Forgotten Hope - News Archive

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Our New Year's High Resolution by: CptBocquier and Eat Uranium

29.12.2021 19:00 GMT

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.

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14 Years by: Eat Uranium

14.12.2021 22:10 GMT

Hello and welcome back to another Forgotten Hope 2 update.

Today is the 14th Anniversary of Forgotten Hope 2. I'm not sure many of us imagined that we would still be working away on the mod after all this time, let alone gearing up for a major release with a new faction and theatre! We'd like to extend a giant thank you to all of you who have enjoyed playing along with us, as well as to those of you who have voted us into the Top 100 Mods in this year's ModDB Mod of the Year contest.

Voting in the second round ends in 6 days, and while we can't win the award again we are still eligible for a Honourable Mention.

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With or Without Smoke by: Eat Uranium

05.12.2021 19:00 GMT

Hello and welcome back to another Forgotten Hope 2 update.

The end of another year is closing in upon us again, and as usual, the team at ModDB have opened their voting for this year's Mod of the Year contest. We'd really appreciate if you could head on over and vote for us in the first round, which closes this Friday.

With that out of the way, we move on to our renders this week: the venerable Lebel rifle and the Mle 1916 incendiary smoke grenade.

In 1884 French chemist Paul Vieille finished work on Poudre B, a nitrocellulose based explosive that was suitable for use in firearms. The military advantage of this new smokeless powder was clear - not only was the problem with smoke obscuring the battlefield gone, but it was also 3 times more powerful than blackpowder and thus bullets could get smaller and faster. Two years of secret work would go into finding the optimum bullet diameter for the new powder, but the same opportunity was not extended to the cartridge or rifle. In January 1886, War Minister General Boulanger ordered that a working system had to be ready within a year.

Hampered by this accelerated development time, the only option was to fall back on existing technology. The new 8mm bullet was awkwardly fitted into an extremely necked down 11mm Gras cartridge case, and the rifle was adapted from the Mle 1885 Kropatschek Infantry rifle. The rifle bolt from the Mle 1874 Gras was adapted with a pair of front locking lugs to deal with the significantly higher firing pressures of the new powder, and the new rifle entered production the next year.

The following 6 years saw over 2 million rifles produced, with a minor design modification made in 1893. The last new rifles would be assembled during the First World War, with major rifle production moving over to the Berthier. Officially declared obsolete in 1920, the Lebel would continue to see updates into the 30's, and was still in wide usage in 1940. It was the preferred rifle for launching rifle grenades due to the relative weakness of the Berthier's single piece wooden stock, and was also the more common choice for mounting the APX21 telescope. Our Lebel was made by Seth Soldier.

This grenade consists of a smooth ovoid sheet metal case filled with 300g of white phosphorus. Upon detonation of the fuse the phosphorus would be thrown 15 to 20 metres, igniting on contact with the air and giving off distinctive white smoke. This smoke and incendiary grenade was made by Seth Soldier.

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