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Update 7 Free Weekend Wrap-Up: Welcome and Thank you!

Hey everyone,

Wow, what a week!

With the arrival of Update 7 and an awesome Steam Free Weekend the team just wanted to take a moment to say...

HELLO NEW PLAYERS AND WELCOME TO HELL LET LOOSE!

Welcome to the frontline, it's great to have you with us!

We've been blown away by how many of you joined us in the free weekend, smashing past our previous peak CCU record. It’s very exciting for us as a team to see the interest and engagement with the title, and it encourages us only to work harder to polish off the rough edges and continue to improve and expand the experience.

We’re excited to welcome you to the community and to the development journey.

For those of you who are new to Hell Let Loose, Steam is a great place to find your feet with the player-base. However, we'd also like to invite you to join the official Hell Let Loose Discord & Community run sub-reddit pages.

Hell Let Loose Discord

Hell Let Loose Reddit

These locations are great for meeting the wider community, finding a unit, joining one of our international clans and getting your meme on. Also, When they get a free minute too you'll see members of the team, including Lead Developer Max popping in for a chat.

These channels are welcoming to all players, whether you're a new recruit or a grizzled veteran, so come say hi!

You'll also see that each week we have a developer blog post, which we title 'Developer Briefings'. We use these to keep the community up to date with what we're doing, talk about community topics and reveal new content!

For the Veterans and Existing Community - THANK YOU!

As a 100 player title, the in-game Hell Let Loose experience is a direct reflection of the community behind it. We’re very thankful for the incredible effort made by veteran players in welcoming newcomers and showing them the ropes during this weekend. We know that while a free weekend is a fantastic way of showing the game to a wider audience, the total experience can become very mixed with so many new players. We really appreciate your patience and generosity during this time and we can directly attribute the enormity of the weekend to the efforts of the community.

What's Next?

FPS & Crash Reports

The fundamental overhauls within Update 7 left us with significant performance and crash issues on both Carentan and the wider maps.

Thanks to quick, timely and constructive feedback and bug reports on these issues the team managed to identify some of the problems and deploy an initial Hotfix. Whilst this addressed some of the issues we are aware of the crashes and remaining performance issues that are present.

As soon as the Hotfix went live we started work on the next patch - designed to fix the significant issues remaining after the Hotfix.

Content Feedback

As part of our normal post-Update process, we've been collating all feedback from across all our channels. Everything from the meta, to current and legacy issues (FPS dips, tank physics etc.), to roles, weapons and every other aspect of the game.

Update 7 represented a significant meta-game change for us, and we’re taking particular care to listen to all feedback before we make any changes. We could see that while games now felt much more tactically and strategically reliable (no more 360 degree defending), there were issues that can be ironed out - both through the implementation of coming features (halftracks, additional Commander abilities and overhauls for both the Engineer and Support roles), as well as small changes to the existing. We’re roadtesting many of these at the moment and have prioritised easier changes for the next patch.

This Week's Developer Briefing & Beyond

This week's Dev Brief will be written by Lead Developer Max and include a more in-depth look at the weekend, as well as our plans to address any bugs that cropped up since U7 dropped.

We're also gearing up to share our next updated Roadmap, so expect more details on that too.

That pretty much wraps things up for today.

We'll see you on the frontline!

Developer Briefing #85 - Update 7 Hotfix, Tactical Maps

Hey everyone,

We hope you're enjoying Update 7 and battling through the streets of Carentan.

The team have been hard at work combing through all of your feedback, from bug reports to your thoughts on the new features and changes that came with U7.

Thanks to your bug reports the team were quickly drawn to FPS issues and game crashes reported in Carentan and in some cases, other maps.

We're pleased to announce that Update 7 Hotfix v1 will go live tomorrow (Friday) morning BST.

The main focus on this initial Hotfix will be:

• Optimisations for Carentan
• Optimisations for new assets
• Player model optimisation
• High certainty fix for Crash 01
• Speculative fix for Crash 02

To tell you more about Hotfix v1, as well as the follow up Hotfix v2 that we're already working on, Lead Developer Max took a moment to pen a Hotfix and Development Status update for you all:

An update from Lead Developer Max - Hotfix v1

Hi everyone,

Thanks for jumping into Update 7 and for the great feedback.

We're keen to give you the full status update of the immediate next steps.

As many people have reported, several significant issues presented themselves immediately once a large number of players joined the game for this new update. While we QA each release for weeks, the largest issues normally only present themselves as soon as you start throwing tens of thousands of players at the game. This is always hugely disheartening for us as a team, as we've spent the better part of 6 weeks QAing the game and fixing more than 900 issues to prep the Update for launch. As you can imagine, having the work overshadowed by frustrating issues for you all is unideal at best! Fortunately, we've been provided with huge amounts of very useful feedback by you - the community - as well as our brilliant QA team who have been able to live-test in-game all week. We're also fortunate that our crash uploader has been working perfectly, enabling us to quickly assess the frequency distribution and triage the most common occurring to the least occurring.

The whole team has been working overtime on this as we know how fundamental many of these issues are to a great experience.

Current client crash breakdown:

- Client Crash 01

Makes up approximately 28% of crashes experienced.

- Client Crash 02

Makes up approximately 40% of crashes experienced.

- Client Crash 03

Makes up approximately 30% of crashes experienced.

FPS Dip:

We are actively investigating a severe FPS drop of approximately 20-120 seconds that can happen mid-game on Carentan (we are looking to see if this is happening elsewhere). We are confident that we will be able to find and address the issue, but it will require some time and QA testing to make sure we understand the problem to its fullest, and make sure we don’t introduce new bugs and issues upon trying to resolve.

Carentan Optimisation:

While we had been continually testing and optimising Carentan on a huge variety of machines prior to the Update, there is something unusual occurring specifically with Carentan that emerges at 100 players, and varies wildly from machine to machine - often a mixture of different hardware causing very mixed outcomes. Players with traditional middle-spec machines have experienced higher FPS in Carentan than players with high-end machines. In addition, there have been other complicating issues caused by what we are terming the “FPS Dip”.

What we do know is that optimisations were needed on the CPU side. Ironically, the map itself culls objects too effectively, and those objects (and the act of culling them) are run through the CPU - often locking the CPU up and causing all sorts of issues as a result.

To this end, we have implemented several fixes that should immediately see a performance increase. With the performance increase, we will start to get a better idea of what are standalone issues, and what are issues that are a result of that poor performance (CPU bottlenecking as a result of poor performance may be contributing to or causing the FPS dips experienced).

