Scopey

Hey, everyone!

We’re back with another Intel Report as the development of GROUND BRANCH V1034 continues diligently behind the scenes. Here’s the usual reminder:

⚠️ This report is not an exhaustive list of V1034 features!
For the most up-to-date list of expected V1034 and later features, see our roadmap. You may also want to check out our Intel Reports for June (#015), July (#016), August (#017), September (#018) and October (#019).

And with that out of the way, we got just one more thing before we can take a look at what’s been cooking since our last dev blog:

🍂 Steam Autumn Sale: GROUND BRANCH is 25% OFF!

We weren’t planning on it, but Valve approached us with a nice exposure deal to participate in the Steam Autumn Sale, and so we accepted at the last minute.

If you have a PayPal account and are willing to pay the game’s USD price, consider buying your Steam key from our official store using code GBFALL23 at the checkout to apply the same 25% discount.

🚨 The Autumn Sale ends November 28 — don't miss it!

Alright, on to the report!

Preparing for (and fixing things around) prone

We’ve mentioned it a lot before, but just in case this is your first Intel Report: upcoming release V1034 will introduce the new prone stance into GROUND BRANCH.

And as much as we would’ve liked to be proven wrong, adding prone has been as massive an undertaking as we predicted, with entire systems being reworked to support it.

In addition to all of the things necessary for prone to be implemented on the character side alone, care is being taken to support it within maps (environment interaction) and to generally make sure it doesn’t break various areas of gameplay. For example: did you know that preventing the characters’ legs from clipping right through a wall if you crawl backwards towards it requires additional programming? Regular character collision used while standing or crouching doesn’t automatically apply to prone, so extra logic has to be created specifically for it.

The same is true for something as seemingly simple as making the character conform to sloped surfaces while prone (instead of disregarding the terrain and always looking like it’s lying on a perfectly flat surface) — all of that requires intricate logic to happen. Take a look:

Arm and weapon collision also had to be reworked for prone, as the short-stocking and other collision animations don’t just carry over for the stance. For the time being, obstacles will simply prevent players from turning their aim beyond a certain point (this may or may not change as prone develops and feedback is received).

Another factor we had to account for: what happens if you go prone in water? Which leads us to…

Underwater effects

Section by Matt “Fatmarrow” Farrow

One consequence of bringing prone into the game in V1034 is that it is now possible to go underwater in areas that were previously not accessible.

We are still not decided as to whether we want to let players go prone underwater; it is not something we intended as a core gameplay feature, and it is probably something we would like to prevent entirely (older players might remember 2001’s Ghost Recon line “Too deep” whenever you tried to lower your stance in waters that would submerge your character).

Nevertheless, as an interim solution in V1034, we have added some underwater effects for those players who want to leopard-crawl their way through the watery deep.

In our interim solution, you can hold your breath for a short while, but when you start seeing pulsing effects on screen, you will soon be out of breath. At that point, the game forces you out of prone to take a breath (and too bad if you are in front of an enemy). While underwater, you cannot shoot, use items, or aim down sights. It may turn out that this is a game mechanic we are happy to keep, but until then, have a go and see what you think. See below for a demonstration of the new underwater effects in Creek (as well as a demonstration of the new smooth time of day transitions).

💡 Even if we end up preventing players from going underwater, the effects will be useful for non-gameplay camera purposes such as Spectator Mode and screenshots.

—

Though prone is currently highly functional — in the sense that the foundation is there and it allows all essential actions (moving, shooting, aiming, reloading, switching items) — there’s still plenty to fix and refine, even if we’re not expecting to release a fully fleshed out iteration straight away.

AI development

New enemy AI systems continue to be developed, with existing features also having to be rebuilt within the new Kythera AI middleware. This month, we’ll be focusing on more sight detection.

Take a look at this first video:

In the video above, a character walks into the cone of vision of an AI bot, quickly raising its Alertness Level from “Idle” (Alertness = 0) to “Suspicious” (Alertness > 0). Once Alertness reaches 1.0, the bot goes into the full “Alert” state and is instructed to engage the enemy.

