Steel Beasts 5.0 Thread

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/4546-steel-beasts-content-wish-list/page/267/?tab=comments#comment-200422

The intermediary text sizes, and a number of other GUI related things too. At this point it's impossible to make an accurate prediction about specific features implementations; the point of 5.0 is to implements a new software architecture that allows us to adapt development processes, rather than the implementation of a specific catalog of new features. But, it's safe to say that reworking the user interface is going to be a major component of the task, and that will bring, among other things, the end of rasterized fixed size fonts, so it will work with Windows font scaling (and thus, implicitly, with 4K and higher screen resolutions; once that we can do Windows based font scaling we can also have near-seamless in-application font scaling for map graphics).

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/4546-steel-beasts-content-wish-list/page/267/?tab=comments#comment-200439

It absolutely should. Even if we may not be able to address each and every issue right away, it should at least simplify things enough that we can adapt the GUI to customer requests with much less effort than has been the case since about, well, "always". Redesigning the GUI framework is another major development effort - somewhat comparable to a new terrain engine - less sophisticated maybe, but the UI by definition has ties to about every component in Steel Beasts.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/13573-4k-display-problem/?tab=comments#comment-200962

I expect the next update before July, maybe even around end of April/early May.

[Rinix]

https://forum.steelbeasts.org/forum/thread/8775-sbprope-4-163-r%C3%BCckmeldung-1/?postID=60130#post60130
Looks like Steel Beasts 5.0 will come at some point after Steel Beasts 4.2. Translated using Google Translate:

I don't like this variable numbering. That is why it was abolished again - however, this is a bugfix, which is probably only used in version 4.2.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14150-few-questions-before-buy/?tab=comments#comment-205029
Looks like "I expect the next update before July, maybe even around end of April/early May" was actually a reference to 4.167.

Q: Will there be an upgrade soon?
A: Not in 2020, probably not in 2021 either. An update? You bet. A big one.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14157-update-for-sb-in-2022/?tab=comments#comment-205106
Looks like I was wrong in my previous post:

Thanks for the kind words. There may be a misunderstanding, though. I wrote of a "significant update" (not upgrade) (and this year, not 2022), so it's not going to revolutionize everything. Still, more than a patch, and more than just a patch with a token feature addition.

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14157-update-for-sb-in-2022/?tab=comments#comment-205107

Just to clarify the wording - 4.161 was an upgrade to previous versions, we charged classic license owners money for it.
All the versions since last August were patches - free bugfixes, no new features.
Updates are in between. Mostly bugfixes, free of charge, and with some new features.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11017-what-tank-simulations-did-you-play-before-sb/page/3/?tab=comments#comment-205676
Steel Beasts currently uses a DirectX port of the Viper Engine, which is a student project. I guess Ssnake has become dissatisfied with it. It's a shame, since Viper Engine does have Vulkan support.

We'll develop a new Steel Beasts engine. I hate being dependent on the whimsical decisions of other developers. We'll make sure that there will be, in the worst case, a migration path to convert old content (like what happened with the new terrain engine in 4.1). Ideally however the new version would be capable of reading legacy files without requiring any user action.

Converting files sucks, so the "migration path" is a distant second option for me. But like in version 4.1, sometimes there is no other way, and then it's better than nothing. Implementing that kind of backwards compatibility probably cost us a year and a half in development and testing, and it wasn't fun for the beta testers at all, but the alternative would have been a total catastrophe. We take preservation of your time investment into the stock of scenarios and map files very seriously.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14157-update-for-sb-in-2022/?tab=comments#comment-207676

The major uncertainty about the release date has been resolved. I expect something in late autumn, but well before Christmas.

