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World War II Online FAQ: Technical Details
Will
there be a Mac version?
Yes.
Will
there be any differences in the Mac version?
Yes, it will suck. No, really, there shouldn't be any major differences
in how things appear.
What
will the scale be like?
One kilometer in real life will be represented by 0.5 kilometers
in game.
Why
the metric system?
Who knows...
What
kinds of 3D cards will you support?
They are planning to support both Direct3D and OpenGL for the PC
and just OpenGL for the Mac.
How
long will my in-game handle be able to be?
Right now it is set at 8 characters, but it may change after the
beta.
Is
there going to be sound?
Nope, it's a silent game. Actually, the architecture is totally
new, they will be supporting stereo and Doppler effects, and they're
looking into proximity, time-delay over distance, and environmental
audio effects as well. The aircraft engines respond to changes in
manifold pressure, and prop load already, and it sounds fantastic.
Will
there be custom skins?
We have talked about supporting "squad level" custom skins
for vehicles. Right now we've left it at probably one vehicle type
per squad, and only "historical" type markings. We'll
see how much we can support. We still need to design a standard,
but it's something that we all want to see make the final release.
We still have bigger fish to fry right now until the open beta is
rolling along.
UPDATE: "We want to offer squad-level custom
paint. This will probably take the form of a patch or area of the
vehicle that a squad can custom-color, or display a small low-res
bitmap. Still to be determined."
Will
identical-model aircraft belonging to different countries have proper
paint schemes?
Yes. A Mustang that belongs to the RAF will be painted
in the proper RAF paint scheme.
Will
there be paint schemes for vehicles depending on theater?
Different vehicles will have different paint schemes, and
we will try for different skins for different seasons too. Units
liket he P-40 and Spitfire will probably have "theater"
skins. So when you fly a P-40 in the Med/Africa terrain, it'll be
sandy brown, and in the PTO it'll be OD, etc.
What
resolutions will the game support?
The alpha is currently running in: 640X480, 800X600, 1024X768, 1280X1024,
1600X1200. Note: this is not final.
Will
the game support 3D sound?
Yes.
What
will World War Two Online's sound system be like?
The Rats
are planning on doing a 'layered' engine sound for all the vehicles.
You will be able to hear your prop load up when it's getting a good
bite, hear your engine 'load up' while trying to scale a hill with
your Panzer. Sounds will not be 'back burner' this time around,
you can expect a lot of immersion throughout all aspects of World
War Two Online. Corn is building the sounds with you subwoofer junkies
in mind; nothing like being able to rattle your neighboors teeth
from 3 blocks away. Corn is also trying to make sure the sounds
still sound good on 'low end' speakers, but the better your speakers
are, the better the sound will be.
Will
the sounds have a proper Doppler effect?
Yes, they
sure will.
Will
the engine support shadows?
Yes, the Unity engine supports shadows, but they are not
optimized yet and should be in place by beta.
UPDATE: Shadows are going in and will be 'real
shadows,' meaning that they will stretch from the sun's position.
Will
the engine have deformable terrain?
The terrain will be dynamically deformable, but Killer
doubts we'll see much of it used in World War Two Online. What they
are doing is storing a DEM map of the majority of Europe locally
on the player's hard drives, with changes to it downloaded as needed
(such as craters, burned buildings, etc).
To
what scale is the terrain and vehicle systems modeled?
All ships/airplanes/vehicles/men will be 1:1 scale, as
weill everything else except the data points of the terrain, which
will be 2:1 scale. An an example, the size of the city of Paris
might be 1/2 all ground dimensions but all buildings will be 1:1
scale.
What
about the network?
In the words of Killer:
We will be using three
backbones for triple redundancy, we will also have symmetrical routing
through each so that you have three distinct and seperate paths
to choose from to get to us.
We are working on automatic selection so that even mid game the
game can open a new route if the current connection path you are
using is causing problems, and a dual protocol system to allow a
protocol fallback if needed to provide a stable connection.
We will document protocol to the point that will allow people to
configure proxies, NAT's, and firewalls to allow people to play
from behind them.
We will not rebate downtimes unless they are severe. We cannot guarantee
a good connection path for everyone. With the state of the internet
that is impossible.
I do expect a better connection to us for more people than any other
online game in existence and will personally work to ensure that.
Folks who know me from the "other" company can vouch for
my ability to do so, so long as our programmers do their part with
reliable protocols, and I am putting together our initial network
with several times the capacity.