When the character is no longer visible, the AI goes into a “Cautious” mode and is instructed to start searching for the target after a short period of time. (This, of course, is just the basic behavior, which will be expanded over time.)

💡 Why are there 2 cones of vision?
› The wider cone (gray) is the actual visual perception cone for the AI: any enemy activity picked up within it will raise alertness.
› The smaller cone (red) is used for target selection: targets within this cone will be engaged according to priority — more on that in a future report.

But how does visibility work? Well, target visibility is determined by various factors such as:

• Distance: the closer to the target, the faster the AI will identify it
• Angle: targets that are in the primary cone of vision (red) will raise suspicion more quickly than targets in the secondary cone (gray)
• Time of day: broad daylight makes detection easier by increasing the range/length of the cone, while nighttime makes it shorter
• Light sources: proximity to artificial light sources can make targets more easily detectable

To illustrate the last two points (time of day and light sources), here are two quick demos:

In the demo above, the player character is outside of the AI’s cone of vision for nighttime. As time of day is changed to daytime, the cone expands and the player is now within the AI’s visual range.

But nighttime isn’t the only factor to consider:

Above, the player is initially invisible to the AI. As the character steps into the light, however, you will notice how the Alertness value quickly increases until the AI is alerted and starts engaging.

💡 Please note that these videos and visualizations are merely for demonstration purposes and don't necessarily represent final AI detection behaviors or values.

💡 For earlier AI-related news and demos including grenade usage, shooting out of windows, cover system and world interactions, make sure you've checked out Intel Reports #017, #018 and #019.

Although we have basic light detection in the game currently (in V1033), these systems had to be rebuilt with the move to the new AI middleware. They should hopefully be more consistent and efficient than the current implementation, as well as better integrated with other AI behaviors.

Time of Day alarm system

Section by Matt “Fatmarrow” Farrow

We have now implemented what we call a time of day alarm system in order to implement an appropriately timed call to prayer in the Compound map.

Islamic prayers are not synchronized with hours of the day, but are aligned relative to astronomical phenomena like sunrise, midday and sunset. Luckily, we have already established an internal system which maps a “standard day” to an actual day of the year, where hour 6 is designated sunrise and hour 18 is designated sunset (this system is what already allows you to use shorthand like “sunrise” instead of a specific time of day). Of course, the times of sunrise and sunset depend on the date and latitude, but this is also taken into account in the system.

For example, the Fajr prayer (the first of the day) takes place at the first light of dawn. Through trial and error, we determined that a “standard” hour of 5.5 or so (a little bit before the standard sunrise at 6:00am) reasonably satisfies this criterion. In the Compound level itself, a blueprint plays a call to prayer sound effect on receiving an alarm event from the time of day system.

💡 The system can also be rigged to work with "normal" or "actual" hours, for example to have a bell sound every hour.

One reason for this deep dive is to point out one of many features that modders will soon be able to use to help them bring their own maps and props to life (though map mods will not be available just yet, as we are focusing on weapon mods in V1034). There is an eclectic but relatively extensive library of features that will be available to player-authored blueprints. In due course, we will provide documentation to assist with this.

Other developments

Female voices coming to the Comms Menu and other audio updates

With the introduction of playable female characters, V1034 needs basic call-outs for the Comms Menu (default G). Here’s a quick look:

🔊 Audio reverb is also being updated. Whereas in V1033 the reverb is essentially binary, accounting only for whether you're "outdoors", in a "large room" or in a "small room" — with no in-betweens — in V1034 reverb should dynamically adapt to the size and layout of rooms.

Making sure you retrieve that intel

Section by Matt “Fatmarrow” Farrow

You know how it goes. You play Intel Retrieval for the first time. Excitedly, you search the laptop and then you hot-foot it to extraction. But why is the round not ending? The laptop, of course, is where you left it, and not with you at extraction. It is a GROUND BRANCH rite of passage, but it isn’t all that fun.

