bombspot, the other team has to defend. So there is no more dedicated defending and attacking team, this will be decided during the round. This game mode also have players respawn during the round for more quick and focussed gameplay. For this gamemode we want fitting and proper maps. These will be brought over time, we might start with one map in one of the newer patches.

Upcoming patches (long term)

• We are looking into redoing the complete 3rd person player animations (the current animations are slightly wooden, we agree)
• Apart from that the regular stuff: new weapons (some surprises there!), new maps, new weapon animations - in short, more content!
• A great action keybinder system
• Unique character models, combined with taunts and voices
• More depth to sounds in the environments (better footsteps, reverb effects, etc)
• You can see our complete roadmap here: TO4 Trello

What will not happen soon (just so you know)

• Added bot support (you can have absolutly stupid bots or they come with a pre-aim to them. There isn't really a good way in between. We want them, but we lack the time currently and we have other priorities (see the list above).
• More remade maps from the Tactical Ops game. We want to focus on new stuff. Maybe a map will slip in, who knows!
• Insane new graphics, overhauls of maps, etc. We simply lack the manpower to create more unique settings and looks then we currently have.
• Don't expect weapon skins and stuff like that. We are looking into possible tweaks to your guns, but there will be no flashy, cartoonsy weapon skins.