Narva+ Mod: What’s new?
Welcome to the Narva+ Mod for SQUAD. With this side project, we want to present and test our newest game mechanics and content with the player base of SQUAD, until our Fulda Gap Project is ready for it’s first play tests. We hope to add new game play experiences for you guys, while gaining vital information’s about our newest developments. This way Fulda Gap can ship faster, once it´s ready for play tests.
The current built of Narva+ add’s our new destructible bridges (crossing the train tracks in the middle of the map) and winter weather, for a change of look&feel to the vanilla map. We hope you like our change’s. Join our Discord to report any bugs and to keep updated about playtests and other news!
How to: Blow up Bridges
If you want to trigger the destruction of the bridges over the train tracks, you will need to damage the marked bridge pilar’s with the High Explosive damage class (HE). You may use everything, from C4 (3x – 4x), over 30mm HE auto cannon to HE tank shells to do so. The destructible bridge pilar’s are marked with a red arrow, pointing upwards, and a pre damaged concrete part, with steel rebar sticking out.
When you damage the pilar further, you will be able to see a visible progression of it’s damage state from “pilar is outch” to “get the hell outta here”. So watch out for damaged bridges from now on, or otherwise your tank column might get a nasty surprise, while crossing.
Narva+ Mod: Performance
You will experience a loss of ca. 3 FPS for the destruction animation itself and about 5 FPS for the currently used smoke fumes (SQUAD standard smoke). Your VRAM will get an additional load of 300 MB for the pre-loaded animation – players with older GPU´s with less than 3 GB VRAM might run into issues (Please report it and tell us about your used rig if you run into any problems).
Narva+ Mod: Known Issues
Please be aware, this is a ongoing development. The new mechanic got tested on live servers with up to 60 players several times and all major / gamebreaking bugs got removed for this release. We believe the Mod is ready to be played on full 100 player servers.
- Rallypoint does not get any Damage
- Smoke Effect causes fps drops
- The destroyed Bridge model does need a new texture
Narva+ Mod: Playable Layers
BW_Narva_AAS_v1
BW_Narva_AAS_v2
BW_Narva_AAS_v3
BW_Narva_Destruction_v1
BW_Narva_Invasion_v1
BW_Narva_Invasion_v2
BW_Narva_RAAS_v1
BW_Narva_Skirmish_v1
BW_Narva_TA_v1
BW_Narva_TC_v1
BW_Narva_TC_v2
BW_Narva_Training_v2 //<- for testing
Narva+ Mod: Your Opinion & Future Development
We hope SQUAD’s publisher OWI takes note of our work and will step up to support our efforts. We already invested 8 full man hour weeks to get to where we are. It is totally possible for us, to add more destructible elements, such as destroyable wall segments (for tactical building entries), destructible doors & gates, destructible fences and fencing walls (so vehicles won’t have to drive around a chain link fence anymore) or even multi stage destructible buildings. The limiting factor is basically just what is regarded as standard VRAM size to play the game and the available “VRAM budget”.
If you would like to see more of this technology in the game, tell OWI if you like the new destruction mechanics! Join the SQUAD Forum or voice your opinion at the SQUAD Discord. Also be informed, remotely detonated C4 charges are already in the making with us at the moment, so timing bridge destruction’s might be a thing in the future for Bluefor factions, like with insurgency IED´s.