Our New Year's High Resolution

Hello and welcome back to another Forgotten Hope 2 update.

Once again we find ourselves in that weird week at the end of the year. 2021 is nearly over but the new year has not quite arrived yet. We'd like to wish everyone the best for 2022, and as a (slightly early) new year present we are showing off some things that have been in the works for a while now. Before that though, we also have a couple of renders of more of the great little detail work that is going into the next release.

After World War 1, French manufacturer Brandt worked to improve the rather basic British Stokes mortar. While their design kept the same basic aspect, it was nonetheless redesigned and paired with better munitions. It was introduced as the Mortier Stokes-Brandt de 81mm Mle 1927, later modified to the Mle 27/31. When set-up, it could fire 20 bombs per minute up to 2 kilometres.

It quickly proved a large success. Throughout the thirties it was sold, built, modified or copied by more than 20 countries including the United States, Finland, Italy and the USSR. Our Mle 27/31 is a reskin by CptBocquier of the US M1 Mortar made by altfuture and Toddel.

The ammunition for the 81mm mortar would be carried in metal boxes, each one containing 3 bombs (infantry) or 6 bombs (cavalry). The ones showed here are the infantry variant, as it was also used by Italy for their own variant of the mortar.

We would like to thanks the people at France 40 Véhicules museum who allowed us to take a large amount of pictures and measurements in their collection, in particular for the 81mm boxes. Check them out at their website here.

Perhaps the most impressive difference between 2.58 and 2.6 is the rework to our ingame HUD. The old design was not much more than a modification to the original BF2 HUD, and apart from some changes to the minimap has been the same since 2.0. We hope that the new design fits the theme of WW2 a lot better, and should also work a lot better on the larger, wider modern displays. Every texture has been doubled in resolution, and the game will now detect your screen ratio and adjust the menus accordingly - no more stretched textures in widescreen.

Much of the design and graphics work can be attributed to Ekiso, with McCloskey and Stubbfan also contributing. Also we would like to thank Mats391 from Project Reality for a HUD related fix for the flagbug issue.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the new HUD is that it comes along with extensive customisation. You can see from the (work in progress) menu that there are plenty of options available for you to try out to get the game looking how you want it.

That's all for this week, but be sure to come back next time for another update. Until then, feel free to visit our Discord, our public forums, our Twitter, our subreddit, and/or Facebook pages to discuss this update and other news.