So in V1034, we’ll try having players pick up the laptop automatically after searching it. There was some concern about players being “locked” into the pickup animation, but in practice it is not really a great inconvenience or vulnerability. You can say a fond goodbye to the “did I remember to pick up the laptop?” meta game.

Patching out certain patches

It turns out that making country flag patches was a bit of a minefield.

Rather than be forced to make what might be construed as political decisions regarding which country flags/patches to include (or not), we have decided to limit the official selection of flag patches only to those that represent the countries of our development team.

The good news is that the process of making and sharing modded patches will soon be streamlined via Steam Workshop, so we anticipate that the community will step in to fill the gap if there is demand.

Bugfix corner

In this month’s bugfix corner, we have a few doozies that will be in V1034:

• Fixed reticle not updating when scope magnification levels are changed by the player while not in ADS (aim down sight) mode.
• Fixed lights being blown out when shooting poles and other parts of light fixtures rather than the bulbs or light strips themselves (a particular issue on Small Town and Depot, for example), and some new VFX has been added for lights shot out while off, and also to add some visual feedback when multiple shots are required to take out a light (for example the large floodlights in Depot).
• Tweaked various outfit and gear skins to:
  • No longer mismatch with other items of the same skin (especially camos)
  • Have better consistency in camo pattern scaling
  • Tone down excessive brightness (most noticeable in desert patterns/colors)
• Breaching Charges can no longer be placed or detonated while the player is “frozen” (e.g. at round start).

So when is V1034 coming out?

Though we wanted to have a full V1034 release before the end of the year, difficulties with the implementation of prone have thrown the proverbial wrench into those plans, as is probably clear at this point. So we’re settling for releasing the public testing version of the update by then.

As much as we don’t like giving out ETAs: we’ll be aiming to start the public testing on December 19 — about three and a half weeks from today.

So hang in there and pray to the gaming gods that we get as much as possible in order by that date.

And this is it for this month’s Intel Report!

We have a testing branch to put out, so next time you hear from us, it should be a Build Update rather than another Intel Report.

Enjoy the weekend, and as always: thank you for your continued support of this project. We’ll see you next time!

Oh, hey! Hi.

Welcome to another Intel Report! This month we’re bringing you previews for upcoming release V1034 and beyond, as well as other development news. But first, the usual disclaimer:

⚠️ This report is not an exhaustive list of V1034 features!
For the most up-to-date list of expected V1034 and later features, see our roadmap. You may also want to check out our Intel Reports for June (#015), July (#016), August (#017) and September (#018).

Due to personal lives clashing with work (such as 3 members of the team being in the process of moving places) this report might be a little thinner than previous months in the eye candy department, but we’ll try to make up for it with previews for things that won’t be in the game until V1035 and later.

Alright, let’s get going.

New voices on the way

With female characters being included in V1034, we needed at least one female voice recorded and processed for the “commo rose”-style pre-recorded messages (accessible with the G key). But because writing and recording lines is all one big intertwined process (and because we want new voices sooner rather than later) we decided to go the full length.

Hence our announcement, a couple months ago, that we were looking for talented voice actors.

And thanks to our followers and the awesome voice actor community who helped spread the word, we were able to find and cast a roster of 18 (!) voice actors, male and female, in four different languages: most of them English (US), but also Russian, Spanish (Mexican) and Arabic. In case that isn’t obvious, we’ll not only be replacing the current enemy voice lines; we’ll be replacing them with native language voice lines for 3–4 different OPFOR factions, each with 2–3 different actors.

Here are some samples:

Lines for the player and the team will consist of 3 different voices for male operators, another 3 voices for female operators, and one for the team handler — a CIA lady back at the TOC (tactical operations center) keeping tabs on the mission and communicating with the ground unit in real time.

💡 Should we expect new voices in V1034?
The main goal for V1034 — as far as voice lines go — is implementing the female counterpart for the existing pre-recorded voice messages. As a stretch goal, Zack will process one of the new male voices to replace the existing ones.

