News Liste Hell Let Loose

Mortain sits in a shallow valley – where the US rallied against German troops amid Operation Lüttich. The battle took place in August 1944, in Normandy, France.

Units from the 30th Division, including the 2nd Battalion, 120th Infantry, and two tank destroyer platoons, were dispatched to relieve the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry. Their directive was to defend the town of Mortain, strategically utilising Hill 314 (also known as MontJoie) as a tactical defensive and overlook position.

During Operation Lüttich the town was destroyed, left in ruins with only a few buildings standing. The destroyed version of the town will be featured in the map.

Offering a plethora of notable locations – both historical and natural – Mortain features themes of contrasting areas throughout. Rock formations permeate the map alongside hilly areas of countryside and farmland.

Mortain - Environment Art

It brings the team great pleasure to finally release Update 15 and our new map, Mortain.

Since joining the project, the team at Expression Games have worked with our partners to deliver a map that offers a new and exciting world to experience in Hell Let Loose, while honouring the legacy that Black Matter had left for us.

Being our first map release, we wanted to gather feedback from the community early on, and as previously mentioned in other briefings, we cannot thank you all enough for supporting the PTEs that helped shape this map. Hell Let Loose has one of the most dedicated fanbases within online gaming, and although there have been some challenges bringing it to the standard previous Normandy maps have set, you have been instrumental towards its development and have made us accountable in creating quality gameplay and visuals.

Since the last PTE, the Environment Art team have been focused on fixing as many bugs and visual issues as possible for release, as well as incorporating some new dressing and polish. We have also supported Technical Art in producing some crucial optimisations, within Mortain and in particular textures across the game. We hope that these efforts mean you’ll enjoy the varied terrain and vast forestry of Mortain at its best performance yet.

To read the developer briefing from the PTE, which has additional details about Mortain Environment Art, Level Design and Front End Updates, click here.

During the last Mortain PTE, there was a known issue where aiming down sights caused noticeable discrepancies between LODs across the map, with foliage, in particular, losing shadows or changing silhouette significantly. This is an issue that is present across the game, however, due to the high contrast lighting used in Mortain, this was much more noticeable to the point where this was impacting gameplay, particularly with longer-range weaponry. There was a collaboration between Code, Technical Art and Environment Art to look into this issue, and a fix was finally found and implemented by Gage Griffiths - Senior Programmer at Expression Games.

The fix consists of two console commands that are run when you join a game within Mortain. To keep performance across Xbox Series S/X, PS5 and PC consistent, different values for these commands are set based on the platform.

Firstly, the density of foliage was scaled down slightly across the map. This was fine-tuned to ensure there is not a noticeable loss in visual quality, but enough to where we retain performance. The commands and values we used for this are:

PC - foliage.DensityScale 0.8
Console - foliage.DensityScale 0.65

Secondly, Unreal Engine uses a calculation based on how much of the screen a particular asset takes up, to determine what level of detail that asset renders. When you aim down sight, a tree appears larger on the screen so the game renders a high-detail version of it, but when you stop looking down sights the tree takes up less of the screen so a lower-detail version is rendered instead.

The fix essentially alters the distance from the player where the higher detail foliage would swap to a lower detail asset. These are not exact figures, but as an example, previously a tree may have been 10,000 triangles at 10 metres away, swapping to 5000 triangles at 20 metres. This has shifted so that the tree would still be 10000 triangles at 20 metres away, with the swap to 5000 triangles happening at 40 metres, meaning a tree has to be much further away before the lower detail asset is rendered.

The exact values we set are:

PC - foliage.LODDistanceScale 2
Console - foliage.LODDistanceScale 1.3

The results of our testing are extremely positive, and we hope that if you managed to play Mortain during a previous PTE you will notice that this is a huge improvement from before.

As this is an issue that has been in the game for a long time across all maps, and the results have been promising on Mortain, I can confirm that this is a fix that we are looking to implement across the entire game, which should improve foliage LOD issues on all maps. We are also confident that this would bring huge improvements to some urban maps, in particular, Stalingrad, as a large portion of the map including buildings are technically rendered as foliage, which was a performance-saving technique used by Black Matter.

Due to this being a game-wide change, we want to ensure there is adequate testing and feedback before it’s live across all maps, so Mortain will be the only map in Update 15 to support this change. However, if feedback is positive and the consensus is that assets are ‘popping’ less for players without performance impact, this is something we are eager to implement in a future update for all maps.

We have made every effort to ensure Mortain is ready for release, but if you experience any issues while playing, please don’t hesitate to give feedback through the appropriate discord channels or social media. The team frequently reads comments and shares videos with each other, so if there are any comments or issues you have surrounding the map we want to hear them.

Lastly, I’m pleased to share and hope you enjoy some final renders of Mortain. I’m incredibly proud of what the team has produced, and I hope these images showcase a new benchmark for content in Hell Let Loose going forward.

