Riverland, the Grand Bridges and the Shroud

The Steam store page for Wavefront: Vanguard went live on October 5th, and the game is coming soon to Early Access. This post covers the week's work that went into the screenshots and the trailer on it.

Riverland

The fourth map shape is a bigger island cut by a grand river: a wide, deep, meandering tidal channel, 25 to 115 m across and 13 m deep, running from the sea far inland through a broad valley. Ships can sail it. Roads can't cross it, except at one or two great bridges over its narrows: a steel truss up to 140 m, a suspension bridge hung between two pylons above that, each with approach ramps the road climbs.

Both are built in sections, and every section is its own destructible structure. A truss section rests on its own piers and drops alone. A suspension deck hangs from its cables as one, so losing any section brings the whole suspended span down, section by section, leaving only the pylon ends. To blow one, arm attack-move and click the bridge. A right-click just drives across it.

Vehicles on a section when it goes fall with it. Into deep water they flood and are lost in one to three seconds. Onto dry ground or into the shallows, they drive on. The wreckage breaks apart along its real shape, cables and hangers falling whole, and splashes into the river.

Bridges are part of the map, so every side always sees them, and a Persistent World now remembers exactly which sections were dropped: the rest of the bridge is still standing when you come back, and the crossing is still cut.

The shroud

Every map now starts unknown: a dark shroud over everything but your own base. What your side learns stays learned for the rest of the battle, in three steps.

A radar that covers the ground, or an aircraft flying over it, surveys it: the relief is known and drawn as a slate contour map with a line every 15 m of height, the sea as flat slate, with nothing standing on it. No trees, rocks, villages, roads or deposits yet. The look-down radar on the early warning aircraft surveys everything in range, and a ground radar only what it really covers, terrain shadows included.

Only the eyes of one of your units, or an ally's, explore it, after which it's drawn in full. Eyes follow the same rules as detection: their range shrinks at night and in bad weather, and a hill hides the valley behind it, so a scout on a ridge explores far more than one in a hollow. A "Map 37%" readout beside the clock tracks it, and the debrief reports the final shares.

Twice the terrain detail, and things that break

The terrain grid is now 6.4 m instead of 12.8 m, which puts 10 million vertices in a skirmish map. The landforms are still shaped on the coarse grid, so a seed keeps its base sites and load time, then interpolated up with small gullies and scree worked in at the fine scale. The full-detail map is never held in memory at once: chunks stream in around the camera on worker threads and are freed as it moves away.

Buildings now shed parts as they take damage, like walls and bridges already did: the HQ, vehicle factory, radar, shipyard, ore mine, oil derrick and research lab each have a few upper parts that break away at 75, 50 and 25% health, shattering along their real shape. Roads got asphalt with dark kerbs, worn wheel tracks and a broken centre line, and every structure sits on a ragged apron of dirt, sand or dull ice.

A destroyed submarine breaks in two. The hull is cut near midships on a skewed plane, the bow and stern drift apart, tip their flooded ends down, sink at a slow terminal speed trailing bubbles, and settle on the real seabed in a puff of silt.

Big blasts now throw embers that lift on the heat and sink, lob burning debris on smoke-trailed arcs, and leave a smouldering crater. Burning wrecks cook off their ammunition with a crack and a hiss. Every vehicle, ship and structure has a running sound: diesel and track clatter, tyre roar, a ship's throb and bow wash, a submarine's electric whine, mains hum in a radar, the creak and thump of a pump jack.

The store page and the trailer

The Steam page has twelve new screenshots, all captured in one automated run at exact Steam sizes, and a 93-second trailer cut from eight in-engine cinematics with the game's own sound: an armoured push, a ride on a close air support jet into its strike, the shroud lifting ahead of the scouts, a radar sweep followed by the radar scope and thermal, a frigate's missiles at dusk, a column crossing the suspension bridge as a section drops, a base at sunrise, and a column pushing through a storm front. The same screenshots and key art are now on this site's media page.

Cosmetic skins are in: camouflage patterns for your units, which every player in the battle sees. Some are earned in game with war bonds paid out for XP and medals, others are sold through Steam. The loadout screen's ordnance bench now shows each weapon on a 3D turntable, with its seeker, fuze, warhead or trigger parts cycled with arrows and the model changing to match.

What's left before Early Access

• Balance tuning, with the bench from last week pointing at the numbers to move.
• A real two-PC Steam test: hosting, joining, invites from the friends list, and a French client meeting an English host.
• Steam Cloud for the progression save, and the rich presence that shows friends what you're doing.

Wishlist the game on Steam, and come find us on Discord if you want to be in the playtests.