Hello, Soldiers!

We’re hard at work fixing up the PTE bugs found by us and our players last week, with 2 patches for it already out and almost all crashes smoothed out. We had over 260 crashes over the last weekend and only 15 this weekend. This gives us around 95% reduction in crashing mainly thanks to the Public Test Environment working as intended – giving us more data than we can gather ourselves in our small team and leading us to faster fixing. Thank you to everyone that took part in the testing, reported bugs and sent the crash reports – we couldn’t be as effective without your help.

Work on 0.7 is progressing nicely, with almost all big issues resolved in the last week and more issues fixed on Friday and over the weekend. Apart from normal optimization effort, we’re also focusing towards networking optimization, which will further help with CPU load on the server and make the game ping lower.

With networking mainly done, we can now optimize and bugfix as much as possible without the problem of it being constantly changed and broken by new features. This is true for all facets of development and with more and more systems being finalized, we’ll have more resources to put elsewhere and into optimization and bug fixing.

Since 0.7 hit PTE, we’ve already found a few big things to improve, like replication your own equipment every 30 frames and not every frame, main base points sending their state to everyone even though they can’t change their state during the whole game and we’ve tightened up the shooting direction of other players, so you better see where the shots came from. The list is quite a long one, but not all of those changes make it into patch notes due to their technical nature – most of them don’t make any sense without the knowledge of the underlying code. Overall, there’s a lot of small changes like that and they will make a big difference in the long run.

New Strikes

Let us introduce two new powerful strikes, which will help you shape the frontline as you please. The Smoke Artillery and Napalm Airstrike.

Let’s start with the first, more tactical one. The Smoke Artillery is your typical artillery but instead of dropping explosive materials, it covers the desired area with a giant smokescreen which persists for few seconds obscuring the vision. So if you want to disguise your troops before attempting a point capture or you want to cloak your teammates so they can retreat safely, the Smoke Artillery is your new friend.

The second and much more fearsome strike is Napalm Bombing. Once you see it coming, you better be running to safety. When it’s called it drops the bombs that explode and do a moderate amount of damage, but what’s more important, the explosions leave the ground burning for some time and will cause more damage until the flames go out. With this tool, you can disable a fragment of the map for a short period of time and make sure that no one will interrupt your masterplan.

We hope that those two additions will help with the more tactical play and give players more tools for crowd control and funneling enemies into traps. With a well coordinated attack, we’ve seen whole games turn on one or two of those strikes in internal testing already and with the new VOIP system the coordination should be a lot easier now, making those strikes even more useful for a well oiled squad.

Speaking of which, we’re really amazed by the response it got during the PTE testing and we’re really happy the new VOIP is so well received. We’ll continue to improve it and give you more tools to make World War 3 your own and have as much fun in it – be it roleplaying an officer, having fun ordering people around, or just simply shooting your enemies.

Let us know how you like the look and the idea of those new strikes and see you in the next Weekly Report!