As predicted, the massive beast that is Update 17 needed a bit more taming. We’ve just released a patch to get rid of some nasty little bugs crawling all over the game. Not ruling out follow-up hotfixes!
The Steam Sale is still going on - so if you want to join the awesome AFF Community and shoot a bunch of ion cannons at us, now’s a pretty good time!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Hotfix changelog:
Fixed a backdoor in the engine that’d let people get into passworded servers
Fixed a server crash introduced by new AI code
Tweaked bots to be more snappy at all difficulty levels, official servers now turned down to difficulty level 4
Put some safeguards in to prevent AI from spawning infinite vehicles
Several fixes to the new Delta map:
- Fixed the drill frying people unintentionally (remember not to touch laser drills anyway, kids!)
- Tightened up terrain collision
- Fixed tanks parking in the illegal parking space
- Added collision to laser drill bits to stop sneaky ninjamen from cheesing
- Added proper team-blocking volumes to stop enemies from going in the bases
Adjusted the boarding logic at Lacroix to prevent some desynchronization in spawnpoint toggling
Adjusted cameras on the passenger seats of Turtle IFV
Adjusted some collision in Irega to quick-patch bots getting stuck there
Fixed erroneous application of boost buff to gunships
Fixed an infinite loop bug caused by footsteps being played based on animation frames
Amended infantry armour mod loadout stat display to new value
Increased Partisan’s forward/backward speed to 30% more than Dhaka, decreased Dhaka’s 2-burst interval by 50% to reduce spreadability, significantly increased Partisan cannon’s shell speed, increased Partisan HP to 50% more than Dhaka rather than 35%
For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
Update 17 is live!
Hey there AFF Community!
It’s finally here! We appreciate it’s been a while - however with so many changes to jam into the update crate, we trust you’ll enjoy the payout!
To coincide with this update AFF is currently 40% off for the duration of the Autumn sale so if you’ve been keeping an eye on this we hope you’ll join us!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Now let’s crack open the lid on the Update 17 box and see what treats we have for all! It’s a huge patch that touches on pretty much every system in the game in some way - so we fully expect it might need tweaking and hotfixes in the coming weeks:
New map - Delta
A mining operation set on a moon extremely rich in hydrocarbon resources and complex chemicals. A valuable asset indeed but requires a lot of finesse in warring over it - the moon is small, the gravity is weak, lighter vehicles would be inoperable so completing this mission is up to heavy tanks and agile infantry.
It’s a Territories map where vehicles are limited to tanks for both sides - watch out for interesting effects low gravity might have on their handling! The infantry on the other hand is able to utilize this effect for increased mobility. Jump high in the air to find a sniping spot on one of the drilling stations or perhaps explore the rock formations for some interesting sights.
AI upgrade continues
The vast majority of development time for this update went into reworking the AI, specifically how the individual bots navigate the maps. They’ll move more naturally now, flank better, use all available routes to objectives, avoid damage by hiding behind cover or strafing, revive teammates.
This upgrade also applies to their ability to drive vehicles and pilot ships - watch out for them using the newtonian flight mode to engage tailing enemies!
We also reconfigured the bots to be less of a perfect sniping force at any range. They won’t perfectly compensate for recoil of every weapon and instantly snap to target’s head. AI tweaking is a process that’s never over though, so we’ll see what else needs adjusting after this update. Too hard or too easy at a particular difficulty level? As always, we’re waiting on Community feedback!
Turtle coming out of its shell
The Turtle IFV has always been at a bit of a disadvantage due to its primary weapon being hidden under the rim of the front armour. It was a cute concept but not very practical. No more! Antareans beware, as the new Turtle enters the battlefield with a rocket launcher mounted on top!
Gunplay and gunsights
We always try to improve on that nebulous area described as “gunplay feel” in AFF. Recently we gathered a few more ideas, mainly from playing high-budget shooters like BF1 (all in the name of research, naturally). Despite having no intention of bringing AFF’s gameplay anywhere near that model of instant time-to-kill twitch shooter, we’ve noticed a few things they do better in terms of responsiveness. Based on that we’ve now fixed and tweaked some math behind how your gun behaves after coming out of sprint and when aiming-down-sights. Overall it should look and feel more polished and responsive now.
We’ve redone and improved some of the sight models - ironsights and MRAS sights are less blocky now and received some incandescent dots to be usable in darker areas. Holographic sights are perhaps a bit less realistic now but much more practical in gameplay terms - should be clearly visible regardless of background colour and light conditions.
Commander voting menu rework
The commander voting UI bit has been simplified and changed from an awkwardly-scrolling list to a nice grid of candidates. In singleplayer you can click on MILNET AI to immediately set the AI as a commander, in multiplayer you pick a candidate and if no one votes for anybody, MILNET will take command. Click on yourself to opt in as a candidate, by default only opted-in candidates will be clickable on the grid. No more getting voted on because you alt-tabbed. It’s that simple.
What’s next?
The commander voting menu is the first tiny bit of what we’ll be focusing on for the next update (some inevitable hotfixes to this massive one aside). Next update will be all about user-experience: reinstating the tutorial, making several parts of the UI more intuitive and polished. We want to start promoting the game to a wider audience early next year so it’s crucial to get those things right.
