The Last General

I have just uploaded Alpha 0.1.14 (which 26 people in the Discord have access to) and recorded it, so here is a little summary of gameplay video of that quick testing session.

Remember this is just an alpha so A LOT will change in the next few months before the first public demo, and in the next year until early access and the decade after that.

The Last General - Alpha 0.1.14 - Gameplay Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2566700/The_L...

Hi generals!
This week I uploaded TLG alpha 0.1.10 and then 0.1.11 and extended the alpha access to our 4 most active members here (Level 20+), and a few more friends! On other news, TLG is now in the top 400 most wishlisted games on Steam ( #395)!

So far 20 people played the alpha, with a Peak of 10 players in a day and 4 concurrent players. Overall it has a 2 hours median play time which is pretty good considering half of them only got the alpha for a few days and all the classic alpha crashes, issues missing features, etc. So far 6 players played more than 3.5 hours and 3 players played more than 5 hours (and this is yesterday's information, might be more now). One of them has been playing with specs way below the minimum requirements that I entered on Steam (a laptop with an iGPU!) and was able to run the game in the two smaller maps.

We have also just hit 133.333 wishlists on Steam!

In the last 10 days I got a ton of stuff done:**

* In alpha 0.1.9, after a while, the game audio would start cracking and making static noises. I had been optimizing the number of voices that play at once, with priorities and distances as expected, but the problem remained. So after a bit more debugging I found that a ton of audio objects were being created in WWise and never freed up. After a while, all those objects started bringing audio thread performance down until sounds started glitching, as it didn’t have enough time to process all the objects in time before the end of each frame, causing buffer starvation. Now I am deregistering objects once they are used, for both one time audio events (shooting for example) and even for ongoing events (vehicle engines, fires) once they are far from the camera. Instead of quickly reaching several thousands of objects, not it stays at around 200 objects maximum, which takes almost no CPU time. Hopefully 0.1.10 won’t have any audio corruption issues and will also save some precious CPU time!
* Improved exposure with a small range, and made some indirect illumination and tonemapping improvements to improve contrast.
* Settings screen now has 4 tabs: general, graphics, audio and controls.
* The new “Audio” tab has a ton of sliders to control the volume of different things in the game.
* The “Controls” tab doesn’t have anything in there until I move the control remapping I did before into UI Toolkit.
* Planes physics were not using velocity squared for drag. Adjusted all drag forces and engine forces. Improved throttle handling with keyboard. It’s a bit wobbly right now but I will improve it over time.
* Added platoon selection panels to the strategic orders for defend area, defend line and arty emplacement, so you can configure which platoons should be part of it.
* Now you can actually draw the areas for the arty emplacements.
* Showing relationships between orders and companies.
* Showing relationships between an echelon and its members
* Improved mip map selection a bit to prevent some very low quality textures appearing sometimes. I think it will still some sort of fix from Latios framework side.
* Small ocean improvements.
* Fixed: heliports weren’t producing helicopters.
* Fixed: Some issues during island generation causing overlapping areas and roads.
* Fixed: Problem with units choosing targets for a specific weapon and then trying to use a different one to shoot at that target, which would sometimes cause them to use the wrong weapon or fail to shoot (for example when trying to use an AA missile to lock onto a ground vehicle)
* Fixed: target locking was taking into account visibility of the aiming point and not the actual target.
* Fixed: Camera positioning for scorpion launcher on Charly IFV in first person.
* Added FSR4 frame generation support. Disabled by default, toggleable in the graphics settings tab. This doubles the frame rate but also has some CPU cost so if the game logic was running at 60fps, now it may run at 50fps, but with the generated frames in between it looks as smooth as 100fps. I thought frame generation was a terrible thing, but I am actually pretty surprised by the quality of the generated frames. Now it will be up to each player to enable/disable this for their preferences and hardware limitations.
* Added keys to the settings controls tab. Not remappable yet, but lets players see how to play.
* Allowing giving move orders into an area already covered by a strategic area.
* Changed camera rotation to use Scroll Wheel Click + Drag.
* Allowed zooming in and out while paused.
* Removing debris after some time to increase performance. Once I compound physics objects into groups I can leave debris in placer for a much longer time.
* Improved vehicles suspensions to prevent excessive bounciness making it hard to aim. Improved aiming speed and stabilization. Still some work to do on this, but it’s definitely an improvement above 0.1.9.
* Made loading screen tips rotate slower.
* Made lamp posts lights be visible in the entire island efficiently.
* Made lamp posts lights turn off when they are broken (the image below is before that as you will notice, that was probably a battery powered lamp post or something).
* Made destroyed vehicles lights also turn off.
* Unified, jobified, parallelized and asynchronized all Raycasts from the camera to the pointer and made them reusable from multiple systems that use that information but were casting their own rays individually and blocking main thread.
* Now buildings and other objects in construction will show an “in progress” ghost, so you know where things will be while trying to place other objects around it.
* Added messages showing the current game speed when changing the speed pressing T.
* Reduced shadow shaking/flickering because of sun movement. Improved shadow quality when close to the ground.
* Improved AI jets maneuvers.
* Improve jets camera positioning and crosshair and directions for different weapons.
* Made crosshairs always point vertically for the camera during unit rolls.
* Fixed: ground textures had some issues on some Nvidia GPUs where they would shake in strange ways and display road markings and farm lines wrong in triangular ways.
* Fixed: multiple crashes due to some systems not expecting entities to be deleted. Now everything is deleted through my safe deletion system. And I updated every other system I managed to break so it would support entities disappearing (even in the safe destruction way)
* Fixed: Prevented placing multiple overlapping buildings while the game is paused. Now I don’t rely just on the physics of the new building to block you from building, because while paused the foundations don’t start showing up until the next frame.
* Fixed: Plane indicators from appearing above dead units.
* Fixed: Now the player can order troops to move to a spot where there is a strategic order. Before the strategic action was blocking right clicks on those positions.
* Fixed: Flickering lights at night due to hitting maximum number of lights in lower quality settings.
* Fixed: Soldiers weapons don’t have sound while shooting.
* Fixed: Scroll views don’t scroll while game is paused.
* Fixed: Prevented zoom in/out while scrolling in the pause menu.
* Fixed: CRAM and potentially other units, shoot forever when they are destroy while shooting.
* Fixed: CRAM was targeting ground units
* Fixed: Building preview in MacOS not detecting ground depth.

