Here we are with another instalment of the Weekly OMG Development Update - With the Holidays approaching, we're actually ramping up development pretty significantly - Lots of movement this week so lets get to it!
Website/Backend
Draygon is hoping to have the backend completely wrapped up in the next week or so, we put out the call to our WarCP Testers to find bugs in the system, missing images, wrong costs, etc. and they came back with quite a list! Most of the bugs have been stomped, and with Doombringer continuing his work ( he has now moved on to graphics for our Doctrine Abilities!) the WarCP is pretty much done (pending some GaryTweaks®). Speaking of Doombringer, here are those American/Wehr Unit Icons I promised last week....
Allies:
Axis:
or 
Heres a taste of the upgrade icons... I'll post the rest of them with next weeks update.
So again, if you see Doombringer on Vent tell him how much you like his stuff, the Dev couldn't be happier with it!
Mike has been around on and off, busy with School, but still putting in the hours with the doctrine system... We spent the last week actually reworking a couple of core systems, namely the Doctrine Progression system & the Point Welfare system (i.e. reworked the Casual vs. Hardcore point bumps).
The Doctrine system incorporates a "Progression Bar" that you put points into to unlock tiers of abilities, the points you put into that bar also give buffs to your entire army - for example if you have a Blitz army, investing in the Progression Bar will give you improved vehicle speed and improved moving accuracy. For a Terror army it might be increased suppression dealt and improved Rate of Fire.... Basically we'll be picking aspects that the core doctrine should emphasize.
This system is a little on the deep side, so I won't go into too much more detail - If you're interested in getting a little farther into it you can look at the Mock-up I put together for it a couple days ago - Keep in mind that in the finished version there would be 1 tree per tab, and you'd tab back and forth.
Laststandmod.com
The Welfare System (internal name) is basically how we plan to keep player progression a little closer than it would be if we just said "Ok, Go!" - Players who play alot will never hit a daily or weekly CP cap, every game you play will count - That was one thing we decided very on, since we're basically a bunch of old hardcore EIR players. As we got into testing builds, etc. We did discover a problem though where you'd have a player who played maybe doesn't have all that much time to play getting smashed regularly by a player who has pretty much all day to play OMG, the discrepancy in advancement was pretty crazy.
If you recall, our initial plan was to give accelerated VP gains for players with less than 25VPs and slightly accelerated gains for players with less than 50VPs - This system has been scrapped in favour of one that looks at all players currently active in OMG and divides them into several groups - It puts players with almost no points into the "Newbie" category, players with less than the average amount of points in the "Lowbie" category, and everybody else in the "Standard" category - Players in the Newbie & Lowbie groups will gain VPs at a faster rate, and will get points for their losses. Players in the Standard group will get 1pt for a win and 0 points for a loss - But keep in mind here that 1vp is a new ability or a new level in the OMG system, no more waiting until you have 14 points to get your T3.
Both the above systems are still WIP so things are subject to change, but the more we get into these player-based systems, the more we're turning towards setting systems up to treat good players fairly and giving poor players/new players/players with not too much time for gaming some bonuses to help them get up to the competitive level faster. Essentially the good players will set the pace for everyone else.
Coding:
Cozmo continues along at break-neck pace, OMG is Coming Soon!® is his war cry!
Bonte has returned from the wilds with Doe-in-tow and has been pounding away at the Wear & Tear® system for degenerative tank repairs - This is an old system actually that hadn't (until now) made it through feasibility & implementation. The short version of this system goes a-like-a-this:
A problem with other persistency based Mods (in our opinion) is the prevalence of armour recycling - That is to say when you have a rifle squad, it gets in a fight and loses 2 men, that is a permanent decrease in overall combat effectiveness for that unit - The problem is that when you get 50% worth of health knocked off of your tank, all you have to do is pull it back and repair it for a little bit to bring it back up to full health as if it had never been damaged.
What the Wear & Tear® system does is whenever you repair a tank/vehicle, for each HP you regenerate, it takes a fraction of a HP off the max health of your vehicle. Currently the ratio is about 20% - So if your Sherman gets knocked down to 50% health, you can repair it back up no problem but it'll only ever be able to repair to around 90% health - Then the next time your repair it that number will go even lower. The idea here is to make it so tanks and vehicles are only really useful up to a certain amount of damage, and after that point you really have to choose if you want to keep it on the field or get it out of there and save the vet.
One thing this system lets us do though, is have multiple squads of engineers/etc repairing the same vehicle - Its simply this, the more units you have repairing (you can have as many as you want) the less each squad will repair individually, but the degradation rate remains the same - So players can make the choice to repair that KT with 5 squads of pioneers and it'll get to the field pretty damn quick, but by the time it gets there it'll be at a much lower max health than if they'd had one squad repairing it for a longer amount of time. Repair Rates will be very similar to EIR, as an FYI.
Design:
Actually the majority of the Design post is located up in the Backend Systems area, but we have been doing some work on the doctrine thoughts - No abilities started yet but hopefully this week, as we get closer to the holidays and some time off for members of the team.
Art & Mapping
Exact repeat of last week (lol)
Two distinct groups here, but I'm shoving them together in one simply because I think there hasn't been much going on here - A number of new Maps are completed, but waiting for an OMG release for testing to begin - Art as well has not been too active, but I think that's mainly due to the Holiday.
So thats your update for this week! Anything you want discussed next week? Post it up here!
Thanks!
