Squad: Alpha v5 Release on the Horizon

The development team for Squad has spent the past month digging into Squad’s core game systems in an effort to get them closer to the developers’ final vision. Squad has surpassed 150,000 sales on Steam through 10 weeks by providing a Alpha gameplay experience that has been breaking new ground in the tactical FPS genre with each Alpha update. This monthly recap includes some hints to the near future Alpha updates.

In the works, a refactoring of the animation system, with nearly every animation being rebuilt or fully replaced, in part due to the addition of another alumni animator from the Project Reality mod team, from which Squad’s Dev team was formed to be the spritual successor. Released today are WIP reload animations of the AK family, pistol, RPG, M4 family, and M249, with such new details as properly pulling and returning magazines from ammo vests and realistic combat reload motions to chamber the first round.

Reveals

Several first reveals are included in today’s recap, the German G3A3 is a 7.62x51mm NATO battle rifle that will be seen in it’s real world usage by militaries and insurgent groups in developing nations and regions around the world. For environment work the first video sneak peek of a foliage bending system is on display, which will soon be combined with the player interaction system and Simul TrueSky procedural wind system. Working on more manmade environments, a modular and elaborate tunnel statics system is shown off, still very much a WIP, that will go a long way toward building verticality into urban combat maps in Squad. A parallel feature is a door system that will allow players to open and close doors, windows, manhole covers and the like, with further plans to allow breashing and locking interactions to further the excitement in close quarter combat scenarios.

UI and Quality of Life Improvements

Since the last update a lot of effort has been poured into the map, user interface and general quality of life, among these changes Squad now has a cleaner and more informative kit system, both for menus and kit selection, as well as brand new map icons to improve map readability. The ongoing improvements of our user interface systems has allowed the gameplay programmers to focus more on improving the look and feel of some of the core spawn and map features, as well as making the system leaner and easier to implement future features. The ammo crate kit icons now clearly display what role they are and what weapon will be your most important, the icons are now more unified with the spawn menu and less language dependent, both in art style and functionality,

The main focus has been to move the map towards a C++ implementation and to fix any bugs that were plaguing 4.0. The spawn menu has been improved with new icons, making each spawn menu unique for the faction, as well as better drawing the eyes to specialty kits. The players map icon now slowly pulses to allow you to easily find your own position, other players directions and important features, like medic and SLs are now easier to find on the map, and the mouse wheel and button zoom now functions much better than in earlier iterations. Some minor improvements of note, the feel of scoped weapons have been updated by giving them a post process effect around the reticle when zoomed, and the dev team re-implemented the way they handle jumping and stamina to allow for smoother traversal of walls and less frustration and stamina cost, while still stopping bunny-hopping and other game breakers.

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