We also want to let you know that Carentan - like all maps we release during Early Access - will be subject to continual fixes and optimisation. We will be working continually to improve all aspects of all 9 maps we have currently in the game to meet a series of benchmarks for minimum acceptable FPS. Now that the animation systems update has been completed, we’re in a great position to dedicate our time to this and the polish and fixing of bugs that have arisen.

Immediate Plan:

Hotfix V1: Friday Morning BST

We have been testing a Hotfix to address a majority of the issues experienced over the last two days. As soon as we started to receive crash log uploads and could profile more broadly in Carentan we began immediate work on troubleshooting them.

The Hotfix will address the most common crashes, as well as include optimisation for Carentan that will improve frames across all machines.

• Optimisations for Carentan and all new assets present.
• Optimisations for player models (will list frames across all maps - especially in high population servers).
• High certainty fix for Client Crash 01
• Speculative fix for Client Crash 02
• Ongoing investigation Client Crash 03 (this may be tied to or solved by the fix for CC02)

Hotfix V2: Release TBD

While Hotfix V1 aims to address the majority of issues the player-base is experiencing, Hotfix V2 will address any issues that Hotfix V1 failed to solve, or any that crop up after the deployment of HF V1. As a team, we always want to build contingency plans out to make sure we have the best ability to solve any recurring issues quickly - as opposed to leaving these issues live in the game until the next Update.

We will be deciding on the timing of HF V2 immediately after assessing the effectiveness of HF V1.

Free Weekend:

As many of you may already know, we have a Free Weekend organised for this coming weekend. Fortunately, one of the reasons we brought forward our Update day to Tuesday was to give us several days of buffer in order to apply a Hotfix before the Free Weekend got under way.

During Early Access, it’s always a tricky balance to combine marketing events with significant systems overhauls. We really appreciate your patience with us as we work to get this right.

The New Meta, Loadouts, Content, Bugs and Everything Else

While our focus has been on addressing the immediate critical issues affecting players, we’re collating all feedback from our channels and building out a document to capture all perspectives and feelings about the new meta, loadouts and general game functionality.

In addition to this, some small but humorous animation bugs have popped up - most around leaving a vault or climb. We also have recorded various bugs and issues regarding black marks on the map and Recon marks capturing your own team, as well as the turnback mechanic on Omaha Beach not functioning properly.

While technical issues and bugs will always be triaged and fixed, we’re making sure we play the game continuously in order to get a sense of the new meta. We’re reading all feedback and are playing alongside the community in order to watch where it develops.

Generally, we like to give each meta shift several weeks of playtime to watch as the community evolves with it.

After this time, we’ll be looking at what changes should be made, balanced with coming features and changes to specific roles.

Finally, we’re also looking at the option to disable or scale all camera movements. We can see that some players are experiencing motion sickness due to new camera animations.

Roadmap

Due to the hotfix and patching that will be undertaken, we’ll be revising the next roadmap to address any residual issues, as well as to make sure release timing is correct.

As soon as we have revised timings, we’ll be releasing the roadmap.

It’ll feature a huge list of everything you’d expect, but with a particular focus on optimisation and bug fixing.

Conclusion

While Hell Let Loose is an Early Access game, we are very keen to not use that as an excuse for poor performance, crashes or any other issues you may experience.

Moving forward, we’re now free to spend significant time optimising all the content that has been added in the last year. Fundamentally, we’re incredibly relieved not to have any entire systems overhauls necessary to complete.

Update 7 was a huge and very risky step forward for Hell Let Loose, but it was a necessary step in order to make sure we were set up correctly for the future. As with all fundamental overhauls during Early Access, it’s always a fine line to navigate between marketing the game and managing the risk associated with the changes.

We’re very excited as a team to work from our new benchmark to continue to improve all aspects of the game, as well as implement new features.

As a team, we’ll be playing a lot this weekend and next week. If you see us in-game, please come and say hi!

Lastly, thank you for all your patience with us during the course of this Update and the ones before. Updating such fundamental aspects of the game has come with huge challenges and we appreciate that it’s been a turbulent experience. Please know that moving forward the technical risk we’ll need to undertake will be much less significant, and that the work done so far puts us in a great position for the future.

New & Updated Tactical Maps!

Following on from Max's update, lets take a look at both brand new and updated tactical maps for your strategic pleasure!

First up we've got the newest addition to the game, Carentan!

Next up we have the freshly overhauled Foy!

As well as the updated Omaha Beach map!

Last but not least we have the classic HLL map, Hurtgen Forest!

Not only are these maps a fantastic way to plan your battle strategy before the bullets start flying, but you can even line them up with real-world maps to see exactly where you're fighting in-game.

Die sind mir irgendwie zwischendurch nicht aufgefallen daher leider etwas spät, aber besser spät wie nie!

Asche auf mein Haupt!

Developer Briefing #86 - Action Plans, Fixes & A Community Event Highlight!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #86!

This week Lead Developer Max is here to discuss what we've learned and what we're working on following your feedback since Update 7 dropped. From bug fixes and crashes to meta-changes and role mechanics we're letting you know what the team are currently working on behind the scenes!

Oh and make sure you scroll all the way to the end, we've got a little something new to show you...

A Message from Max - Action Plan

Hi everyone!

We thought that it’d be useful to now update the community on our current action plans in as granular detail as possible so that you’re aware of where our priorities lie. This is to give you a sense of what is to come, as well as give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re tackling both the current issues in-game, as well as prioritising future work.

In a perfect world, we’d be releasing a simplified roadmap graphic to demonstrate this clearly, however due to the current in-game issues (crashes being the most persistent), we’re going to break down our current action plan for you, then work through the current urgent issues, and then revise our timescale accordingly before releasing a proper roadmap with adjusted dates.

Disclaimer: please know that this list is non-exhaustive and focuses on short term work.

Programming:

The programming team are hard at work with our QA team to profile and fix the two most common crashes. These two crashes are the “Map Change Crash” and the “Apex Crash” respectively. We have huge amounts of logs for both of these - working with both QA and the wider community. However, the issues for both are happening in an obscured location (garbage collection and the physics engine respectively) - making it more difficult to nail a certain fix. Whereas other crashes are quite easy to profile and remedy, these are taking the resources of our programming team, as we understand these issues greatly affect your experience with the game.

