Squad Monthly Update September 2016: Bringing the Boom

Squad Monthly Update September 2016: Bringing the Boom

It was announced by Offworld Industries LTD, that their stated goals, have been focused around bringing a full scale tactical teamwork based first person shooter to the market on a cutting edge game engine, while promoting a social, vocal, thinking man’s squad based gaming experience in their game Squad.  The result of this gaming environment design where strangers can pursue coordinated flanking maneuvers using ingame radio and proximity VOIP has defined the challenges to the developers, finding squad mates to build and defend firebases and coordinating separate nine man squads to search and destroy enemy firebases in the chaos of 72 player combined arms infantry firefights is a challenge that defines the game.

Check out the latest video of Squad release trailer, featuring some gameplay footage:

“The pursuit of perfecting this experience is what brought together 15+ modders in 2014, this is the reason the current team of 30+ developers continue to pursue their passion to build a better first person shooter.  Shown today is the monthly roundup of updates from the dev team and from the modding community.

Over the last month between the release of Alpha 7 and features for Alpha 8, the development team of Squad has been working long hours to update and optimize the game while bringing the big boom into battle with Improvised Mobile Rocket Artillery attached to technicals and trucks, Recoilless SPG-9 rocket systems, and the FGM-148 Javelin Anti-Tank Guided Missile. These anti-vehicle weapons systems are being brought in to prepare for the future deployment of a greater number and greater variety of armored vehicles. Talking of which, the first reveals of the British Armed Forces faction are released with this update, making good on one of the Kickstarter stretch goals to include the UK in the core Squad gameplay experience as the fifth faction in game. Also shown off just this weekend from the Squad Modding Scene comes the WWII mod Post Scriptum, which will include the British and German WWII factions in Western Front maps.

Iterative Optimizations, Stability and Improvements have been the name of the game as the team moves towards Alpha 8. Highlights of the optimizations include a near complete rebuild of the animation system vastly reducing CPU usage, while also adding a new crawling animation to the mix. Multiplied by the current player limit of 72 players, the savings in a full server look to be very promising. Updates to the menu UI, in game UI, in game map UI, radial menu UI, Server browser UI are centered and focused to bring a highly optimized, unified user experience across the entire game. Another highlight is server browser asynchronously updating, to allow a much faster startup and server selection experience, and also a large number of deep engine optimizations, with a special recognition to the developers at Coconut Lizard who host a blog full of low level Unreal Engine optimizations.

Squad Alpha v8 will upgrade to the cutting edge Unreal Engine 4.13, and will see the introduction of new lighting system that makes use of photographic skyboxes. Offworld Industries LTD has brought on several new environment artists as the Eastern European theatre is fleshed out for current and future maps in the game and made available in the Squad Modding SDK.

ABOUT Offworld Industries LLC:

Offworld Industries LLC is an independent studio formed in 2014 by 15+ developers who had worked together for a combined 50+ years on the Project Reality Mod for Battlefield 2, with the founding purpose to bring a standalone spiritual successor of the acclaimed mod to market. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, the team has brought on modders and industry professionals to form a team of 30+ people with the goal of bringing a new take on the large scale tactical shooter.”

For more information on Squad, visit its official website.