What
kind of modem speed will I need to play this game?
28.8 kpbs is minimum and should work fine, but 56 kbps
and above is recommended. It's not the modem speed that counts,
but a constant and clean connections to the server.
Where
will the servers be located?
Physically,
they'll be located in Texas.
How
big will the game download be?
This is undetermined at this time. The Rats are working
on compression techniques and will let us know when something develops.
UPDATE: The download will be about
50-100 Megabytes (MB).
Will
destroyed vehicles/objects stay on the landscape?
Wrecked and broken vehicles will stay in the "world"
for a limited time. There are some issues that we need to keep in
mind like...
1) Vehicle hulks cannot vanish when players are near.
2) Vehicle hulks need to vanish eventually.
3) Vehicle hulk "info" takes up very very valuable space
on players' update packets.
But if all the technology allows us to get burned out hulks to stand
where they died for others to take cover behind, then we will go
for it.
Buildings and facilities will follow a different standard for re-building
that relies on the strategic system's ability to send resources
for repair. Indeed, buildings may remain down or damaged for weeks
and weeks.
Will
voice communication be built from scratch, in house, or are you
incorporating another tool?
"We are looking into a proprietary system, but not sure about
dev cycle time. RW and the standards will always work when in doubt.
More news on this at beta time."
UPDATE: "There will be some kind of voice support.
Clearly RW and BFC will work peer to peer, but we are looking into
the possibility of a proprietary system as well. More on this as
it develops."
Will
there be a visible limit on players?
"There has to be, but we are planning to raise
the bar in a big way." UPDATE: Currently
the visibility is 64 vehicles. Vehicles include tanks, planes, ships,
and troops (crew in a vehicle are not counted). This number will
increase with time.
I've
seen the screenshots and the terrain looks pretty devoid; what's
up with that?
Fret not, young fan of World War Two Online, foliage and other
objects are being added to the terrain to liven it up. What you
saw was a very, very early picture set. "There will be plenty
of cover. We have trees and shrubs as well as man-made objects that
all supply cover for troops, and we plan to have lots of them."
How
will the penetration system work?
World War Two Online will feature a very high fidelity penetration
standard, the physics loop and weapons/damage system track projectiles
and object hardnesses, and results are very realistic. You will
be able to shoot through objects if the caliber is high enough,
down range distance short enough, and obliquity steep enough to
allow penetration. World War Two Online's ballistic model supports
ricochet as well. And "objects" refers to just about everything
in World War Two Online... players, vehicles, buildings, trees,
etc.
How
will the damage system work?
To quote:
"The WWIIOL damage system uses a full "polygon collider"
to detect and apply damage to vehicles. These
shots are from MultiGen Creator (one of our 3D dev software
programs) and show the damage objects for the Pz 38(t) and the PzKpfw
III Ausf F. We've separated the internal objects from the external
shape in the 38(t) to show the various components that we are modeling
to take damage. While the PzKpfw III Ausf F object shows all components
at once to give an idea of penetration routes to various internal
components. All of the vehicles in WWIIOL will have a damage object
similar to these with all major components modeled. These are the
initial objects and represent a peek into what we are going for
in the finished standard. Note the various components inside these
objects...engine, transmission, ammo stores, crew (yes, legs, arms,
torso, and heads), guns, wheels, etc.
Imagine damage or penetration along any "ray", from any direction
in these shots, and you can see just how wide the range and complexity
of return information on "damage applied" can be. We tossed out
the "box maps" and the "hit bubbles" for WWIIOL, they just didn't
have the detail we need for this sim. With the polygon collider
we can get a much finer resolution of damage detection than with
previous systems. The other big advantage over other damage detection
systems is that we can finally add components that were previously
to small, or shaped too oddly to fit into a "box" or for a bubble
to accurately account for...like wing spars, control and fluid lines,
ammo belts, etc."
How
will the collision system work?
This is
too big to paraphrase, so here's the entire quote: "Our
plan is to utilize the polygon collider to "detect" collisions.
While this will give us accurate collision effects and results,
there is no way to really overcome lag completely in a collision
of two player controlled vehicles. There is always going to be the
chance of some weird things happening. This will be much less noticeable
in slower vehicles…tanks etc.
