Hi Squaddies,

The day has finally arrived. After much tribulation we present to the world Alpha 9 of Squad! It is now available via Steam so be sure to update before playing.

In addition to upgrading to Unreal Engine 4.14, this update comes packed with a whole lot of content related additions including new vehicles, map expansions, gameplay changes and balance tweaks.

For more information on some of the major new additions in this version, please take a look at our Feature Preview for Version 9 put out recently.

Version 9 is now available via Steam. Please always reset your appdata in the game settings on every new build!

Full Changelog

Gameplay

Added Minsk 400 Motorcycle, BRDM-2 Scout Car and MT-LB PKT APC to the Insurgent vehicle pool

Added BTR-80 APC, BRDM-2 Scout Car, MT-LB NSVT APC and MT-LB 30mm Cannon IFV to the Militia vehicle pool

Added BTR-82A IFV, MT-LB NSVT APC, MT-LB 30mm Cannon IFV and Ural 4320 truck to the Russian vehicle pool.

Added Stryker ICV to the US Army vehicle pool

FOB Radio Hub no longer creates a spawn point

Added a new FOB Deployable, the ‘HAB’, which is basically a spawn point. US Army and Russian HABs cost 500 Construction Points, Insurgents cost 350 and Militia costs 400. HABs are limited to 1 per FOB.

Added a Heavy Anti Tank for Insurgents and Militia. This kit features the PG7-VR Tandem HEAT warhead launched from the RPG-7. Youll find that this is the most effective anti vehicle weapon on the battlefield. It is similarly very front heavy, so be sure to take your time to line up your one shot. The kit is team limited as well as squad limited, similar to how the Marksman role operates. Unlocks 1 slot per team at every 20 players. Squad size must be 9 to claim. Kit comes with 1 Tandem HEAT round and one regular HEAT round as well as an AKS74U as a primary weapon.

Temporarily disabled the open/close driver hatch functionality on the BTR-80. The feature will return soon! New experimental version of closed hatch available on the MTLB series of vehicles.

Added a new feature where you can double tap the Walk key to stay locked in walking mode and you can toggle the shift manually to sprint. A simple tap of any Walk key will then disable it.

Reduced the stamina regeneration rate by 33%.

Due to the success of the test of the HMG environment penetration, we are now rolling it out for all 5.56/5.45 and 7.62 rifle caliber weapons. This practically means any primary weapon in the game, with the exception of the PPSH-41. The penetration varies depending on the caliber of the round (bigger being better) and what you are shooting at. Both damage and effective range upon exit is modified by the material. Time to consider if you are in cover or concealment from your attacker, as well as if you want to have a weapon with better environment penetration or not. G3s and 7.62 AKs are options in this case. 30mm AP projectiles are similarly able to penetrate the environment, and are particularly good at it. Beware, this is the first damage type able to penetrate the afghan tightly packed mud walls material.

Deployable SPG-9s are now limited to 2 per FOB.

Repair stations are now limited to 2 per FOB.

All 5 ton transport trucks now hold up to 18 players instead of 13

Smoothed out the overheating penalty on emplaced and vehicle mounted HMGs. The punishment period is shorter but you will overheat quickly again. More viable for sustained fire and less crippling.

Squad Leaders are now able to set ‘possible’ friendly FOB locations thru the SLs map Hex Menu as a green FOB icon for the entire friendly team to see. This should help facilitate SL to SL communication when relating to FOB placement.

SL Hex enemy spotted icons are now red to bring it more consistent with items that expand or items that are placeable.

Due to the success of Op. First Light Conquest and at the request of the community, Conquest has now been added to Gorodok and Yehorivka.

All layers have been updated with all new vehicle loadouts. Depending on gamemode, faction, and size will determine how many and what type of asset is used.

Increased head turning angle limits as passengers in vehicles

Systems

Vehicle Handling has been dramatically improved. Force is now applied at the contact point between the wheel and the ground, rather than the center of the vehicle.

Added N-Wheeled and Tracked Vehicle physics. N-Wheeled vehicles allow us to simulate any number of wheels, and Tracked vehicles allow us to simulate vehicles with tracks. The BTR has been moved over to N-Wheeled physics.

Added the ability to climb obstacles by engaging Off Road mode (Default Key: Left Shift), which is useful in situations where you need maximum torque.

The Last player to damage a Vehicle is now cached for 30 seconds. Any unknown or burn damage that is dealt to this vehicle will be attributed to the last damager until the timer expires. Any new damage will become the owner and reset the timer.

Flipped Vehicles now attribute their damage to the driver. If there is no driver, it’s attributed to the last damager. This means that any passengers that die due to a flipped vehicle will be counted as team-kills for the driver.

Added an admin-only notification for when a developer or privileged QA member joins a server

Added a Crash Reporter. Now, if your game crashes or generates a crash dump, a crash reporter will appear, asking you to send the crash to us. Please do, as this helps us find and fix crashes.

Redid the way steering wheel hand animations are handled, resulting is a much better and more natural way to steer

Added some physics to the vehicle as it transitions into its wrecked state after being destroyed

Reduced height impact normal to try and reduce the amount of situations where players were being killed behind low cover.

Content is now packaged into PAK files. This should reduce loading time and increase the security of the game.

Tweaked player movement when going up and down stairs to be a little more deliberate

Updated the Easy Anticheat SDK.

UI

Replaced the Scoreboard with a new design and added many new points of data to track your performance during the round.