Full changelog:
New map - Delta, a low-gravity fight for a lunar mining operation
Vastly improved AI for individual bots:
- Better movement, flanking, taking cover, dodging
- Reliable reviving of teammates
- Fully use all the space flight mechanics, including flipping the craft with the newtonian flight mode
- More human-like awareness, reaction times and recoil compensation
- A physical delay to noticing velocity changes in their target, even with hitscan weapons - i.e. evasive flying and strafing will properly throw their aim off
- Better judgement of where to respawn based on the commander's orders
Turtle now has a rocket turret on the top to scare away those pesky Bastas
New commander vote menu
Iron sights, MRAS sights and holo sights redone to be more practical and visible under different lighting conditions
ADSing from sprint is now available immediately regardless of the weapon taking a fraction of a second to come back online, fixed weapon pose transition lagging when ADSing from sprint
Weapon weight mod now also reduces ADS times by 10%
Adjusted ADS times across the board
Many tweaks and fixes to Lukather:
- Fixed physical material assignment on Lukather's front bay
- Moved ULA spawner slightly further away from the comms tower
- Moved the vehicle dropoff points to a less fail-prone location near the ULA carpark spawn
- Added bollards to areas where gorillas, robots and rabbits could enter the terminal
- People can still take vehicles elsewhere but not in the splined terminal part of the map
- Added vehicle blocking volumes to prevent LAVs and others from falling into the trenches
- Lowered KillZ to an acceptable level so that players aren't dying upon going lower in the maintenance tunnels
- Patched up missing geometry in back end of the terminal
Tweaks to Mirnoide
- Removed central defender spawns, moved objectives
- Hangar spawn for defenders not disabled after the attackers complete that particular station
- Added plenty of cover in and around the hangar
Tweaks to Yin Tao Shan
- Revised pathing and collision near E approach (from underneath) to be cleaner and more usable
- Added cover between drop points and E point for infantry to maneuver up the hill and assault the position
- Redone collision of the overpasses for smoother movement and less shots glitching through
- Fixed collision bumps on ramps and a bunch of overpass z-fighting
Tweaks to Irega
- Widened blocking volume on stairs to stop falling underneath stairs in weird corners
- Fixed collision missing on one of the walkways
- Added collision for pipes
- Changed focus of matinee towards the end of the dustoff sequence to track the dropship instead of the pod
Adjusted some navigation and collision in Fortress
Simplified Lacroix's hangar spawn pushback logic, was a bit prone to failure
Added 15s or 30s delay to LZs becoming capturable after previous droppod is destroyed in both Incursion and Territories
Removed initial spawn delay on match start unless you're attacking in Incursion - now intentionally acts as a small defender setup time advantage
Vehicle loss penalty now altered if special-case vehicle spawn multiplier is active (Delta)
Primary objectives under attack will now stop the pause if it's under 60s remaining, regardless of phase. Different to prior "only pause if final phase" behaviour.
Decreased the income boost from owning all objectives in Territories by 50%
Added out-of-range text to tagged target bracket
Added explainer text sheets to many briefings before we add a proper tutorial and objective chain UI next update
Land vehicle weapon aimpoint now adjusts itself to the leading target only when looking at the target directly, should mean less odd misaligned shots against world geometry
Added pilot's name to the location readout for capital ships
Added destruction effects (explosion, chunks) to deployables and mechs
More chunks of destroyed land vehicles now spawned and not glitching out, plus some optimizations to their meshes
Clientside chunks of destroyed vehicles now properly destroyed when other vehicles encrouch on them
Optimized several shaders all over the maps
Added a smooth screen-door-like transition effect to objects and their level-of-details popping in, like a proper modern game
Some minor optimizations to ship physics, disabled unnecessary things ticking in the background, like handheld weapons while sat in a vehicle
Adjusted the hit effect scaling to be less ridiculous, plus now correctly distinguishes between player's own shots and spectated shots
Pressing ESC to skip the mainmenu intro will no longer bring up the exit popup
Partisan shell's initial speed bumped up by 25%
Passenger rocket launcher turret damage reduced by 25%
Partisan and Turtle armour increased 10%, Basta and Dhaka reduced 10%, Partisan's turning speed increased by 20%
Reduced maximum shots to overheat on the Basta's primary plasma to 16 down from 18 (one salvo less than max ammo, whilst originally you could fire all 20 before overheat actually kicked in)
First part of fixes to mech animations - still nowhere near perfect but should behave better in terms of walking cycles, crouching, jumping etc.
Added missing dumbfire mode to Gheist's version of MLI
Motion sensors now have a noisemaker functionality, selectable as an alternative firemode
Spaceship boost strength now increased from 1.5x to 2x the nominal speed, but halved its duration
Halved the number of spare mags on fighter missiles
Fighters, bombers and dropships 20% tougher
Bomber bay slot weapons' damage increased by 20%, back to where they were previously
Torpedoes now very slightly faster
Reduced curvature of underbarrel rockets' flightpath
Reduced frag grenade damage radius
Increased splash damage radius of railguns
Doubled the combat XP income from spaceship damage
Fighters don't trigger armour regeneration delay on capships now, nor infantry on land vehicles. A bit unsubtle, will tweak when necessary.
