A new version of AFF is on the test branch, in response to the very in-depth feedback we've received from you in the last couple of weeks. It should resolve a lot of the bugs introduced by the transition to the new UI, as well as some long-standing annoyances (ship drift exploit, begone!)
It's fairly likely we'll still release another version on the test branch in a week or so, to wrap some details up. And if that proves to be stable and doesn't cause any major functionality issues, the new UI will finally make its premiere on the public branch.
Changelog:
Fixed a myriad of issues with the settings menu - dysfunctional keybinding, settings changing by themselves, audio options not sticking, not being able to disable ship windows completely etc.
Fixed an issue where multiple instances of a menu could be displayed on top of each other
Fixed issues with accepting ship offers via broadcast menu while alive
Fixed some superfluous updates and flickering happening in several menus in response to clicks and reloading the underlying data
Blocked being able to re-accept a vehicle drop offer during an already ongoing drop animation
Fixed dropships requesting warp point selection when parent ship's already jumped in
Fixed deploy button not showing cooldown state correctly on open
Fixed vehicle turrets' target command addressing
Holo sight should be more visible, less blurry and red now
Fixed new loadout preset creation
Corrected naming of vehicle chassis mod slots
Squadmember selection for ordering on click rather than on wave in the commrose now
Fixed a few tagging (HUD bracket) issues, tag will try to re-find the target if it becomes visible again
Smoke grenades now properly affect enemy tagging/spotting
Tagged target will now display a health bar under the bracket
Commander's and squadmembers' beacons (HUD icons) no longer occluded by level geometry
The locator function of the TacMap can now display squads, teammates and primary objectives on demand
Fixed TacMap breaking when trying to go to a fighter launch menu with an ignored vehicle drop offer
Decreased UI z-depth for less distortion on the tilted parts
Fixed vehicle railgun loadout stats display
Tweaked how weapon damage-at-range stats are displayed in the loadout menu
Fixed vehicle weapon aimpoints not aligning with the crosshair in the new UI in many cases
Nudged lead indicator opacity up a bit when near the crosshair
Added missing medal icons up to rank 25
Player names in chat now clamped to 18 instead of 15 characters
Boarding pod objectives should show up according to viewed location again
Game mode in the Operations menu now property defaults to offline instead of hosting a listen server and will remember your choice in subsequent sessions
Tweaked radar icon scaling to improve depth perception a bit
Added some basic confirmation pop-up and a bit of VO back in when issuing orders
Rewritten infantry and vehicle identification decals (name, squad, rank) as simple texture draws - should fix mystery endgame performance drops
Fixed the ship drift exploit, where you could propel ships up to ridiculous speeds by drifting sideways in no-grav flight mode. Flying diagonally also won't let you exceed the top forward thrust limit anymore.
After declining a vehicle drop you won't be offered the same vehicle for 5 minutes after that
Added missing victory/loss music triggers
Fixed menu music not looping
Knife lunge no longer triggered on friendlies
Knife no longer charges practically instantly and lunge only available on full charge
Removed erroneous inaccuracy off sniperrifles, increased recoil on pistols, tweaked the damage falloff curve marginally to make the pistols less useful for sniping
Widened capital ships' point defense area of effect so it's a bit more effective
Significantly reduced RID's lock/charge times
Renamed APC to LAV
Friendly spawns should now heal in addition to resupply
First-person (nose) camera rotation speed now constrained by ship's turning ability for less jitter and more direct control
Fixed a few issues in AI pathfinding on attack, notably they'll approach Igneous' final objective more cleverly now
Increased AI re-task rate, MILNET commander should be slightly more snappy now
Adjusted the Fortress Territories' TacMap mesh to be less horribly performance-intensive
Fixed lighting on the infantry dotted around the AIA briefing room
Removed some inconsistent and annoying camera shake usage on vehicle muzzleflashes
Fixed broken droppod pathing in Fortress
Shutting vehicles down with EMP bullets slightly more achievable now
Flares should be more effective now and affect all the missiles in an incoming bunch, not only a single one
Disabled the music track embedded in Territories briefing music
Removed the outdated whiteboards from the briefingrooms for now
Pistols can now be equipped in all three weapon slots in the loadout, for maximum gunslinger fun
Adjusted how some weapons are attached on the player's body when holstered
Adjusted the music track selection algorithm to ensure bigger variety of tracks throughout the game
Made a few very-low-level optimizations in the engine to speed a lot of common text operations up in the new UI
Hold-fire order should potentially work more reliably now
Fixed clearing of turret AI orders (freelance option)
Fixed the fail in turning burn/corrosion effects off - would last until the garbage collector decided to kill them
Burning/corrosion effects now properly clamped to 8 and 10 seconds respectively
Getting healed by repairgun or medkit shortens duration of burn/corrosion effects
Now it takes 8 incendiary detpacks, not 2, to kill a droppod
Fixed passenger LSP weapon typo leading to 10x damage
Fixed missing collision and stairs in Errah Territories
Fixed more collision holes in Irega and Plains
Fixed lock-on weapon mods sometimes resulting in unpredictable lock-on timing online
Just a reminder how to switch to the test branch, if you fancy taking a look at this version: 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!