As of this writing, about a third of the actors have been recorded. It’s a lot of work ahead, but we’re super excited about the results so far! We look forward to hearing them in-game and sharing the footage with you as soon as we have it.

What Chris-with-a-C has been up to

Due to other tasks that required his attention, programmer Chris (not to be confused with Kris) has been bashing a variety of things into shape this month, but has still found time to keep working on the AI. He’s back on that full-time this week.

Over the last few weeks, Chris has implemented what he’s calling world events: stuff that is happening in the game world that should arouse the AI’s suspicion and trigger certain reactions. For now, he has created two event types: one is dead bodies, which the AI should eventually check on and take appropriate measures, such as alerting other AI actors; the other is power switches being shut off, which will eventually trigger enemies to go check the relevant switches and turn them back on if uninterrupted.

Though these world events only add the underlying logic and basic behavior so far (as in, bots will simply move to the appropriate actors), they represent the foundation for the fleshed-out behavior, which will of course be accompanied by appropriate animations and voice lines.

💡 Among the other things Chris has been busy with are: compiling a list of build steps for mod kit distribution alongside Callum, keeping the development builds up and running as John moves the server around Ohio, tackling some graphic setting requirements from Nvidia, and adding motion vectors to various UI elements. Don't worry: most of us don't know what any of that means either. But the point stands — man's been busy.

More info on modding!

Section by Matt “Fatmarrow” Farrow

So far we haven’t said much about the new modding features coming in v1034, but this month we’ll take a deepish dive into the new modding system helmed by programmer Callum.

Up to now, modding in GROUND BRANCH has been a rather unofficial affair, requiring players to manually place (and in some cases replace) files inside the game directory. Some kinds of mods, like missions and game modes, are essentially server-side only, but other kinds of mods like patches and asset replacements have required manual installation of the mod in both the server and clients. This has been quite a hassle. But soon, all this will change!

In V1034, we will start using the Steam Workshop as a repository and delivery system for mods. This is a tried and tested system, popular with modders, and the automatic background updating of mods is a key feature that should greatly enhance user experience. Getting content set up in GROUND BRANCH is rather complicated — not least because we are still developing some core systems — so we are going to introduce different kinds of modded content in subsequent updates. That way, we can hopefully get everything right before unleashing a modding free-for-all.

We’ll be kicking it off with one or two weapon mods to show you how it’s done. In the first example, behold! The VSS Vintorez.

What you see in the following screenshot from the Customize Operator screen is the modded VSS appearing seamlessly in the list of rifles, janky icon and all. To get this rifle in-game, you go to the Workshop, find the mod, and click the Subscribe button. And that’s it. The mod will be downloaded in the background, and the next time you run the game, the gun will be there.

So how will you make weapon mods? The answer is the GROUND BRANCH SDK (Software Development Kit), which is effectively a customized version of the Unreal Editor including some basic GROUND BRANCH bits and pieces.

We will in due course be providing tutorials and so on to explain the process in detail, but essentially you import your gun model into the editor, create a weapon blueprint, set it up with various properties (such as magazine type, display name, and so on), and then use the in-editor modding tools to create a mod and upload it to your personal Workshop account.

🔫 Since handguns are setup fairly differently from long guns, we'll also include a mystery pistol as a mod example.

Prone and animation

Kris and Mike continue to implement the new prone stance, which we have started previewing in the last couple months.

Since then, they have added item switching and reloading while prone, transitions between prone and other stances, as well as a proper rotating-in-place motion (instead of characters spinning on their pelvises). There’s still plenty of jank to clean up, but it’s almost fully functional from a gameplay perspective.

Here’s how the more presentable actions are looking at the moment:

In the video, you may notice how aiming from side-to-side while in the prone position has a limited angle. Once the threshold is reached on either side, moving the mouse will free-look a little further to the sides until that limit is also reached.

If you need to aim or look beyond those thresholds, you must reposition your character by holding one of the movement keys. In a previous iteration, the rotation would kick in automatically once the threshold was reached, which we realized felt dodgy as you were never sure at what point you would stop aiming/looking and get locked into the repositioning motion.