There is no way
around the following paradigm in an online game: I get a packet
from the host telling me where you are. I see you. The next packet
I get tells me where your new location is. By the time I get that
info, you will be in a new location again (if you're moving fast)...I
am always a packet behind. Well, lets say I have a 1/2 second update
rate (current online standard). This can be both a very short delay,
and then at times, eons of delay . A forward predictor needs to
be in place to smooth out the movement of objects within this example,
so that I don't see you zap to your new location after receiving
every new packet. This will "guess" my new position before I get
the info and base that guess on stuff like speed and vector velocity
etc... It's also known as a "smoothing algorithm" and is used all
over the place in internet gaming.
Ok, let's get to
the crash...I'm flying along and I find that I'm on a collision
course with another aircraft (yipes!), head on, 700MPH closure (each
of us going 350MPH). At this speed we are each going 5.8 miles per
minute, hich divides down to 475.2 ft per second. At that "standard"
1/2 second update rate, we each cover 237.6 feet for each packet!!
That's going to probably cause some visual weirdness at the moment
of the crash, even WITH the forward predictor running. Now then,
at a slower closure rate (like a tail chase collision) this won't
be so strange...you'll "get what you see" more than the fast closure
example.
Our plan is to
utilize an extreme LOD (level of detail) packet transfer-sorting
standard, so that we give players more vital info faster, and less
vital info at a slower rate. All online games do a variation of
this. What we are planning is a higher resolution of packet transfer
rates. So that the 1/2 second fast update can be made quicker in
trade for delaying other packets of less important info. So that
a standard of say 1/2 second, can be sidestepped, or improved on,
and perhaps dynamically. We are going to have very very fast comm
code folks…very very fast.
Ultimately we want
it to be perfect but until then, our plan is to make it better than
it's been in games up to this point. We'll improve the standard
where we can, and do what we can to improve the standards that are
stubborn."
Will
hearing distance be simulated for voice communication?
There are
a couple of problems/complications with hearing distance, mainly:
1) Online, in order
to support a hearing distance, range checks would need to be made
whenever ANY player typed a message. That would eat up a lot of
bandwidth.
2) If comms depended
on carrying a radio, new players in FPS mode would end up very frustrated
when simply asking for help while outside of "hearing" range...bigtime
hole for new players to fall through.
3) A comm system that
had to support cross-side comms "sometimes" and not others would
be an order of magnitude more complex to code.
"Once we get
the beta running we will be getting feedback from the testers on
what the radio needs and doesn't need. There have been a lot of
good ideas on the boards and we will implement some of them for
sure. Ultimately the comm system is yours, the players. And we will
get the system in place that does what it needs to without closing
any doors on new guys or being so complex that it takes us a year
to get it done. Somewhere in the middle lies World War Two Online's
communications system."
Will
vehicles have a custom identification system (squad logo, etc)?
"We
are looking into a custom ID system for all vehicles, can't get
too detailed right now, we want to make sure it'll work before we
start yappin'. Each theater will support a skin set for all the
vehicles, so there will be a decent amount of variety there. Fly
a P40 in the MED and get the two tone desert scheme, fly the -40
in the PAC and get the OD job, and in CBI get the FT camo etc."
UPDATE: "We'll get some level
of it in there by open beta. Bandwidth and CPU issues are never
that black and white, if they were online games would have TONS
of custom stuff already eh? We'll be limiting custom stuff to historical
applications only, and beyond unit and rank markings it will be
very slim. Probably some limited persona editing, and vehicle ID
editing. I wish we could do it all, nose art, custom photos for
getting a pic of your honey in the cockpit (could save some marriages),
and all the other stuff, but we'll start with what we've planned
and go from there."
If
disconnected, will you be able to log back in quickly and resume
from where you were?
Yes, but
not quite. If you are a co-pilot in an aircraft you could take control
of the plane in the case of the pilot disconnecting, but upon logging
off your character is done for that session.
What
happens upon disconnection?
After staying
in the world for a little while, your character vanishes. This prevents
people from disconnecting in the middle of a firefight to prevent
dying. They will still get killed because their persona sticks around
for some time after they dsiconnect.
Will
I be able to remap my keys/joystick buttons?
Certainly.
Will
each vehicle have its own configuration (keyboard/joystick layout)
file?
Only if
the player chooses to do it that way, yes. You could have a custom
configuration for each vehicle (Bf109.cfg, PzKpfwIV.cfg, etc) or
each vehicle type (tank.cfg, fighter.cfg, etc).
