Hello Fearless Pilots, I have a rare thing to present to you: an update release date: Chapter1B Drops on March 17th!

If you prefer to digest you devlogs in video format, check out the below!

Let me know what else you would like to see in these, I'm curious to try this new format. I'm new to YouTube but I want to share our dev progress- leave a comment, a like or subscribe if you want to help out.

This was our main focus of the last few months.

• Steam Deck fps increased 30%, and hits 90 fps in low action areas.

• Stuttering is greatly improved. The ones that remain are from spawning units and we will improve this over time.

• More settings are exposed now. You can set anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, and render scale. This let's you get the performance / quality experience you want.

This includes adding the new water system! So the game should look better and run faster. The team really cooked on this one.

These updates have allowed us to render some more dense jungle scenes without sacrificing performance, and we are set up really well for the jungle campaign now.

Here's a summary of all the improvements that were made

• Native Steam Deck build - unlocked the 90 fps potential

• Optimized Destruction System

• Updated Unit Navigation - uses ECS for faster calculations, avoided some recalculations.

• Bullet decals are being pooled

• Unity 6.3 Update

• Major vegetation stutters fixed (we pre-load them)

• Major improvement from enabling depth priming, removing SMAA

• More anti-aliasing options offered (FXAA, SMAA, TAA, None)

• Ambient Occlusion is a setting that can be disabled for more performance

• Exposed a render scale setting

• Improved Unit system- more efficient update loop, and LOD priority system

We've added a new section in the home base for arcade missions. Our goal for this was to add replayable content and have a place for experimental missions.

I want this section to be a place where we can experiment with missions that wouldn't fit in the campaign. It should allow us to create more content and to try out more community ideas in a flexible way.

We've only added a handful of missions so far, but this section will evolve a lot. Most of our focus needs to be on Chapter 2, but having this section allows us to add little bits of content over time as we go. This way you're not waiting forever without having something new to play.

AND, now I can make the super duper hard challenge missions that I couldn't put in the main campaign :)

Here's our current list of Arcade missions. These may change before launch.

• Survival Mode

• Mini Golf (with missiles...)

• Skee Ball

• Skeet Shooting

• Roping Missile Challenge

• Radar Turret Challenge

These missions are all pretty short and light, but this is just the start- we want you to help us expand this section over time.

Ok so I know this isn't a top priority, but I've been waiting months to work on this again. Basically, this was possible before but not super rewarding because it didnt't work w all the missiles and when it did work, they didnt do much damage.

Now the missile's can be more reliably redirected back to the turret (or npc...) that fired them, and they will do 3x the normal damage if you pull it off.

The new water system has been added to all the chapter 1 missions in the game!

Recently we built a system that detects when any object is entering the water and creates a splash effect. Throwing props into the water is decidedly more fun now.

This prevents us from having to do custom work for the 384593 props in the game.

Edit- I forgot to mention that there are 2 parts of Chapter1B on the roadmap that we have postponed until later: The helicopter customization and a new playable helicopter.

We did this in the interest of getting this update out quickly while starting production on Chapter 2. Our main priority is getting you the main campaign content as fast as we can.

We will release these features as a later date, in parallel with our work on Chapter 2. I am hoping this works better to keep the updates coming more frequently.

We've been working on the first mission of Chapter 2 as a way to experiment with our new process and see how the water missions work.

A new hazard has entered the chat

Thanks for following along! Mark your calendars for March 17th, and come hop in the discord to celebrate the launch with us: https://discord.com/invite/XmMTqEjpQg

- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team

Hello Pilots! Join me on this Saturday morning as I share what we've been up to since the holidays! New Jungle preview, new water, boats, and performance updates. Let's go...

Our revised jungle theme is coming together.

We've been doing a ton of work finding the right style for the jungle that won't melt your GPU. We're not quite done optimizing but we're getting closer. The overall vibe is coming together and I'm pretty excited about it.

The jungle will play differently than Texas, and we're exploring how those elements play into mission types. Expect to be ambushed by units hiding in the trees, fend off naval attacks, and escort your allies through dangerous extraction missions.

For those of you that have been following the game for a while, you know that we started with a more low-poly style. As that evolved into our current style, the water got left behind in low-poly mode.

Thankfully Texas doesn't have a ton of water :D But now that we're headed to the jungle, it was time to make the water feel like... water.

I explored several different approaches, including some package systems, some basic shaders, and doing something with Unity's shader graph.

I ended up picking this shader that is pretty lightweight - it is meant to even run on mobile devices, so performance is quite good. We get some better looking water, and it actually moves. It should add a lot to the missions we can do in the jungle.

This was incredibly fun to work on- I love the physics stuff. I tried several different implementations of the physics behavior and ended up with one that feels pretty satisfying to me.

I tried a couple different calculations for the buoyancy. A few considerations were:

• Has to run fast- performance over realism

• Simple to implement and tune for different types of vehicles (or NPCs!)

• Has to match the actual wave action of the water

I ended up picking a solution where each object has various float points that get force added to them depending on how much they are submerged, with some damping.

Left: Linear calculation without damping, Right: square root based depth calculation, with damping

The buoyancy system is using Unity Jobs to run the calculations in parallel. So we should see a nice benefit from being able to actually do something with your multiple CPU cores.

The boats can now drive as well! The physics model here is pretty simple- tuned for action and a bit of chaos.

This is just a start- we have a bunch of water units we'll be implementing for Chapter 2.

Yes, the NPCs are just fine with a bit of underwater time.

We spent a good chunk of January exploring how to improve performance in the game.

We found a big improvement by making some small changes and building for Linux. This should improve everyone's Steam Deck performance and allow us to render more trees in the jungle. This will release with Chapter 1B.

We made a handful of small improvements to how units work in the game.

• Previously all the units (NPCs, vehicles, etc) were using the same Unity driven FixedUpdate call. We updated that to use our own update call, which is a bit better.

• We now assign a priority to units based on their proximity to the player, and update further units less often.

• We ignore allies when searching for targets.

We found a small gain here by delaying some physics calculations to when a piece is falling off- not when something first breaks. This just reduces the amount of physics rigidbodies being calculated.

Also if you haven't played w the slider for Active Debris Limit- this will improve your CPU performance in destruction heavy scenes. It was part of a previous update but important to mention.

We've updated the system that the NPCs and vehicles use for pathfinding, and switched to a system that uses Unity's ECS system for greater parallelization. We also added optimizations on navmesh calculation for static objects.

Decals for bullet holes were not being pooled previously. This should be a small improvement to every mission.

We've updated to Unity 6.3, which is their latest long term support version. We didn't notice any major improvements from this but it allows us to update a bunch of other packages which should help.

We found a couple small ways to reduce the amount of extra shadows being rendered, that were outside the game view. We still have some work to do here, but we reached the level of what's helpful without rebuilding major Unity render features.

• What type of water-going enemies?

• What missions come to mind when you think jungle?

• Other childhood game memories you want to relive :D

Thanks for following along- We're so thrilled to get the opportunity to make this game. All thanks to you.

- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team