Onwards and upwards!
New UI on the test branch!
Hey there AFF Community!
First and foremost, the words you all want to hear:
As the title says, a build with the brand new UI is on the test branch.
Every single piece of the user interface in the game has been redone, including the entire HUD:
It will probably sit on the test branch for the next couple of weeks before we move it over to the default, public branch. We’re sure the initial release of the new UI will bring with it some new bugs and potentially unpopular design decisions. We want to gather some feedback from the more adventurous among you before exposing the general public to it - especially about such features as the radar and the new spotting mechanics. Use the forums or our Discord to bury us in piles of feedback!
Just a reminder how to switch to the test 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.
One thing to be aware of - we've unfortunately disabled the tutorial in this build. It got broken at some point, we'll bring it back after the UI goes public, hopefully in a more user-friendly form than it was. This is really the very first iteration of the new UI build - the sounds for UI interactions are not yet final, it needs better auto-scaling to different resolutions etc.
But the big advantage of this new UI (and this will either sound like a marketing spiel or just an overly excited developer speaking) is that it lets us iterate on both the UI itself and the entirety of the game much faster now. Yes, that means taking feedback into account quicker and much more frequent updates. It was really hard for us to make you guys and girls wait so long for the next update - but we couldn’t have released it in the middle of replacing the UI, it integrates into far too many systems in the game.
To make the wait worth your while we’ve managed to arrange a little surprise:
AFF now features an entire album's worth of originally composed music. This should add further quality and variety to the game’s soundscape after the big audio redesign we did previously.
Also there’s something we’d like to address: A few members of the AFF Community brought up the notion that posting a recruitment ad, like we did 2 months ago, is apparently viewed as a bad sign in case of independent developers? That the studio is bleeding staff due to problems?
To be honest we were quite confused by that information, perhaps we’re not up-to-date enough on the intricacies of the indie scene. We’d like to dissipate any concerns though - we’ve never been better, we’ve expanded the team and are going full steam ahead (even if that means our usual slowly and permanently delayed pace;) ) towards more content and eventually exiting the Early Access stage.
In fact, a bunch of new, rather experimental, maps should appear on the test branch in a few weeks. And bits of content improvements by our new teammembers are already shining through even in this UI-centric build, like the new shields:
Changelog (as mentioned, on the test branch for now) :
New UI - hopefully more stable, less confusing and prettier! ESC opens the TacMap as usual, Tab now opens scoreboard, command and communications menus have been redone as mouse- or controller- driven rosettes.
Entirely new soundtrack – the game will also dynamically select tracks based on what’s happening around you and certain events during the match
New spotting mechanics – you can call out targets by hitting G when your crosshair is over the enemy but the enemies will also become spotted in an intuitive fashion when you’re in combat with them. Spotted targets will appear on your teammates’ HUDs as pings (question marks at the location where they were spotted) and fade out if not spotted again, or as full target icons if they have line-of-sight. Using an un-silenced weapon in the vicinity will also flag you with a ping on enemy HUDs.
