Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Hotfix - April 25, 2024
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Hotfix - April 20, 2024
Mapping Competition 2024: "Space Station"
The theme this year is Space Station. Create a standalone mission (of any type) that takes place on a space station or other large spaceship. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- A deathmatch mission with hazards that can be activated via panels scattered around the ship.
- An endless mission where civilians must be rescued from a derelict space station while keeping life support active.
- A mission where marines must fight their way through enemy soldiers to stop the ship's reactor from melting down.
- A mission where marines clear out a space station that is still being affected by the portal storms that preceded the seven hour war, full of warring Xen creatures.
- A mission where marines need to download critical data from computers on a space station that is actively falling apart.
- A mission where marines investigate the ruins of a space station that has reentered the atmosphere of a planet and crashed.
Missions can be submitted via the Steam Workshop using the SpaceStation2024 tag between now and June 1st, 2024 at 00:00 UTC.
Entering will earn you a medal unique to this contest once submissions close, and the winning entry will receive an additional medal unique to that entry. High quality entries may also be featured in Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 7th Birthday
2023 in Review
Since Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 6th birthday last year, the game has gained improved shaders, better weapon readability, additions to Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces including mission bounties, better lag compensation, and an in-game reporting system. You might also notice some changes to the main menu if you haven't played for a while.
In April 2023, we started tracking the causes of marine deaths, and between April and December, 12,734,965 marines died in missions. The most common cause of death? Good old drone claws, with 5,147,736 confirmed kills.
Other interesting deaths in 2023, selected at random:
- 194,240 marines died to self-inflicted damage in deathmatch game modes.
- 30,097 marines were kicked to death by boomers.
- 6,136 marines were run over by a rogue forklift in Lab Ruins.
- 18,857 marines were blown up along with a destroyed sentry.
- 929,538 marines were lost to infestation. 113,511 marines were shot to death while infested.
- 346,432 marines were blown up by grenades fired from a grenade launcher, and an additional 962,861 marines were blown up by grenades fired by their own grenade launcher.
Marines aren't the only ones who die in Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop missions! In 2023, player-controlled marines killed:
- 1,156,620,313 (that's right, over a billion) drones.
- 59,404,675 parasites.
- 51,839,565 xenomites.
- 31,888,835 rangers.
- 30,038,781 eggs.
- 28,923,205 buzzers.
- 20,908,814 grubs.
- 6,392,125 biomass.
- 6,199,796 boomers.
- 5,692,301 harvesters.
- 4,105,397 menders.
- 4,012,723 shieldbugs.
- 3,534,646 mortarbugs.
- 29,210 queens.
- 2,208,733 antlions.
- 254,967 zombies.
- 176,539 headcrabs.
- 190,592 Combine soldiers.
- 18,187 hunters.
In 2023, you completed 7,489,163 missions... and failed 14,054,778 missions. After the November 2023 update added support for duplicate marines in custom game modes, you completed 3,890 missions with 9 or more player-controlled marines (39,932 missions if we count each player separately like we do for other stats) in November and December.
Mapping Competition 2024: "Space Station"
This year's theme is "Space Station". See the announcement of the contest for more details.
Changes in this update
Weapons
- Weapons (other than the M868 Flamer Unit and the Grenade Launcher) in first person now fire from the center of the camera, similar to how other first person games work.
- M868 Flamer Unit: Fixed the firing animation continuing to play on the client after running out of ammo if the fire button is held and auto-reload is disabled.
- Grenade Launcher: The friendly fire crosshair is now activated based on the grenade's predicted location of impact instead of pretending the grenade launcher shoots bullets.
- Grenade Launcher: Fixed the grenade launcher attempting to aim for the inside of the marine's head in first person.
Official Missions
- Area 9800: Power Plant's Generator: Fixed a collapsed metal support sometimes blocking the path.
- Tears for Tarnor: Oasis Colony Spaceport: Fixed the train seating's physics model pushing things in another room.
- Paranoia: High Tension: Fixed a location where it was possible to fall through the ground.
- Nam Humanum: Groundwork Labs: Fixed an explosive barrel being able to be pushed away from the panel it is intended to destroy.
- Nam Humanum: Groundwork Labs: Fixed a stutter near the start of the mission.
- BioGen Corporation: Operation X5: Removed some physics props that aliens could get stuck on during the finale.
