July Progress Update! Alpha is expanding!

Hi generals!! Another month has passed and here is the summary of everything that happened with The Last General!

ALPHA EXPANDING

During July I released multiple new versions of the alpha and also expanded it to 110 players with levels of activity 5 or more on the Discord! By the end of August that will increase to everyone with level of activity 2 or more, which is a few hundred more. That allows me to detect and fix crashes or bugs that show up in different hardware from my test devices on Windows, Mac and Linux. Here is a video I made in Alpha 0.1.16 explaining how the game works and showing the longest uninterrupted gameplay to date. This is still very early but it's starting to take shape!

SCREENSHOTS FROM ALPHA TESTERS

TONS OF CHANGES

• Automated supply system

  • Added capacities and resource types to the supply trucks

    • Made them pick up resources from factories and carry them to the frontlines to supply any units that need them.

    • Made the resources transfer slowly from factories to trucks and then from trucks to units.

• Added SED13 kamikaze drone and setup new flight controller rules to allow them to violate height constraints when going for the final dive.

• Added QBD1 combat drone and HL5 missiles.

• Added FPV-L drone with a SFRPG head attached, with dynamic propeller sound, indicators, first and third person controls and camera noise/distorsion/interference.

• Implemented a centralized danger system so units can report different threats and dangerous positions or areas to other units.

• Implemented many different types of dangers that can be used by different types of units and hierarchy groups to make decisions.

• Made units spotted and explosions contribute to the dangers knowledge for each player.

• Made perceived dangers fade and disappear over time.

• Added an eraser tool to easily delete multiple strategic actions when redesigning your strategy. Added eraser cursor for it too.

• Improved city dominant force calculations (which determines ownership) so that it’s harder to conquer a city when there are still a lot of enemy units in it. Reduced the influence of proximity to the city center and required a larger force difference for a switch to happen.

• Change cursor to a pencil when you are drawing orders so you know you are in drawing mode.

• Improve colors and outline changes on strategic actions to make it clear when they are hovered or selected.

• Improved fading distances for strategic orders to avoid blocking the view of what’s going on in that area when zooming in or controling in first person.

• Smoothed out the shapes of strategic orders to avoid strange zigzags when drawing at low angles. Also make the orders look way more polished.

• Allowed area strategic actions to close properly when the drawing almost forms a valid loop, even if it has a small overlap between the start and end of the path drawn by the player. This avoids drawing a full loop just to have the order canceled because it didn’t form a nice area.

• Fixed visibility issues with unit indicators and hierarchy groups indicators at different distances.

• Drawing a new strategic action for a specific company now deletes the previous strategic order for that company (if any).

• Improved the line that shows connections between companies and their orders to go to a more relevant place inside the order’s area.

• Added a clearer title to the panels for actions that create a new company (when a company is not currently selected).

• Now helis can orient themselves properly (using pitch and yaw) to aim and shoot at detected targets.

• Improved unguided rockets to follow a more realistic trajectory which should fall way less than they were falling.

• Removed construction ghost preview if the construction is hit and interrupted/destroyed.

• Fixed the main crash affecting the alpha! From time to time something would randomly trigger the catastrophic destruction of hundreds of thousands of physics objects at the same time, causing the game to freeze and crash a few seconds later. With a lot of detective work with the alpha testers and a helpful unrelated bug report from @giraffe2.0, I finally managed to reproduce this catastrophic event consistently (by shooting at factories while being built), and was able to figure out and fix the issue!

• Made soldiers and vehicles react to dangers nearby and move away from it.

• Made soldiers react to dangers by crouch to become a smaller target for direct projectile, or stand and run away from explosive dangers like artillery, tank shells or drones in the future.

• Added voice communications when cities are captured or lost.

• Added locking and locked target sounds to know the status of guided missiles launchers.

• Improved helicopter controls so they are easier to control with WASD on the keyboard. Now A/D will apply both roll and yaw, and you can still use Q/E to change yaw specifically if you need to (and those keys are all remappable).

• Fixed problem with companies not getting deselected properly when clicking on the ground.

• Made a new basic animation system. Used it to rotate the ZU234 radar, Legion CRAM cannon, drone propellers, and to add recoil to tanks cannons.

• Make planes and drones have their preferred altitudes and minimum safe altitudes and different maneuverability levels that the AI can use to control them better.

• Improved Legion C-RAM model to have better quality in first person.

• Changed first person camera on L2A4 to match the gunner view.

• Made a new tool to create material mask maps easily so adding new units is much faster now.

• Improved sound distance attenuation curves.

• Made system for independent explosions unrelated to projectiles, and switched kamikaze drones and proximity fuse projectiles to use it. This system also allows chain reactions of explosions making other things explode.

• Improved performance on explosions particles when near the camera. Later they will go away fully when I switch to volumetric particles.

• Fixed issue in polyanya-based and road based pathfinding joining algorithm causing weird short loops around objects and making units get stuck.

• Added aiming hint points and lines

• Reduce C-RAM smoke particles that were blocking visibility of the shots and target.

• Slow down AA and C-RAM bullets as expected because of air drag.

• Hid strategic orders in first person, keeping only relevant ones (air orders if you are piloting an aircraft, or arty orders if you are controlling arty units)

• Improved death cams to show the dead/destroyed units or their impacts better. Specially for units that crash themselves into other objects.

• Improved transitions between weapon (1st person) and unit (3rd person) cameras

• Migrated unit weapons and ammo to UI Toolkit and made it show/hide too when toggling UI on/off.

• Made a new shader for dust, scratches and burning of vehicles including deformation for destroyed ones.

• Fixed infantry movements glitch causing weapons to point in random directions when running and switching directions.

• Fixed infantry transition between first person and third person when running to be interpolated the same way they do when the camera switches are done by the player.

• Hiding minimap area too when toggling UI on/off.

• Changing in-game songs dynamically depending on the current match situation.

• Fix camera glitching when following a unit and pointing straight up or down.

• Fixed camera glitch when zooming in too much while following certain units.

• Hide the cursor sight for units with fixed weapons where it wasn’t needed.

• Increased the effect of low altitude on drone feed interference.

• Pausing game automatically when going into the pause menu.

• Added pause menu music

• Added timestamps to production build logs to help with debugging.

• Stopping all game sounds when exiting to main menu.

• Fix volume and speed changes on audio emitters when game is paused.

• Fixed issue with keyboard navigation in menus.

• Improved some materials and visual effects.

• Added Jimothy to the game!

• Added a danger map so units can plan their routes avoiding enemy territory when possible.

• Now company members can transfer automatically to other strategic orders that need them if they are not currently following any orders.

• Improved soldiers weapon camera so when soldiers run the camera moves to their chest instead of the third person camera.

• Improved transitions between third person camera and weapon camera for all infantry weapons.

• Improved recoil in first person for infantry.

• Made starting budgets be proportional to map sizes.

• Change unit indicator colors for supply units to be easier to distinguish from combat units.

• Made transports picking up passengers move at full speed

• Spawning more initial companies.

• Spawning more trucks and further from the water.

• Spawning some initial heliports in the island from the beginning.

• Improved sound distance attenuations for loud sounds (explosions, jet engines, missiles) so they can be heard from far away without being too loud when near the player.

• Fix bullet flyby sounds sometimes triggering for your own bullets.

• Improved industrial areas to give more space between objects and prevent blocking the path for produced units.

• Fixed bug finding the closest navmesh position to certain coordinates.

• Fixed and improved some texts in the factory panels (capitalization, showing units for stored resources)

• Fixed issue causing units to avoid some bridges when pathfinding.

• Fixed two crashes that happened very often at the end of island generation.

• Fixed crash when deleting a selected order using the eraser tool.

• Make initial and newly built factories also produce trucks.

• Removed FPV drones from the factory retooling options (they are deployed with infantry directly)

• Updated some credits (let me know if you are missing there or if you want your name there changed or removed)

• Made soldiers not die so easy from falling from some height

• Fixed empty texts in Portuguese and Bosnian that didn’t fallback to english when they didn’t have an approved translation yet.

• Shortened Russian texts in the orders bar that were too long due to including “order” at the end of each text.

• Prevented selection of disabled strategic orders (with both mouse and keyboard).

• Allowed rebinding the keys to rotate the camera (middle mouse button by default)

• Fixed cannons from destroyed units sometimes pointing up.