Field Report 39: Harper’s Ferry & Update 100 released

25/03 - 2018

Hello and welcome to the Thirty-Ninth Field Report!

Today, we’re happy to announce the release of Update 100 and with it the first release of the next map in line to be made available in War of Rights.

Harper’s Ferry

As Lee and his army were moving into Maryland, he found that there were several Union positions around him that still had garrisons, most notably the important position of Harper's Ferry. On hearing about the Confederate invasion, General McClellan was refused to pull back the Union garrisons by the General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, which left General Dixon S Miles with a little more than 12,000 men in the town of Harper's Ferry with only the orders to defend it as best he could. To Lee, this town was not only an important strategic position, but the railroads that went through were an important supply line for his army and the invasion.

Harper’s Ferry, having been in production since 2014, is only rivaled by Antietam in terms of age and thus we are extremely happy about allowing our alpha backers to set foot in the historic town – center of US arms manufacturing, location of John Brown’s raid (greatly escalating the growing national disagreements into an actual Civil War) and the site of the biggest number of union prisoners of war taken during the war (12,419 Federals surrendered to Jackson).

The map will be gradually released covering different skirmish areas like Antietam has been. The first skirmish area to be released is titled “River Crossing”. This skirmish area focuses on the Confederates attacking the town by the two bridges (one railroad bridge and one pontoon bridge). While it never came to direct infantry fighting within the town (the union forces surrendered before the planned confederate assault began) we think these alternative town-fighting scenarios of what could have happened had the Federals not surrendered will provide the players a very different play experience than the rural farms & fields offered by maps such as Antietam.

Please note that Harper’s Ferry, as all things in the alpha, is very much a work in progress – expect to see lots of updates to it throughout the development of the game.

Dynamic Environment Probes & TOD Changes

The update brings more than just Harper’s Ferry – it introduces a new dynamic environment probe solution that we have created to better support our time of day cycle (which has also been heavily updated). Until now, we’ve been limited to a single environment probe in one specific area no matter the time of day. The environment probes capture the visuals of their specific environment (could be a dirt field or a forest for instance) and project the reflections and ambient lighting of that environment onto whatever is inside their affected area. A wheat field specific probe will for instance generally project a more yellow/golden colour (the light cast from the wheat) onto objects than a forest probe would.

Before today’s update, all probe textures were captured at noon. This meant that even though you were standing in a wheat field by night, the environment reflecting from you would be that of a wheat field by noon. With our dynamic probe system, we are able to capture the environments every hour and have them dynamically update based on the time of day. This means you standing on a wheat field at 20 past midnight will result in the environment probe projecting the environment captured at midnight instead of noon. This also allows for much more real world accurate lighting values as the time of day changes so the night ends up not just being dark, but super crazy dark, which then makes the eye adaptation give the scene much more exposure which in the end, results in brighter colors at night seem much more intense, such as campfires, gunshots and artillery explosions. Another side effect of this is that the flash from gunshots at night, is now able to illuminate the smoke that has been building up during the battle, making for some exciting night time battles. If you fire your weapon at night, you will most certainly give your position away.

The results of this (please note that this is the very first iteration of the new probe system) means a closer to real life look overall.

Update 100 contains many other tweaks and fixes such as a more streamlined ready to aim animation, new regiments for to fight in Harper’s Ferry and a lot of code cleanup just to name a few. The full patchnotes can be found here: https://www.warofrightsforum.com/showthread.php?1888-War-of-Rights-Patch-Notes&p=75940#post75940.

Community Videos Highlight

Below is a handful of some of the great videos created by the community these past few weeks. We’d like to thank all content creators out there for spreading the word of WoR!

Skirmishes Phase II & Early Access

So, when is the next phase of skirmishes and the early access launch? This is a question we’ve been asked once or twice, and we understand the frustration when we answer that we do not know yet. While we still don’t have an ETA for either we are pushing towards both a Phase II and Early Access launch this year. Server & client stability as well as being able to leave a server and join another one are some of the main factors keeping us in skirmishes phase I. With the introduction of 150 player servers and the formation buff system and with the flag bearer spawning system just around the corner as well as officer specific game rules to limit trigger happy Rambo officer, the main focus of our programming team will short shift entirely to the above-mentioned issues.

That’s all for today. We look forward to be seeing you in Harper’s Ferry!