Once these crashes are dealt with we’ll be tackling:

• Engineer overhaul.
• Support overhaul.
• Adding transport and logistics vehicles.
• Supply systems overhaul.
• Ammunition systems overhaul.
• Bullet penetration.
• More undisclosed items.

Mapping:

With 9 maps currently in the game, your feedback has made it clear that our focus should now be on fixing and optimising the current map rotation in the game. As such, we have the following focus for the mapping team:

Updating, optimising and fixing gameplay (impenetrable fences, lack of cover, poor lighting) for PHL, SME, Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Carentan and Foy, with heavier work done on SME. Our aim here is to make sure each of our nine existing maps have the same quality lighting, optimisation and are free of visual and gameplay bugs. In addition, we’re also making sure that gameplay feels good on each of the Strongpoints.

Adding Warfare or Offensive modes to maps that do not yet have them.

A total overhaul of both Hurtgen Forest and Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont with a huge focus on optimisation and unique gameplay.

On top of that...

• Unannounced New Map 01: approximately 75% complete.
• Unannounced New Map 02: approximately 15% complete.
• Unannounced New Map 03: approximately 55% complete.

Sound:

Currently, we’re working through the update feedback list and expansions of the new systems:

• Better positionality for enemy shooters.
• Tweaks to weapon sounds per feedback and constant playing.
• Continued application of sound “environments” per map (ie. making sure the forested areas alter the gunshot sound correctly).
• Refining and assigning different interiors sound volumes (industrial, residential etc.)
• Overhaul of all heavy weapons sounds (tank explosions, grenades, mines, bombing runs etc).
• Continued refinement of vehicle sounds.
• Fixing any occurring bugs.
• Scoping out voice over lines for soldiers within proximity.
• Overhaul of footsteps sounds.
• Overhaul of bullet impact sounds.

Animation:

• Working through visual bugs and glitches for both FPP and TPP.
• Refining systems for TPP to create more fluid visuals. This includes altering and expanding some methods for player inertia.
• Setting up new weapons.
• Scoping out several new gadgets.
• Scoping out melee systems.

Art Team:

• Working on new 3D assets for the Engineer and Support overhaul, as well as the new supply and ammunition meta.
• Working on new weapons.
• Working on new vehicles.
• Working on multiple new map assets.
• Overhaul of vehicle vision port textures to up-res them.
• Overhaul of lower res firearms in order to optimise them and increase visual quality.

Character Art:

• Overhaul and expansion of Crewman and Tank Commander uniforms for both forces - including additional unlockable uniforms.
• Continual creation of new uniforms, headwear and faces.

HUD/UI:

• Polishing off outstanding aspects of HUD and UI that do not yet share the same design language.
• Scoping out additional force UI elements.
• Revising tactical map readability issues.

Design:

The largest design shift in Update 7 were the changes made to the metagame around Garrisons.

We’ve been playing a lot since the Update, and feel that the game is now moving in the desired direction - characterised by much more logical flow of infantry during attack and defence, as well as a lack of “Garry bombing”. Defending is rewarded now with far fewer “360 degree attacks”, while offensive units can exploit gaps in the line in a much more rewarding fashion. To this end, the recon mechanic within the game is now far more powerful - enabling you to relay far more useful information due to more consistent enemy locations and pathing.

We feel now that the flow of battle is now far more stable and provides a great basis for us to expand with new mechanics - namely transport vehicles, additional Commander abilities, the Support and Engineer rework and halftracks.

That said, several issues remain - largely around indestructible Garrisons behind the lines in locked sectors. Fortunately, many of the creative ideas that the community have had about dealing with these are exactly where we want to go.

In addition to the overall metagame tweaks, we’re also working on:

• Supply metagame overhaul.
• Resource node functionality expansion (enabling functional use of them by soldiers and vehicles on the battlefield).
• Ammunition separation and expansion (different ammo boxes for different ammo types).
  Engineer overhaul (new gadgets and all deployables significantly reworked to become powerful and useful).
• Support role reworked to alleviate the die/respawn gameloop.
  vAdditional Commander abilities.
• Specific new gadgets, weapons and loadouts to create new playstyles and interesting meta (satchel charges etc.).

Community Event Highlight - Hell Let Loose International Cup Tournament 2020

As we have mentioned previously, we want to highlight more community run events, to recognise the fantastic teamwork, dedication and support shown by everyone involved in organising and running these for you all to enjoy.

Something we never anticipated happening so early on in the HLL development process, was the extraordinary level of comradery & commitment by these communities and individuals.

We will always do our best to make sure we support these organisations as much as we can, and want to give a great big shoutout to all communities running and organising them. We recommend to anyone who has a desire for comradery, that the Hell Let Loose training camp in coordination with participating communities, is a fantastic place to start for both new and veteran players!

A word from GOD-sSs-END - Hell Let Loose Training Camp

Join the HLL Training Camp Discord, almost at 1500 current members!

“WEEK 3 of the HLL International Cup 2020 begins this Saturday, the 25th. This tournament pits 12 teams against one another in a grueling 30-minute, 18v18 match, centered on a single sector and cap. We are streaming LIVE to twitch using a high-def, split-screen format with some of HLL's top players commenting on the action. It's all free (no subs or follows required). It's just great teams from an amazing community getting together to do something SPECTACULAR.

Below is the match schedule for this weekend. Matches highlighted in gold will be streamed in the new (advanced) format. Matches highlighted in purple will be streamed in standard format (Discord-based).

Note: All teams get a recording of their matches, so they can review their performance and prepare for the following weeks. Two matches on both Saturday and Sunday overlap. The two streams are so we can cover and record all matches.”

[82AD] IronFi$t on the HLL International Cup 2020

“It's the perfect example of HLL communities coming together and organising a fantastic tournament that spans the globe for people to enjoy HLL. The participating teams come from all over Europe and the US, and it functions just like the world cup of football or rugby. The work these guys have done in organising this is outstanding!.”

Be sure to check dates and times to catch the live Cup-cast brought to you by the following channels:

God_sss_end

Cayovnzl

Week 3 HLL ICT 2020 Schedule - Starts July 25th

We want to thank GOD-sSs-END, all the members of the HLL Training Camp, and all participating communities for your contribution, on behalf of Black Matter & Team17

We salute you!

Classic map revamp first look!

A taste of what's to come...

That wraps up this week's Developer Briefing, have a great weekend everyone!

We'll see you on the frontline.

Developer Briefing #87 - Patch Date, Bullet Penetration and Hurtgen Overhaul!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #87!