Added new Kit Role icons, replacing the old set

Ammunition UI has been updated to conform to newer design standards

Tightening some style elements regarding font sizes

Restyled and reworked the backend on how Text Chat is rendered on the screen

Added a new more realistic reticle for the BTR-80 KPVT Turret

Added new icons distinguishing APCs vs IFVs (IFVs have a 30mm Cannon or greater)

Added new icons distinguishing Tracked and Wheeled armoured vehicles

Added new loading Splash image

Updated loading QuickStart guide

Tweaked radial menu button sensitivity to feel a better in terms of hovering over with your mouse (outer widgets were being selected too early when moving the mouse from the middle to the outer widgets)

Removed old Ticket Counter and Round timer as they are now integrated into the new Scoreboard

Optimised code for the Stamina and Jump bar, also adjusted the visual styling

Updated Credits

Audio

New vehicle engine sounds for all new vehicles and also modified the existing vehicles

Improved some bullethit impact sounds and flyby bullet crack sounds

Modified distance sounds for some explosions

Modified M4, AKs, SKS, KPVT fire sounds.

Added burning vehicle sounds

Added UI sounds

Added music tracks ‘Downtime’ and ‘Faith’ to the Main Menu music playlist

Maps

Gorodok has been expanded greatly, with the addition of more towns, industrial complexes and points of interest.

Yehorivka has had additional towns, map detailing and points of interest added.

Adjusted map terrain lod levels to minimize distance warping especially on Kohat. Should reduce occurrence of floating players and vehicles.

Added an array of additional compounds and ruined areas to Chora as well as fixing general bugs and issues. Optimization pass to reduce draw call overhead.

Kohat and OPFL have been completely merged down to hardened maps (some minor final steps) should see increased GPU performance especially on low end machines. Allowed us to push foliage and grass draw distance out to more acceptable levels.

Added Minsk Motorcycles on the Jensen’s Range Racetrack, along with additional spawn points

Improved behaviour of map borders on Sumari, Logar, Kohat and Chora.

Adjusted scale of the Bridge on Kohat and improved its collision mesh to prevent players from falling through

Removed all static Minsk 400 bikes from maps

Updated Kokan lighting on PAAS V1

Added a number of additional compounds to Kokan

Fixed a lot of doubled up static geometry occurring on some maps

Fixed ammo crates on Sumari ITC from being in the ground.

Bug Fixes & Optimizations

Fixed super dark shading on the Militia faction soldier models

Fixed odd player camera rotations while as a passenger in a vehicle

Fixed a bug where the logistics driver wasn’t getting points for dropping supplies off

Merged a lot of deployable statics together, improving performance

Heavily optimised the Weapon Cache mesh

Fixed engine sounds playing the incorrect sounds on low settings

Increased shovel detection zone size on repair stations.

Fixed attachment of burning and destruction effects on vehicles

Tweaked rocket trails and backblast effects

Optimized footstep dirt effect

Fixed a couple of issues involving shooting your own vehicle unintentionally with the turret gun on some vehicles

Adjusted and optimised a number of vehicle wrecks

Fixed chain-link fences, razor wire and regular wire fences to be penetrable

Fixed collisions on a number of stone-wall statics

Changed minimum required mipmap LOD bias to prevent .ini changes from making the minimap unusable

Fixed collisions issue with destroyed vehicles bouncing around like crazy and colliding with players

Fixed giving radial menu access depending on your deploy role instead of your current role

Prevented unnecessary overlap events from firing on all vehicles to improve performance on vehicles

Fixed an issue where dying due to bleed damage shortly after revive would incorrectly send you to wounded rather than dead.

Fixed a bug where ‘Use Inventory Switch Timer’ config setting didn’t persist across game restarts

Started hardening passes on many of the older maps, dramatically decreasing draw calls. Will continue into A10 on newer maps as they become complete.

Audited physmats to ensure penetration was enabled on all appropriate material types.

Modding

Exposed the following functions to Blueprint.

SQVehicle

bool IsValidSeat(int32 Seat) const

bool IsSeatHeldByClaimingSquad(int32 Seat) const

void EjectAllPlayers()

TArray GetSeats() const

USQVehicleSeatComponent* GetDriverSeat() const;

void GetExitPoints(TArray& OutTransforms);

AController* LastDamageInstigator

void EjectPlayerFromSeat(int32 Seat)

void RequestChangeSeat(class ASQPlayerController* Player, int32 RequestedSeat)

SQGroundVehicle

void SetEngineActiveInput(bool bNewEngineActive)

void SetEngineBoostPressed(bool bInHasEngineBoostBeenPressed)

bool CanToggleEngine()

Fixed an issue where the OnSeat Events weren’t being called in SQVehicle (Thanks SgtStryker)

Added a 4-param event in SQSoldier, OnSeatChange(Soldier, Vehicle, FromSeat, ToSeat) for when seat switching happens on the client. The client only receives this event when a seat change event happens, not why. A player has entered a vehicle when FromSeat is null and ToSeat is valid, a player has exited the vehicle when FromSeat is valid and ToSeat is null. A player has switched seats when both FromSeat and ToSeat are both valid. FromSeat and ToSeat both being null is an invalid operation, and will never happen.

Exposed “Wound” and “Die” to Blueprint. Note: These functions may fail in certain situations and the player may not be wounded or die. Check the return value to be sure if the call succeeded!

Offworld out.