Development Update, End of June 2014

Hey everyone,
This is the follow on update that Florian promised in his "Status Update June 2014" blog post.

We have been working hard over the last few months to get the basic game mechanics implemented into the game. What we consider basic game mechanics are Run, Crawl, Face, Target Selection, Auto Target Selection, Shooting, Hit Percentage, Suppression (Stress), Standing to Prone, Prone to Standing, Throwing Grenade, Stunning, and Killer Grenade. This is all from a game play perspective, we have also started implementing features like Hot Keys, Camera Movements, Path Finding, and a Map system.

As you have seen from Florian's post we have been shy about showing off actual in game screen shots because of the place holder art assets we are using while building the basic mechanics.
Recently we decided to show off a few screen shots of the in-game mechanics, to let you see that the development is progressing nicely.

So with that said I bring you all a nice present, I have put together a video about the mechanics we have implemented :)
Remember what you are seeing is a work in progress and very rough, but I wanted to give you a taste of our progress.

As we move forward through alpha and into beta we will be implementing the advanced mechanics of Call of Combat.
Things like Rank, Chain Of Command, Line Of Sight tied to Command Structure, Weapons, etc.

As always, please leave your questions and comments below.

Thanks,

Brett

Comments

GameMation's picture

Oh I love it I love it I love it I love it! This is good stuff. XD what's the alpha gonna look like. Basically the video but playable or will is have most of the design. Also, having add on questions. Will soldiers actually be able to be forced to shoot back if you wanted to even tho they are surpressed? In the first one if you were surpressed/stun/stressed you couldn't do anything but run away. the grenade arrow is a nice thing. also can grenades bounce off walls? Btw, the rifle shooting sound sounded like a halo sniper rifle lol.
UltimateGod's picture

The Alpha will look the same in terms of mechanics, but will have art assets.
Currently suppressed soldiers will behave like V1.
Currently we made the decision to not have grenades bounce, as it would add a lot of complication to the system right now. We will re-evaluate this later in the development, or for subsequent patches.

The rifle sound is from V1 :)
GameMation's picture

Sounds legit. Good to know I'll get my ass wooped again XDDDD.
Tyler's picture

The mechanics are looking great--innovative, but true to the original. [: nice job team, I'm eagerly anticipating each update!
Colethemole69's picture

Really liking how its going for ya! Hope that we can all get in on the beta ASAP! :P
Darthpyro's picture

Not sure if you've addressed this, but are we going to be able to remap the hotkeys? I'd also just like to say that I too am interested in bouncing grenades.

But looks great so far!

We'd like to offer as much customization as possible.
We also think that bouncing grenades could be loads of fun, we'll be dedicating a lot of R&D; budget in such experimentations.
vade's picture

my name in the game was bloodvine or vade i cant remember but ya i hope to see u all again
Costas's picture

Thanks UG. We're all looking forward to it as you can tell. By the way I'm surprised nobody commented on your 1.85% kill there :)
In all seriousness (and I understand that it's a prototype) I guess the percentage would go up a lot, wouldn't it? It appears that only a few "squares" away and within nading distance your rate was 4% against enemy standing with no cover?
Also regarding the waypoints, would like a right mouse click cancel the command/waypoints? There has to be a way to cancel in case of mistake. Also would that be a feature that people could possibly turn off to avoid mistakes?
Last question/concern is about the nade mechanism. During a fast paced battle, before you would try to nade around corners and such and when you couldn't the system simply wouldn't allow you. My concern is with this mechanism now, players will have to essentially disengage from battle to place the perfect grenade throw. I think this may hinder the fluidity of the gameplay itself. As for bouncing nades, object manipulation is a bonus, it allows for people to use creativity and outsmart enemies behind cover.
UltimateGod's picture

The hit % formulas I was using were created before Florian re-scaled the game. For the hit% I was getting, the distance to the formula was like 100 m. So they need to be adjusted to the game scale again.
It is actually something we can do fairly easily in V2, and something we can do without needing to push out a new version of the game like we had to in V1.
Pretty much all the mechanics are adjustable without ever compiling the code. This allows non-programmers to help us tune and tweak the formulas.

I'm just glad I did not get a 0.0% kill ;)

To your other questions, those are things we will be evaluating during Alpha, and changing/tweaking to improve the game play.