We hope you've had a great week. Today Lead Developer Max is back with a locked in date for the second Update 7 Patch, as well as some exciting news on Bullet Penetration and Hurtgen Forest!

I'll hand you straight over to Max now who has all the info:

A Message From Max

Hi everyone,

In the wake of the free weekend and the huge expansion of the playerbase, we’ve been hard at work looking at the fundamental issues affecting players. The key ones we’ve been focusing hard on are:

• FPS dips and drops
• General performance issues (CPU and VRAM)
• Crashes

We want to acknowledge that while these are our top priority issues, we have collated vast amounts of feedback around the new meta, as well as every other issue in every department.

While in the last six months we’ve often separated our releases into hotfixes and huge updates, we’re bringing back the patch style release. For those of you who have been with us since our Early Access launch, you’ll recall that these releases strike a balance between applying urgent fixes, while batching larger bug fixes at the same time.

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be patching on Monday, 3rd of August. This patch is designed to fix a large number of issues you’re seeing, including the top three mentioned above. We will be releasing granular patch notes on the morning of the release so you can see the full scope of what has been fixed.

We’ve opted for this style of release now, as we needed a larger portion of time (approximately 5 days) to profile, isolate and fix the above issues. That portion of time enabled our broader team to also apply fixes relevant to your experience within their department.

We want to give a single caveat - that a particularly aggravating PhysX crash remains.

This crash is a very unusual one, in that it is happening as data leaves our code and enters the PhysX black box within the engine code. We’ve attached a huge amount of debug to replicate this. We’re also found that some players may never experience it, while some players may experience it frequently. Some players have found that deleting their PhysX cache has solved this issue, while some find this doesn’t help. For the last two weeks we’ve been working with our QA team to try and isolate any fix reported by the community, and A/B testing it. During this time, we’ve worked our way through the majority of other issues affecting the game.

We love watching all the conversations about the game that occur across all our channels. Something we felt may be useful would be to explain the timelines of the development and QA process with the community.

We’re keen to be as transparent as possible about this in order to assure you that we’ve identified and are tackling core issues, while also balancing a proper QA testing cycle and sign off to make sure we don’t rush to race out a patch that could make things worse.

We’re also aware that the past several Dev Briefings have been quite dry in nature - due to us prioritising and fixing the largest issues affecting the community.

While these are our top priority for our programming and QA team, the rest of the team have been hard at work on new content and features that you can expect to see in U8 and beyond.

This week, several new features have been completed:

Bullet penetration

We will be breaking down this system in a detailed way in a coming Dev Briefing, but we’re very excited for the implications this will have on gameplay in the future.

Initially, we felt this was a critical step in allowing us to handle penetrating soft skinned vehicles correctly, and while that’s the case, it has also opened up huge gameplay opportunities when it comes to balancing the power of different firearms within the game, as well as the specific power of different weapons.

Stay tuned as we’ll be taking you through this in detail in the coming weeks...

Map Overhauls: Hurtgen

With map overhauls, we often don’t release huge numbers of work-in-progress images of the work we’re doing. However, we thought you may be interested when it comes to Hurtgen.

The overhaul process on both Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont and Hurtgen are really “make new”. Instead of touching up the existing maps, we’ve imported the terrain height data into an entirely new map. From there, we’ve set about concepting the different gameplay aspects of the map - with better separated biomes within the map that will give you a very different experience each time you play.

Previously, Hurtgen largely felt like a very dense forest map, with some open (and ugly) wasteland full of floating tree stumps and objects (whose main purpose it felt like was to block you placing a Garrison, or to totally trap your vehicle). Armour was really difficult to play effectively, and while the forest was dense, it wasn’t dense enough to make any area properly defendable. Nearly all engagements took place at 50-100m ranges - except at the scar.

With our Hurtgen rework, we’ve separated out the different biomes to match the battlefield of the day - but far more clearly and with greater separation of gameplay styles. Hurtgen now has the typical dense European pine forest, but the trees have been scaled correctly and more light is let through the canopy to the floor. There is a greater density of built fortifications (trenches, bunkers, foxholes), as well as much larger usage of blocking elements (like barbed wire). This now better emulates the defences in the forest during the battle, and will provide defenders with the ability to better create choke-points and tactical challenges the attackers will need to overcome.

The second biome is the most unique to the overhaul so far, and that is the destroyed forest. Burning trees, ashen earth and shell holes litter the ground to create a WW1-esque wasteland for you to fight your way across.

Thirdly, a grass mountainous plain biome has been added on the North Western side of the map where the Siegfried line dragon's teeth are. This area provides huge vertical gameplay and will be a key location for armor to control in the push back and forth across the map. Prepare for long ranged firefights from peak to peak as you assault uphill.

Lastly, the riverbed in the center of the map is now a functional river, requiring each team to consider the necessity to own one of the three crossing points in order to make any sort of push.

Hurtgen will have Offensive mode added for both teams - with separate weather conditions each time to truly widen the experience and replayability.

Below you can see some very work-in-progress images of the map, as we consider layout and sight-lines for armour, as well as infantry pathing and strong point locations. You can also see some of the references we’ve gathered to define each specific biome - in both appearance and playstyle.

See you Monday!

That wraps up this week's Dev Brief!

Thank you all so much for your support and patience whilst we worked on your feedback and bug reports since Update 7 dropped, we're looking forward to the patch going live Monday morning (BST/CEST).

See you on the frontline!

Patch 12 - Live Now!

Hey everyone,

Patch 7 is live now!

I know we've said this already, but we really want to reiterate how grateful we are for everyone's patience and feedback following Update 7's launch. It's really helped the Dev & QA process as we've worked to iron out the crash and FPS issues.

Lead Developer Max will be taking the reigns for the Patch Notes themselves, detailing what you can expect from today's Patch as well as what we're working for upcoming Patches and the next Update.

Oh and make sure you scroll all the way to the end...

Patch Notes from Max

Hi everyone,

We hope you’ve had a great weekend!

We’re happy to launch Patch 12 today as we have been working hard to try and resolve as many issues as we could - as fast as possible.

Please note that this patch is non-exhaustive, and we’re continuing work on any remaining key issues.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to drop us a comment or post and we'll endeavour to answer!

Performance

A huge number of improvements have been made to the way we handle culling and total meshes within a scene. As a result, we expect there to be a significant performance increase across the board (5FPS+). Results will vary depending on the exact spec of your machine.

Please note:

These were optimisations that we were able to apply in time for the close of patch. We have continued significant optimisation work in our main branch (for release in U8).

