Hello Everyone!
There hasn't been a game update in the last months as we have been busy working on some larger features. To keep you all in the loop here is a short summary of what we are working on. And what you can expect from the next game update.
Gameplay
Since December our Balance Team has been busy cooking up the latest set of tweaks and shake ups for gameplay. We said a bittersweet goodbye to BeigeAlert during this time as he pursues an exciting new opportunity. However this caused a bit of a delay for the development of gameplay changes. Enter Katzenfleisch joining the team! He has been working together with Ghoul since February to get us back on track. Trucking along and implementing the balance changes requested by the balance team (led by Rantology). To have a look at what is cooking in the stove join a server running the UWE Balance Beta mod. Look for servers with “UWE Beta Balance” in the title.Engineering
The last update decreased the connection timeout to 5 ms from 5 minutes to get rid of ghost player entities. Those blocked players from reconnecting to a server. However this resulted in some players being unable to connect to servers without timing out while loading. Looking into the issue we discovered multiple critical issues. The engine currently doesn't handle file assets as well as it should. It doesn't schedule some tasks properly onto the cpu. And it fails to manage some callbacks properly. All of that slows down loading on some systems drastically. Making the client unresponsive to incoming network messages, causing the server to assume the client timed out. But it also has some very negative effects on the stability of the frame time for all systems. So fsfod and Ghoul integrated some new debug tools to better diagnose these kind issues. And are currently resolving them one issue at a time. If you are affected by client timeout issues please join our discord server where we regularly publish new experimental builds with the latest iteration of those fixes. (Often found in pinned messages in the NS2 chat channel)New Map: METRO
Loki, Kash, Zavaro, Runestorm, Rantology, Ironhorse, Shrimm, Psyk, Mephilles, Samoose, Vlaad, and the Map Testing team have been busy working on an epic new map called METRO for quite some time. Right now the art team is busy detailing and optimizing the final stages of the map. METRO will make its debut in the upcoming patch. For now, here is a teaser image as an appetizer for you:
