9.14 Public Test - Gameplay Improvements

Hull Rocking

The hull of a vehicle can now be rocked back and forth, thereby altering the vehicle's scaled armor value. This ability depends on the vehicle's speed and what other actions it's performing.

Dynamics When Turning

When making a turn while moving forward, the vehicle loses much less speed. 

Fix For Issues with Stuck Vehicles / Climbing Hills

Your vehicle now loses much less speed due to improved suspension. Also, it now behaves more naturally when driving over small terrain irregularities.

When driving across a hill, your vehicle will not lose linear velocity. At a certain angle, vehicles will start to slip off the hill.

New Movement Effects (Drift Your Tank!)

We added a new skidding and sliding effect depending on how you're moving your tank with the new physics. 

New Maneuvers

Turning radius control: Due to change in driving speed (by pressing or releasing the W button), you can now control the turning radius. In this way, the radius and time required to complete a turn will be less than that at high speed. You can better control vehicle behavior when maneuvering by holding down the "W" button. 

Sharp maneuvers that change the direction of movement: Blocking the tracks while on the move allows you to perform sharp turns, controlled drifting, or a quick U-turn! Pressing the space bar blocks both tracks and the vehicle performs sharp braking. Pressing the SPACE bar and a directional button simultaneously blocks a track and allows you to perform a sharp turn with the loss of some speed.

Improved Sounds

With the release of Update 9.14, in-game sound will be significantly reworked. With a transfer to the Audiokinetic WWise sound platform, game sounds will be more informational, realistic, and atmospheric.

A preview of the new sound ambience in World of Tanks will be available to any players who participate in the 9.14 Public Test!

Changes from Prior Versions

• Changed sound events upon injury when a tank is destroyed and when it takes serious damage. 
• Reworked the sounds of high-caliber guns.

Battle Ambience

Ambient sounds will change considerably as we overhaul all existing sound effects and introduce new ones. Owing to modular architecture, each game event will have its own distinct sound: now, each sound is a 30- to 10-module construct. In this way, highly diverse sounds will make every gameplay event unique and distinct. Also, all the new sounds were recorded with the use of authentic vehicles at a real proving ground!

• Added sound events for gearbox shifting and operation of the suspension and the transmission.
• When your vehicle is driving at a high speed, the sound of wind becomes louder.
• New shot sounds are more detailed and realistic.
• Added new sounds of ricochets and tracers (passing-by shells).
• Added new sound environment for the Garage.
• Added new movement sounds that change depending on the surface that the vehicle is driving on.

Informational Sound

The information component of sound will be improved! Sound ambience will relay important information. You'll be able to follow the course of battle not only by the minimap and view range, but also by the informative sound events. This added information will help you make more informed tactical decisions on the battlefield.

• Unlike previous sound tests, hits on vehicles more than 100m away from the player are not heard.
• Added more distinction to the sounds of hits by different shell types (HE, AP, HEAT).
• Added sound events upon activation of consumables.
• Added sound events upon critical hits to modules.
• On non-penetrating hits or when a shell passes by, you might be able to determine the shell's caliber.
• Reviewed artillery damage sound events in Artillery Aim -- now, when the tank is damaged, a player will hear this from inside the cabin.

Sound Component Optimization

• Optimized the usage of resources by the sound component. A transfer to the new Audiokinetic WWise technology allowed us to move sound calculations to a secondary CPU core, which will improve the performance of the game client.
• Advanced sound effects settings are now available to players, who may fine-tune the performance of their game by tweaking these options.
• We've added the ability to fully disable sound, which will increase the performance on single-core computers by 30%. On multi-core computers, the increase will be by 5%. (Estimates)
• Introduced sound presets for different types of audio equipment: a preset for speakers with limited dynamic range (such as laptop speakers) and a preset for speakers with wide dynamic range are available.

Summary

Our development team has adopted lots of feedback received from players during previous testing phases -- the new vehicle movement physics and our sound environment are now close to their final versions!

The updated physical model provides for new tactical possibilities in close-quarter combat while making vehicle handling more realistic and keeping the vehicle behavior that players are used to. Gameplay continuity is one of the most important factors for us!

We wanted our new sound to provide information and atmospheric combat, and we've placed great emphasis on optimizing consumption of the resources spent calculating sound. 

Please feel free to share your feedback on these innovations!