Getting the call from astragon Entertainment, a publisher well-known for bringing many beloved and sophisticated simulation games, had us ecstatic. On top of that, many of us have played some of the games from their line-up, so getting to peek behind the curtain was a challenge we were eager to take up.

Firefighting Simulator – The Squad, developed by Chronos Unterhaltungssoftware, really nails the meaning of a simulation game. The game places players in the shoes of an urban firefighter working in a fictive major US city. It allows for online multiplayer or single player experience that has you commanding AI to experience one of the most daunting professions out there.

The game features officially licensed fire engines and equipment as well as real-life firefighting strategies testing the player through advanced fire simulation that includes water, smoke, heat, back drafts, flashovers, grease fires, and a wide range of other causes of fires, such as electronics, chemicals, and explosions.

Firefighting Simulator – The Squad was one of our biggest projects and one of our first detailed encounters with the Unreal Engine. We were tasked to port the game to PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. During the process, we frequently presented our progress with playable builds, which put a strain on our resources.

On top of that, other technical issues came from optimizing the game for 8th gen consoles and dealing with the lack of SDK implementations for the Unreal Engine v4.27 and the PS platform.

To accommodate the customer’s needs and the complications that came from working with UE, we created our own dev tools, like an engine patcher, build and patching tools, and many others.

This also helped address some other issues. One of our favorites being the infinite hose spawn.

When it came to optimizing the game, we had to work with GC cluster circular dependencies, which caused crashing by removing references and manually loading/unloading resources when they were required.

Additionally, we used device profiles to optimize texture size on memory and the disk itself. We made full use of the Unreal Engine’s LOD creation tool to reduce triangle counts in the vegetation, foliage, and other 3D models.

On top of that, we encountered issues with XR/TRC requirements. While working on we also discovered that the EOS was incompatible with the game’s online beacons, but we found a fix that made the multiplayer work flawlessly.

It was a big challenge: from memory leaks and bugs to multiplayer network issues and our, at the time, lack of experience working with the Unreal Engine.

But now, we can freely say that you can brave fires and step into the boots of a real-life hero on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. Stay safe!