Further audio effects upgrades
Drastically reduced view bob when walking while aiming-down-sights
Red-dot sights now always point at the center of the screen to align with weapon AIM
Rebalanced MLI's and RID's refire and lockon times to be less spammy, made the RID not 100% accurate in dumbfire, made bots use RID lockon better
Re-ranged (lowered in several cases) weapon movement penalties
Halved support XP income from using the multiwrench
XP streams rebalanced. Ranks now extend to 25, support income rate increased, you may drop a couple of ranks due to this but your xp has not been reset
Doubled carrier core lockout objective health
50% tougher capital ships
Normalized damage falloff ranges for vehicle passenger weapons so they reflect the hand-held equivalents better
Increased the gatling projectile speeds in space almost twice - let's see how well this works in a real networked environment
Adjusted TA's sprint pose so it doesn't cover half the screen anymore
Now possible to rearm fighters and dropships at fighterbases and carriers still in warp - perhaps a temporary solution until a more elegant is found
Adjusted briefing for Igneous
Improved AI navigation in Meudeverre
AI won't steal player-owned gunships anymore
Capital ships should no longer drift out of the battlefield when engines are disabled
Added a few lights to Irega's final room
Limited turrets to one deployed at a time (one per inventory slot, so if you pick 2 turret items in the loadout, you'll get 2 turrets)
Added shields to spawn rooms where they were missing
Downgraded dropship pilot weapons to their lightest variants
Stripped medium and heavy spaceship missiles of a superfluous firemode
Protected vehicle drops, briefing end and map voting against idle players
No order-location-proximity command points earned while idle or from idle players
Removed erroneous shell casing noises in space
Removed the casing effect and audio from the DK11A to better represent its supposed use of caseless GAR ammo in the lore
New look for the main menu backgrounds. Thoughts please!
Added missing TacMap models to a few locations
Drastically decreased EVR turret's range
Deployable turrets will now trigger lock-on warning upon acquiring target
Turret AI will no longer keep tracking the target ad-infinitum, even beyond their configured sensor range
Experimental short-range lunge added to the knife when fully charged and aiming at an opponent
Removed some floating meshes in the Ranger's interior
Prefixed bot names with "(AI)" globally
Added and amended a lot of descriptions for loadout items (no more "lasers pew pew", sorry)
Replaced several "hold" objectives with "hack" objectives
Adjusted passenger turret behaviour to be less affected by motion of the parent vehicle
Adjusted battleship spawnpoints
Significant weapon damage balancing pass
Added an extra clip to EVR and A420
Adjusted the appearance of all land-side shields
Ixion's background planet upgraded and optimized
Fixed .ini files getting overwritten whenever Steam decides to touch them, resulting in losing loadout configurations etc. Should now merge correctly every release instead of getting overridden.
Fixed squad assigning logic, players should no longer be all thrown into a single squad after transitioning to a new map
Fixed issues in AI order following
Fixed several silly typos in loadout items ("vulnearbility", "amour")
Fixed several cases of the game timers breaking down due to misconfigured phases
Fixed Lacroix spawnpoints and multiple navmesh issues
Fixed lighting in several instances of dropship and droppod interiors
Fixed issues with bots pathing towards objectives in Fortress
Fixed incorrect offset applied to sights when strafing
Fixed several pathing issues, rock collision and improved routes to objectives in Fortress and Igneous
Fixed pathing in Ixion's station hangars
Fixed default AIA character materials to actually have the AIA identification symbols
Fixed some missing collision and being able to fall out of the map in Irega
Fixed superfluous Griphon appearing in Ixion Territories
Fixed AI navigation in the Khamun's interior and fixed a few instances of missing launch sequences for fighters
Fixed missing staircase in Errah Territories
Fixed a few destroyable decorations in Fortress
Fixed inability to exit spectator mode in some cases
Fixed AI firing at their own objectives
Fixed being able to shoot through some terrain parts in Errah
Onwards and upwards!
And Happy Easter to those celebrating the occasion!
Scramble All Talents!
Hey there AFF Community!
We've got something unusual to talk about today.
We’re reaching out for artists and level designers to help us expand production on Angels Fall First. Over the past year, many folks have joined in our development with feedback, ideas and discussion. But we are sure there’s plenty of you among the Community with the skills to put some of that into practice!
The core AFF team consists of game industry professionals and an elite cadre from related fields, many of whom owe their careers to the experience built up through work on AFF. We’re asking if any of you would like to join us and help develop AFF!
We’re mostly looking for level designers and 3d artists, as those are the departments we need to expand the most. But if, by some miracle, you’re a coder experienced in UScript and have nothing better to do, feel free to contact us as well (No, really do. Please. We can’t believe you exist!)
What we offer:
This is a paid job. We’re not a large studio, we can offer part-time work for modest sums. We offer some compensation per job, and we can also pay a percentage of profit from sales of the game.
Flexible time. We built AFF in evenings and weekends, so we’re open all hours and understanding of your other commitments.
Real-world experience. We’ve made and fixed almost every mistake in game development over the years, and we can offer a great environment to increase your skills outside the AAA industry. Big studios would much prefer to employ somebody who knows how to correctly lightmap a mesh, fix geometry errors and create smooth collision for a map - and the track record of our team members proves AFF is an excellent point on the path to a solid career.