Crashes:

2 of our most aggravating crashes have been solved, with our third one sitting as top priority.

Please note:

We wanted to acknowledge that the Update 7 Hotfix temporarily disabled cloth physics in the game as a change in the way they are handled occurred between UE 4.21 and UE 4.23. This was causing crashes for some users. We will be bringing this back for the next Update.

The Third Crash

This crash is a very unusual one, in that it is happening as data leaves our code and enters the PhysX black box within the engine code. We’ve attached a huge amount of debug to replicate this. We’ve also found that some players may never experience it, while some players may experience it frequently. Some players have found that deleting their PhysX cache has solved this issue, while some find this doesn’t help. For the last two weeks we’ve been working with our QA team to try and isolate any fix reported by the community, and A/B testing it. During this time, we’ve worked our way through the majority of other issues affecting the game. We’ve dropped in several community-found speculative fixes below which are worth exploring if this crash is persisting for you.

FPS Dip

We’ve profiled this a huge amount and have applied several speculative fixes to address the mass FPS dips experienced by some players.

In our profiling, and collection of data across the board, we’ve isolated that the spawning of 4-5 body parts per dismemberment is causing significant CPU bottlenecks on specific machines. As a result of this, we’re trailing a test where we’ll despawn unseen body parts (not visible in-camera) within a second of them being out of sight.

Visual Improvements

• Fixed: There are severe LoD issues with many of the buildings found in Carentan when only a short distance from them.
• Fixed: [Omaha] Pre-placed Garrison is clipping into a destroyed vehicle.
  Fixed: [Carentan] Very low quality LOD when 50m from a building.

Animation

We are aware of a few outstanding animation bugs, and are continuing to fix and polish.

• Lowered prone head bob intensity to reduce sea-sickness (we’ll be looking at implementing a switch that will allow you to disable all head bobs/camera moves in the next update).
• Fixed: [FPP] Missing weapon switching animation while crawling
• Fixed: [FPP] Wrench audio/animation does not work correctly
• Fixed: DF shadow appears for the player's helmet.

Gameplay

Several features we’ll be introducing in coming updates will flesh out the current meta for both Offensive and Warfare mode (especially looking at Offensive mode, and mixing in objectives (eg. blow up enemy gun position), but we were keen to fix low-hanging fruit as fast as possible.

• Enemy Garrisons in enemy territory can now be destroyed, and can be dismantled but with a longer (30 sec) dismantle time.
• Show difference between enemy near and overrun on Garrisons (icon will now turn red when Garrison is overrun.)
• Fixed: performing a partial reload with the M1 Garand gives 1 extra round on the next clip.
• Recon markers have been tweaked and are now visible for 60 seconds and the Recon Plane ability has a cooldown of 5 minutes. Recon vehicles remain the same.

SFX

• Altered the way incoming fire is spatialised.
• After lots of play, we’ve nullified the bullet-flyby “whiz/crack” for all friendly gunfire, to better enable you to determine when an enemy is firing at you. The sheer amount of nearby friendly fire was often totally drowning out the soundscape of the gunfight.

HUD/UI

• Fixed: Create Unit screen is missing a "Cancel" button
• Fixed: Admin broadcast message disappears too quickly

Speculative Fixes

We’ve also collated several of the community-suggested fixes for those experiencing a wide variety of issues:

Speculative Fix 01

Type in "%LOCALAPPDATA%" in the "url bar" down by the Windows logo on the bottom left of your screen, find the folder "HLL" and delete the entire folder.

Speculative Fix 02

Try setting your audio to “low” and try to relaunch the game.

Speculative Fix 03

• Reinstall HLL (Uninstall, clear steam cache, reinstall).
• Wiped the HLL config in AppDataLocalHLLSavedConfigWindowsNoEditor.
• Cleared the Nvidia Shader Caches.
• Rebooted the PC and relaunched Hell Let Loose.
• Disable Steam Overlay.

Speculative Fix 04

Also try lowering the dead body despawn to 0.5 (30s).

Speculative Fix 05

Also play from a SSD or NVMe.

Speculative Fix 06

Reverting back to a previous Nvidia Version also works.

Currently working on:

• Upgrading to Unreal Engine version 4.25. While painful, this is designed specifically to future-proof us to continue working for years to come within Unreal Engine, as well as to allow us to fix current engine-version specific problems and crashes.
• Optimisation on both GPU and CPU.
• Bullet penetration.
• Engineer role overhaul.
• Support role overhaul.
• Adding transport and logistics vehicles.
• Supply systems overhaul.
• Ammunition systems overhaul.
• Unannounced New Map 01: approximately 75% complete.
• Unannounced New Map 02: approximately 15% complete.
• Unannounced New Map 03: approximately 55% complete.
  vTweaks to weapon sounds per feedback and constant playing.
• Continued application of sound “environments” per map (ie. making sure the forested areas alter the gunshot sound correctly).
• Refining and assigning different interiors sound volumes (industrial, residential etc.)
• Overhaul of all heavy weapons sounds (tank explosions, grenades, mines, bombing runs etc).
• Continued refinement of vehicle sounds.
• Scoping out voice over lines for soldiers within proximity.
  vOverhaul of footsteps sounds.
• Overhaul of bullet impact sounds.
• Fixing any occurring bugs.
• Working through visual bugs and glitches for both FPP and TPP.
• Refining systems for TPP to create more fluid visuals. This includes altering and expanding some methods for player inertia.
• Setting up new weapons.
• Scoping out several new gadgets.
• Scoping out melee systems.
• Working on new 3D assets for the Engineer and Support overhaul, as well as the new supply and ammunition meta.
• Working on new weapons.
• Working on new vehicles.
• Working on multiple new map assets.
• Overhaul of vehicle vision port textures to up-res them.
• Overhaul of lower res firearms in order to optimise them and increase visual quality.
• Overhaul and expansion of Crewman and Tank Commander uniforms for both forces - including additional unlockable uniforms.
• Polishing off outstanding aspects of HUD and UI that do not yet share the same design language.
  vScoping out additional force UI elements.
• Revising tactical map readability issues.
• More undisclosed items.

Thanks to the entire community for your patience and support as we continue our Early Access development.

We will be following up in the not so distant future with our next roadmap.

Cheers and see you on the frontline!

Support & Something new...

That wraps up today's Patch Notes, as delivered by Max!

We also just want to take this opportunity to remind you that if you do experience any bugs, issues, crashes or anything under that umbrella we've got your back!