[Rinix]

The next release of Steel Beasts will bring new crewable vehicles (no details are provided): https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14157-update-for-sb-in-2022/?tab=comments#comment-207693

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/4546-steel-beasts-content-wish-list/page/278/?tab=comments#comment-208218

The point of this thread is to let everybody voice his preferences. That, if multiple people express their wishes, some of them may be contradictory, is pretty much a given. The community is not a hive mind. Insofar I find this critique unfair, as it juxtaposes different opinions from different people as if they were coming from a single body. That simply isn't the case.

Also, I think I made clear that eSim is working on an entirely new engine that will no longer use DirectX 9, that an explicit and major goal of this engine is to separate the render loop from the simulation loop, and as a natural consequence of that a server that doesn't need a graphics card in order to host a session appears quite feasible, possibly via command line switch. Insofar we'll be able to maintain established hosting procedures as well as allowing people with a dedicated gaming server to run SB Pro  without the need for a graphics card.

Everybody wins.
Can we move on now, please?

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/4546-steel-beasts-content-wish-list/page/278/?tab=comments#comment-208259

Is it still too early to ask what api will the new engine have?

We picked one. We're trying to make it work. If it doesn't, we'd pick another. As far as end-users are concerned, it could be powered by a hamster in a wheel ... as long as it works, right?

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14242-danish-centurion-lack-of/?tab=comments#comment-208844

It's not the lack of profitability, it's the lack of excess manpower (and the resulting opportunity costs). Once that we have completed the work on the engine change and everything else related to 5.0, we'll free up some capacity to work on exotic or historic vehicles again.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14706-gunners-reticle/?tab=comments#comment-212346

The question is, how many controls to we want the user to fiddle around with. Personally, I think that for selected vehicles we've already gone too far with depth of focus plane shifting in the thermal view, brightness and contrast for some thermal sights, or the brightness of reticules. It's selected in some vehicles (not the M1A1) because Steel Beasts is used in containerized crew simulators, and the changes for these simulators are seeping back into the Personal Edition.
I don't like it because it's distracting the player from the big picture. Now, you could say that this is something he'd have to deal with in real life, but IRL you have two hands and ten fingers and analog switches and dial knobs all around you, and you're four people in that tank and not just one. In Steel Beasts, you have a keyboard, and a mouse. In Steel Beasts, even if you're in the gunner's place you're usually still in the role of tank commander, platoon leader, and maybe even company team leader, and you need to maintain adequate tactical situational awareness. In Steel Beasts, you're in the gunner's place at this moment not just because it's fun, but also to make up for limitations of the AI, at least at times. And now you're confronted with the switchology of a number of different vehicles in your company team with which you have minimal to moderate familiarity.

IMO, as far as the Personal Edition is concerned, fewer controls are better. Yes, many of you are veterans of one or two systems simulated in Steel Beasts and you'd like to see more - but even if you're an M1 master gunner and you know everything there is to know your familiarity with the CV90/35 (ah, but which one?) will be minimal, and here we are, today's scenario is a company team of T-72s paired with CV90/30 because it's set in Finland, and all the work you invested last week in learning the Danish CV90/35 doesn't help you.
Maybe, in SB Pro 5.0 we'll make the level of detail configurable. But even then we won't have the same level of detail implemented for every vehicle because some are in and tailored to a specific customer demand, and some are in because we went and added them on our own initiative, to the level of detail with which we felt comfortable/that we had researched at the time of creation. And the M1A1 is our tank #1. The first fire control system we ever created when we were young and didn't know better. And we never had a military customer for it who was interested in the switchology. So it doesn't have these controls, and I think you're better off because of it.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14798-shout-out-to-the-map-makers/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-213654

With the advent of TerraSims world map sever, does Esim have any plans to utilize their services?

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14798-shout-out-to-the-map-makers/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-213658

That specific server? No.
Will the classroom version 5.x be capable of utilizing such servers in general? Yes.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14852-list-of-system-requirements-for-a-laptop-that-can-play-sb-with-average-40-fps-and-that-for-the-next-5-years/?tab=comments#comment-214038

Asking for advice with a five-year hgorizon and a "guaranteed" framerate >40 is a task for which a serious answer is not possible. I might luck out, but I can only tell you what our design goals are.

