Hell Let Loose’s Patch 12 is now live, a look at its patch notes revealing performance improvements, crash fixes and more.
Patch 12 improves how Hell Let Loose handles culling and total meshes within a scene, which should result in an increase of at least 5 FPS across the board.
Two of Hell Let Loose’s more notable crashes have been fixed, while a handful of visual and animation improvement should make for a better overall experience.
Hell Let Loose Patch 12 Patch Notes
Here are all the changes introduced to Hell Let Loose in Patch 12, as per its full patch notes:
Performance
A huge number of improvements have been made to the way we handle culling and total meshes within a scene. As a result, we expect there to be a significant performance increase across the board (5FPS+). Results will vary depending on the exact spec of your machine.
Please note:
These were optimisations that we were able to apply in time for the close of patch. We have continued significant optimisation work in our main branch (for release in U8).
Crashes:
2 of our most aggravating crashes have been solved, with our third one sitting as top priority.
Please note:
We wanted to acknowledge that the Update 7 Hotfix temporarily disabled cloth physics in the game as a change in the way they are handled occurred between UE 4.21 and UE 4.23. This was causing crashes for some users. We will be bringing this back for the next Update.
The Third Crash
This crash is a very unusual one, in that it is happening as data leaves our code and enters the PhysX black box within the engine code. We’ve attached a huge amount of debug to replicate this. We’ve also found that some players may never experience it, while some players may experience it frequently. Some players have found that deleting their PhysX cache has solved this issue, while some find this doesn’t help. For the last two weeks we’ve been working with our QA team to try and isolate any fix reported by the community, and A/B testing it. During this time, we’ve worked our way through the majority of other issues affecting the game. We’ve dropped in several community-found speculative fixes below which are worth exploring if this crash is persisting for you.
FPS Dip
We’ve profiled this a huge amount and have applied several speculative fixes to address the mass FPS dips experienced by some players.
In our profiling, and collection of data across the board, we’ve isolated that the spawning of 4-5 body parts per dismemberment is causing significant CPU bottlenecks on specific machines. As a result of this, we’re trailing a test where we’ll despawn unseen body parts (not visible in-camera) within a second of them being out of sight.
Visual Improvements
- Fixed: There are severe LoD issues with many of the buildings found in Carentan when only a short distance from them.
- Fixed: (Omaha) Pre-placed Garrison is clipping into a destroyed vehicle.
- Fixed: (Carentan) Very low quality LOD when 50m from a building.
Animation
We are aware of a few outstanding animation bugs, and are continuing to fix and polish.
- Lowered prone head bob intensity to reduce sea-sickness (we’ll be looking at implementing a switch that will allow you to disable all head bobs/camera moves in the next update).
- Fixed: (FPP) Missing weapon switching animation while crawling
- Fixed: (FPP) Wrench audio/animation does not work correctly
- Fixed: DF shadow appears for the player's helmet.
Gameplay
Several features we’ll be introducing in coming updates will flesh out the current meta for both Offensive and Warfare mode (especially looking at Offensive mode, and mixing in objectives (eg. blow up enemy gun position), but we were keen to fix low-hanging fruit as fast as possible.
- Enemy Garrisons in enemy territory can now be destroyed, and can be dismantled but with a longer (30 sec) dismantle time.
- Show difference between enemy near and overrun on Garrisons (icon will now turn red when Garrison is overrun.)
- Fixed: performing a partial reload with the M1 Garand gives 1 extra round on the next clip.
- Recon markers have been tweaked and are now visible for 60 seconds and the Recon Plane ability has a cooldown of 5 minutes. Recon vehicles remain the same.
SFX
- Altered the way incoming fire is spatialised.
- After lots of play, we’ve nullified the bullet-flyby “whiz/crack” for all friendly gunfire, to better enable you to determine when an enemy is firing at you. The sheer amount of nearby friendly fire was often totally drowning out the soundscape of the gunfight.
HUD/UI
- Fixed: Create Unit screen is missing a "Cancel" button
- Fixed: Admin broadcast message disappears too quickly
Speculative Fixes
We’ve also collated several of the community-suggested fixes for those experiencing a wide variety of issues:
Speculative Fix 01
Type in “%LOCALAPPDATA%” in the “url bar” down by the Windows logo on the bottom left of your screen, find the folder “HLL” and delete the entire folder.
Speculative Fix 02
Try setting your audio to “low” and try to relaunch the game.
Speculative Fix 03
- Reinstall HLL (Uninstall, clear steam cache, reinstall)./li>
- Wiped the HLL config in AppDataLocalHLLSavedConfigWindowsNoEditor./li>
- Cleared the Nvidia Shader Caches./li>
- Rebooted the PC and relaunched Hell Let Loose./li>
- Disable Steam Overlay. </ul>
Speculative Fix 04
Also try lowering the dead body despawn to 0.5 (30s).
Speculative Fix 05
Also play from a SSD or NVMe.
Speculative Fix 06
Reverting back to a previous Nvidia Version also works.
Hell Let Loose's Patch 12 follows after the World War II first-person shooter's Battle of Carentan Update which significantly overhauled its animations, added a new map and more.
Hell Let Loose is now available in Steam Early Access.
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