Intelligence Bulletin Vol 3 * No 22
New! Nice! Natural! Gah! I was trying to follow last week’s intro with positive words starting with the letter ‘N’, but that was harder than expected. Right now some of you are probably reaching for your calendars in confusion – thinking ‘Intelligence Bulletin – Is it Friday already? I haven’t gotten through half the stuff I was supposed to do this week!‘ BUT fear not, it is NOT Friday yet.
What you are looking at is the updated version of the Intelligence Bulletin. The previous setup where individual developers reported in took way too much time away from real development tasks and took a lot of time for me to censor and make sure that the content made sense to people outside of the studio. So instead we have grouped the Intel by the teams as they report it to one another.
We might still modify how we write the Intelligence Bulletin if we find more effective ways or if anyone has fantastic ideas or feedback.
That is all from me, and I hope you had a great weekend everybody! :-)
New LOD Models and textures
One of the things we need to do when creating buildings and other props for the game is to build LOD (Level Of Detail) models. LOD Models are low-resolution models that are used when you are looking at something far away. If you imagine a door with hinges, keyhole, door handle etc. When you are 50 meters away you cannot really see any of these, so there are no reasons for the computer to spend CPU and GPU power drawing them.
Continue reading to see how we got there :-)
Create a squad and play with your friends
An oft requested feature for the game is to make it easier to play alongside your friends in the same battle. This is something we have also wanted to build for a long time and now the time is here for the first version to make its public appearance. So in the upcoming build ‘Jefferson’ you will be able to create a squad, grab your friends and join match-making as a group.
Press ‘Create Squad’ on the bottom of the Characters page and see what happens
Forum is back online
We’ve brought the forum back up.
There might be some issues with a number of accounts where, when you login, it looks as if your account is brand new without any posts etc.
We will start working on a fix for that (so you can get your posts etc. back) now, but wanted to get the overall forum up first.
The ONLY thing that this bug caused was the possibility to impersonate other forum accounts and act as them (that is bad enough). As soon as we became aware of what the issue was and were able to reproduce it we took the forum down and got to work fixing the bug.
Happy Birthday! Reto.Lusa
Yesterday was our Project Coordinator reto.Lusa's birthday and she created marvellous cakes for the rest of the gang. – Reto.Robotron3000
It is very important that our hard working Reto-team gets their mandatory sugar supplies. It makes them work faster and longer hours – and able to be more focused on their tasks and sharper when hunting bugs.
I expect that with these high energy cakes – the next build will be out one week before deadline, and include 6-8 more features that we haven’t even planned for and maybe even more.
I know I don’t have to tell you this – but as you all can see, one of the cakes is a M26 Pershing, and yes, it was supposed to look like it has been fighting tough battles! Just as the highly trained graphic designers – I prefer a tight hyper-realistic view to my work.
Dev Q&A – May 13 part 2
Ladies & Gentlemen! The second set of answers to this month’s Developer Q&A session is here! Reto.Vashu has been gathering questions in a forum thread and then we have answered to the best of our abilities.
Time & Money
Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time. – Jim Roth - American Entrepreneur
With the Irwin build we introduced several changes to the monetary system in Heroes & Generals. We changed the way the virtual currencies work and introduced a new currency. Many changes at the same time. We could have introduced the changes gradually but we felt that it was best (also from a production point of view) to introduce them at the same time. In this post I will try to explain how it works and the reasons for the changes.
NB: There could also be a line showing you can earn Warfunds from the action game (by taking objectives etc.) but it was left out to keep the diagram easier to read, Ed.
Intelligence Bulletin Vol 3 * No 21
Nasty! Naughty! And in other ways nefarious bugs! That has been the main theme this week. A lot of us are focusing on either fixing bugs for Jefferson, or hunting for them with our binary butterfly nets and looking glasses. We are doing our very best to find and fix as many of these issues as we can before we roll out the Jefferson build. This is both fixes for bugs that snuck unto the live servers with the last build as well as making sure the new features and optimization work as expected.
Apart from polishing the Jefferson build, we are also deep into the production of features for the next build “Keating” and planning of the build after that is going full steam as well. While you have been able to read about some of the new features in Jefferson, such as Cloud renders, Anti-Griefing, GUI/HUD improvements etc we still have a few interesting things for you that we will tell about in the time leading up to the release of Jefferson. As for what will happen in Keating, we will get to that after Jefferson is released.
That is all from me, so have a great weekend everybody! :-)
