This update includes a ton of new Unreal Engine 5 assets that we're testing. Here's an example of a new map we're planning for a military outpost:

There's also dynamic weather that we've setup so the map is sometimes day time or night time, which will automatically enable/disable dynamic lighting such as industrial lights and spotlights.

We plan to add a lot more assets over the coming weeks as well. This should make the game feel fresh and up-to-date prior to re-releasing back on the store.

This update also addresses a critical issue with throwables falling through the ground when landing in water. It fixes a problem with footsteps as well that caused them to sound as if they're behind the player when spectating another player.

This update fixes a critical bug with water volumes interacting with bullets and the new lean mechanic. If a player was leaning in water it would cause them to "go sliding" due to the lean pushaway system hitting all the water. It was also not possible to shoot through water using the current bullet mechanics. We've now corrected these issues and leaning in water should no longer be a problem and bullets should currently ignore water completely until we implement proper penetration mechanics and particle effects for this special case scenario.

The update also includes water noises when the player is moving through deep water. These sounds will scale based on the depth of the water and trigger whenever you're moving or turning in water.

Finally this update addresses an important issue with footsteps sounding as if they're behind the player. We've corrected the problem and the new footstep audio system should properly keep these sounds in front of the camera for the currently visible player.

This update fixes a critical issue with water replication. There were some inconsistencies with the networking between servers and clients with these new movement mechanics, so now these issues have been addressed. We've also utilized the integrated water system that comes with the engine for determining water depth which means custom water volumes are no longer required since everything just automatically works now.

We've addressed another issue with workshop maps that prevented certain engine assets from loading due to the content not being part of the game. Now workshop mappers should be able to utilize all types of water assets without having any broken materials after cooking and uploading your map.

This update overhauls all the animations for the new leaning system. The character will now keep their feet more planted and actually moves the weapon to the left when leaning to the left. So now your "other right" (left) can finally shoot around corners too!

Please note this is a slowed down view of the animation. We also have an all new ADS system coming in a future update with new FPS arms along with sights, scopes, and snipers. So until then the animation only needs to support hip fire for the time being.

The update includes all new water mechanics as well. There are now "water volumes" available which slow down player movement based on the water depth. If the water is not shallow enough then you will be prevented from proning. The same goes for crouching where you cannot crouch in water that's deep enough to put your weapon underwater. In both these situations the movement system will automatically force the character to stand up.

If you find yourself in water that is so deep you cannot even stand in it without your weapon being underwater, then you will be killed with a "has drowned" killfeed message. So don't tread out too far!

This should prevent players from abusing water areas on various maps. The footsteps system has been updated as well so that you make proper splashing sounds when moving through shallow water. However we haven't setup any special effects for deep water scenarios just yet, such as ripples and whooshing noises.

We've setup buoyancy for ragdolls too!

There's also a new water blueprint that's available for workshop mappers to designate which areas of their map consist of water. In a future update we'll include more buoyancy support for other physics-based objects as well.

Finally the update addresses an issue with footsteps not registering when running downhill on certain types of objects. Now these sounds should register a bit more often, but there's still some testing and fine tuning required for things such as staircases.

This update includes a ton of new Unreal Engine 5 assets that we're testing. Here's an example of a new map we're planning for a petrochemical plant:

There's also dynamic weather that we've setup so the map is sometimes party cloudy, raining, or even an all out thunderstorm.

We plan to add a lot more assets over the coming weeks as well. This should make the game feel fresh and up-to-date prior to re-releasing back on the store.

The update also makes some critical changes to explosive forces, which will apply most specifically to grenade damage priorities. The previous system would just randomly loop through each player on the map and didn't provide any concrete output in terms of the order that players were killed.

Now explosive forces will apply any and all damage to each hostage or VIP inside the damage radius before applying damage to each individual player based on their distance. This means an explosion will damage the closest player and then work outwards applying damage as a real explosion would. However this also prevents players from abusing the mechanic by killing a player first even though that explosion would have actually killed the hostages or VIPs as well.

