Hi Everyone!

It’s already the end of July and here’s our development update.  Today you’ll see a new update for the game that includes a new shotgun, carrier drone, networking improvements, and bug fixes.  You can view the full change log at the bottom of this update.

New Features

Carrier Drone

The new carrier drone opens up some new ways to play.  You can attach small items such as magazines or explosives to the bottom and deliver them to different locations on the battlefield.  Let’s say you see a patrol coming down the road and want to set up an explosive to ambush them.  Attach an explosive, fly the drone to the ambush point, and drop off the explosive to detonate later. Or maybe a buddy is out of ammo for their M249, attach a box of ammo and fly it over to them.

M1014 Shotgun

Next up is the M1014 semi-automatic shotgun. It accepts any optic that uses 1913 rails and can hold a flashlight or PEQ-15 on the front.

Throw Magazines

You can now toss magazines to your buddies if they are low on ammo and you're pinned down. To throw a magazine, place it into one of the item pouches, equip it, and then toss it as you would any other thrown item. This is also how you attach magazines to the new carrier drone.

Multiplayer optimizations

A lot of work has gone into improving multiplayer performance and stability.  We added three features to help with this.  First was  One issue you may have seen is that you can spawn into a mission and not see other players or enemies.  This was caused by a backup in the message queue.  So the first change was to increase the send rates while lowering the size of each message. Our tick rate was 10, so 10 times per second we were sending the full information on each object you own.  We changed this to instead send a little bit every single frame.

While spreading out the load improved reliability, we still had an issue with the volume of data.  The next step was to reduce the size of each message.  We went through each object's update message, organized the data, and added compression where we could.  The largest boost was compressing quaternions into a single 32bit number and then decompressing it on other clients.

Finally we set up priority based send rate adjustment.  Priority is modified during gameplay to increase the priority based on the distance from players, if the object is moving, and how much of a threat the object is to a player.  So if an object is not moving we send its position less, if players are very far away from something we send its position less often, and this can be changed per entity type which allows us to increase the priority for important objects like helicopters and enemy characters while lowering rates for less important objects like boxes or smoke grenades. 

Here you can see a visualization of this working.  Watch the increase in messages as the weapon falls from the shelf.

All of this work has allowed us to play multiplayer on a simulated 2G cell phone internet connection!  There’s still improvements to be made but this should be a very noticeable improvement for everyone.  We’ll continue to tune and improve the networking, packet sizes, and update rates for objects.  So if you see something moving slowly just let us know and we’ll get it fixed.

90s Sneak Peak

Last month we showed off the road map.  The next update will be the 90s Pack!  We’re hard at work preparing this first content pack and we want to offer a sneak peak:

The future is looking bright!  

Thanks!

- Dan

Change Log

July 29, 2025 - V0.5.04 - Build: 719 Changeset: 4662

Known issues:

• When loading a save with the XM29 it doesn’t start with a magazine.
  
  

Notes:

• Added mission difficulty completion stars to the mission buttons

• A mission is now selected upon entering the ship in single player. It selects your last selected mission, next mission after a victory, or the first available if one is not set.

• No key assigned inputs will no longer appear in instructions as they just added more text that wasn't needed

• Your own player now shows up on the compass while operating a drone

• Added confirmation when deleting a save file

• The player now moves faster with nothing in your hands or just a knife.

• Players can now send mortar strikes from the map.

• Added lens flares to flashlights.

• Players are notified with a pop up in the free fly camera when they are being revived.

• Improved networking performance (See the dev blog for details)

• Added ping and packet loss information + icons that show in the top left corner if they are bad enough.

• Replaced host star icon

• Fire rates are now saved on weapons.  This applies on the load out selection menu too.

• Night vision state is now saved and loaded instead of falling back to the default.

• Added a new setting to reduce or remove the zoomed view look input multiplier.  Defaults to 1 to have zoomed views reduce input speed proportionally (this is how it works in previous versions).  Set to 0 to remove the reduction all together and have the zoomed view move as fast as it would without being zoomed.

• Added Toggle Walk input.  You can set the key in the input manager

• Shotgun swaps slower if changing weapons (equip time). 

• Added m1014 shotgun 

• Added carrier drones to transport equipment, magazines, or drop explosives.  Look at the drone while holding an item to attach.

• Increased mortar strike size by 50% for both HE and Smoke

• You can now throw magazines.  Place them in one of the pouches and throw like you would with a grenade.

Bug Fixes:

• Fix for exfil helicopter not failing mission when it was destroyed.

• Fix for the failed mission pop up spamming every couple seconds.

• Fix for Convoy and Cache Clash missions not failing when the infil/exfil helicopter was destroyed. 

• Fixed error with AI navigation on clients.

• Fixed radio tower particle size rendering differently in scope views.

• The infil helicopter no longer leaves if there are dead players inside.

• Fixed mission status saving constantly causing performance issues during the Victory menu.

• Joining a multiplayer game after the mission has been defeated now shows the proper status for the joining client.

• Fixed reload issue when loading a save with an M203 or various other weapons.

• Fixed save issue that would cause vehicles to sometimes move back to their starting position after loading.

• Fix for being able to quickly reload a shotgun. 

• Fix the missing shotgun sounds.

• Fix for bipods not being able to be placed on certain objects.

• Fix for drone sounds not turning off when the battery dies.

• Fix for not being able to complete the tutorial achievement.