SB Pro PE should always run decent on whatever current mid-range hardware is available at the time of release
For eSim Games visual quality is not the top priority; SB Pro shouldn't look deterringly ugly however. Therefore, if the artists want to take the route of physics based rendering I won't stop them. If they came to me demanding that we immediately switch to real-time raytracing, I'd say No.
Future SB Pro PE versions shall take advantage of most hardware capabilities that the given platform offers, especially parallelization. I would not want us to cap the usage of available CPU cores to four or some other arbitrary number when 16-core Ryzens are already pretty affordable today. Not every task is parallizable, so simply throwing more cores at Steel Beasts isn't guaranteed to eliminate bottlenecks, but when I recently made the choice between a 12-core and a 16-core Ryzen, I did not think very long about the extra expense.

With all that being said, I'd definitely go for 16 GByte RAM.
I'd go for the mostest-core CPU that still fits into the financial and thermal budget of the notebook (certainly a factor to consider too)
I'd consider a GTX1070 the absolute lower boundary of a five-year notebook's GPU. That being said, think out of the box for a moment. There are external GPU adapters for notebooks. You might be better off with a solution that has Thunderbolt sockets through which you'd connect an external GPU which might even be something that can be switched later. That way you could rely on integrated graphics for non-game applications and pull out the big iron only when the task demands it. You could pay for a reasonably-priced GPU right now, and a reasonably priced GPU of the future to upgrade later. I cannot guarantee that this is going to be the cheaper or more-potent-for-the-same-budget solution, but it may be something worth exploring.

Coming back to the question of "thermal budget", you should ask yourself if you want to be wearing headphones all the time. I have a notebook with a GTX2070, and whenever a game is on it's almost like an effin' leafblower on my desk. Without noise-cancelling earphones it's just not bearable.
If you value silence in operation most of the time, a small tower is always going to be superior and cheaper for the same performance, or faster for the same budget. They just suck in transportability.

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14852-list-of-system-requirements-for-a-laptop-that-can-play-sb-with-average-40-fps-and-that-for-the-next-5-years/?tab=comments#comment-214042

I don't think that the RAM requirements will grow massively beyond 16 GByte. Sure, more is always more, but 16 should do it for a good while.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14852-list-of-system-requirements-for-a-laptop-that-can-play-sb-with-average-40-fps-and-that-for-the-next-5-years/?tab=comments#comment-214073

WRT the 144Hz thing, this is primarily a VR/3D shutter glasses requirement so that each eye gets updates at 72 Hz.
Yes, Steel Beasts can't take advantage of faster monitors right now because he have a framerate cap at slightly over 60Hz based on the experience that high framerate variations were more detrimental to the game experience than a smoothed out version at a lower framerate.
Nevertheless, future versions of SB Pro might lift this artificial cap, assuming that the new engine actually manages to maintain much higher framerates in all situations. Even then, though, I don't see us reworking all vehicle interiors to accommodate the requirements for a VR/3D glasses version.

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/14852-list-of-system-requirements-for-a-laptop-that-can-play-sb-with-average-40-fps-and-that-for-the-next-5-years/?tab=comments#comment-214074

RE "the mostest-core CPU": the pricerange I'm looking at (1500 EUR) seems to be limited to max. 6 cores => is this OK for today's SB ? (or is it already old hat ?)

Six cores aren't bad and will do in the future, but I suspect that most notebook models that you checked so far are Intel CPU based, and Intel simply is way behind AMD at the moment. AMDs Ryzen 4000 series offer more core bang for the buck, but notebook manufacturers are slow to adapt AMD solutions; they simply remain an unconventional solution (and in computing that's not necessarily a compliment). But if you find a model with a Ryzen 4xxx CPU, it may be worth a second look to see if it fits all other requirements.