Now that we’ve released the 2nd fix for issues involving the VR update of Honor and Duty: Arcade Edition, we have most of the critical bugs fixed and most of the highly requested features in. For requested features, we tried to address ones that were critically affecting people’s ability to play like leftie support (big oversight on our part, sorry about that) and having to hold the stick down to run. We also tried to get some features in that a lot of people wanted such as vibration for shots fired.
The one big issue we haven’t been able to fix is the framerate issue and that’s been due to the fact that we need a big match to reliably to see and test against. Right now, we’ve narrowed it down to a group of about 10 coding systems on a remote player in the match. What we’re doing is disabling these and seeing what affects and doesn’t affect the framerate. When we try something and then need to alter it, it can take about 20 minutes to create a new build so we need a big match for a long period of time and with people coming and going, it’s been hard to get testing in. These middleware coding systems are slated to be replaced in the sequel with our own coding so we’ll either find the problem or it will be removed at some point so it will get fixed one way or the other.
H&D: AE was built on a large code based called UFPS. We started using this when we were new to Unity and it got us up and running much faster than we could have done on our own. UFPS is designed to be flexible for a lot of situations which means there’s a lot of features that any one game won’t need. Having worked with UFPS for several years now, we’re much more familiar with Unity and it’s architecture and we’re going to be moving away from UFPS and back onto our own coding designed around what our games need. This will allow us to have better performance and make changes and troubleshooting much quicker. Some things like the player orientations are problematic to fix as it’s not clear where in UFPS this is getting set and how to reliably change it.
We’re about to start work on changes for Honor and Duty: D-Day which will start with the current code base. We’ll be making changes for the sequel in the current H&D: AE game. This means that for a while, as we fix and improve things for D-Day, AE will be updated as well. At some point the code bases will likely become incompatible but for a while, we’ll be able to bring a lot of what’s planned for D-Day into AE. Things like online bots and more game modes are along the lines of what to expect in addition to a lot of minor clean ups. We also plan to add a few maps and weapons along the way. The rocket launcher will hopefully make it back into MP as well as some fixed tripod mounted guns for base defense.
Here’s a short list of what we have on the immediate horizon:
Major items:
- Fix framerate issue for smoother playing matches.
- Continue to improve player orientations.
- Add voice chat.
- Add jumping to MP.
Minor items:
- Add M2 browing for the heavy.
- Give each weapon a distinct vibration setting so they feel different when being shot.
- Sounds for killing an enemy in mp.
- Sound when a player joins an online match.
- Add footsteps for online matches.
- Option to move in the direction the gun is pointing.
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