Visibility

- Cold-tech - many small tweaks to this system. Burning vehicles and buildings will heat squads. Scatter, artillery weapons, off-maps are more restricted during blizzards. Infantry are better in blizzards because we've reduced the slowdown.

Jump back to quoted post12 Apr 2013, 21:28 PMpathfindergold

Summary for those without password?

Hey Everyone,

Gotta tell you, we're having a blast doing this beta. It's been fun interacting in the forums, and we're having some great discussions every day.

I thought I could touch - briefly - on some of the improvements we've been making in the game. I'll focus mostly on the gameplay, although the UI team is also hard at work. We won't be able to patch this stuff in for this round, but your feedback has proven very valuable and you should see the benefits of the beta feedback in future builds.

AI
- AI takes a while to get together. A whole bunch of new AI levers and controls have been added and tuned. And the AI feels better every day - it selects a good variety of units and uses tactics really well. The current challenge is getting the AI to concentrate on fewer objectives so it offers a good hard-hitting challenge.

Pathing
- We've made dozens of changes to pathing, squad formation tuning, etc. A number of deep-seated latent bugs were dealt with that caused squads to hitch and do odd things.
- Vehicle pathing has a good evacuate system now, meaning vehicles will move out of each other's way more appropriately, squish together less, and generally perform much better. Night and day improvements.
- Infantry move around vehicles in a much more believable way now - less jitter and weird stuff.

Tuning and Systems
- Cold-tech - many small tweaks to this system. Burning vehicles and buildings will heat squads. Scatter, artillery weapons, off-maps are more restricted during blizzards. Infantry are better in blizzards because we've reduced the slowdown.

We're also running on our server now with our first set of features. Again, we'll announce features for launch, post ship etc. at later date.

And lots more...

Just for perspective, we use Perforce for our version control. The changelist numbers when we shipped the beta were in the 260000 range. My last check in today was 284073. That doesn't necessarily mean there have been 24,000 changes but it does speak to the current pace of development.

Some of the team is off to London next week to show off a few different pieces of the game. More multiplayer/skirmish and even some of the campaign levels. Keep your eyes peeled for more previews. We'll also be visiting the Bovington Tank Museum (my second visit in a year). They have King Tigers there. Two different kinds.

Just sayin'.

There probably won't be an update from me next week, but I'll be following the progress from the road.

Best Regards,

Quinn

Jump back to quoted post22 Apr 2013, 15:02 PMGenosseGeneral

What I noticed after playing Beta for a while now is that the vehicle aiming mechanism do not correspond to the true sight system.

Example:

have a tank with a moveable turret chase another tank, while an enemy infantry unit is nearby. The enemy tank will disappear behind something that breaks the LoS, which prompts your tank to automatically turn your very slow moving turret at the other squad. If your tank is moving, there is no way to avoid this (attack ground while stationary would somehow do the trick to some degree). In essence, this makes it very easy to outmaneuver tanks, simply because of poorly implemented gameplay mechanics. There is just no workaround.

Jump back to quoted post22 Apr 2013, 15:20 PMTychoCelchuuu

Yeah, I'm not sure Relic really thought the whole "how is true sight going to work with our silly tank turret AI" think through. Men of War handles this by letting you manually control the direction of the tank turret. The easiest way I can think of solving this is to have a tank's "attack ground" command persist even through movement commands (it would only cancel when you give it another attack command or a stop command). The ideal solution would be to give tanks an "aim" command that would allow you to retarget the turret in a direction, but that would be hard to figure out because you'd have to get the tank to shoot at stuff in that direction but not far from that direction and then the question is "how far is too far" and so on. There may simply be no solution that Relic ends up implementing.

Jump back to quoted post22 Apr 2013, 15:55 PMTychoCelchuuu

It wasn't thought through properly, but the problem was also present in Company of Heroes. It just wasn't nearly as bad because it wasn't so easy to lose sight on things.

Jump back to quoted post22 Apr 2013, 16:02 PMGenosseGeneral

couldn't agree more

Jump back to quoted post22 Apr 2013, 15:02 PMGenosseGeneral

have a tank with a moveable turret chase another tank, while an enemy infantry unit is nearby. The enemy tank will disappear behind something that breaks the LoS, which prompts your tank to automatically turn your very slow moving turret at the other squad. If your tank is moving, there is no way to avoid this (attack ground while stationary would somehow do the trick to some degree). In essence, this makes it very easy to outmaneuver tanks, simply because of poorly implemented gameplay mechanics. There is just no workaround.