Developers Update 32

Steam post image Welcome to our 32nd developers update. After quite some time, we are back with some status report on our current work and planned work for the future. There are two major tasks, that are our priority list at this point:

New campaigns

We are working very hard on finishing two new campaigns that are included in the Season Pass / Ultimate Edition. You will receive a total of 20 missions, 10 for Germany and 10 Russia. As before, they are fully scripted missions with varying mission objectives and gameplay. We tried to improve upon the first missions, by creating larger scenarios and with more units available at your disposal. Also, we moved most missions away from the Middle Eastern setting and provide you some interesting and fresh Eastern European battlegrounds with new assets all over the place. Steam post image If you are into singleplayer content, we suggest upgrading your package during the sale!

Performance

The second key goal for this year, is to enhance the game performance significantly. 2019 will be all about optimization and improvements to the game engine. We are currently working on improving the multi-threading capabilities of the game engine. Furthermore, we go through each major feature, that is demanding, most of them are related to AI and think about ways to optimize them even more. We already made great progress here and we expect noticeable boosts from our current work. Not only do we want to improve performance, but we also want to improve AI behaviour. For instance AI will now have a peripheral vision and can notice units moving in from behind. If you are careful, you can still sneak up on enemy units, but it won't be that easy anymore. Also, we aren’t quite happy with the multiplayer stability, since we switched to 64-bit. The CPU architecture isn’t all too compatible with fully synced multiplayer. Something that put us in a pretty bad spot, as 32-bit is stable netcode wise, but unstable due to the memory load, while 64-bit offers more than enough potential memory usage, but the synchronization model is not fully in sync and causes OOS. To solve this, we are moving the netcode from a fully synced model between clients, to a server to client architecture. Step by step, the server will handle more and the clients less, which should also help gaining performance for clients and fixes OOS related issues, as the server makes sure everyone has the same data. At one point, it could also possibly allow us to have a full server model, including dedicated servers. Steam post image For solo skirmish players, we are also working on a feature, that allows you to play against AI, as if you were playing in singleplayer. All netcode related implications will be removed and you have a perfectly smooth game, just like in singleplayer. Obviously, there are some limitations when playing in multiplayer, tick rates and similar, that limit the maximum possible performance. We think, if you play solo, these limitations shouldn’t apply to you and that's why we are working on this special case. We are fixing the 1st person controls, that sometimes tend to warp, as the weapon aligns to the target. Furthermore, we plan to have the local aiming model, once we completed the server / client architecture. This will help significantly to minimize the input lag. Overall, we expect the game to perform better and better throughout the coming months, which should be a noticeable quality improvement for everyone.