Hell Let Loose has access to a dedicated Player Support Team over on Team17's side who will give you 1 on 1 assistance to get you back into battle. You're more than welcome to use it and you can find them at the following locations:

Report a Problem Steam sub-forum

Team17 Website Support Page

We're also lucky to have members of the community sharing useful information over on the official Hell Let Loose Discord, so feel free to stop by there too!

Now about that something new...

We're pretty sure you'll have a blast with this in the future:

See you on the frontline.

Developer Briefing #88 - Bullet Penetration Details & Implementation!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #88!

This week Max is back to give the first formal details on a new mechanic that will be coming to Hell Let Loose in Update 8 - Bullet Penetration!

Now I'll hand over this week's brief to Max so he can go through things...

Lead Developer Max - Bullet Penetration Details!

Hi everyone,

When approaching bullet penetration systems, we thought hard about what would make the difference to Hell Let Loose. Hell Let Loose is a huge game in scale, and a feature like bullet penetration - if made too complex or obscure - may make little to no noticeable difference to players. We also felt that making the system too obvious and powerful would create very cheesy gameplay - with players being shot through solid surfaces and nowhere ever feeling safe.

After several brainstorming sessions, we felt that the best option would be to apply bullet penetration across the game on an individual basis - both for the object being penetrated and the type of ammunition being fired.

We stepped back and looked at our netcode budget (the higher the amount of complexity - the worse it’ll hold up in 100 player conditions) and then looked at how far the system would need to stretch.

As a result of this we’ve created several categories - both on the material side (eg. the wood of a wooden fence), and on the caliber side (a weapon’s ammunition).

We’ve built out a huge amount of materials - with several different types and styles of each (eg. wood_hollow, wood_solid etc.), each material in the game is then given a “material penetrability” value. Setting this figure essentially acts as a penetration check - if the penetration power of the round is higher than the penetrability of the material - then the round will travel through the surface.

If the round is able to travel through the surface, we’re then able to set up other values in the ammunition, including numbers of times the round can penetrate subsequent objects, as well as the degrading velocity of the round and the lowered resulting damage to the player hit by the round. Eg. a player who is hit by a round that has travelled through several planks of wood will take less damage than the same round that has travelled through one plank of the same wood.

Finally, we now have the ability to take our specific ammunition: ie. the Kar98k 7.92×57mm Mauser and then set its “penetration power”. This lets us tune each ammunition type to penetrate different materials with different levels of effectiveness.

What we end up with is a rough breakdown in the power hierarchy of weapons, with a rough order as follows:

All weapons can penetrate:

• Fabric
• Paper
• Glass

Smaller rounds will be able to penetrate:

• Thin Wood
• Plaster

Large rounds will be able to penetrate

• Thicker Wood
• Some Brick
• Thin Metal (sheet metal)

We’re currently working through the majority of props in the game and thinking carefully about what we want to enable with regards to penetration - as it’s important that hard cover still feels reliable and therefore valuable to infantry players.

The images below should give you an idea of what we're going for:

Yellow: All Weapons

Orange: Smaller Rounds

Red: Large Rounds

Please note, like all features we release - we’ll be watching your feedback and playing a lot in order to understand what (if any) changes need to be made once this is live.

To the frontline!

That wraps up Max's message and this week's Dev Brief!

We hope you enjoyed your first detailed information on the Bullet Penetration mechanic coming in Update 8 - Let us know what you think!

In the meantime the team are continuing their work on bug fixes, optimisation and even more new content.

Have a great weekend everyone.

See you on the frontline.

Developer Briefing #89 - Grass Overhaul & Optimisation!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #89!

This week we're taking a look at something we've seen mentioned a few times over on the forums and what will actually become even more important when bullet penetration arrives - Grass!

Long grass, short grass, bushes, these features enable stealthy plays and approaches for all sorts of playstyles and can be crucial in making tough pushes or evading an enemy patrol.

Because of this the team have been hard at work improving not only the quality and draw distance of our green features, but also that tasty optimisation!

To go into the full details we've got Lead Developer Max who's put on his gardening gloves for this Dev Brief.

Make sure to stick around until the end too as today Spono from the Black Matter team has stopped by to celebrate a big community Discord milestone!

A Message From Max - Lead Developer

Hi everyone,

Alongside much of the programming team working through the remaining crash and some large scale optimisation (as well as bug fixes and an engine upgrade to 4.25), we’re in an interesting period now where the team is hard at work on some huge future features, maps and a broad array of content that we’re keen to save to reveal in full at a later date.

Development and marketing a game is always a balance between showing as much as possible as we go, while also retaining some surprise and excitement for the future in order to build up a release.

In the meantime, this week we thought we’d return to a small, but very important aspect of Hell Let Loose:

Grass, Glorious Grass!

We’ve been profiling the game across the board, and have always known that some aspects of the visuals are particularly heavy across the board. One of these is grass. For any of you that have followed Hell Let Loose, you’ll be aware that grass has had more than five iterations within the game, and that each time it’s had its positives and negatives with regard to the three key aspects: optimisation, visual fidelity and impact on gameplay.

Grass within games is hilariously complicated. Often increasing visual fidelity hurts optimisation, which means it needs to be culled quickly - removing it from gameplay. However, ugly and optimised grass can seriously degrade the look of the game - which is a huge issue when Hell Let Loose contains fields and fields of it.

That said, in order for grass to look nice within a game it also needs a very refined shader and texture set up, and each stage of it has to be defined very carefully (both up close and at greater ranges).

Coming in Update 8, we’ve totally overhauled our grass - both visually and in terms of performance and gameplay. This has been something we’ve known was a significant area for optimisation for a while and we’re very excited to return to it.

Visually, we’ve retained the photoreal quality of it up close, but have greatly reduced the polycount. The pain of grass is that in a game like Hell Let Loose (and broadly this can be said across the whole title), visuals have to hold up with a camera 10cm away, as well as a kilometer away (compared to an isometric game like Path of Exile, where the visuals are always sitting a fixed distance from the camera). This rework has allowed us to retain a great look up close, but it’s also allowed us to optimise the grass in a way that allows us to keep it present at much greater ranges.

On a gameplay level, every map in Hell Let Loose has “long grass” and “short grass” layers. Previously, our long grass layer has been so expensive that we’ve had to cull it away much quicker than we’d like.

