A week has passed after the release of the latest Survarium update, and our development team has prepared a new surprise for you! It is not a huge update considering the number of changes, but it contains a number of important innovations. We hope you’ll like it.

Holiday Season Celebration!

The magical time of the winter holidays is near, and traditionally we have prepared some surprises for you!

Log in to Survarium during the holiday season to get a unique winter camo and the fire monkey decal. New players will get a more festive outfit instead of the usual blue pants and a knitted sweater.

In addition, during the holidays you will get Christmas-tree toys for participation in battles. Collect enough toys and exchange them for gift bags. The bags contain a lot of useful items, including weapon blueprints with unique Holiday camouflage. Collect enough blueprints to exchange them for unique UMP-45, SVD or ASh-12!

New Network Synchronization

In Survarium update 0.34 we are changing the approach to network synchronization. From the moment we started working on Survarium we thought that to ensure synchronization the computers of all players must calculate and visualize the data in the same way. This led to the fact that positions of the characters of other players, on the screen of each player, were extrapolated based on the current data of the game.

So when a player changes the input, your client learns of this later (as all the data from another player's client has reached your client after going through the server). Most importantly, this data changes the game world we have already visualized for you. As a result, the next frame you see may differ significantly from the previous one. Thus, the transitions between the animations of other players were "eaten up" for the period of time equal to the ping of the client to the server.

In update 0.34 we will display the position of the characters of other players with a delay of 150ms (the amount may change during the public testing). Because of that you will see characters not where they are at the moment, but where they were 150ms before that. Of course, the hits and damage are also registered according to the positions of the characters 150ms in the past.

For clients with a ping lower than 100ms and ping jumps of less than 50ms it gives the opportunity to always properly interpolate the movements of the characters during rendering. Extrapolation will still be used for other clients but its value will also be less by 100ms. Thus, you will see improvements regardless of your ping. If your ping is less than 100ms, you will not see the characters of other players teleporting.

Some specific "time artifacts" are possible in the new scheme:

Kills from around the corner. This effect can occur when your character has already ran behind around the corner, but for the enemy he is still 150ms in the past. If the enemy kills your character, the kill will be counted.

Active players have the advantage. If you run from behind a corner, the opponent will see you 150ms later. If the enemy stays still you have an advantage of 150ms to end a duel in your favor.

Equal opportunities for players with the ping of up to 100ms and the maximum ping jumps up to 50ms. Players with ~15ms pings will not have any advantages over players with ~90ms pings. But if your ping is more than 100ms or there might be a sudden ping spike, you'll notice other players' characters teleporting, but desync will be less for 100ms. If your ping is fine but other players have problems with their connections, you won't notice anything. For you everything will be rendered smoothly and uninterrupted.

Watch the video comparing netcode in Survarium 0.33 and Survarium 0.34!

Changes in the Character’s Skills

In Survarium update 0.34 we will make several changes to the characters’ skills to balance them both in number and usefulness. First of all, we decided to discard one of two final skills. Now each set of skills will have only one ultimate skill that will give a significant advantage.

For Firearms training this skill is Terminator, which gives the ability to equip two primary weapons. For Physical training it is Frenzy. It gives the character 25% protection from bullets while sprinting. The Forest Sense skill allows you to see the location and type of all anomalies on the map.

In addition, we've added several new skills which have replaced previously inactive ones. In Firearms training we have a Steady Breath skill, which reduces the crosshair sway for sniper rifles.

Physical training has undergone more extensive changes. The Endurance skill now reduces the impact of equipment weight on energy consumption. The new Stayer skill increases maximum stamina of the character. Mobility skill allows you to increase movement speed while crouching, and the Unstoppable skill reduces the slowdown effect from being hit.

We have also removed from the game all skills adding ammo pouches, pockets for supplies and artifact containers. Now these parameters can only be obtained with the help of equipment items.

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The Public Test Server launch date will be announced later. Stay tuned!

Discuss the update on forums