Doubled the amount armour added by infantry body armour mod, to 100
Slightly reduced droppod health
Fixed a typo in 3x scope description
Fixed orders issued on the TacMap always falling back to a "move to" order
Fixed lock-on weapons (AFX, MLI etc.) not triggering a lock-on warning on the target until the missile is away
Fixed the shelved guns in the briefingrooms not getting proper attachments according to their faction affinity
Fixed the operations land maps filter in the operations menu
Fixed custom bot names not applying properly if too long, when hacked in with .ini changes
Fixed infinitely burning/corroding vehicles, hopefully for good this time. EMP effect on infantry now timed sensibly - 12-15 seconds depending on the selected suit
Fixed unranked slider disabling in operations menu
Fixed AIA medium suit having slightly different specular intensity than the rest of the infantry models
Disabled some respawn functionality which was resulting in the timing-specific multiple capships and driverless capships
Fixed bots initially walking a few meters in a random direction on match start
Some more safeguards around renderer thread when changing resolutions, should result in less crashes from both Scaleform and UE's internals now
Added a synchronization event between UI and rendering threads to combat the render frame fence jitter (HUD icons jittering, especially noticeable in space battles in fullscreen and with vsync on)
For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
Halloween Spooks or "Where on Antares Is The Next Update?"
Hey there AFF Community!
Turns out there’s a Halloween Sale on Steam right now and AFF is a part of it! Why? We have no idea, maybe space is spooky enough! Regardless, it’s a good occasion for putting the game out there for a tenner, so here goes:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Let’s address the elephant in the room then: it’s been over a month without a new update. Usually that means we’re working on some massive system overhaul and it’s true this time as well - there’s indeed that big AI navigation update incoming very soon. This extra delay is surely because of extra rigorous testing and has nothing to do with the flu season and cold weather…
There’s one upside to half the team having a bit of a downtime - we played a lot of games this past month. We strongly believe one needs to play games to design games and it’s doubly true in AFF’s case - we’re making the game we would love to play after all! So we went through a lot of titles recently, from PUBG and Destiny, through EndlessSpace2 and Factorio to Divinity, Battlefront, No Man’s Sky… the list goes on and on. As you can see it’s very diverse genre-wise but that’s always what inspires AFF - the whole spectrum of awesome things you can do in games.
One other thing we thought we should mention is that AFF has been in Early Access for two years now. We are not exactly sure what to think about it - our store page still claims “maybe year and a half (...) reality will verify this” so it’s understandably something our players might be fed up with. At the same time it almost feels like an occasion we should celebrate - it’s been one hell of a ride with our Community, we managed to largely avoid feature creep, the majority of the massive changes we’ve made (and admittedly didn’t expect we would have to make to that extent, hence the extra development time) were dictated by the feedback from You, guys and girls! We’re a little bit proud of those last two years, is what I’m saying. Cheers!
Now we’re doubling our efforts to get as much done as possible before the end of the year. The final part of the big AI upgrade is coming, then the next update after that will very likely focus on user-friendliness - tutorial, better explanation of objectives, ironing out the kinks in the UI. There’s obviously the AAA releases season going on right now too, a very sub-optimal time for anything independent and low-budget. Logically, we’ll be using those couple months to work on AFF some more and schedule more of an organized promotional effort in early 2018. In the meantime we’re working on getting our website back up and running, we owned the thing for like 10 years and there’s been some issues with its hosting service recently. It should be back on a new proper host soon and bring with it some exciting new content, stay tuned for that if you’re interested in the wider AFF lore.
Again, we invite everyone to drop by our Discord! Come say hi, drop some feedback on the game, have a great space Halloween!
Onwards and upwards!
Mini-update 16.1
Hey there AFF Community!
While another big update is in the works we decided to release a bit of an intermediate patch. There were a few aspects of Update 16 in need of tweaking, plus in the meantime we’ve implemented some quality-of-life improvements. We didn’t want to keep you guys and girls waiting so here it is:
Lighting improvements
In Update 16 we experimented with new lighting pipeline for our maps. It made some places look better and some worse in terms of lighting and shadows. We’ve polished the whole process a bit more and once again updated many areas, especially the outdoor ones, with better shadow quality and less artifacts.
Head-bob toggle
A toggle for the camera bobbing when running was a very popular request so we got around to putting that in. This also prompted a re-organization of the settings menu - we added a section for all the other options not strictly related to graphics or audio.
Discord link in the game
Quite often we get asked about the link to our Discord server in the game. It’s pretty inconvenient to paste it into the in-game chat and doubly so for players to copy it from there, so we added a link in the main menu - just click the Discord button there and you’ll be able to join our awesome Community on the server.
Full changelog:
Added a head-bob slider - adjusts how much camera wobble is applied when running
Rearranged the settings menu a bit to move all the miscellaneous options to a separate section
A lot of locations now with improved lighting and shadow quality
Added a Discord link to the main menu - will open in Steam overlay or web browser if the overlay is unavailable
Game will no longer center the mouse cursor on the TacMap popping up when the application window isn’t in focus
Adjusted the in-menu descriptions of several maps
Infantry AI will prioritise threats better now, based on the distance to themselves, not their order
Further tweaks to bots’ reaction times and accuracy to make them more player-like
Blocked some more rooftop off in Irega, spidermonkeys begone!
Blocked off exploitation areas beyond cargo containers on either side of ULA spawns in Igneous
Changed the freelook icon and blocked it showing for infantry where it serves no purpose
Optimized the infantry on-fire effect
Phases in Igneous adjusted to avoid a gap when the new dropship hasn’t landed yet and the previous spawn got disabled
Lacroix spawnpoints moved up
Added a Ti corvette to Mirnoide, last two objectives moved forward
Fixed being unable to get a visible tag on objectives like the defense platforms in space through level geometry
Finally stopped bots shooting at their own planted hack-spikes
Removed all legacy music cues from briefings
Fixed the ULA briefings in Irega and Lacroix not repeating properly or overlapping
Mirnoide’s briefing now properly client-side, just like the rest of the maps
Fixed vehicle drops in the TacMap sometimes not displaying the correct status
Fixed space defense platforms having no collision and glitching out client-side
Fixed some missing or glitchy end-game cameras
Fixed magazine size weapon mods
Fixed empty ammo option on fighter-grade MGA
Fixed the stats on the underbarrel grav stabilizer
If you got a feedback on anything in the game, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
Update 16 is live!
