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War Thunder has expanded again to add in a brand new Swedish Aircraft tech tree, the first Swedish tanks, ten new mixed nation naval units and more.

Some of the new vehicles included are "Premium", meaning you need to pay for them in some form. That much is true for the Swedish ground vehicles Strv 103-0 and the SAV 20.12.48 when looking in-game earlier. There's over 20 new Swedish aircraft, only two of them Premium the rest are just needing Research as normal so that's not so bad. Also included in this update is 10 new naval units, 2 new naval battle locations and the usual mass assortment of balance changes and bug fixes.

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Sadly the graphical upgrades like Ray Traced Global Illumination and HDR support don't appear to be in the Linux version. Hopefully, Gaijin Entertainment will eventually get their Vulkan support fixed up properly to give Linux players a better experience since the OpenGL version is old. Works well enough for me, but sure could be a huge amount better. Back when our contributor, BTRE, interviewed the CEO of Gaijin they did seem positive about the benefits of Vulkan but it seems work on it stalled at some point.

See the changelog here, play for free on Steam.

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5 comments

Schattenspiegel Dec 19, 2019
Anyone a clue about the current state of the OGl client?
Last time I checked some months back performance was meh, monster trees-bug made aircrafts unplayable, gunner positions were only modelled for dx11 and FXAA was the only working AA option for the Linux client.
Would be great to be able to return to the game if some of that was fixed.
14 Dec 19, 2019
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I have more general questions. Is the game just constant chaos? Are there "instances" of battles that have a beginning and end (skirmishes)? Commanders? Just wondering what you fight for. Is it one big world like EVE Online and you fight for territory and keep it until someone conquers you? Many servers?
peta77 Dec 19, 2019
Well rewriting a render engine takes a while, and as it's constantly updated I don't expect Vulkan support soon. Though it would be nice to have the full graphics quality in the Linux client too.
But for a while now I face a bigger problem. The launcher is crashing when focus is transferred to a different application, also during update downloads... And the game itself also doesn't run at all..... Send the crash report a couple of times now, but no reaction so far and no update fixed it....

Quoting: 14I have more general questions. Is the game just constant chaos? Are there "instances" of battles that have a beginning and end (skirmishes)? Commanders? Just wondering what you fight for. Is it one big world like EVE Online and you fight for territory and keep it until someone conquers you? Many servers?
Most of the stuff is more like games insurgency/battlefield/etc. just with planes, tanks, etc. There's two teams. The goals usually are: destroy enemys artillery and/or airports, capture and hold some areas/airports. Each game is time limited (30min), each team has a specific number of tickets and each player also has only a limited number of respawn. So you can either hunt others or destroy stuff. If time's up, a team has no tickets or respawns anymore, the battle is over. Usually a game takes 10 to 20 minutes.
There's also those large battles with combined armour. But haven't played those, so don't know what they're like.
Also there sometimes are special events like air races (I especially love those) which can be lots of fun.
VR is also included. Really adds something to a game like that. Helicopter flying in VR is fun! But tried it only once and I don't know if it was Linux or Windows. So can't tell right now if it works on Linux.
Another cool thing is: you can play either arcade style (quite demanding already), realistic style and simulation. So if you have the equipment, you can try out simulation to see how good you really are.
There's only the official servers, for several regions. Normally there's enough players to be found quickly (within a minute) and connection to the servers is usually pretty good (in germany at least). What may be harder to find is, if you've ranked up and have planes/tanks/ships of higher levels, it may be harder to find a game, but they've included bots at some stage, so you can still have battles.

And the best of it all: it's free and it's definitely no pay-to-win! You really need skills to be successful at this game. (There's some training stuff in there to get you started)

Hope that helps to get a small insight into the game.
Tuxee Dec 19, 2019
Quoting: SchattenspiegelAnyone a clue about the current state of the OGl client?
Last time I checked some months back performance was meh, monster trees-bug made aircrafts unplayable, gunner positions were only modelled for dx11 and FXAA was the only working AA option for the Linux client.
Would be great to be able to return to the game if some of that was fixed.

I suppose the OpenGL client will stay "as it is". I have been using the Vulkan renderer for the last couple of weeks and most of the time it works pretty well. You get your gunner positions modelled, antialiasing and much nicer burning planes. Problems: AA in aircraft battles yields a rather low frame rate (I have pretty much everthing maxed out on 2560x1440) and minor glitches like square shaped marks where shells hit or vehicles got destroyed, some artifacts in the clouds in air battles, a few rare crashes. Overall I'd say it's better than OpenGL - even in the current state.
Schattenspiegel Dec 19, 2019
Quoting: TuxeeI suppose the OpenGL client will stay "as it is". I have been using the Vulkan renderer for the last couple of weeks and most of the time it works pretty well. You get your gunner positions modelled, antialiasing and much nicer burning planes. Problems: AA in aircraft battles yields a rather low frame rate (I have pretty much everthing maxed out on 2560x1440) and minor glitches like square shaped marks where shells hit or vehicles got destroyed, some artifacts in the clouds in air battles, a few rare crashes. Overall I'd say it's better than OpenGL - even in the current state.

Thx, unfortunately i never got the vulkan version to run stable before. Guess, I will wait a few more months then - would have to repair a pot in my throttle anyway before being able to fly again. Still hope they get their shit sorted one day - the game is actually quite good.
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