This has led to awkward gameplay where lying down in it only serves as a disadvantage - as you can be both seen and shot from long ranges (because the grass is not rendering for enemy players), while also having your own view obstructed. However, due to the huge cost savings on the new grass, we’re now able to cull the long grass far further away than previously. This means that large Normandy grass-heavy maps like Purple Heart Lane, SME, SMDM have become infinitely more interesting when crossing fields and fighting around strong points. Grassy fields and clearings now feel far more three-dimensional, with different concealment creating possibilities to use longer grass to flank and hide.

Finally, this overhaul has lifted frames across every single map significantly. While it’s difficult to give a uniform number, depending on the current strength of your GPU this could be double digits for many players.

A Word From Spono - Hell Let Loose Discord 30k Member Milestone!

I want to congratulate the entire community as we have now reached a milestone of 30,000 Discord members!

I can remember when Max and I first set up the Discord just before the Kickstarter campaign, and we had our first 100 members. We were buzzing and super excited. Now look how far we have come and still with a massive journey in front of us!

Some of you may also have noticed that we have setup two Announcement Channels that you can follow to get the, #special_news_bulletin & #telegrams channel announcements in your own discords.

If you still haven’t joined the official Hell Let Loose Discord, I certainly recommend joining in the conversations on everything HLL. We invite all new and veteran players, and value everyone's feedback. We invite you in to share this journey with us.

You can jump in now using this invite and please share it with your other HLL comrades.

Also please read our server rules in #readme-rules as well as the Discord community guidelines.

Cheers,

On behalf of Black Matter and Team17 team.

See you on the frontline!
MEHR ÜBER DIESES SPIEL

Developer Briefing #90 - Let’s hear your Wilhelm scream!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #90!

Today's Brief comes to you from Black Matter Dev Spono who brings with him an exciting opportunity...

A Message From Spono - Let’s hear your Wilhelm scream!

Hello everyone, Spono here.

Start LOOSENING up those vocal chords!

We are very excited to give our community an opportunity to become a larger part of Hell Let Loose.

We’re asking those of you with some talent (or without any talent whatsoever!), to submit one or more of the following sounds in a YouTube video. This will then be considered for implementation into HLL, as well as securing you a spot in the credits.

We’ve listened to much of the community feedback about adding greater ambience to the battlefield with the grunts, screams and voice lines of soldiers. While we’ve been planning to create these sounds ourselves, we felt it could be good fun to open this up to our beloved community first. You can be as creative as you wish - we’re excited to see what you come up with! But please bear in mind, to be considered for game implementation we want sounds that are in line with the vibe of HLL, and audio that would add to the atmosphere without it breaking immersion.

What the hell is a Wilhelm scream?

The Wilhelm scream is an iconic sound effect used in over 400 films and TV series since 1951. You have likely heard it many times before, perhaps not ever knowing exactly what it was.

Still not sure what the Wilhelm scream is, watch this video from WatchMojo

So yes that’s right, your Wilhelm scream, war cries, moments of anguish have an opportunity to become embedded into Hell Let Loose and history forever!

Your Submission

Submissions will only be accepted as a YouTube link via this FORM*

All submissions received via this form will then be considered for possible implementation into Hell Let Loose!

We ask that you title your video: Hell Let Loose Wilhelm Audio Submission. And include your Discord name, ID and clan tag if you wish.

Example here: Hell Let Loose Wilhelm Audio Submission - Spono#7368

You can find your ID at the bottom left of your Discord and copy it by simply clicking on it. If you are not a member of the official Hell Let Loose Discord yet, you can join by simply clicking on this DISCORD LINK and following the instructions. We also recommend installing the Discord App if you have not done so already.

We ask that you label your sound(s) and use the description area to timestamp them if you wish to do multiple sounds in one video. Please only one submission per person!

*By submitting to this FORM you give Black Matter the right to use your submission for purposes of game content and or marketing material.

If we do like your video submission we will reach out to you via email and or Discord and make sure you are added to the in game credits and receive the deserved acknowledgement!

We will also supply you with a couple of game keys, so you can show off to your mates. And maybe even a certificate that you can put on the fridge

Please note, It is very important that you use your own original voice! And we will verify this with you.

What we want!

Your video excerpt should not last more than 60 seconds, and can be a series of sounds and footage strung together. It should contain footage of your own gameplay, with your sounds edited in.

It can be as amateur or professional as you like, but the focus is audio quality.

We are at this stage after both the United States, and or German variations of the following sounds.

You can get creative, but the sound must be original and what the player would emit orally.

You can choose one or more of the 10 sounds for your video up to 60 seconds.

Wilhelm Scream:

1 . Your best death scream/cry

Fatal Damage:

2. Bullet to the Head

3. Bullet to the Body

4. Ran over by vehicle

5. Dismembered

6. Drowning

None Fatal damage:

7. Bullet

8. Shrapnel/Explosion

9. Fall damage

10. Burning/On Fire

To be considered for including into HLL

• Must be a clean original recording.
• Not have added effects or reverberation

Audio Quality:

Please keep any audio files you use in your video SEPARATE from the in-game audio, such as WAV files. This is because we will likely request them from you.

Post editing in the form of file clean-up/de-noise is welcomed but by no means necessary.

Other accepted file formats if necessary but not preferred:

ACID, AIFF, AVI, BWF, CDDA, EDL, FLAC, KAR, MIDI, MOGG, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG VORBIS, OGG OPUS, QT, RADAR, REX2, SYX, W64, WAVPACK, WMV

Minimum Requirements

Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz

Bit Depth: 16 bit

Maximum Requirements

Sample Rate: 96 kHz

Bit Depth: 24bit

How much time do you have?

Last day for submissions will be on the 2nd of September, giving you almost 2 weeks. After that the form will be closed.

You Understand

Again it is very important that you use your own original sounds. If it does not meet the audio specification we may not be able to use it, so please keep this in mind.

If we love your video submission we will reach out to you and make sure you are also added to the in game credits, and may request raw audio files so again please keep these saved. We will likely share some of these amazing videos with you all in Discord. And we are sure to see them on the Hell Let Loose subreddit too.

*By submitting to this form you acknowledge and give Black Matter the permission to use your submission for purposes of in-game content, social media, marketing material and in any other manner, platform or format we may choose.

What’s Next?

We are currently working on our next roadmap, and will share this with you in next weeks Developer Briefing!

Good luck & Cheers,

Spono

Hear you on the frontline!?

Sound-off Soldiers!

That wraps up this week's Developer Briefing!

We're really excited to hear what you come up with over the next two weeks. Who knows, you may well be hearing yourself or a friend on the frontline in the not too distant future.

