Developer Briefing #139 - Optimisation, Patch PTEs, Dan Carlin

Hi everyone!

Thanks for jumping into our release of Update 10 and fighting across the Eastern Front!
We were thrilled to see such a large number of players grab the game for the first time.

We want to thank you - the community - for being so welcoming to all the new players. We know that large influxes of new players are wonderful because the community grows, but that there are also teething issues as people learn the game for the first time. It’s always a tricky balance to manage and we greatly appreciate the welcoming environment that you’ve made the game - both on our social channels and in-game.

I’m new. What are Dev Briefings?

We also want to explain to all new players that during the development of Hell Let Loose we post a weekly “dev briefing”. This weekly post tends to focus on one area of development - be it a new weapon, vehicle or feature, or it may look at a map, a technical change within the game or put a spotlight on community activity. We tend to post them on Thursday or Fridays - depending on the course of development. So far we’ve posted one every week for more than 130 weeks and will be continuing this into the future.

Optimisation

We know that optimisation has been an issue on Stalingrad - resulting in a stutter occurring on specific hardware. We spent a long time profiling this, as the correlation between the stutters and in-game activities were hard to trace. Each time we’d look at what may be causing it (explosions, or spawning, or throwing objects), the profiling would show acceptable results. We were also aware that this was only occurring on specific machines, and it didn’t seem to be universal to any spec of machine (meaning that some machines at each end of the spectrum suffered from it).

We can happily report that with the extremely hard work of our wonderful QA team, tech artists and programmers, the issue has been found - namely a texture streaming issue on specific hardware that locks up the machine temporarily on the game thread.

As a result of this, we’re currently running several PTEs to ensure that the fixes made give a considerable frame boost to Stalingrad especially and eliminate stutter.

The micro stutter should be fixed across all maps on GPUs with 3GB+ of VRAM.
These optimisations should increase FPS in all maps, but we have focused our testing on the Eastern Front.
You should expect to see a major general FPS increase in Stalingrad.
The physics stutter was removed from Stalingrad in PTE in the most recent PTE, and similar work is currently being done on Kursk.

We appreciate the patience as we continue optimisations across different areas of the game as quickly and methodically as we can. We are working very hard to make sure players have the best experience possible, cheers.

The PTEs

Thanks to all those who jumped in the most recent PTE to test the latest build. We’ve seen some promising improvements with the latest round of optimisations, but still need to stress test this with more players. The feedback is that players are getting significantly more frames on Stalingrad (with reports between 10+ to 30+ FPS) and elimination of stutter.

To help us totally put this issue to bed, we’d love you to assist us by jumping into the PTEs that we’ll be hosting over the next couple of weeks before deploying Patch 16. We’ll attempt to give as much notice as possible, and will consider alternate & more flexible timing across the different timezones. Please checkout the discord, for the latest PTE information.

Max & Dan Carlin - HARDCORE HISTORY

Description:

Dan Carlin - the man behind the fantastic Hardcore History podcasts - talks with Max about Hell Let Loose, the genre, its development, growth and challenges through the broader context of wargaming, ethics and depiction of history.

Voir la vidéo sur YouTube

ICYMI - New Player Guide, by The Community for the Community

Incase you missed it, we’re excited to present an incredible player guide that has been put together by some brilliant contributors. Even in its early stages this unique concept impressed the team and we were very excited to see it progress from start to finish. Our heartfelt thanks goes out to the people involved for making it possible:

Authors: Dbl0Douche, General T, Inchon, Nuc1e4r, Oddball, Xiang_Ganger.
Editor: Dashthirty
Art and Design: MoscaTnT

You can Download the New PLayer Guide PDF here: https://bit.ly/HLLNewPlyrGuide
We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did!

Hell Let Loose Community Fan Art or Screenshot Reminder

This will run for approximately 1 more week. So please consider U10 Eastern Front content.
Showcase HLL in a creative way. This can be a sketch, drawing, painting, original screenshot or reworked screenshot that is instantly recognizable as Hell Let Loose.

Simply submit your linked art image, along with your Discord name and ID. Please make sure you are in the official Discord so we can contact you directly.

Submission by: JT1902

Submission by: [BST2] El CaMaRaDa

Join the Discord here - https://discord.gg/hellletloose

We will be giving away a few HLL Keys, and an exclusive helmet to our favourite pieces. We will highlight this art across our channels and in the Discord.

Please only ONE submission per person.

We look forward to seeing them!
HLL Fan Art/ Screenshot submission form - https://forms.gle/4rkW2ZGJsKWjRcuv6

And that’s all for this Dev Brief. Once again thanks for all the support, have a great weekend and see you on the frontline!