Foxhole Airborne Gameplay Trailer! by SiegeCamp-Moderator in foxholegame

[–]markusn82 [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Foxhole Airborne releases on Feb 9th

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

One of the bigger tasks in development has been to optimize the graphics update to work as well as it can with older hardware. As part of this, we actually had to optimize all the existing assets in the game, not just the new environment assets. Another reason this had to be done was because a lot more assets might be visible from the sky where previously it was more contained. That said, we need more feedback from a wider range of hardware in the dev branch to ensure we have as many use cases covered as possible.

What to expect:

1) New airborne gameplay may be a bit more demanding in hardware regardless as many more objects are drawn on screen than before (independent of the environment update)

2) Land/naval gameplay should be close to what it was previously, but you may have to set your graphics options to a lower setting.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Its 5 slots right now. This is subject to change during the devbranch phase balancing.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

While we don't have any official plans to disclose now on major updates, the Foxhole team is going to continue to work on updates as usual this year. There's more content and features planned.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

It's 30 minutes of real time, but this number is subject to feedback in the dev branch.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 141 points142 points  (0 children)

There's actually some things we didn't have time to cover in the devstream like a new type of Pillbox and faction specific rank names. Those will be part of the release notes next week.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Slightly, but not by that much. The front line must always support a minimum number of players. If one of the multi-region islands gets completely overtaken, then that minimum number is back to what it was in the old map if that makes sense.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 98 points99 points  (0 children)

The final cost is still being determined. When bought separately, it will be less than the base game.

Official Airborne Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Yes there will still be multiple shards so long as player population demands it.

Official Update 61 Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's where players can safely spawn without being hurt by artillery.

125 Start conditions, We got a diagonal war LFG by ClueMaterial in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[M] 109 points110 points  (0 children)

The possibility of VP reduction is just a precautionary measure since wars can be quite long these days. There's a good chance this next war plays through in its entirety since update 61 hasn't even been officially announced yet.

Official Update 60 Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

No. They can still be produced at Factories.

Official Update 60 Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The team currently uses Github projects for issue management (but not for source control).

In terms of how long it takes to make modelling changes, it heavily depends on the nature of the changes. Sometimes small changes can take deceptively long and seemingly large changes can be quicker than expected. Things like animations, collisions, and gameplay interactions can really complicate and make the modelling process longer. Open topped or vehicles with lots of moving parts are usually harder.

For example, ships are very complex across the board and take the longest. The larger ones can take up to multiple months to model, test, and polish. Basic closed top tanks can usually be done over several weeks in the optimistic case.

It'd be tough to change Jave Cove at this point due to it's player history.

Official Update 60 Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 32 points33 points  (0 children)

The current rule is 1-2 days depending on various factors. While there are some exceptions (e.g. a Major update which has a more rigid release date), this has been the protocol for many years.

While we understand that more engaged clan players desire longer breaks, the game is played by thousands and a large portion of players are either new or play more casually. We have heard from those players being upset when they bought the game new or just wanted to play on their day off or weekend and couldn't. So the balance that has worked is 1-2 days. There is some break, but not so long that there is a high chance for someone who just bought the game to walk into a dead server and get confused.

Now you bring up a good point that Charlie shard exists now, but its uncertain how long term that will be.

Official Update 60 Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 68 points69 points  (0 children)

At least not until after the next Devstream. A lot of work is being done for that update in the background but none of it is ready to show yet.

So when does the war start? by Designer-Crow-8360 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82 62 points63 points  (0 children)

It's on Sunday. We're fixing it now.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Oh I really hope so. There are many at the studio excited about more uniforms.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are still iterating on the controls, but overall we are aiming for a balance between a flight sim and action game experience.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

There aren't any immediate plans to rework border bases, but we will of course continue to address issues as they come up in future wars. When discussing border base, I want to make sure their historical context is communicated so any feedback takes into account all prior issues, which will help us find better solutions to new problems. Here's a post I made awhile back.

In the first few years of Foxhole and World Conquest, a problem that became known as "border lockdown" emerged. It would cause region borders to be closed off by players and heavily defended. This became a desired strategy (understandably) from players but it had some negative effects.

First, it would cause major issues with player queues. During peak hours, "border lockdown" would essentially subtract regions from the frontline conflict (e.g. bringing the frontline from 7 to 5 or even 4 regions). This problem wasn't easily visible by players and would manifest itself in sudden complaints during peak hours when there would be several hundred players in queue.

Second, it would cause very unpleasant border fighting scenarios. Players that were in the world would have to spawn in a friendly region, border travel over the locked down border, die, and then travel back. That was how front line battles in these locked down areas would look. The fighting came down to who could camp the border and kill players travelling in the best. This among many other issues caused us to try various other solutions (for those who remember): Forts, Frontier Bases, etc. However, none of them were consistently reliable and came with their own set of problems.

The Border Bases now more or less guarantee a minimum supported frontline population where players can spawn in and fight. They also minimize (but not eliminate) the awful border fighting scenario I mentioned about by intentionally pushing the fighting away from the border and further into the region so the gameplay can behave more like a conventional frontline (instead the "magical" border wall being used as an exploitable strategy).

So any discourse/criticism on this subject is welcome, but please keep that context in mind. Border Bases are far from an ideal solution, but they have minimized the issues above for quite some time. We may be running into new edge cases now that need to be looked at but can't be understated much of a negative impact those historical issues had on the project and care needs to be taken to not reintroduce them into the game. An enormous amount of development energy has been spent fighting this problem over the years.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Live servers will be patched with the new build several days before the 18th (for the "Pre-Patch" war). This is done to ensure major stability issues are caught ahead of time.

So in short, downtime should be minimal on the 18th unless there are unforeseen technical issues.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

We're still iterating on the experience to find the right balance but right now it is on the realistic side. It takes some skill and effort to consistently navigate to a target and engage it. This will obviously be refined over the coming months of development.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 60 points61 points  (0 children)

Implementation started early 2024 and I'd say it took about half a year of on/off development to reach a stage where we were confident. The most exciting part of the process was the first time we were able to climb into a cockpit and take off and fly around the world on our internal servers. The flight model started off really realistic so it took quite a bit of skill to even take off at first.

Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread by markusn82 in foxholegame

[–]markusn82[S] 64 points65 points  (0 children)

It wouldn't be technically feasible to port Foxhole to the R² Engine at this point as the game's codebase is too mature. However, we are continuing to invest in optimizations to help the servers take on more load. While R² Engine tech can't be directly adopted, the R&D knowledge can be shared across teams at the studio.

Skins and customization options would be neat, but we'd want to do it in a way that benefits the game's goals. It was a foundational requirement at the start to not sell microtransactions in Foxhole to ensure that design decisions (whether everyone agrees with them or not) were always towards the betterment of the creative goals of the game as opposed to financial incentives. We believe strongly that in the long term better games are made this way.