Hey there AFF Community!
We're back from summer vacation with another update!
In reality it's been quite a busy month at AFF. We had to dedicate some time to unexciting but much needed chores - maintenance, content pipeline improvements etc. Nevertheless we've managed to prepare a super-sized update, starting with:
New map - Mirnoide
Mirnoide is a deep-space Antarean research station. It becomes the centre of a heated battle when the USN tries to take the station by force. The stakes are high - controlling the station means access to critical research data regarding new, super-efficient terraforming methods.
It's a map for the Incursion gamemode - Imperial forces are on the defense this time and the League has to breach and capture 2 separate biodomes on the station. Both domes are available for breaching concurrently - so both teams will have to coordinate and strategize to split the forces in just the right proportions to out-smart the enemy. There's also a twist to it all - the breach points are boarding pods drilling into the station walls. Therefore they're primarily vulnerable to attacks from the outside, giving the defending team an opportunity to go on offense space-side.
Infantry AI upgrade - part 1
Last time we upgraded the commander-level AI and now we're following that up with a rewrite of the individual bots' AI. Consider this to be a 2-parter at least. Next update (or updates) will focus on making the bots' movement more natural, this time we've addressed the most irritating bits in their behaviour.
The bots are much more responsive now - their reaction time on par or better than human players (depending on the difficulty setting, of course) and their focus kept more naturally on their current targets and objectives.
This means they'll appear more life-like and pose a much bigger threat by relying on reflexes and tactics instead of inhuman accuracy. The players will very likely need to utilize all of the available assets and game systems (shields, grenades, mods etc.) to defeat the bots at the highest difficulty level.
Performance improvements
Despite the bots being more intelligent now, we actually managed to make them less performance-intensive. In addition to this we optimized the movement code for infantry, made further updates to how and when the commander-level AI issues orders and fixed some critical issues in managing the dynamic HUD elements. All of this should result in significantly less stress put on the CPU, especially when playing offline with bots.
Spectator mode
The players could join as spectators before but the mode was pretty barebones and didn't work completely reliably client-side. We've improved its functionality, upgraded it with a few different camera settings and a free-cam mode. Time will tell whether it proves to be too much of an exploit but given AFF's gameplay not relying on team-wide stealth operations it shouldn't be a big problem - the free-cam doesn't let you phase through walls either and as spectator you don't currently get any HUD indicators.
Steam Cloud
AFF now supports Steam Cloud storage. From now on your loadouts, camouflage choices and keybindings will be saved to the cloud and synchronized on other PCs you run AFF on. It also means you'll get those back even if you uninstall AFF at any point.
Roadmap update
We haven't updated the public roadmap in a while and it sort of fell off the radar it seems. We're planning on making the game more visible across the media soon so the Trello board has been brought up-to-date as well, to give the AFF Community a better idea about what tricks we still have up our sleeves. We'll keep updating it as we go.
Changelog:
New space map for the Incursion mode - Mirnoide
Bots upgraded to be much responsive and menacing
Completely rewritten turret AI to bring it up to par with the infantry bots - this includes deployable turrets, vehicle passenger turrets and capital ship turrets
Further upgraded the commander-level AI to cope with multiple locations better
Igneous phase 3 redesigned with an additional entry route, moved some cover around for more interesting gunplay
Anaster visuals updated to give a better sense of depth as well as better represent the hollow moon setting
All maps processed with new content pipeline utilities to ensure more consistent and optimized lighting across the board
Rewritten and improved spectator mode
Added command unit selection functionality to squad status module in tacmap (click on mates to select for ordering)
Upgraded redeploy suggestion logic - will also make the AI redeploy less often for no reason
Adjusted the health and capture times of various objectives - generally a bit tougher to take and destroy now
Moved armour regeneration disabling effect to acid rather than EMP
Replaced some lowest-poly models (crates, mostly) to look a bit more modern
Added freelook indicator to crosshair
Adjusted the task/status texts displayed on human and bot squadmembers in the briefing phase
Adjusted the positions and movement of some of the HUD plates
Increased AI sight radius in fighters to make them defend more proactively
Vehicle offer info is now built into the TacMap and several issues in its functionality have been fixed
Weapon charge now reset to zero on switching away from that weapon
Converted passenger turret railgun on land vehicles to match RID behaviour
Added minor spread to capship railguns
Capital ships' subsystems now harder to destroy from the outside, their health regeneration rate slightly increased
Space defense platforms now have 20% less health
Subsystems of defense platforms in Meudeverre can be properly targeted and damaged now
Doubled shield health on transports and capital ships
Shortened the duration of the launch autopilot sequences globally and adjusted the launch locations a bit
Reduced vehicle offer score requirements by 30% in the Territories mode
Reduced sprint recovery, weapon switch and aim-down-sights times and weapon weight penalties to those by 30%
Hipfire inaccuracy now only goes up to 50% due to running, the rest of the range is only applied as recoil from shooting - promotes a bit more mobile playstyle with weapons optimal for hipfiring (pistols, SMGs)
Added 4s arming delay to mines
Reduced throw distance and increased preparation time on detpacks
Rebalanced grenade, mines and detpack strengths (damage and status effects) to fix apparent effectiveness
Buffed A420, DK31 and EVR a little bit
Slight decrease in EVR recoil to improve handling, shots till overheat in light mode increased by 70%
All weapon mods reworked to make more physical sense and to give the mod choice more substance - check your loadouts, the mods now have meaningful advantages and disadvantages
Added a few new mechanics-specific internal mods to weapons - charge time, cooldown and magazine size
P8 damage profile adjusted to sit inbetween the TS20 and a charged L9R in order to keep it viable without making the L9R unattractive
Added barrel mod support but removed the internal slot from P8 for consistency
