There are so many new features and changes coming to Foxhole in the next couple of weeks, it's both exciting and scary to think about the impact they're going to have on the game.
Weekly Wars & Practice Mode
In the near future, we are going to be trying out a new model for when wars are fought. Rather than having wars loop constantly, we want to have them only occur once a week at a scheduled time (most likely on Saturday).
Last week's community war showed us that scheduling a war to happen at a certain time helps to increased the number of simultaneous players in the game. It also really helped in building up anticipation among the community for fighting in a war and was generally an exciting event.
The feature will work as follows. If you log into the game when a war is not live, then the game will be played practice mode. In this mode, the playable area of the world is reduced. A countdown timer will appear at the top of the screen, indicating when the next weekly war will start. Below is a mockup of how this will look.
Once the weekly war begins, the full world will open up and be playable. Once the war ends, the game will revert to practice mode. We will record stats for the weekly war and publish them afterwards like we did for the community war last weekend. We will try to increase the quality and detail of our stats moving forward.
New Damage Mitigation Model
We are moving to a new damage mitigation model. Before I get into the details about the new model, I want to explain how the existing model works.
Each weapon in the game has a damage type. Currently, these are:
1. Small Ballistic (Rifle, Pistol, SMG, Heavy MG)
2. Small Explosive (Grenade, Mortar)
3. Heavy Explosive (Satchel Charge)
We currently use a subtraction based model for damage mitigation. Each structure in the game has an armor component that has a damage mitigation value for one or more damage types. The damage mitigation value is subtracted from any incoming damage for that damage type. For example, if structure has a damage mitigation value of 20 for small ballistics, then 20 points are subtracted from any incoming damage from a Rifle before it is applied to the structure.
In the next update, we are moving a percent based model for damage mitigation. That is, the armor component for each structure will have damage mitigation values specified in the form of percentages. Any incoming damage is reduced by those percentages. In addition, at least 1 point of damage is always dealt as long as the mitigation is less than 100%. This means that even a Pistol will deal at least 1 point of damage on any structure that doesn't have a small ballistics damage mitigation of 100%.
To go along with this change, we are reviewing the damage mitigation values of all structures in the game. Structures that were previously impervious to all non-heavy explosive damage types will be changed so that they will receive at least some damage from all weapons.
Land Mines
Early on, we did some internal tests with Land Mines, which is why you see them in one of our published screenshots for the game.
There were some design issues that we encountered such as:
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How do you detect mines?
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How do you dismantle mines?
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Do friendly players see your deployed mines?
These questions halted us from throwing them into the game. To be upfront, we don't feel like we've found the ultimate solution for them yet, but we think we've found an initial approach that were happy with so we're going to be adding land mines to the game soon. This is how they will work:
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You will detect mines by being in the crouch position and being close to them
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You can dismantle mines by shooting at them
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You will always be able to see mines deployed by friendly players
Here is a prototype of our mine explosion effect (Note that the grenade-like object you see on the ground won't be present in the actual game).
Medic Role
For awhile now, we've wanted to provide more options of players that want to play into the medic role. We are introducing several changes to the way health and death works in the game.
To start, Medkits will no longer be part of the game. Instead there will be three new items to replace it: Bandages, First Aid Kits, and Trauma Kits. Here is how they will work:
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When players receive damage, there is a chance they will enter a bleeding state. Bandages must be applied to stop the bleeding. They are self administered and they do not replenish health.
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Players can only replenish their health by having another player use a First Aid Kit on them.
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When players receive a fatal blow, there is a chance they can be revived while they wait for their respawn timer to count down. Players are revived by other players using Trauma Kits on them.
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The Medical Tent will be the new structure where Trauma Kits, First Aid Kits, and Bandages will be manufactured.
Character Persistence
It's one of our top goals to make player characters feel more persistent in Foxhole. In an upcoming update, characters will persist between game sessions. That means that their location and inventory will be persisted between logins. This is how it will work:
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If you log out of the game when you are at your Campsite or an Outpost, your character will persist so long as the structure isn't destroyed while you are offline.
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If you log out at any other location, your character will remain at that position in the world and go into a sleep state. If they aren't killed for 10 minutes, they will automatically return to their designated respawn point (Campsite or nearest Outpost) and be persisted to the next session.
Transport Truck
Vehicles are not quite ready yet, but we are very actively working on them. The stock vehicle system that Unreal Engine provides did not fit our requirements so we had to code a custom solution from scratch. This has significantly added to our development time for vehicles. We're confident we will have them included in an update within 2-3 weeks from now.
The first vehicle in the game will be the Transport Truck. This vehicle will be able to transport up to 6 passengers (including the driver) and will also be able to hold up to 9 items as cargo (though this number is subject to change). Here is the finished model for the truck.
Here is another animation of it in action.
Oil Refinery
The Oil Refinery will be used to produce Fuel, which in turn be required for vehicles to work. Players will interact with this structure in the same way they interact with Manufacturing Plants.
