As everyone knows the long-awaited update to Battleground Europe has been in open testing for several weeks and with the help of the player community, the testing was nearing completion- until today. The number of test "tickets" for the production team to work on prior to final release of v1.29 is approaching zero but one issue has been a constant concern in the past weeks- performance.

As part of the v1.29 development cycle, the production team has been upgrading several types of building objects in the game world. Replacing some of the low detail buildings with higher polygon count buildings is an on-going task and provides a much needed upgrade to the game. Unfortunately, the nature of WWII Online: Battleground Europe, with visual ranges in excess of 5 kilometers, means loading a lot of objects sometimes mean a hit to performance- especially to lower end machines.

Parallel to the development of 1.29, the coders have been continuing their work on the Unity game engine upgrade. Part of this work has shown indications of measurable performance increases across a wide range of end user systems. So, as is usually the case with development of a game that is constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptable performance, we've decided to move ahead some of the changes slated for the Unity upgrade into 1.29 with the expectation that those gains will offset any possible hit of the updated building objects.

Adding this means the v1.29 test will be extended through the week of November 16th in order to ensure that any issues that arise can be addressed, tested again and ready the client for public release with the expectation that there won't be any widespread bugs.

We appreciate the efforts of all the players who have been participating in the open Beta test and we hope we can count on continued interest and help in closing out these last issues prior to release. In the meantime, the rest of the dev team are already hard at work on v1.30 but more about that another day.