The update implements a new system for console messages that allows dedicated servers to redirect output to clients. This is very important to admin commands as there was previously no information being provided when a command was submitted, which made it quite difficult to know why a command wasn't actually working.

We've added an automatic AFK kicking system that monitors whether or not players are actually playing each round. If a player is AFK for a certain period of time the server will kick this player while still allowing them to rejoin, whereas the admin kick command would prevent the player from rejoining for a certain period of time. There's also a custom disconnect message that says that player was "kicked for being AFK" rather than "disconnected" so other players can know when someone was kicked automatically rather than by an admin.

There's now a physics restriction on weapons when dropping them to the ground which limits the speed at which they can move. This should prevent weapons from flying very far or unrealistically whereas they should now fall to the ground more appropriately. We've also added some important debug output for the new user interface system as more DirectX 12 functionality is built out behind the scenes until we make the switch back from DirectX 11 later this year.

This update changes the default renderer from DirectX 12 to DirectX 11. We're making this change because after extensive testing we've determined that the game runs smoother this way without really losing too many new UE5 features that we don't necessarily need right now. That's because we value performance much more than graphics, even though we want to make a game that still has good graphics. So until we update from UE5.2 to UE5.4 later this year for some extensive performance updates to DirectX 12 in UE5, we plan to keep everything defaulted to DirectX 11 until then.

If you would like to test the game on DirectX 12 then you can use a special command line parameter via a desktop shortcut in order to launch the game in this graphics mode:

There are still some significant benefits to DirectX 12 along with many optimizations that save developers time so they don't have to optimize their assets as much. So by falling back to DirectX 11 you do lose some of these newer benefits, and it's worth trying out which mode works best for your current system. But again based on all of our tester feedback it appears that DirectX 11 was the preferred renderer a majority of the time, with players noticing very little change in how good the graphics actually looked.

This update also overhauls the entire audio system with some very significant optimizations and reorganizations. We've setup audio priorities for every single audio sample in the game so the engine can know which sounds are most important in order to prioritize them over others to ensure they always play. This is because audio engines are limited by a certain number of channels that they can mix together before the engine has to start choosing which sounds to play and which sounds to drop.

The weapon optimizations are very significant as we're no long spamming the game world with audio and particle components to simulate weapon fire. Instead we now have a much more robust system that properly cycles through preallocated audio and particle effects that repeat in order to simulate the effect of constant firing. This should make the shooting feel a bit snappier as the entire system is now using a lot less resources. We've also added new "dry fire" sounds to the weapons which should trigger when you try to fire the weapon when it's out of ammo.

We've included accelerated paint support for DirectX 12 now as well. This means the DirectX 12 user interface will be just as snappy and quick as the DirectX 11 user interface after our previous update last week. This means accelerated paint mode is being officially rolled out across both rendering platforms and ensures that your web-based user interface (a web browser floating on top of the game engine) works at full 4K 60FPS. That's because the underlying system is now sharing a live texture from the web browser with the game engine, which allows for instant graphics copying rather than the extremely slow process that previously had to go through the CPU. Now that everything stays on the GPU the entire user interface system is extremely quick and snappy compared to before, and will work just as fluidly at 4K resolutions.

This also means we've removed the temporary 90 FPS cap in the game, which was in place to prevent the game engine from overloading the web browser and causing the entire user interface to lock up. Now with accelerated paint we no longer have to worry about the game engine and the web browser fighting for CPU power, and you can run your entire game now with a completely uncapped FPS if you'd like.

We fixed a critical issue with workshop blueprints breaking between map changes. This caused doors and other workshop components to glitch out and have multiple copies on the map, because the "fake" ones that are used in-editor to place around were accidentally showing up in-game when they shouldn't. This also made it difficult to pick up the bomb at times as it would appear that there were two different bombs on the ground. The grenade arc has been fixed up as well and should now no longer appear overly dark or create any kind of "glowing" effect in the game world. We've also disabled all post processes on workshop maps which should prevent custom maps from using undesired features such as motion blur, film grain, vignettes, auto exposure, and more.

