Things have been going well since the last update which removed the troublesome middleware from H&D. Both AE and D-Day are now running on new coding and the performance on AE has been great. Whereas before AE would start seeing serious framerate issues when there were more than 6 people in an online match, we’re now seeing 9 player matches with no lag at all so the new replacement coding has been a success. We have an exciting announcement to make for H&D AE but need to finalize a few details first so watch our FB page next week for the news.
The big focus at this point with AE fairly stable is to get D-Day finished so AE updates will be less frequent for the next few months. Don’t worry though as we have a lot coming for AE. Replacing the middleware was one of two big coding changes we needed to make. The 2nd change is updating all of our PS4 specific code (sign in, controllers, trophies, leaderboards, etc..) to work with a new version of of the PS4 SDK. H&D AE was released in 2016 on a version of Unity that had early support for PSVR and the Aim. A later version of the SDK was released and our coding was not compatible with this newer version and would require a lot of changes so we became version locked on an old version of Unity. The newer SDK is required for all new PS4 releases so we are updating our PS4 specific coding to work with the newer SDK. We’ve already started and it’s not looking like it’s going to be too big a deal.
In addition to the PS4 code update, we’ve been working on Move support and our happy to say we now have Move support in D-Day. We’re doing something a little different and allowing players to play with a variety of controller combinations. Although there is a 2 controller limit for VR tracking in world space, players will be able to play with a combination of 3 and possibly 4 controllers ( DS4, Aim, & 2 Move). Right now we haven’t been able to get the DS4 & Aim to work together but from what we’ve read, it should be possible. This means you could play with your Aim for shooting but grab a move to throw a grenade. You could put down the Aim and pickup 2 Moves and “grab” the 2 handles of a mounted machine gun. You could also use a move for holding a gun and hold a DS4 in the other hand for a makeshift nav controller. Controllers can be connected and disconnected during gameplay and the game will optimize the control scheme for what you are using. We have this working right now for the DS4 and Move controllers and hope to have the ability to use the DS4 and Aim together. This will be useful for vehicles where the Aim is better for guns but the DS4 is better for controlling vehicles. Why would we do all this you ask? It turned out it was just about as easy to do it as to not do it the way we structured our controller code.
While working on the Move code, our art team was working on the first level and those wanting larger maps than H&D AE will be very happy. The first map is huge compared to the old ones and well suited for vehicles. There are buildings with interiors, height variations, and lots of detail items. We’ll be releasing a video shortly to showcase the first completed map for D-Day.
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