Development Update and Roadmap – April 14

[luthier]

Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of days, I waited until our progress was a little more clear. We are up on here a lot, and your feedback and reports are extremely helpful. Thank you all for your support!

We are planning another patch for this coming Monday the 18th of April*, with a beta version of the patch this Friday the 15th. The beta version will be the same as before, manually extractable to your game folder, then automatically overwritten by the release version of the patch.

Before I get more into the patch, I want to discuss the sfs – mod situation a bit. First of all, the data you’re accessing was never intended to be hidden from the user, but rather accessible as part of our larger plans for SDKs and user mods and expansions. It’s just we planned to open it up ourselves eventually, once the SDK was ready, but our enterprising fans found a way to do it earlier.

Most importantly, I need to mention something about Valve anti-cheat. Valve has their standard feature running on top of multiplayer, and we have some of our own additional checks. The way it works is not an automatic immediate server ban, but rather a data-gathering and review process resulting in eventual account ban from all multiplayer for the game.

So while many of you may enjoy playing around with game content, please do so offline. We do not yet have the user interface for switching between modified and stock files, nor do we have the server GUI to allow/disallow custom content so that makes things a little more difficult for the players. We’re probably going to ignore any infractions before today, but we’ll become more aggressive in the coming days. Please be warned. There will be a wide-scale account ban once we identify a large number of culprits. Everyone will be banned simultaneously, with no prior warning or chance for redemption. If you do not wish to be made an example of, please do not use ANY modified files in any online matches.

After all, cracking the game is against the EULA and theoretically we could ban everyone who has ever tried any mod, but that of course would serve no purpose. Once again, we do not mind you fiddling with your own game on your own machine, as long as you don’t use that ability to try to give yourself an unfair advantage online.

And now, the patch.

1. Further improvements to framerate in regards to the terrain engine. The improvement promises to be the most drastic yet, but since it’s currently split in half between two different machines we won’t have a more precise idea of the FPS gain until later today or early Friday.
2. SSAO is optional, a checkbox in Video Options.
3. Texture manager split into a separate core, which does wonders for performance on 4+ cores but offers no improvement on two cores.
4. Texture quality slider added to video options.
5. New Steam Lobby feature as an alternative to existing Server search.
6. Improvements to the Quick Mission Builder feature.
7. Large number of various changes in aircraft and cockpits

Future plans and roadmap:

1. SLI / Crossfire support (had to temporarily halt development due to ongoing work on FPS and texture manager)
2. Improvements to the campaign engine, including a rank and awards system.
3. Changes to multiplayer interface to better deal with the mods
4. More FM and DM tuning
5. Finally, documentation on dedicated server and campaign interface that should allow more meaningful 3rd party content!