Hey Squaddies,
Lest another three weeks slip by unremarked, we’ve got a patch for you! Some of the good stuff in this one includes performance tweaking, stamina changes, bug fixing, and some localization fixes. We’re still in alpha, so let us know if anything looks out of sorts. And, as always, if you run into any issues with the update, try clearing your cache. Let’s roll:
Stamina
- Vaulting, climbing and jumping now consume stamina in addition to sprinting and prone movement, which already did so previously
- The separate “jumping stamina” has been removed
- Low stamina will not prevent you from vaulting, climbing, jumping or sprinting
- Stamina below half will gradually decrease your movement speed until your sprint at 0 stamina is barely faster than normal movement at full stamina. This affects crouched and prone movement too.
- Weapon sway is still affected by stamina
Localization
The Squad Community has done great work translating Squad into many different languages. The initial import of the localization files into Alpha 10 failed, however. We also discovered some issues with our use of different fonts in the game and the way we set some text assets. We are currently fixing all those issues and unifying our font use. In Alpha 10.1, all supported languages work but a few text strings will not be translated yet. We’ll continue working with our awesome localization community to have the game fully localized for Alpha 11. Qapla’*! (*Sorry, Klingon support not included.)
Performance
A focus of our work in these past three weeks has been the performance of the game. Particular problem areas identified were server performance and client performance on specific maps.
With that in mind, our mapping department is currently working on addressing the most problematic maps, as noted in the recent Recap, and will continue to improve maps one after another. Map optimization is a lot of manual work and no major changes have been done in this short time frame, but they’re not the only team working on a better Squad experience.
For server performance, we’ve done some changes to make player state related replication operations quicker. However, the public test on Monday indicated that the server performance is still not on the same level as the later A9 versions. This is a problem because longer frame times on the server can lead to perceived issues with hit detection on the clients and poor kill feedback.
The best approach to improving performance is not trying to make existing systems quicker, but to rewrite the systems to be smarter and only do necessary and relevant operations, especially in regards to replication. We started this process last year on our road to 100 players.
Even though we didn’t achieve our performance goals for the Alpha 10 release, it would be wrong to spend more time trying to optimize systems that are being rewritten at the same time. As we continue our development work towards 100 players, the optimizations that come with it will find their way into the next releases.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
- Updated EAC SDK
- Complete rewrite of freelook to fix it not replicating on deployables and improve performance
- Fixed vehicles sometimes taking reduced damage from rockets
- Fixed occasional invisible gun on revive
- Fixed one hand getting detached in the 1p animation doing funny things
- Increased rotation acceleration and maximum rotation speed on 3p soldier animations
- Fixed bandaging not detecting other soldiers reliably
- Fixed bandaging animation not cancelling when moving away from the soldier that’s being bandaged
- Set Medic’s field dressings to be 25% faster to apply compared to any other role
- Fixed crouch-sprinting not having correct stamina cost
- Guns no longer get forced-lowered when very close to an enemy
- Fixed an issue with reloads having to be done multiple times
- Fixed rocket backblasts being too wide
- Fixed nametags disapperaing on prone lean
- Made nametags more transparant when aiming directly at them. The enemy won’t be able to hide behind a nametag anymore
- Fixed an issue where enemy players could cap a neutral flag for your team
- Fixed inconsistent behavior when right clicking in the Squad-Leader’s Fire Support sub-menu and enemy markers sub-menu
- Fixed invite list not being scroll-able so it could not be collapsed when a lot of players were unassigned
- Fixed an exploit that allowed squad members to take more limited role kits than allowed
- Fixed part of the player’s body showing above him on incapacitation
- Fixed MAT-V open top turret not blocking projectiles
- Removed one BTR-82A from Narva AAS v1,v2 and v3
- Removed two Strykers and replaced one BTR-82A with one BTR-80 on Kohat AAS v2
- Fixed a RUS transport on Gorodok Invasion v1 spawning half way into the map
- Fixed Narva AASv2 Old Barracks flag capture zone preventing leaning
- Blocked windows of a wip building on Narva that players could glitch into since climbing was introduced
- Fixed Mestia Tunnels dynamic shadow-casting light sources causing performance issues on AMD GPUs
- Removed attack markers on Invasion ruleset
- Fixed a bug that prevented un-muting a muted player
- Fixed logistics technical showing 2000 as ammo/construction point capacity
- Toggle lean status now gets cancelled on sprint so the player doesn’t start leaning again by himself when stopping the sprint
- Fixed a rare bug where a player would be able to move at very high speeds after using a bipod
- Fixed a rare bug where players would launch into space after using bipods
- Fixed a bounds issue on the SPG-9 deployable making it invisible in 1p
- Fixed BTR’s special blurred camo ability when ADS
- Minor tweaks on dozens of movement related animations
Not too big, not too small, but… by the nature of Early Access, not *just* right yet either. That’s what the next patch is for! Stay tuned for more updates from the Squad team.
Offworld out.