The amount of rotation applied to each repositioning is currently only about 30 degrees, which is likely to be increased to a wider angle somewhere in the 45- to 90-degree range — or whatever testing determines to be best.

💡 Animations and control schemes are all subject to change, so let us know how you feel about all of the above. You'll get to try it out yourself soon enough.

Animation optimization

Section by Kris

As of V1033, animation updates are performed on multiple threads, but much of the logic relating to animations was still on the game thread. This is being addressed in V1034, with as much logic as possible being moved to a custom animation proxy, allowing it to be run outside of the game thread.

At the same time, we’re ensuring that the animation graph conforms to what the engine calls the Animation Fast Path. (For those of you familiar with UE4 — or just morbidly curious — you can read more here.)

Both of these changes should lead to improved performance, especially for offline play and listen servers (the ones hosted locally via the Host Game option).

More quality-of-life updates for servers

Section by Matt “Fatmarrow” Farrow

Servers will get another boost in V1034, with a few more options added to the Admin Panel to make things easier for admins and players alike:

• A server setting has been added for the default ready countdown time, which is used unless overridden by the MapList.ini parameters. Up to V1033, if you wanted to vary the default countdown time, you had to add a parameter to every entry in the map list. We know you have better things to do with your time.
• If a dedicated server is started up without a defined MapList.ini file, a basic one is generated and the server continues from there. Previously, dedicated servers would hang on startup until a MapList.ini was manually added to the ServerConfig folder.
• There’s been a big pass on server restart options: you can now set a dedicated server to restart at (or at least near) a particular time of day, and it is now possible to configure the shutdown configuration via the Server Preferences menu.
• We have added a big red button and a console command to allow admins to reboot server from within the game. Sorry that took so long, admin folks.
• The majority of voting settings, previously editable only via the Vote.ini configuration file, have now been added to the server settings admin menu.
• There is a new AllowVotesWhenAdminPresent voting setting; if it is “false” then no votes can be started (except by admins) when an admin is online on the server.
• There is a new DelayVoteFromRoundStart voting setting; if “true”, then the server will not allow votes to be called during the round until this many minutes have elapsed.

We may be able to squeeze a few more server quality of life features into V1034 (we are looking to improve the kick/ban process, for example), but we hope that whatever features do make it into the update will help to bring calm and relaxation to overworked server admins. Namaste.

Bug fix corner

Press F to pay respects to these V1033 bugs (which will be gone in V1034):

• The debug camera (ToggleDebugCamera in console) will no longer spawn a mysterious stranger in the player list, also preventing new rounds from launching properly afterwards.
• Eyewear will apply the appropriate skin that has been selected inside the character customization. In V1033, eyewear defaults to black once you leave the customization screen.
• This isn’t a bug as such, but we have changed the mid-round spawning process to spawn you in without any freeze, and with your weapon already positioned at the Ready position (pointed forward). Hopefully this will reduce the number of “bullshit spawns” in Deathmatch and other respawn modes, where you get insta-killed before you can shoot back. OK, that will still happen, but it’s going to be more your fault now.
• In fact, we’re removing the janky, synchronized weapon drawing from round/mission starts altogether.

Post-V1034 cosmetics

Regular contractor Pau Peñalver has been working on a lot of small tweaks and upgrades to assets.

Although the new items won’t be available until after V1034 due to time constraints, we thought it would be cool to give you a little preview of some of them:

💡 Friendly reminder: these are special artist renders; they do not represent how assets will look in-game with dynamic lighting and other real-time restrictions.

As you can see, we’ll be expanding the face-wear selection with a neck gaiter/face scarf, 3 variants of the single-hole balaclava, and a three-hole balaclava.

Female operators will also be able to wear a traditional head cover, which can be had either with or without the pattern seen above.

This has been Intel Report #019!

We hope you’ve enjoyed these previews — we’ll probably have another batch for you next month — and as always, thank you for keeping up with the development of GROUND BRANCH! Your support, feedback and patience are greatly appreciated.

Take it easy, everyone!