Gophur of Cornered Rat Software answered some questions from the WWIIOL community about the next updates and its features. The biggest next toys introduces will be mortars.

Barracks

Q: What kind of different mortar shells will be available to choose from and what will the mortars max range be? – Soon

A: We’re shooting for a smoke and an HE round for each weapon. We’ve stumbled on a little error in how statistical HE shrapnel was being thrown at infantry. The radius check was way too big. Fixing this should dramatically increase the lethality for grenades and mortars while providing even more fidelity to the system versus prone and kneeling targets. Max range for all of these mortars is around the 500m mark.


Q: Do the Rats plan on making SPAA in the near future? – Ace

A: We’re undecided to be honest. We have airplanes in the works and we want to do some naval stuff later this summer. For ground vehicles we’re investigating smoke rounds and dischargers to see if we can come up with a fair set to add. SPAA is in the mix of things to do in the future but I think for the air war, adding a new observer and reporting system (some call it radar) will do more to help planes find other planes to fight and give the air guys not only a more compelling game to play but also give them less time to be worrying about squishies. Personally, I don’t want to mess with it until we can do some iconic vehicle mounted pieces. An mg on a pickup just doesn’t do it for me.


Q: After the Mortars are released, are you going to be making more models/sizes of them or something else altogether?

A: Undecided at this point. The 80mm sure are iconic and we need to get them in but they truly are crew served. We may go something more along the lines of a placed terrain object for them or an installation that players can set up and man. They also are over the horizon munitions and will need to have a whole new kill tracking system set up. I don’t imagine more mortars will be our next infantry weapon. I’m leaning towards piats and Killer wants flamethrowers, naturally. I have serious questions about the usefulness of that but fire is cool.


Hangar

Q: Will we see development of more destroyable ground facility targets for aircraft in the Near/Distant future? - Urikbg26

A: probably not in the near term but then again that’s a bit misleading. There are already thousands of targets to be destroyed; they just don’t do anything much at present other than rebuild themselves. You see, every building in the game generates resource points. These points are flow across the network of links and move to help rebuild things that are destroyed.
One thing we’ve always wanted to do was to incorporate these into the production of vehicles and material for the war so that destroying small factories and town centers might have a direct impact on the war. We might start with something as simple as letting fuel tanks and supply crates generate RDP points of perhaps just provide scoring opportunities.
There is currently a discussion going on within the halls about what sort of changes we need to make the bombing game more fun. That might be a good discussion to get started in the Hangar as well. Perhaps Surly can help moderate that and get some suggestions together for us to review for inclusion in 1.28.


Q: What’s the Atmospheric Conditions in game? @SEA LEVEL 29.92"(1013mb) @ 59F(15c) Lapse rate @ 3.5F(2C) /1000ft??? – Primernr

A: Oh man that’s a doosey. We do model barometric pressure and temperature as functions of altitude. We even model oxygen levels at various altitudes but without rickb handy I can’t give you specifics. I know what he’d say…”It’s just like real life dude!” He’s into that sort of thing.


Q: What’s next on the horizon after the release of the three fighters for version 1.27? - Lepski, Imjohnny, Chaser26

A: Spotters and reporters to show you rough locations of enemy and friendly air units on your map as an abstraction of the plotting tables and radiomen, who, in the real war, are coordinating your efforts. A mechanism designed to aid you in finding engagements, basically.

Following that we’ve got bailout of some flavor to consider. We also want to better report factory damage and then the big one, bombs as ordinance that can kill without sighting the enemy. As I mentioned earlier, we’re trying to get some more items to focus on for 1.28 so now’s a great time to get a wish list going for us.


Q: They said a while ago that they would look at making it possible to change target town mid flight, and so that the objective chat changes to the new town also. Is this any further up the dev tree and will we see it this year? – Airmessy

A: That’s still a priority. We’re going to start making in roads on that once we get the ToE stuff finally out the door. That’s not an air only feature though and it is as much about changing the origin as the target and is thus really a mechanism designed to keep groups together.


Q: Is there a plan to complete French Dewo 338 artwork and remove stand-in JU 52 Transport? – Angriff

A: Nothing planned at the moment.