Omaha Beach, and two rendering bugs that had been there since the renderer changed.
Omaha Beach
The landing is a warzone now, and almost all of it is content that shipped with the game and had never once been played.
- The crowd. Two 60-second beds of American voices, hundreds of men shouting and screaming, one at the waterline and one up at the shingle.
- The screaming. Allied panic lines, men calling for a medic, from across the sand.
- Your cover answers back. Rounds hammer the steel you are hiding behind, using impact recordings authored for this map and used by nothing.
- The seasick man. On the way in, one of the Rangers leans over the side.
- The wounded. Men in the sand writhing, men doubled over on their knees. Casualties nobody is working on.
- Scattered gore, blood in the surf, bodies and wreckage along the shore.
- A Sherman that gets shelled while you watch. It starts intact. Walk up to it and an incoming round finds it.
- Landings on the flanks - grounded Higgins boats and men working up the sand either side of you.
- The boat crew flinches at the shell that lands beside you, instead of ignoring it.
- Boats that die on the run-in now brew up properly instead of making a splash.
Two long-standing rendering bugs
The blurred edge where the water meets the sand. This had been wrong since the renderer changed and had been "fixed" four times without ever being diagnosed. The cause was a texture wrap mode the new renderer never implemented: the wet-sand strip is authored to repeat along the beach and clamp across it, and the renderer clamped both. Ninety-three percent of the waterline was a single stretched column of pixels.
Mod shader overrides were being ignored entirely. The new renderer resolved shader names in the opposite order to the old one, so any override that replaced a stock name silently lost. Two Omaha water effects had been written and had never rendered at all. Now fixed, which is why the surf moves and there is blood in the water.
Fixes
- Enemy blood and battle damage were not showing at all. An entire shader file was being discarded over a single malformed line, taking 70 definitions with it.
- Smoke screens grew, collapsed and regrew on a loop. Nearby effects were evicting them; the particle budget is raised and six effect loops are throttled.
- Rounds now crack past your head. The close-pass distance was being forced back down to a near-graze on every launch.
- The concussion ring after a near explosion was playing at three percent volume, muted by the same effect it was meant to cut through.
- Blast protection behind cover was only half-connected and never actually shielded anyone.
- A development probe was writing over 1600 lines into every player's console log.
Downloads are 32 MB smaller
A staging folder was being packed into the download under a path the game never reads. Every byte of it was unreachable.