- BioGen Corporation: Invisible Threat: Fixed unexpected aiming behavior near the fan caused by out of bounds geometry.
- Accident 32: Research Center: Reduced the amount of parasites and drones in this mission.
- Accident 32: Confined Facility: Made the drop into the sewers more intuitive.
- Accident 32: Confined Facility: Improved visibility in the area under the glass near the start.
- Accident 32: Confined Facility: Reduced the health of a door on an alternate path to make it more viable.
- Accident 32: Lab Ruins: Changed the indicator lights on the panels in the final encounter from green to blue to make them easier to see with the lighting.
- Space Port Catastrophe: Removed some invisible geometry above a doorway near the end of the map.
Infection Deathmatch Challenge
- Humans are now slower than Zombies.
- Increased Last Stand health bonus.
- Fixed a bug that caused only one Prime Zombie to spawn at the start of the round when the requirements were met to spawn two.
Technical
- Fixed addons that are subscribed but disabled through either the in-game addon menu or the Steam properties window not being loaded when required by a challenge.
- Fixed dedicated servers spawning more IO threads than intended. Dedicated servers now spawn 3 IO threads rather than one per core with no limit (or 0 as before if -noasync is passed on the command line). The client keeps the behavior it has had since 2018, spawning an IO thread per processor core up to a maximum of 3.
- Fixed an issue causing reports to not contain the reported player's ID in the intended format. A workaround is in place on the server, so no reports made after March 2nd are affected.
- Reworked the way that inventory items are sent to the game server. For now, this just means that medals should show up faster when you load into a lobby.
- Marked func_breakdmg_bullet, func_breakdmg_club, and func_breakdmg_explosive as cheats.
- Fixed the Swarmopedia unlock message showing gibberish instead of the name of the alien.
- Added a message in chat when a player receives a medal for completing an achievement or other in-mission task.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Hotfix - March 6, 2024
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Hotfix - March 1, 2024
- Fixed a crash on the main menu when hovering over the public lobby list or list of friends.
- The Season 20 Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces medals were given out with the wrong numbers. These have been revoked and re-issued.
- Fixed the Report a Problem text box only allowing English letters.
- Fixed the Maximum Game Bandwidth setting showing the number in kilobytes per second while the description said kilobits.
- Added an icon to the main menu that can be used to access the legacy server browser.
Additionally, some late notes for the release earlier today:
- Tears for Tarnor: Oasis Colony Spaceport: Made auto-aim target Fred (the colonist who dies at the beginning) to keep a speedrunning trick working.
- Reduction: Fallen City: The box car door no longer collides with aliens and physics objects.
- Fixed the chainsaw idle sound starting after having fired the chainsaw when rd_chainsaw_idle_sound is 0.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Update - March 1, 2024
Reporting
- Added a button to quickly report or commend players in the player list (by default, F9, or the thumbs-up icon in the lobby). Reports go to the Reactive Drop Team.
- Added a new option to the pause (ESC) menu: "Report a Problem".
- Entering the pause menu now takes a screenshot that can be attached to the report.
- This feature can be used for anything you think the Reactive Drop Team should know about. (Let us know through some other method if you get errors sending a report.)
- Once a report is started, you can resume the report at any time until you close the game, or throw it away and start a new one.
- You can start a report on any player you played with or the last dedicated server you were on for up to an hour afterwards.
- You can also file a report that is not tied to a player or server (for example, a bug report or asking for help with a problem related to your account) at any time.
- Fixed the "Automatically report players I mute or vote for" checkbox on the player list always appearing to be unchecked when the menu loads.
Deathmatch
- Infection Deathmatch Challenge: Prevented Onslaught from being activated in these modes.
- Infection Deathmatch Challenge: The railgun now pushes zombies with much more force.
- Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces servers no longer filter deathmatch challenges.
Colonists (for mappers)
- Colonists are no longer an auto-aim target by default. (Can be adjusted in Hammer.)
- Colonists now show the friendly fire warning on the crosshair unless they are marked as an aim target.
- The colonist behavior that makes them follow marines when interacted with can now be disabled in Hammer, and the colonist now has a glowing outline to indicate that this action is allowed.
- Added "spawn with weapon" option for colonists in Hammer. However, many weapons act strangely with colonists; this will be addressed in the future based on what mappers need.