This update makes some very significant performance optimizations for Steam Deck. We've completely reconfigured the entire graphics system in UE5 for Steam Deck with automatic detection of the platform and implementing default settings that provide a smooth gameplay experience on Steam Deck. There's even special graphics modes that we're using to provide the best performance possible which would normally not be necessary on PC, so hopefully these updates really help to provide the best experience possible on Steam Deck.

A small issue in the training map was corrected where you'd keep your weapon from the previous round. This should no longer be the case in the training map anymore. Another bug was also addressed regarding the HUD completely freezing. This was not because of any user interface issues, but because of a certain data connection breaking between the server and your game client. However there's still some extensive testing required for us to confirm this issue is indeed fixed, as there might be more to it depending on how testing goes.

The "map" command has been fixed so that it will now look for existing maps in the maplist prior to loading the requested map. This allows the command to maintain the existing round timer and total rounds from the maplist rather than using the default 3 rounds as was previously happening. It's also very smart in that if a map appears on the maplist multiple times but with different game modes, it will actually pick the proper settings from the maplist that match the desired game mode rather than picking the first match in the maplist.

Finally this update overhauls the entire collision and physics of the third-person camera. We've added an entire "smooth gliding" system that prevents the camera from stuttering or glitching out for quick instants, which especially happens when running through doors or underneath other objects. Now the camera will pop forward but slowly slide outwards to create a very subtle effect that allows the player to focus more on their aiming and less on their camera collision.

This update makes some significant performance enhancements to the user interface system. We are now using something called "accelerated paint" in order to provide a much more responsive and snappier UI. However this system is currently only in place for DirectX 11 and is not finalized on DirectX 12, which means you would have to manually switch into this graphics mode for the time being. However this is a huge step forward for us to ensure we have a user interface that runs smoothly at a similar FPS to the game.

There's also been some adjustments to smoke grenades, which should now deploy faster than before, as the timer has been reduced by 1 second. We've added some new graphics commands as well to disable some newer features such as virtual shadow maps via the graphics_vsm command.

This update adjusts a lot of settings for Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections. We've carefully tuned some default engine settings which should fix a lot of issues with existing maps and things being a bit too dark. There is now a significant amount of indoor lighting to prevent things from over-darkening along with some boosting to texture colors.

There's also an important fix for auto-exposure settings which weren't originally tuned very well for a competitive shooter. These settings are what adjust the exposure of your eyes as you walk into light areas vs dark areas. We've now overridden the entire auto-exposure system in the engine so that it performs as intended. The same goes for workshop maps which should inherit all of these settings by default.

This update enables Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections by default. It includes some optimized settings to ensure these new lighting modes run as efficiently as possible. These new features are what make everything "pop" in Unreal Engine 5, but (as we always do) we wanted to focus on performance fixes prior to experimenting with these new rendering features.

As you can see, these new GI and reflection modes significantly increase the graphical fidelity of the game. There are now actual light bounces that adjust the color of surfaces to create a much more sophisticated representation of a scene. It also creates high quality reflections that can now show elements that are completely off-screen.

However while these new lighting modes look fantastic, we want to ensure performance is never compromised. Therefore we've included some new graphics settings that allow players to manually enable/disable these new features if they aren't desired. The following commands can be used to control Lumen settings:

• graphics_lumen
• graphics_lumen_gi
• graphics_lumen_reflections

These settings will save with your other video settings for the local device and are not synchronized via Steam Cloud as is the case with bindings, gameplay settings, ect.

In the workshop editor, a post process system can also forcibly disable Lumen on workshop maps if modders don't want these lighting features available on their maps at all. Finally we've included an engine system that detects if Lumen is disabled and automatically forces skylights to be stationary, otherwise they would have significant shadow artifacts without Lumen enabled.