Chokepoint Gaining Momentum

[Cornered Rats]

With an all-new team at working on WWII Online: Chokepoint, we're pleased to report that hard work is materializing into actionable developments. This development update is designed to inform you of a bit of that progress and reinforce the positive impact it has on the entirety of our mission to innovate and bring WWII Online to the future.

UPGRADED UNREAL ENGINE VERSION

Presently Chokepoint is not only running Unreal Engine 5.3.2, but we've just recently upgraded it to the "source" build which will allow us to build/deploy on dedicated servers. This gives us the flexibility we need to deploy Chokepoint as we see fit, while also streamlining some automations we're building to optimize future developments.

INVENTORY SYSTEM RESOLVED

Leveraging the latest and greatest that Lyra has to offer, we've effectively resolved the inventory system that was a bit challenging as we moved from UE4 --> UE5. We've got this functional and have a bit more polish to do, but it is looking good. We even went ahead and rebuild the inventory UI window that shows your weapon and ammo availability.

INCREMENTAL WEAPON REBUILD

We've elected to take an incremental rebuild approach of the primary weapons needed to conduct base level game testing within UE5. Essentially all weapon blueprints and connections have to be rebuilt post conversion.

It took a little time for the new team to put together some viable connections but we're aiming to get the following first weapons assembled within UE5:

1. M1 Garand

2. M1911

3. Kar98

4. Walther P38

From there we will continue to rebuild each weapon, ranging from its blueprint associations to its connected animations, sounds, functions, etc.

RESTORING AIMING & SPECIAL FX

We had to rebuild several aim-down-sight functions that included first and second stage aiming, as well as cleaning up the sight aperture on the M1 Garand so it displayed things properly.

When you were aiming there'd also be a vignette and blue to enhance your perspective, this was also rebuilt to mimic UE4 behavior.

NEXT STEPS

We're repairing all of the immediate and in your face issues possible so we can get back to play testing at the earliest opportunity. We recognize it has been a bit of a road but we want to encourage you, that CRS is doing the hard work to get there as soon as we can.

Turns out the upgrade to UE5 was quite intense, but it is finally starting to come together and it is an exciting chapter in our book of doing the impossible. With an all-new team working on the project, you can see a fire within the studio to see this through.

If everything goes accordingly, we will be in Unreal Engine 5 playtesting before the end of this year. We hope sooner, but we want to make sure we're a bit conservative and manage expectations. This is a great sign of progress, all the same.

IMPACT ON WWII ONLINE 2.0

We wanted to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Chokepoint's progression is directly correlated with WWII Online 2.0 progress, as this is the asset creation pipeline for our future infantry system. It is also training our contributors on the ins-and-outs of Unreal Engine development, which is starting to show a bit of an acceleration.

This new infantry system will dramatically optimize infantry game play for WWII Online (2.0) and give it a much more modern and immersive feel, as it relates to responsiveness and smoothing. It feels, really good!

Check out this Chokepoint play test in Unreal Engine 4 conducted on April 28th, 2024.

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