- Combine soldiers now use asw_weapon_pdw_single rather than being hard-coded to use a custom model and animations. asw_weapon_pdw_single becomes an asw_weapon_pdw with special settings once it spawns, so scripts that manipulate asw_weapon_pdw do not need to be updated.
- Colonists now support ai_goal_actbusy. All Half-Life 2 citizen busy actions are available.
- Additionally, Drone_WallPound and Ranger_Sleep busy actions are now available.
- Aliens now make "sounds" that humanoid NPCs can hear whenever they complete or loop an animation.
Other Bug Fixes and Tweaks
- Jacob's Rest: Cargo Elevator (all variants): Fixed some graphical oddities based on camera position on the metal plating after the toxic pit.
- cl_lagcompensation can now be changed while connected to a server.
- Fixed choppy animations for eggs.
- Fixed computers sending an extra OnComputerHackCompleted output after the download is completed if asw_simple_hacking is enabled.
- Fixed a main menu crash when cl_quick_join_scroll_max is 0 and rd_reduce_motion is 1.
- Fixed a performance hitch when sending equipped inventory items (such as medals) to a server.
- Removed some console warning messages that the game's Steam Input support code could show in non-error cases.
- When running rd_steam_input_disable, the game now turns XInput support back on for every attached controller.
- Changed the color for voice-muted players from gray to red to make it easier to differentiate them from non-speaking players, which were a different gray.
- Removed a spammy server log message that could be triggered by alt-tabbing.
- Lag compensation no longer runs for spectators.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Hotfix - February 2, 2024
- Fixed a crash related to bounty notifications on the main menu. (hotfix went out shortly after midnight UTC on Feburary 1st)
- Fixed bounty notifications duplicating the first mission in a group instead of showing all missions together in one notification. (hotfix went out shortly after midnight UTC on Feburary 1st)
- Fixed low frame rate or stuttery alien animations.
- Fixed aliens being affected by incendiary mines more often than they should be due to lag compensation.
- Fixed parasites moving much more than intended while infesting.
- Fixed cl_alien_extra_interp being able to be set to a negative value.
- Grubs no longer block movement for entities such as doors.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop Update - February 1, 2024
A note on Lag Compensation
The internet doesn't transmit information instantly. Information can only travel at the speed of light, and sometimes the speed of light is just too slow. For example, if a player from Frankfurt joins a lobby hosted in Beijing, even if their computers were directly connected by a very long wire, information would take 50 milliseconds to get from Frankfurt to Beijing and back. In reality, the information needs to travel much further than the 15500 km round trip because the information doesn't move in a straight line.
When you fire a bullet, the information travels a long distance through complicated circuits before it even leaves your computer, and then it spends time traveling through a series of other computers before it finally reaches the one hosting the lobby. But that's not the end of the journey. Once the lobby host has figured out what your bullet did, that information needs to travel back to you and every other player in your lobby. By the time your bullet reaches the lobby host, the alien you were shooting might have moved! But game engines have a few tricks up their sleeves to hide this from you, and because they can't shorten the physical distance the information needs to travel, they do something easier: time travel!
The information about the bullet you fired doesn't wait until it gets to the host and back before it shows something on your screen. First, the game running on your computer pretends the information about the bullet made a round trip to the host instantly. This is called "prediction" because the game "predicts" what the host will say happened. Prediction is shown in red in the images below.
Second, when the information about the bullet reaches the host, the characters in the game move back in time to check where your bullet would have hit. This is called "lag compensation", and is shown in blue in the images below.
Alien Swarm and Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop (prior to this update) lag compensation algorithm, shown with 300ms simulated round trip ping and default settings.
That's not good! If the drone hadn't been moving toward Vegas, he would have completely missed the shot! The lobby host rewound time, but it didn't do a very good job.
Here's what that shot will look like after this update:
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop (as of this update) lag compensation algorithm, shown with 300ms simulated round trip ping and default settings.
Much better! If you have a configuration that sets cl_lagcompensation 0, we recommend removing that command as it means the lobby host won't time travel at all when you fire a bullet. The hotfix a week ago inadvertently marked cl_lagcompensation as a cheat; it can now be changed freely when not connected to a lobby.
Want to try it out for yourself? Use the newly-added sv_showimpacts 1 command.
Missions
- Tears for Tarnor: Oasis Colony Spaceport: Fixed a piece of the ceiling being solid to grenades near the security office and metal detectors.
