FROM: Project Lead
TO: Beta Users
INFO: Altis deployed, Sandbox staging
PRECEDENCE: Flash
SITUATION
Yesterday we finally pushed the Altian homeland to development branch. It was great to see a lot of players jump into multiplayer and take a road trip together to explore the vast terrain. The rather sizable update came in over two gigabytes of data, because it did not only contain the Altis terrain data, but supporting objects as well. Included were its vegetation, rocks, roads and many static objects, such as the unique landmarks and other structures.
Next week (hopefully September 4th) we have another large development branch deployment planned for everyone who is already with us in the Beta. All of the rest of the sandbox content is to be staged on development branch - meaning tanks, artillery, static weaponry and more. We're only keeping playable content for the actual release. While we understand everybody is wanting to try out the content, please do remember that development branch is an experimental daily build. We do not offer guarantees this branch does not contain major issues and it passes very little testing. Check the disclaimers before opting in, and consider switching back to the primary version after September 12th.
INTELLIGENCE
We'd like to welcome the communities in Australia and New Zealand to an official Facebook page for their region. It is managed by our distributors Down Under - All Interactive - and they have special local events and activities coming up.
OPERATIONS
The gentlemen looking after our AI have deployed another round of tweaks and tests to development branch. They've mainly focused on Close Quarters Battles to make the AI not as easily caught unaware and oblivious to nearby threats. Their rotation speed and accuracy is affected by more factors now (like players) and they are more reactive. This does also make them more of a challenge, and our devs are looking for feedback to tweak the values. They also welcome isolated reproduction missions for specific bugs. It is still unclear whether these changes will be approved for the release version. Firstly, we need to check whether they work generally, and then to see how they affect existing scenarios.
LOGISTICS
For a lot of people Altis appears to be running great. For others however, there are reported issues with loading and running it. We are working on investigating this with priority. Some of our developers may contact people on the forums directly via Private Message, asking for system details. Your contributions to isolating the problem are appreciated.
Meanwhile there are also other factors that can impact your performance. There were a few rather persistent errors in the RPT logs, which were fixed on devbranch today (or can be disabled by using the -nologs parameter, but that also removes our ability to trace issues). Secondly, this was a large data update and if you've been on devbranch for a while, you'll have experienced daily data changes. If you are not using SSD storage, try defragmenting your drive. Verifying the Steam data integrity via its client can also ensure you do not have corrupted data.
Finally, now could be a good moment to revisit your video settings, previously optimized for Stratis alone. Altis is a much larger terrain and balancing your details, view distances and similar settings can help a lot. The maximum (Ultra) settings we offer in our game are there to suit the needs and abilities of future and enthusiast hardware. There may certainly already be PCs that run these settings now, but we recommend care when evaluating what configuration is right for your hardware. The auto-detect option is a good starting point.