Here are some screenshots from the alpha!

The alpha started expanding in the Discord server!

Moderators there have been testing an initial alpha version and I will release 0.1.10 and expand it to some of the most active members in the Discord too.

It's been a couple of months since I posted here, but I have been posting weekly updates (or more) on the Discord, I should get better at sending updates here too more often.

In this time I worked a ton on UI, gameplay and pathfinding stuff, added a few more vehicles and translations for 15 languages (another 25 coming soon).

Here are some images from the updates I posted in the Discord in all that time.

Remember to wishlist the game on steam and join the discord to see all the news way faster and try the alpha soon!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2566700/The_Last_General

Discord: https://discord.gg/thelastgeneral

today is the 3rd year anniversary since I started developing The Last General!!

Here is a pretty long video compiling some of the videos I captured during those 3 years (some never seen before and some new ones from yesterday and today).

What's your favorite video?

The Last General - 3 years of development! Today it's the 3rd anniversary of The Last General, since I first installed Unity and started developing it!This video compiles a lot of videos I captured du...

Hello ! Here are some of the latest things I have been working on since the last update:

* Optimized projectile lights to use my pooled companions system, saving a lot of cpu time. I got to run the game at 1440p at 110fps today.
* Improved vehicle wheels friction and centers of mass so they can travel faster and drift a bit when taking sharp turns instead of rolling over so easily.
* Optimized the camera system to run most physics calculations in the background, and ensured it stays above ground when controlling units in third person and looking up.
* I added graphics settings in the main menu and during the game, in a new pause menu.
* This allows changing resolution, graphics quality, antialiasing, upscaling, physics quality and enabling/disabling reflections.
* I added a loading screen with very useful tips while the maps are being generated.
* Improved the day/night cycle visuals so I can include it in the alpha tests.
* Made farms have actual lines of 3D crops like in real life and not just lines painted on the ground textures.
* Tuned a lot of visual settings for crispier shadows and better atmospheric effects in the distance.
* Fixed an issue with motion vectors and enabled them in many parts of the game, making bullet tracers way better.
* Made all tracers be visible in the distance.
* Improved the design of the ground attacks and build panels and switched them to UI toolkit too.
* Created the Steam playtest app and linked the game builds to it.
* Added Steam achievements (just a welcome one for now).
* Moved the project to my old 2019 Macbook to build the alpha, then fought against some issues, but now it seems to be working. Will proably sign and notarize the app tomorrow and upload it to Steam to start testing in my wife's macbook!

New vehicles in The Last General!
TM-21 Volley artillery and NAFT4 fuel truck!

Now soldiers can carry multiple weapons, and they drop them when they die (so other soldiers will be able to pick them up and use them in the future).

New infantry weapons in The Last General, and first person camera too!

100.000 Youtube subscribers!! This is wild!

New video about Air Defenses in The Last General!!

The Last General - Air Defenses This week I have been working on all sorts of air defenses for The Last General.Added the buildable DSAMS surface to air missile launchers, made the Legion C...