Lowered projectile velocity and added drop to underbarrel rocket launcher
Reduced cooldown of capital ships' mines
Removed missiles slot from bomber loadouts to enforce more of a specialized role for those ships
Decreased bomber torpedoes, plasma and rail damage by 20%
Rebalanced fighter missiles to fire their burst then reload for 4-9s, increased their damage, and decreased their ammo count to about 20 bursts each
Doubled tank cannon reload times
Buffed underslung flamethrower
Stopped commandvote and TacMap showing for spectators
Corrected ammocount on EVR vehicle variants
Fixed some HUD icons being unnecessarily processed even when seemingly off-screen
Fixed stairs pathing issues on Lukather
Fixed a whole lot of minor collision, pathing and visual oddities across all maps in response to our Discord's #map-bug-reports
Blocked off the tower rooftops in Irega
Fixed some navigation issues at the bottom level of the Irega terminal
Improved pathing and collision inside the Ixion station
Fixed camera animations in AIA fighterbase in all maps
Fixed heavy and bomber space plas,a damage falloff
Fixed warp exit selection being incorrectly transferred on switching teams
Put in docking point infos to fighterbases, so that you can technically warp out to rearm if the map only contains fighterbases without capital ships
Fixed some minor errors and warnings spammed by space maps without capital ships
Fixed AI unable to complete rearming at carriers, including ones still in warp
Fixed some glitches and improved the performance of flares
Fixed issues with bots retaining previous spawner/docking point selection
Fixed seat-disabled camera static effect on capship passenger seats
Fixed Turtle's nosegun icon and description
Fixed misaligned mesh on sniper barrel mod, was resulting in dodgy positioning
Fixed flashbangs behaving in an unpredictable way, often not blinding the enemy effectively
Fixed detpacks getting stuck in lowered pose and an infinite script recursion error caused by them
Fixed bots sometimes not spawning into unmanned capships to recover them
If you got a feedback on anything in the game, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
Update 15 is live!
Hey there AFF Community!
We're back with more content, some important fixes and a big system overhaul.
New map - Anaster
Anaster is the massive corpse of a failed moon, situated in the belt of debris around the planet Anansi c. The tunnels and chambers were partially formed by natural processes, when the more porous rocks were etched away. In times past pirates and smugglers from Glyfhaven had build structures in the vacuum of these tunnels to serve as an outpost.
These have been long since abandoned, but the Antareans see it as an optimal location for establishing a beachhead on the border with the Cinnabar Republic. Now, both the Antarean Empire and the ULP fleets are vying for control over this curious structure and the habitable planet below.
Gameplay-wise, Anaster is a space Territories map, with a handful of twists. This time you'll be facing off inside a structure with your fighters and corvettes. In addition to capturing the objectives you'll also be able to take control of additional warp-in beacons to bring in the reinforcements exactly where they are needed.
Commander AI overhaul
Over the last few weeks we've been carefully observing how players organize their defense and offense on various maps. Based on that data we've rewritten MILNET, the commander-level AI in the game.
This doesn't affect the behaviour of individual bots in combat as much but an AI-driven team as whole should behave more like an organized group of actual people. The new AI has a much better understanding of spreading and focusing forces, picking flanking routes, prioritizing objectives based on teammembers' locations, enemy locations, objective completion percentage and a couple hundred other factors.
Of course this also means the human squadleaders should now be given more sensible orders if MILNET AI is in charge.
Smoke effects
Another thing we've been investing into recently is rendering upgrades that will be introduced over the next few updates. In the meantime we also got a lot of feedback about the smoke grenades being, well, frankly quite useless - the smoke did technically mask the signatures of enemies but the visuals were so glitchy and weak that you could simply spot enemy silhouettes inside the smoke cloud.
So in response we used some of our new tech to make a more seamless, better optimized and more functionally obscuring smoke effect. It will possibly need some further tweaking but it's a good representation of the visual fidelity we want our VFX to achieve in the nearest future.
Changelog:
New map - Anaster. Fight over control points and warp-in beacons inside a huge space rock
Improved commander AI based on data gathered from Community playtests
New effects for the smoke grenades/detpacks - less glitchy and more functionally obscuring
AI-led squads will now re-deploy whenever dropships become available more responsively, dropship-occupying AI will fall back to boarding a different ship if they can't get inside the one they're ordered onto
Tweaked the destroyable objectives (dropppods, lockouts, cores) to be a bit weaker versus explosives and AV weapons
Minimap location name now cycles with driven vehicle name
Disabled overheat mechanic on space shotguns
Objective-related messages stick around on the HUD for a bit longer
Added HUD prompts which tell the player that a dropship is available at a particular station/carrier
Rebalanced the health of subsystems on capital ships so that they can be disabled easier from the outside, having a more meaningful impact on the gameplay
Tweaked all the LSP variants (for infantry, vehicles and ships) - more lenient overheat, smaller burst size
Reduced splash radius of the underslung rocket launcher
EVR rebalanced to have a more useful (and faster-traveling) primary firemode and less overpowered heavy mode (less accurate, plasma travels slower, overheats faster)
Rail barrel mod slightly less powerful
SAR reconfigured to be less good at everything and more of a specialized weapon - burst-fire, with a minor potential for overheating and a recoil pattern that promotes stationary firing
Reduced heavy vehicle counts in Yin Tao Shan Territories
Improved how spawnpoints and warp-in beacons are listed in the locator part of the TacMap
More lenient Sturm tailgun constraint
Ship interior location subtitles in the TacMap now cycle between displaying the location name, person at the helm and ship health value
Shortened the core meltdown timers for destroyers and corvettes
Increased the speed of MLI rockets
Reduced the spread on RID's dumbfire mode again, should be less ridiculously inaccurate but still not practical compared to the lock-on mode
Gunship bomblets split into submunitions over the ground and inherit gunships velocity. Generally they now fall where you'd expect them to now.
