Gophur's been away for a bit, so this production update will not include his news or participation. We've been working away on the wide range of goals we have for 1.29 and beyond. Some discrete things are finished or nearly so, and other new systems are also nearing completion, while core infrastructure changes, such as those underway for our future render solution and also gamewolrd instancing, remain significant and complicated tasks for which there are few incremental achievements to share with you at this time.

The updating of many buildings continues with revised LODs ("Level of Detail", how it appears at different ranges) and colliders for urban buildings are nearing completion, as are some bridges. It's a buttload of stuff when you begin to realize how many buildings and building objects have populated the game in recent years. In adition to entirely new building objects and bridges we are overhauling texture resolutions and material shading for a slicker more professional look. We are incorporating as much revision of older art assets, into a newer better look; as we can possibly cram into this rather large and complicated v1.29 development cycle.

The tutorial system is now in a foundation phase and is able to be tested and experimented with so that we can ensure it provides proper feedback and functionality when it is completed to it's first stage implementation.

Another new system we created is the ability to have different controller setups, such as "keyboard only" or "keyboard driving and mouse steering." We are now able to test these internally and will soon send an implementation of this into beta testing.

There are also a lot of smaller fixes and additions that we have already done but unfortunately cannot give to you until 1.29 is ready for release. These include a wide array of things from several new Gold Builder statues to a fix for the problem that causes many joysticks to fail to work correctly when you have a USB keyboard. As with almost every release we have ever done there are dozens of little things that no one ever notices when they are fixed but stand out as "bad" when they are broken. Terrain glitches, little things in the UI, this makes for a fairly wide range of "fixes" that while semingly insignifigant do contribute to a better quality feel to the game and how it looks and functions.

We have made the knife a lot more deadly ... so you won't feel like you are trying to kill a guy who didn't know you'd snuck up on him, with a knitting needle anymore. The M5-76mm (French) ATG is getting a going over for handling issues (much like we rebuilt the QF.17pdr ATG recently) and a small issue with the PaK.40 handling was found and fixed.

A new rank and skill tree structure is being created for the infantry branch, much like we did with airforce branches for when the new planes go live at release. As a word of advice to all of you ground pounders, login some good hours over the next few weeks and call all your buddies and get them to do so as well, when the new rank structure is finalized there will be changes to what ranks get what weapons next campaign. The tanks and AFV's will be next after we get done with the infantry. We will also be making a small change to the sapper and adding a greater delay to the placement of the satchel to better mimic time spent "setting the charge in place and fusing it" but this requires more work on the animation of placing the charge. It is a possibility the sapper may be losing his rifle (and getting a pistol) since we want to focus the sapper role into one that is performed by players wanting to be sappers rather than just an uber rifleman with 4 HEAT composite explosive packs. The sapper will probably get other gameplay roles as well, in the future after v1.29 is done and in the bag.

We're working as hard as we can, and trying to stay out of the 106F degree heat. This will probably work out well while we're so busy since we actually have to leave the office to find out it's 106F outside. :D

Until the next update, have fun and go kill some players in game. S!