The 6th update is here!

If you are using the itch.io app, updates should be applied automatically. If you are using your browser, you have to redownload the game.

Random battles

Random battles are back! You can either start a quick battle with just two button clicks or you can adjust some settings and create a random battle based on your settings.   The units are placed much better now and the battles are larger than in Ancient Warfare 2! But the battle size will depend on the amount of cpu cores. As in the previous part, you can play many random battles in a row or try some of them again.

New objects

As requested, there are some decorative objects in this update. There will be more of them in future versions, but for now I have added this ones:

• Small wood house
• Small stone house
• Small stone crate
• Single tree log
• Tree logs[x3]
• Tree logs[x5]
• Wood arrow sign
• Wheat field[small]
• Wheat field[large]
• Corn field[small]
• Corn field[large]

Performance improvements

I started to do some performance improvements. The scripting runtime upgrade isn't stable enough, so we have to wait for the next unity release. But I did some major performance improvements. Most of the are only available for Direct x11+(Windows), Vulcan(Linux) and Metal(MaxOS).

The target was to relieve the cpu, because it's the bottleneck at the moment. This is the list of improvments I have done this week:

• Mesh skinning is now be done on the GPU
• Reduced the amount of drawcalls on the GPU
• Enabled instancing to reduce cpu usage for batching
• Enabled multithreaded rendering
• Meshs are now being optimized before I build the game

However, there is still much todo to improve the performance. The main performance killer is the dismemberment and the blood. But this update will give your cpu some time for more important tasks like pathfinding.

Bug fixes and improvements

Of course there are some bug fixes and improvements in this update:

• Added the option to drop your shield
• • Default key is Z
• Adding new options for keys won't reset your controls anymore
• Fixed a bug that players could use dead animals
• Fixed a bug that caused ranged units in guard mode won't work correctly
• Fixed the ladders, they should now work much better

Multiplayer

Since Ancient Warfare 3 is a paid game now, I thought about adding virtual reality or an online multiplayer. Both options are very expensive, but I will try to develop a multiplayer with very low costs.

Yesterday I started to experiment with some webservices to create my own matchmaking solution. If that would work, I would jsut have to find a small low price server to host my service there. The multiplayer itself would be from client to client, so that I wouldn't have to buy game servers.

And if none of this works, I can still wait until the steam release and use the steam matchmaking service.