Lock-on and reload mods removed from vehicle weapons for now
Cooling weapon mod increases reload time by 10%
Increased the effective DPS of MGA across the whole spin-up range
Flechette cannon mag size increased to 50
Minimap location name now cycles with driven vehicle name
Fixed TT18's default ammo display in the loadout
Fixed an issue where HUD chatbox steals focus from mouse actions, preventing weapon-switching with mousewheel
Fixed vehicle offer and team balance prompts spamming the HUD during the de-briefing
Fixed disabled-by-EMP effect not appearing on vehicles
Hopefully finally fixed bots navigating that ramp in the hangar at Ixion
Reduced some instances of log getting unnecessarily spammed with messages for players who join an online game during the de-briefing, bloating the logs directory
Several minor fixes to Meudeverre's collision and navigation
Fixed the dropships limit not working correctly on some maps
Fixed incorrect command rank being displayed for the MILNET AI
Several minor fixes to collision and lighting in Irega and Errah
Added missing server details in the in-game server browser
Steam's server browser (the one in the Steam client, not in-game) should now display correct playercounts
Fixed a rare case of Steam invites failing due to bots filling the server
Fixed passenger turret variant of the MNL
If you got a feedback on anything in the game, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
Sealing hulls with epoxy (Hotfix #2 for Update 14)
Hey there AFF Community!
Here's one more patch to address the awesome feedback we've been getting since the last major update, before we go back to implementing new content.
We made a lot of adjustments to maps. And not only to the newest Lukather maps, we've also redesigned the gameplay of the least played pair - Meudeverre Territories is now focused on lighter ships that can move around this big map faster, while Meudeverre Incursion received an overhaul of its objectives. They should be more interesting and dynamic to play and feel more unique now. We've also made several balancing tweaks and small quality-of-life additions (a toggle option for leaning, for example).
There's been some reports of the game crashing on alt-tabbing or changing the visual settings too. Even though these cases seemed very rare (AFF might be not particularly well optimized yet but it sure is stable on the vast majority of systems) we managed to find a potential offender - a bug where the engine wouldn't clear certain texture buffers correctly, resulting in an inevitable crash on changing graphics options or resolution. Hopefully that issue is gone now.
We'd also like to use this opportunity to remind everyone that it's the last day of the Steam Summer Sale!
You can still grab AFF at 30% off!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Changelog:
New phase for Meudeverre Incursion, with generators to destroy. Beware the EMP when they blow up!
Adjusted the objectives in Lacroix
Slightly adjusted the spawn locations in Irega
Replaced Ixion's station missiles with gatling guns for less infuriating flying experience
Adjusted the Incursion phases in Yin Tao Shan
Re-balanced the NB3345 map to be focused purely on battleships and their fighters and bombers
Removed battleships from Meudeverre Territories because they were no fun on this huge map with tight spaces between the asteroids
Extra ammo suit mod will now grant 30% more ammo for all guns instead of adding clips. Multiple mods of this type can still be stacked.
Human players per team noted on scoreboard for easier balance checking
Added a "toggle leaning" option, can be enabled in the Controls->Misc section of the Settings menu
MNL alt-fire will now produce bouncy grenades
Increased damage dealt by the "return to battle" volumes to 200 per second
Increased bleed-out time
Increased point-defense flak damage
Fixed lock-on line-of-sight calculations when aiming from a vehicle or a ship
Fixed a rare crash on changing visual settings or resolution
Fixed a few issues with the boarding icons display logic
Fixed several destroyable elements (like breach pods) receiving less damage than they should
Fixed the extra ammo suit mods not working for weapons that don't store ammo in magazines/clips (like the P8 rifle)
Fixed support points not popping up when repairing ship components
Fixed the delay on displaying the scoreboard screen
Fixed blocked breachpoints inside the Khamun frigate
Trimmed the unruly hedges and shrubberies in Lukather, smoothed over the random edges that ended up becoming a safety hazard
Lukather Territories now has a properly configured sea level too, eliminates players falling in. Adjusted the effect of falling into the ocean
Lukather now has "return to battle" areas properly configured according to Incursion phases
The top of the Lukather tower now with more railings and less nasty hidey-hole
Slightly less opportunities to glitch vehicles into the terminal on Lukather
Corrected planting the hack spikes taking unusually long on Lukather
Added some cars to the rather barren Lukather parking lot
Replaced temporary TacMap icons for several locations in various maps
Fixed several mis-placed and mis-scaled "return to battle" volumes around the maps
Thanks again for the excellent, in-depth feedback, keep that coming guys and girls! And see you on the battlefield!
Onwards and upwards!
Plugging up the holes (Hotfix for Update 14)
Hey there AFF Community!