- Tears for Tarnor: Oasis Colony Spaceport: Made a ceiling between the hangar and the baggage claim fade out sooner to be less distracting.
- Added a workaround for missing sounds in the workshop mission The Gauntlet: Arctic.
Weapons
- Fixed an animation issue causing aim to shift to the right shortly after the reload animation started, causing missed shots after successful fast reloads on weapons like the Precision Rail Rifle.
- Fixed newly unlocked weapons having their "new" marker removed by unlocking another weapon and then closing and reopening the game rather than only removing it when the weapon is selected in briefing as intended.
Lobby
- Leader and kick votes are no longer reset on instant restart.
- Prevented instant restart from being used more than once every 3 seconds (asw_instant_restart_cooldown). Does not apply to instant restarts performed after the mission complete/failed screen starts fading in.
- Fixed a visual bug causing the challenge to appear to be changed to "cmd_change_challenge" when exiting the challenge selection submenu immediately after opening it in the create lobby screen.
Misc
- Added a notifications list and filtering settings to the main menu.
- Added support for bold and italic text in inventory item descriptions in-game.
- Added rd_vindicator_fire_rate. If 0, it will use the previous behavior of inheriting its fire rate from the shotgun.
- Fixed medics having a 1-in-25 chance of shouting that they were out of meds when using the "Zing!" chat wheel command.
- Fixed a rare crash that could happen after stats were recorded at the end of a mission related to the upcoming crafting materials beta.
Infection Deathmatch Challenge
- Rifle grenade damage bonus is now calculated after the knockback force is calculated.
- Decreased rifle grenade damage.
- Massively increased rockets' knockback force.
- Increased rocket damage.
- Damage taken during the preparation phase is now immediately healed.
- Humans' burning damage against zombies now receives damage bonus regardless of whether the source of the burn is an incendiary mine.
- Constructed sentries are now deleted immediately.
- Allowed the server console (and challenge scripts) to use the deathmatch game mode console commands (in addition to the lobby leader).
Upcoming changes to Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces
What's Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces?
Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces (HoIAF) is a monthly competition to complete as many difficult missions as possible on participating servers (marked with an 🏅 icon in the lobby list).
You earn more points for harder missions, difficulty settings, and challenges, and for marines in your squad surviving to the end if hardcore friendly fire is enabled. At the end of the month, everyone who participated receives a medal, with special medals going to the players in the top 20 and top 100.
You can display medals on your Steam profile the same way you would display any other item in your inventory, as well as equip up to 3 medals on your Commander Profile in-game. Medals are also available from many other sources. Check out the guides on the Steam Community Hub to find out more!
Scoring Multiplier Updates
109 of the 133 rated missions and 28 of the 76 rated challenges have received scoring changes.
In most cases, the difference between challenge score multipliers has been reduced and the difference between mission score multipliers has increased.
The full list of modifier changes is available on the Reactive Drop developer website.
Personal Best Scores
Starting in Season 20 (February 2024), your personal best score for each mission will earn you bonus points towards your season score. Your 5 best scores contribute the most, with each group of 5 scores afterwards contributing half as much.
The point bonuses are generous. For example, if your best single mission score is 500 points, you'll gain nearly one hundred thousand points towards your season score. If you manage to beat your score by 100 points (600 total), you'll gain an additional nearly forty thousand points.
If you want to stay ahead in future seasons, you'll need to hone your skills at a multitude of missions, and super-high scores in endless missions are now worth far more than the points they give directly.
Mission Bounties
It's not just the high-scorers who are getting a bonus this season! A few times per day, the Interstellar Armed Forces will provide bounties for completing specific missions. You can find these in the notifications area on the main menu, and the missions with bounties you haven't claimed are also marked in the mission chooser while you're connected to a participating server.
Bounties grant points for the successful completion of a mission regardless of difficulty settings or challenges. That means that if you were previously getting a measly 1 point per mission on Easy, you can now earn hundreds or thousands of points a few times per day.
Bounties are created every 8 hours and last for 24 hours. Each set of bounties is either a campaign of 3 to 9 missions or 5 to 6 assorted missions. Bounties do not span multiple seasons, so there is a period at the start of a season with fewer than 3 active sets of bounties and bounties at the end of a season are shorter than 24 hours. Each bounty mission can be completed independently. If you don't want to see information about bounties on the main menu, you can disable the notifications using the button at the bottom of the notifications list.