Dear Mechanics,
Welcome to our one hundred twelfth development status update.
The future is now
Stage 5 is now Stage 1 and Stage 2 is now Stage 4…. But one step at a time - we need to lighten things up a bit on what we are currently working on and what is coming up. The last few months have not been easy for us, we've had to stop updating the game a bit now and then to take a deeper breath and focus on development and further patches - and we have a lot of that. As a result, we need to change the scope of what we planned and reorganize it a bit. We've also switched to a new version of the Unity engine, a switch which has not been without its slight setbacks that we've had to fix. As you probably know, we are working at full speed on two of our games - Tank Mechanic Simulator and Tank Squad. From January this year, we are preparing a major update to TMS, numbered 1.4.0, which will include a new Stage 1 and part of Stage 5, along with the release of the second DLC#2 with Shermans tanks.
”Shermans” DLC#2
All new Sherman tanks are currently under heavy QA tests. We are going to release this DLC#2 with patch 1.4.0 as mentioned above. The Steam Store page will be available soon.
New tanks:
- M4A1 Sherman (Early production)
- M4 Sherman (Mid production)
- M4A2 Sherman (Late production)
- M4A3E2 Jumbo
- T34 Calliope
New engines:
- Wright Continental R-975-C1 (Early, Mid, Calliope)
- General Motors 6046 (Late, M10)
- Ford GAA (E8, Jumbo)
New gearboxes:
- Spicer Synchro Mesh Gearbox
Additionally, each vehicle contains packs of new museum stands, posters, ammunition, and achievements.
Vehicle/Tank Creator
We need to push this a bit further in time. We’ve got working tools that allow us to configure, pack and upload custom vehicles to the Steam workshop but still finalization seems to be the harder part. We would like to share all documentation needed to understand the processes to fully configure and set up required bits and aspects related - that can be a tank or any vehicle with you.
Once again, let us know if you would be interested in testing out the tools before we release them publicly anywhere soon, write to us at community@degenerals.com.
Update 1.4.0
Full change log will come with an update announcement.
What will be included:
- We switch Unity version from 2018 to 2021 as part of preparation for the new console update.
- New vehicle - M10 Wolverine (rework from Roadmap Stage 1)
- New vehicle - M4A3E8 Sherman (rework from Roadmap Stage 1)
- New posters & refreshed museum stands for reworked tanks
- Improved Camera Controls (from Roadmap Stage 5)
- Performance optimization - Occlusion Culling option
- Performance optimization - FPS boost in paint room while interacting with a tank
- Periscopes refresh options
- Bug fixes to reported issues
Dynamic Occlusion Culling
We present a new system that can significantly increase in-game performance without compromising on quality. Game engines, like Unity, by default process all objects which are located inside the player's field of view, even if they are invisible on screen. Let's take a situation when a player looks at the tank - processor and graphics card render all tank elements, but indeed every time we only see some of them, because most of them are covered by others. Our in-house GPU-Based Occlusion Culling uses the DirectX earlydepthstencil attribute to accurately determine which objects are visible on the screen in real-time, allowing it to cull objects that are not visible. It works for both static and dynamic geometry. This results in reducing the rendering load (decreasing the number of Draw Calls) and smoother gameplay. Dynamic Occlusion Culling will be available in the next update, so remember to check settings!
[previewyoutube=vyWu8_EM0wY;full][/previewyoutube]
Periscopes refresh options
From 1.4.0 under game settings you will be able to change refresh time for Render Texture that is used to simulate periscopes inside tanks. From realtime refreshing (that required better PC) to more optimised forms to support a bit older GPUs.
Thanks for all the support and have a good weekend.
DeGenerals