Have a great weekend and we'll see you next week as we detail what's next in our updated roadmap.

See you on the frontline!

Developer Briefing #91 - HLL Roadmap Update!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #91!

This week we're pleased to be sharing with you the updated roadmap for Hell Let Loose!

For the grand reveal, as well as some extra details on what the team are working on thanks to your feedback I'll be handing over today's brief to Lead Developer Max.

Enjoy!

A Message From Max - New Roadmap!

Hi everyone,

We’re very excited this week to share our new roadmap with you as we lead up to Update 8. We also feel like the next update will be smaller and less content-rich in size - that is until we write down all the content to come. We hope you’re as excited about what will be coming in Update 8 as we are.

Update 8 is a great opportunity for us to fix broken gameloops (the redeploy Support loop) and vastly improve existing ones - such as the way that Supplies, Ammo and Engineer abilities work. As you’ll see there are also large amounts of map overhauls as we seek to bring each map to a universally optimised standard, as well as take them to the same level of visual and gameplay quality.

As always, for each feature you see on the roadmap, we’ll be accompanying it with a developer briefing to better explain it.

Updated Roadmap - Update 8

The Existing Crash

Many of you will be aware that the occurrence of what we’re calling the “Physx Crash” (the key crash you’re experiencing within the game currently) has meant that we’ve delayed our roadmap release while we find a fix as soon as possible.

As a result, we’ve taken the last couple of weeks to dig deep into it (involving largely working through the physics code in a very granular way) before sitting down to discuss the contents of the next update.

The good news is that we’ve found a 100% reproduction method for the crash, and that it occurs when two limbs from separate bodies collide after being dismembered. As you can imagine, it was not a fun task to deduce this - given the very little information being output from the engine despite all our logging.

We’re now working on a fix for this crash, and will constantly communicate about an ETA on when we will deploy this.

DX 12

While DX12 is not fully supported by Hell Let Loose yet, we’ve also got good news to share in that we’ve found a fix for Foy crashing for those with DX12 enabled. We’re aware of several other non-map related crashes for DX12 users, but we feel that fixing Foy will allow a much greater level of stability for the time being.

Where to now

Although the roadmap serves as a public declaration of our intent around short term development goals, we’re also hard at work behind the scenes on some as-yet unannounced content - both small and large.

As a dev team, we’re really excited about the future of all the content coming to Hell Let Loose and look forward to revealing more in the near future!

Upcoming Briefs

That wraps up this week's Dev Brief and Max's update!

As you can see there's a lot of new content on the way with Update 8 and we're really looking forward to sharing more details with you in our upcoming Developer Briefings!

If there's anything you're really keen to know more about, or have any questions about the new roadmap then let us know in the comments and on the forums.

Have a great weekend everyone.

See you on the frontline!

Developer Briefing #92 - Crash Patch Incoming, New Tanker Uniforms & More!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Dev Brief #92!

This week we've got some good news on the infamous 'PHYSX' crash fix, a first look at some shiny new uniforms for the Tankers among us and an update on the 'Wilhelm Scream' competition!

Before I hand over to Max and Spono who'll go into all the cool details, I just want to take the opportunity to relay the team's thanks for your patience, bug reports and understanding whilst we worked away on the crash fix. Every report we received helped us track down the root cause and, fingers crossed, address it.

So, you're probably wondering what the cause was, well... It could occur when body-parts from two different dismembered bodies collided with each other in the air, normally following an explosion.

This revelation led to a humorous take on the situation from the incredibly talented Moscatnt, who is equally impressive on both the frontline and canvas!

A Message From Max - Good News!

Hi everyone,

We’re thrilled to announce that after an enormous amount of debugging, we’ve isolated the issue in the physx code that has been causing the most common crash experienced in the game. After nearly five weeks of QA, we are very confident that we have resolved this specific crash, and as a result we’ll be rolling out Patch 13 alongside a fix for DX12 crashes on the map Foy. To make sure we don’t cause any other disruptions to gameplay, we will be limiting the patch to these two crash fixes.

We are in the process of signing off this Patch, and we will update the community on the release date as soon as it’s ready. All going well, this will likely drop on Friday next week.

We want to also note that if you are using DX12, there are still some known issues that are likely to cause crashes such as alt-tabbing.

Meanwhile we’re hard at work on all aspects of the game - content, bug fixes and optimisation. To give you a small taste - we’re working through giving all tanker roles at least two additional uniforms to unlock for both forces. Over the coming weeks we’ll start to do deep-dives on the ways we’re overhauling some underdeveloped aspects of the game, optimising, and generating new content.

Screaming With Spono - Let’s Hear Your Wilhelm Scream!

Wow, what a response we have had so far to the Wilhelm submissions! So far what we have received from you has been wonderfully harrowing to say the least and we as a team thank you greatly for the “overWilhelming” response. We are well underway in narrowing down the clips that we feel are most suitable and that would complement the atmosphere in game.

If you are reading this and still don’t know what all this means, please check out this link from Dev Brief #90 it has all the submission details.

In response to some questions of what exactly it is that we are looking for, we wanted to keep the description in the Wilhelm Dev Brief minimal to let your creative freedom flourish. We’ve had many different variations of screams, grunts, gasps, gurgles and whelps that have all been exciting and inspirational to listen to. Some members of the community have asked if we are accommodating spoken dialogue within this submission, whilst we are specifically looking for non-spoken audio lines that isn’t to say that somehow and some way we can’t filter in spoken lines, however we are primarily looking for more deathly oral sounds.

As a result of the massive response we have had, we’ve decided to extend the close off time for the submission for at least another week. So if you didn’t get the time to submit, now’s your chance! Submissions will only be accepted as a YouTube link via this FORM*

Here are just a select few clips that contain great examples of what we look for and also the quality of recording we like. These are by far not the only ones we love but we would like to give you a sneak peak at what some members have been up to.

Thanks again to everyone who has made a submission so far, and we are super excited to listen to more.

*By submitting to this form you acknowledge and give Black Matter the permission to use your submission for purposes of in-game content, social media, marketing material and in any other manner, platform or format we may choose.

Onwards to Patch 13!

That wraps up this week's Dev Brief.

We hope you're as pleased with the crash fix news as we are and enjoyed your first look at some upcoming Tanker uniforms.

If you're on the fence about giving the 'Wilhelm Scream' competition a shout, go for it! Your dulcet tones may well become part of the frontline...

Have a fantastic weekend everyone.

See you on the frontline.