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Hey everyone,
Welcome to Dev Brief #129!
This week we’ve got plenty for you to look at with the announcement of the winners and runners up of our video competition! The level of quality in these are amazing and well worth checking out, so get comfy and give them a watch.
On top of that we’ve also got news on our next PTE (Spoilers: Kursk) and an update on our current optimisation focus, including specifics on how it’s being addressed from Lead Developer Max.
So, we’ve got entertainment, information and an opportunity to help us test Kursk ahead of its upcoming arrival to the frontline – Let’s get stuck in that we…
Competition Winners
With an amazing array of many entries it is time to announce a winner for the Hell Let Loose Video Competitions ‘Filming Private Ryan’ and ‘We Want You’.
Again we would like to express our thanks to all those who entered and helped their friends and communities in any way.
The quality and numbers of entries was fantastic and impressed us all here at Dev HQ. After a lot of consideration we have managed to (and this was no easy task) pick a winner for each genre.
Once we agreed on a winner, we hit another roadblock trying to work out a runners up for each category. After a few days of discussion and arm wrestling we have decided that the quality of the entries was so high that we have decided to have multiple runner ups.
Also ‘ALL SUBMISSIONS’ who were not a winner or runner up, will receive a prize. This will be in the form of one Hell Let Loose Steam Key.
Congratulations to all who were involved in this comp, the community is extremely talented! o7
We hope it was as much fun for you all to make those clips as it was for us to watch and appreciate them all. We cannot thank the community enough for their contributions. We have been very humbled by your enthusiasm for our game.
We look forward to seeing you all in the future, with more to come on the horizon.
And now the winners!
Filming Private Ryan
WINNER
:
[EASY] submitted by Bickley with the entry ‘War is Hell – Hell Let Loose’
We will be contacting the winners and runner ups directly. Also everyone else who made a submission can expect an email from us, if you haven’t had one already.
Again we wish we could have included you all, and thanks again for the enthusiasm shown! We will look at getting out as much of the content as possible via our various social channels.
https://youtu.be/1EP9Djf708M
PTE Next Week – Eastern Front – Kursk
We would really appreciate the community’s participation in next week’s PTE. This will be a test on the new Eastern Front map Kursk. As we are still in development mode for U10,
this build will be buggy
, so please consider that if you are participating.
We will follow up with the exact day and time next week. We will also include known issues and a changelog overview so you know what to expect. This test will be best suited for those in the GMT timezone, and will take place from approximately 11am to 4pm GMT. We will look to have several PTEs, so if for any reason you can make this one, don’t worry!.
If you want to know how to join the PTE, please join the official HLL Discord below:
YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD
You will find all the details you need to join there.
Getting into the weeds with Grass
Optimisation is an ongoing process and challenge when developing Hell Let Loose – with a special combination of high player count, huge emphasis on replicated physics and large scale maps. We know that it’s one of the most requested aspects of work, and it’s something we’ve had a dedicated team working hard on for the last several months (as opposed to having to bounce back and forth between content creation and optimization).
One area of key significance (and ongoing pain) is the grass within Hell Let Loose. Setting a game in Normandy – amidst endless rolling fields – demands that grass not only be present, but play a somewhat active role in the gameplay – typically concealing you at close range when lying down. It also plays a large role in adding detail to large stretches of otherwise featureless landscape. As a result, we’ve tried to balance our grass to provide a photoreal look up close that is also appropriate concealment, while also billboarding it in a way that allows us to keep it present at longer distances (instead of culling it – as you’d do in games that don’t rely on longer range engagements).
At present, we’re currently working on creating much smoother blends between the different levels of detail of the grass. This will mean that you’ll notice far fewer shape changes the closer or further you walk from the grass, and that the final transition to the billboard (the version of the grass we use at very long range) will be much softer and less noticeable. We’re also performing some key optimisations to the way it’s rendered – including reducing triangle count to lower costs and increase visual bang for buck.
Next week, we’ll take you through the usage of smart materials when it comes to vehicles. We’re rolling this out with our new Russian vehicles first, and we think the results are pretty incredible when it comes to preserving detail right up close – at LESS expense than any time before.
Optimisation is ongoing and has greatly increased in the last several months. We want to assure you that it has huge priority within the team and we’re excited to show you the results.
Onwards to the weekend!
That wraps up this week’s brief, thanks for checking it out!
Have a fantastic weekend everyone, we’ll see you on the frontline.