We've just released a bit of a hotfix, big thanks to all of You for immediately spotting a lot of holes and quirks in the new maps. We plugged a lot of them up, less horrible deaths by getting stuck or falling through the world should occur now!
This patch should also address some recent balancing concerns. We also got a report of a rare crash on certain PCs and we've tracked that down to be audio-related. We're not certain whether we've identified the core of the issue yet but we've corrected some cases of multiple sound sources thrashing the audio devices, so hopefully that'll alleviate this problem.
Hotfixes mean the hot summer is here and hot summer means Steam Summer Sale, therefore:
AFF is 30% off during the Summer Sale!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Changelog:
Infantry suit's armour plating mods give more armour now
Less movement penalty from armour mods across the board
Reduced the jump height benefit from equipping speed mods
Fixed a rare case where equipping a weapon with sniper sights and then equipping the RID afterwards would make RID's sights non-functional
Fixed lock-on times of MLI and RID on the infantry not getting calculated correctly, should be much less effective to lock onto people than onto vehicles
Explosives (rockets, detpacks) no longer completely ineffective against droppods, ship cores and other stationary destroyables
Infantry hip-fire spread and held weapon movement penalty now reduced proportionally to how heavy the armour you're wearing is
Slightly reduced the lock-on time of MLI
Slightly reduced lock-on time increase by distance everywhere
Reduced MLI dumb-fire's splash damage radius
RID and MLI now have a slightly longer maximum range than vehicle weapons, Locust and Sturm primaries slightly shorter range than other vehicle weapons. Prevents gunships from hovering up-high unchallenged
Removed hitscan weapons as options for the Sturm tailgun
Constrained Sturm turret rotations, now vulnerable from above and can't focus both turrets in the same general direction
Locust now 20% more maneuverable and faster
Sturm primary weapon more susceptible to overheating
Rearranged the objectives in Lacroix a bit
Removed one of the top-side radar dish objectives from Ixion to make phase 1 less likely to stalemate
Fixed inconsistencies in how capture progress was calculated for some objectives
Intro matinees on several maps won't erroneously reset on hitting space anymore
Support points no longer awarded if you heal someone you've damaged yourself (when friendly fire is on)
Rearranged Meudeverre Territories objectives and warp locations to scale down the distances involved
Fixed ammo type selection for passenger turrets (you might have to re-select them for your vehicle loadouts after this update)
Small command console rebound from the apostrophe key to F2, because apostrophe bind doesn't work reliably on every keyboard
Ambient sound in the warp tunnel no longer played from a million sources at once, should go easier on audio devices now. Lowered the hit of Irega's background battle noises too.
Fixes to the Lukather maps:
- Moved the vehicle drop points so they don't end up in the ocean
- Disabled phase 1 AIA spawnpoint when phase 3 is captured
- Falling into the sea now properly eliminates the player, you sink like lead brick in cold ocean
- Added a pattern to the spaceport's glass that will make it far more noticable and less confusing
- Moved initial ULA spawnpoint a bit closer to the action
- Closed off direct route to the tower
- Reduced how often the audio in the spaceport repeats
- Added missing floor meshes in several locations
- Fixed missing collision in several locations
- Aligned some floating meshes to the floor
- Trimmed some overgrown bushes
- Added some detail lighting and made the spaceport roof more shiny
- Fixed excessive numbers of particle effects spawned for the background combat scenes
Thanks everyone for playing the game with us in the last few days, it's been a blast!
Onwards and upwards!
Update 14 is live!
Hey there AFF Community!
The time has finally come to update the public branch with all the changes we've been making to the game over the last few months! We've received some incredibly detailed feedback while releasing the test builds - big thanks for that! AFF certainly wouldn't be the same game without all the late-night discussions with our lovely Community!
While our work here is certainly not done, we now feel like the new UI and all the massive changes it brings are ready to be released to a wider audience. So just to recap what this update brings:
New UI
We've completely redone the HUD and all the menus. AFF's gameplay should be much easier to understand thanks to that - the HUD is more readable, the objectives are clearly highlighted, the flow of the menus is more user-friendly. We're aware not everybody will like with the new, less stylized aesthetic. We're not 100% sure whether these are the final looks of the UI either but iterating upon it is also an order of magnitude easier than what we had to deal with in the old UI. That means we can also respond to player feedback with fixes and new features much faster now.
New soundtrack
The game now features an entire album's worth of music by celebrated cinematic composer Edward Patrick White. The tracks are picked dynamically based on the current situation around the player - ambient melodies for calmer periods, more up-beat tracks for combat and faction-specific themes for intro and debriefing sequences.
Visual customization
We had to add something special to reward our awesome Community for the patience you guys and girls have, for dealing with us and waiting for the public update for so long. We've implemented a camouflage customization system where you can pick patterns and colours to paint onto your armour. Separate themes can be selected for infantry and each vehicle. If you don't want to see other players' customization, we've also included an option to not display them on your client in the settings menu.
We're not sure yet whether we'll tie it to any sort of in-game progression or achievements. We do understand that progression appeals to a lot of gamers but we don't want a feature to exist purely for the sake of unlocks. The AFF ethos is to give players ways to have fun in their own way, express their own style of playing, not artificially limit the choices. So we'll see where this goes, nevertheless we want this feature to be a milestone marking a new period for AFF - a period of new, shiny content.
