Dev Blog July 2025

Hi Everyone!

It’s already the end of July and here’s our development update. Today you’ll see a new update for the game that includes a new shotgun, carrier drone, networking improvements, and bug fixes. You can view the full change log at the bottom of this update.

New Features

Carrier Drone

The new carrier drone opens up some new ways to play. You can attach small items such as magazines or explosives to the bottom and deliver them to different locations on the battlefield. Let’s say you see a patrol coming down the road and want to set up an explosive to ambush them. Attach an explosive, fly the drone to the ambush point, and drop off the explosive to detonate later. Or maybe a buddy is out of ammo for their M249, attach a box of ammo and fly it over to them.

M1014 Shotgun

Next up is the M1014 semi-automatic shotgun. It accepts any optic that uses 1913 rails and can hold a flashlight or PEQ-15 on the front.

Throw Magazines

You can now toss magazines to your buddies if they are low on ammo and you're pinned down. To throw a magazine, place it into one of the item pouches, equip it, and then toss it as you would any other thrown item. This is also how you attach magazines to the new carrier drone.

Multiplayer optimizations

A lot of work has gone into improving multiplayer performance and stability. We added three features to help with this. First was One issue you may have seen is that you can spawn into a mission and not see other players or enemies. This was caused by a backup in the message queue. So the first change was to increase the send rates while lowering the size of each message. Our tick rate was 10, so 10 times per second we were sending the full information on each object you own. We changed this to instead send a little bit every single frame.

While spreading out the load improved reliability, we still had an issue with the volume of data. The next step was to reduce the size of each message. We went through each object's update message, organized the data, and added compression where we could. The largest boost was compressing quaternions into a single 32bit number and then decompressing it on other clients.

Finally we set up priority based send rate adjustment. Priority is modified during gameplay to increase the priority based on the distance from players, if the object is moving, and how much of a threat the object is to a player. So if an object is not moving we send its position less, if players are very far away from something we send its position less often, and this can be changed per entity type which allows us to increase the priority for important objects like helicopters and enemy characters while lowering rates for less important objects like boxes or smoke grenades.

Here you can see a visualization of this working. Watch the increase in messages as the weapon falls from the shelf.

All of this work has allowed us to play multiplayer on a simulated 2G cell phone internet connection! There’s still improvements to be made but this should be a very noticeable improvement for everyone. We’ll continue to tune and improve the networking, packet sizes, and update rates for objects. So if you see something moving slowly just let us know and we’ll get it fixed.

90s Sneak Peak