Ryan Thomason-Jones - Senior Environment Artist, Expression Games

Mortain - Technical Art

The Technical Art team have been fine-tuning the performance around the Mortain town area to accommodate the additional enterable buildings. This was a combination of LOD merging, forced distance culling and removing shadow casters on any object already in shadow. This was to ensure we retained the detail and storytelling of the interiors while reducing the cost of the extra detail.

Throughout the town, the Environment Art team made a wonderful set of modular destroyed building assets, creating a wide variety whilst keeping material and texture costs to a minimum. This, in turn, meant that we had smaller assets, however, this also increased the mesh draw calls, especially with shadow and occlusion checks. To address this as we did not want to create combined render meshes driving up the memory cost and with that texture cost, we created a series of shadow proxy assets that were lower in complexity and limited to one simple shader meaning a single shadow and occlusion call.

Many combinations of walls and buildings benefited from a Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes pass, similar to that done with buildings in El Alamein (HISM is an instancing method that allows for better memory performance, supports LODs with good asset culling which results in better rendering performance).

On this map, we also limited the use of HLODs (Hierarchical LODs). One of the drawbacks to using HLODs extensively was increased memory overheads. This was limited to the town area and only used for medium-sized buildings.

In addition, the Technical Art team ensured that there were no unnecessary occlusion checks and unique assets, which were not adding to storytelling to save on mesh and texture memory.

To create a believable atmosphere for the destroyed part of town, we had to take into account the amount of dust that would be present in the air. However, adding a large number of dust particle effects can negatively impact performance due to overlapping translucent sprites creating overdraw.

To achieve the desired effect, we decided to create a fog to simulate the presence of thick dust around the buildings. Since using volumetric fog would cover the entire map, we opted for shader-based localized fog volumes instead. By placing a single volume over the destroyed area and adjusting the shader controls, we were able to control the fog's height, density, and colour. This approach helped to achieve the desired effect without the need for a large number of particles.

Although the fog worked well, it lacked movement. To fix this issue, we added a few variations of dust particles. However, we kept these fairly limited and added a couple of shader tricks to improve performance. The main shader trick we used was to scale the sprites down based on the player's distance from the effect, which reduced overdraw. Scaling the sprites down to nothing eliminated any render cost.

We also had to be mindful of when the player walks through the dust particles. Lots of large translucent sprites filling the screen could significantly impact performance. To tackle this problem, we used a similar method as the distance from the player. Only in this instance, we faded the alpha and scaled the particles as you moved through them, reducing the chance of frame drops. Having long sightlines with lots of particles could be costly. However, a combination of optimized VFX with a few shader tricks allowed us to create an area that looked heavy in dust with minimal impact on performance.

Technical Art team, Expression Games

Sainte-Marie-du-Mont - Map Updates

To coincide with the release of a Control Skirmish mode for Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, we looked into issues commonly brought up about the map as a whole across various community forums. Keeping in mind that the map is a fan favourite we chose to focus solely on the most impactful changes, those being to address the lack of enterable areas within the town and the inaccessible Brécourt Manor courtyard.

When tackling the updates to the town centre in Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, we started by focusing internal playtests on just that space. Utilising feedback from these playtests, along with community sentiment derived from various social media platforms, we were able to help find and improve the key problems on just those areas of the map.

Our biggest focus was on increasing the overall playable space around the town, helping to provide more routes into and out of the capture point. This increase in playable space also lends itself to creating more viable outpost/garrison placement options, and more flanking opportunities for attackers and defenders alike. Within these newly opened spaces, additional enterable buildings were placed to further increase the opportunities for attackers and defenders to seize the capture area around the church.

The above GIF showcases the reduction in blocking volumes throughout the town centre, in turn showing the extent of the newly opened space. These changes should not only improve navigation throughout the town but also help drastically reduce instances of being stopped from entering an area because of an invisible wall.

The following images show before and after shots of the four main quadrants of the town, North West, North East, South East and South West. The areas captured highlight the largest scale changes to the playable space, with new routes that lead directly into the town.

Kienan Southern - Junior Level Designer, Expression Games

The set-up for this Control Skirmish mode is focused around the Cattlesheds capture point from Warfare and Offensive, allowing us to capture a nice balance of spaces that should make both infantry and vehicle combat intense.

The bocages surrounding the Cattlesheds provide cover and routes into the capture point and the space within it provides engineers ample opportunity to bolster your team’s defences.

For tanks, the nearby open fields afford the space to bombard the opposition from a distance, or to act as support for the infantry pushing the objective.

Kienan Southern, Junior Level Designer - Expression Games

Also known as Eichenlaubmuster, this was one of the many types of camouflage patterns used by several divisions within the German forces. Often worn in the autumn, it is unique with its distinct colourisation.

For players, wishing to combine this uniform and match it with headwear of the same pattern, we would recommend using the Leopard Covered M42 helmet, already available, in-game.

Matt White - Creative Director, Expression Games.