Lukather Seaside Spaceport maps
Speaking of content, we've added 2 maps, for the Incursion and the Territories game modes, based on the old Lukather Spaceport location we had in the early prototypes of AFF. You'll get to fight through landing pads, cargo areas, passenger terminals and in the parking lots on this one, with plenty of opportunities for both close-quarters and long-range combat. These maps also focus on providing the players with more light-weight armoured assets - LAVs, mechs and gunships will help fighting through the tights areas between freight containers and damaged structures of the spaceport.
And we're just getting started with this! Watch this space for much more content coming your way in the nearest future! In one of the previous announcements we've also mentioned we'll be releasing experimental maps to the test branch after this giant update. We will probably skip doing that and instead release them directly to the public branch, and retire the test server for now. The reason for this is we don't want to split the small Community any further - and those maps aren't in particularly early stages either. They're close enough to completion to not be out of place on the public branch in the near future.
Other notable changes previously only present on the test branch include:
New spotting mechanics Spotted infantry only remain so while you have line of sight. Enemies generate a stationary "?" icon when they make noise or are tagged by friendlies when out of sight. Big vehicles - capital ships and tanks - will remain spotted all the time. This enables more nuanced gameplay, asking the players to be more aware of their surroundings, while at the same time keeping the big battles centered on key assets like capital ships.
Changes to Territories mode rules We've been experimenting with the Territories game mode and now blowing up enemy vehicles will impede opposing team's progress, subtracting a few percent from their score accumulated by capturing objectives. How many percent depends on the importance of the destroyed vehicle. This should encourage the teams to conserve their assets more carefully, especially defend their battleships in space. When your team's vehicle is lost, the whole team will get a message informing about the setback.
User settings should no longer be wiped between updates Configuration files were getting overwritten whenever Steam decided to touch them, resulting in losing loadout configurations, graphics settings and so on. They should now merge correctly every release instead of getting overridden, unless we deliberately need to reset some settings.
Smoother interactions on boarding and docking We've put a lot of effort into making the ships behave in a more stable manner on docking and boarding, especially online. Dropships should now properly attach to enemy hulls without phasing through the target ships or station and fighters will dock for rearming much more gracefully.
One thing conspicuous by its absence is the tutorial in the main menu. We had to disable it because, with the advent of the new UI and all the changes to the game mechanics, it got really outdated and broken. We'll re-introduce it in a more comprehensible form in the nearest future.
Whole changelog can be found under the link below, as it's simply too big to fit it into a Steam announcement:
If you got a feedback on anything in the game, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!
Another test build ready to go!
Hey there AFF Community!
As we've mentioned, we're putting one more version on the test branch. We'll monitor it for a few days there and, if nothing looks spectacularly broken, this will be the final one in this batch of test versions. Which means it will finally be moved to the public branch, with all the new UI, soundtrack etc., followed by plenty of new content in the near future.
Come shoot us in the face on the test server so we know it works properly!
Changelog:
Added a first, simple version of a dust effect in space to make the movement of your ship more immediately readable
Added a timeout to the warp-in point selection to prevent idle players from blocking ships, if no point is selected the ship will automatically jump in after 30 seconds
EVR heavy firemode damage reduced by 20%
Doors in Fortress shifted a bit to be less exploitable
MGA, SAR and TT4 now slightly less accurate across the board - 20% reduction in recoil supression when crouched, bumped up recoil when aiming down sights to make them less obnoxiously effective at range
Reduced the range at which flares attract missiles by 30%
Redeploying via TacMap has no 10s penalty now. Let's see how that works, if it's too exploitable we'll tweak the values again
Dropships should no longer phase through half the map when leaving a station after boarding in online games
Dropships should no longer jitter around the boarded ship when viewed by another online clients
Boarding and rearming icons now easier to see and with the logic of when to display them adjusted a bit
Bots will try to take cover a bit more often
Silverback now won't do a barrel roll at every opportunity (awwww)
Capturing objectives now not sometimes blocked by enemy presence. Each additional member capturing increases capturing speed by 10%.
Hacking objectives now give the same amount of command XP as all the other types of objectives on completion
Countermeasures cooldown time now shown on the HUD
Boardable enemy ships can now be found in the TacMap even when not boarded, so the commander can issue orders on them
Reduced the number of burning/corroding effects that can be shown on ships and vehicles, and modulated it by vehicle size
Improved formatting of map descriptions in the operations menu, server browser, debriefing and faction selection menu
Fighters launching from stations should no longer obsessively try to faceplant into a random wall
Fighters and dropships should no longer spin out in a random direction after boarding or rearming
Fighters rearming at Halifax no longer entering the station backwards
Blocked some exploitable locations in Irega and Lacroix
A lot of collision, navigation and lightmap fixes in Meudeverre, Ixion, Irega, Errah, Mazikeen and Lacroix
Halved knife charging time
Fixed damage being incorrectly calculated for a charged-up knife
Audio volume settings now properly applied when opening the main menu for the first time
Fixed a bunch of misaligned meshes inside the briefing rooms
Fixed getting stuck in the warp-in point selection menu
Fixed commander voting menu not refreshing the number of votes properly
Fixed a few typos in map descriptions
Fixed driver camera rolling uncontrollable on land vehicles
Fixed an issue with capture times of objectives being handled differently between land and space
TacMap now more reliably opening on the expected location
Fixed FOV settings affecting TacMap icons in a weird way
Fixed display of briefing rooms in TacMap
A reminder how to switch to the test branch, if you fancy taking a look at this version before we propagate it to the public branch: In your Steam library, right click on AFF, pick Properties and then on the tab called “Betas” change the dropdown to “Test”. A server running the Test build will be up shortly as well.
If you have more feedback regarding the new UI or the game in general, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