Will
on-board transform and lighting (T&L, for GeForce and GeForce
2 GTS cards) be supported?
Eventually,
yes, but not in the first open beta release.
Will
fortifications have the same damage system/penetration system as
vehicles?
All ground-based objects use the same model, as well as defensive
guns such as AAA.
Can
buildings/terrain be damaged?
"All
buildings will have various damage levels and that will be effected
dynamicaly by combat damage and the re-supply/convoy system. As
far as shells and bombs hitting, they will leave crates for sure,
but there will be a limit to how many we can display for all the
players. They will "go away" if no players are within range."
Will
explosions kick up dust and debris?
Yes, but
for a much shorter period than in reality.
Will
mountains be sharp-edged, or will they smooth out?
"That is soley determined by the size of the individual
terrain squares. The "smoother" the mountains, the shorter the vis
distance, the smaller the terrain, and the lower the frame rate.
We're pretty happy with this compromise, you may not be."
Will
rivers have a certain depth?
Yes.
Will
bridges be present?
Yes, with
different sizes, types, and structural strengths.
Will
fires spread?
Yes, from
building to building and other significant structures (and vehicles).
Will
there be tread and tire marks on roads/grass/dirt?
Yes, but
only temporarily (the time of existence has not been set yet, perhaps
a player-set amount).
Can
vehicles be used to ram the enemy in desperate situations?
Yes.
Will
a ricochet system be in place?
Yes, it's a part of the extensive ballistics system.
Do
all vehicles exist at the same time on the fields, or do they spawn
when selected?
The vehicles
are spawned when selected (unlike capital ships, however, which
are persistant and at sea at all times). There will also be some
aircraft in "repair hangars" that can be destroyed, but
more importantly, it lets the enemy know exactly what your side
is flying in terms of new technology.
Will
the enemy find out immediately when new technology is developed,
or do they have to find out for themselves?
They'll
have to find out on their own... the British won't know about new
German aircraft until they encounter them in the skies.
Why
do the models seem to have such low polygon counts?
"In regards to tank wheels, etc., note how MANY wheels
the PzIII has... now think how many triangles are needed to do a
3D 24 sided wheel (about the minimum to look fully round)... it's
96. Now multiply that by 7 (number of road wheels)... that's 672.
The average airplane in Warbirds has only about 700 triangles in
it TOTAL... so we chose not to spend a WB plane worth of our polygon
budget on just the wheels. (grin)
One of the best
things about working on an online game is that as the minimum system
creeps upwards, we can easily redo the objects to be more detailed.
I redid the planes in WB 3 times over the years, each time adding
about 50 to 100 triangles. I see no reason why that won't happen
here too."
Will
ambient or environmental sounds be featured?
Yes, both. "Ambient sounds are planned as well as combat
sounds. We have a proximity/vector algorithm in place that allows
for Doppler, time delay, and volume fade for distance in our sound
module. When in FPS POV you will hear ambient environmental sounds
as well."
Since
the terrain is half-size, will cities be half-size as well?
Yes, city size will be halved to better framerates and visual
capacity. "We are taking the liberty of halving the size
of the cities as well...first off, they fit the DEM terrain better,
and they will tax frame rates much less. We are testing city objects
right now in fact and they are looking great.
Hamlets and villages
will be as detailed as we can get them, but with objects covering
the vastness of a major city we have to make some sacrifices in
level of detail. Buildings will all have damage models that will
show multiple levels of damage, not just destroyed. And the ones
that can be entered will be obvious."
Will
the cities be design in true European fascion (no repetitive block-after-block)?
"We are designing a road grid that is based on the "center
of town" format. Where roads fan out from the center. It's very
Euro but still allows for great flexibility with minimum repetition.
It's looking great and is not a square grid at all. City/town fighting
is going to be quite a challenge."
Will
there be a third-person view?
No, World
War Two Online is strictly first-person in all aspects.
Is
there any way that players can know how much lag they're currently
having in the game?
There'll
be some sort of indication of latency built into the game.
What
is the current visible range?
Right now
it is set to 8-9 kilometers (for those that don't know, that's a
lot). It might end up being shorter for ground troops, since they
don't get to see much over the horizon.
Will
multiple monitors be supported?
No, they
will not be.
Will
troops always look the same?
No, real-time
shading will be in use for the models and they will look differently
under different lighting. This helps immensely with camouflage.
Can
damaged vehicles be recovered?
As it stands
now, this is not possible, but they are working on a way to allow
this.
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