Currently to place waypoints, you hold down control and click, each click adds a point. if you miss clicked you could just click the map without holding control, then start holding control again.

For bouncing grenades, its something we can do but there are some issues we need to solve that take a fair amount of time :(
Ryan's picture

I just have a couple of questions regarding the control scheme.

Will it be possible to issue soldier commands without mouse click? Essentially what amounts to "smart casting" in MOBAs.

Will it be possible to divide specific soldier commands onto separate hotkeys? Think the CoC v1 setup where each man had it's own respective set of control keys. Whilst the control scheme in the video appears to be more intuitive, I believe that it would prove comparitively inefficient due to the extra keystrokes required.

These questions were undoubtedly addressed when the control scheme was first brought up, however a significant amount of time has passed since then.

We would like to use something like smartcast, but we haven't implemented it, therefore not tested it. Not sure it's gonna be in the first Alpha, but probably at a later stage.
However, each soldier will have its own hotkey for each of the most important action. That's actually already implemented. And its working quite nicely.
Rezurexc's picture

I'm looking forward to the game a lot, and whatever I'm going to say now won't affect how excited I am for it, but the hit percentages are pretty low, and they feel the same in v1. I know it's still in development, but are you guys keeping it the same in this video or change them a bit? Because that 4.25% in no cover will be like a 40.25% chance for me, and these are skilled soldiers right? lol :P
UltimateGod's picture

The reason they are so low is because we recently tweaked the scaling of the engine, basically how far 1 unit is in terms of real life. The formulas for hit percentage and suppression calculations have not been tuned for the new scale.

Also all the calculations for movement speed, hit %, suppression, stun, etc have not had a pass by our game designers, so they are all place holder formulas that I probably made up for testing the mechanic.

They will be changed, new variables will be added, hopefully we can reduce the number of 0.0% shots we all came to love in V1 ;)

We will be improving the mechanics and formulas through out alpha and beta phases.
Hades's picture

It looks like there is some really nice progress being made. I watched the full video twice just to make sure I didn't miss anything! The soldier movement looks fluid and clean. My only concern was what Costa said earlier about nading around corners and losing the ability to spam click until LOS was achieved on the intended target. I'm not sure which way is better honestly, I look forward to testing it out.

Keep up the good work, videos and frequent updates like these should encourage people to consider donating after they see progress is being made.
MonkeybombV2's picture

Just have three questions...
#1: Are the machine guns (MG42, Browning) going to be as effective as they were in V1?
#2: Are the fighting factions still going to be United States and Germany, or are Russia and Japan going to be added into the fray as well?
#3: Is the hit percentage, while the target is in cover, going to be as low in V1?

If anyone could answer these questions, that would be much appreciated.
Rezurexc's picture

If you read the post(s) above, it should answer question 3, 1 and 2 haven't been passed by devs yet
UltimateGod's picture

I wanted to respond to a tweet from a fan, but wanted it visible to everyone including those that do not follow on twitter.

The question was about grenade explosion time.

3bada ‏@3bada33 Jul 2
@callofcombat Grenades don't blow up instantly like before? D:

The true answer to this question is that in V1 grenades actually did not explode instantly, the grenades were on a 5 second timer from the time the grenade left the soldiers hand until it exploded, it just seemed like it exploded instantly due to the travel time of the grenade being about 5 seconds for max range, which in my experience was how far I was throwing all the time.

The grenades in the video were on a 5 second timer (how long a fuse in grenades normally are), the travel speed of grenades are subject to change for game balance purposes :)

If you have any mechanic questions from V1, or the new game leave a comment or post the question on the forums and I will be happy to dig through the V1 code and or bug Florian about them :)

-UG
Shallow's picture

I was just wondering... would there be different type of weather in the game like rain for instance?

Shoot! it has been about 5 years since I played this last! I loved the game so much. Can't wait to check the new version out...(Probably won't be much good anymore). Spent days of my life on this
Pai-ku-han's picture

a status update! Im anxious about this project you know! Its been too damn long since i last played coc. Please give us a beta so we can have some peace!
Vatsug's picture

Keep up with the good work, I'm sure you'll have a bunch of alpha-testers once you'll need us. Old and new.

I've still not found a game that can replace CoC :)