Fun! Angels Fall First is a great toybox. We have a ton of fun experimenting with new content and being an independent studio lets us play with and improve upon tech and tools a lot. It’s a much better supported environment to realize game ideas than just setting out with UE4 or Unity and a bunch of web documentation.
A genuine outlet for your creativity. AFF is by no means a democracy but we’re pretty laid-back as far as game studios go. All team members are a constant source of internal feedback regarding every feature. Furthermore if you prove your skill in any given area you’ll get more creative freedom to try out your own ideas.
What we’d like from a candidate:
Portfolio. A proof of skills, some examples of previous work. It doesn’t have to be super-professional, it doesn’t have to be from the gamedev industry in particular. We all started out as modders.
Experience with UE3 in any form will be greatly preferred, whether professional or with the UDK or UT3 modding back in the day. It’s not that crucial if you’re a 3d artist but it certainly helps to be familiar with the content pipeline. For level designers some knowledge of the editor is essential. If you have experience with UE4, CryEngine, Unity, Source etc. instead - we are aware some of the skills translate directly between those platforms. Portfolio will always be the deciding factor.
Asset creation experience if you’re an artist. Good knowledge of basic polygon modelling, texture unwrapping and material creation.
Commitment. If you’d really like genuine experience in the visual and mechanical disciplines of game development, you’ll have to help us with some of the less fun jobs. We need collision doctored, meshes upgraded or fixed, levels debugged, problems solved and testing performed. It’s not all glory, but these are the skills that the industry needs more than pretty models.
Ability to work as a part of a team. Game development is massively interdependent. We’ll require you to work under the direction of our core staff to get some tasks done in a timely fashion. On top of this, we’re as much a group of gamers as we are a studio. We’d like anyone working with us to be part of this culture.
We’ll ask you to sign a legal Non-Disclosure Agreement as a matter of course.
We’ll reserve the right to withhold compensation if you can’t deliver any work that you’ve agreed to undertake, and the agreement will also offer you protection ensuring that we won’t rip you off in any way.
So if you’d like a chance to work on an awesome game with awesome game devs, please get in touch via email to info@strangelyinteractive.com or, even better, catch us on Discord https://discord.gg/RpdCCvV so we can talk to you directly.
Here’s some examples of the content you’ll have a chance to work on. These are maps at different states of completion, in need of your art or level design proficiency:
... and a Happy Space Year!
Now that Christmas has passed and everyone's more or less woken up, we've moved the new build from the test branch to the public one. So officially now:
Update 13 is live!
The changelog from the Christmas post still stands, with a few additional tiny fixes to maps thrown in for good measure.
Again, the whole AFF team would like to wish you all a Happy New Year with a ton of awesome space games to play and technological breakthroughs to witness!
Onwards and upwards!
Merry Space Christmas!
Hey there AFF Community!
We would like to wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and for any Holidays you're celebrating to be the happiest ones yet!
And of course we wish you a lot of awesome games in the upcoming year!
Meanwhile we've prepared a patch that takes care of some of the annoying issues that resurfaced after the last update. Mostly graphical and collision-related glitches, but we've also addressed the concerns people had about the turret AI and anti-vehicle weapons locking on through walls.
We'll put this patch on the test branch for now and push it to public after Christmas most likely, unless there's a big demand on Discord to do otherwise. You can opt into the test branch by right-clicking on AFF in your Steam Library, opening Properties, going to Betas and selecting "test" from the dropdown there. We'll set up a test-branch-compatible server shortly as well.
The reason for the patch going on test branch for now is mostly that we don't want to force all the players into downloading a gigabyte-heavy update now. People might've just bought the game and the Steam pipes are already under a heavy strain and not necessarily working full-speed. Speaking of patch size - this one might seem unusually big but that's because we're experimenting with how the game is packaged. Changing this makes you download a different structure of files this time so the update is big, but hopefully will help minimizing the size of subsequent updates.
Alongside the ongoing work on the new UI we've also implemented a system that will help us skin characters, weapons and vehicles in an easy way, so that we can provide the players with more customization options in the future. The game might decide to test this feature in an appropriately Holiday-themed fashion at one point, watch out;)
Update 13 changelog (on the test branch for now) :
Weapons with multilock and fire-on-release mechanisms will no longer lose their clientside firing sequence (no more silent swarms and AFX)
Fixed looped FX from ship component damage persisting past ship's death and floating in space
Collision fixes to ramps in Yin Tao Shan and Irega, fixed missing floor boards in Yin Tao Shan
Rebalanced damage by range for the fighter guns (TT4, TT18, flechette)
Fixed AI pathing on multiple staircases in Errah Territories
Wobbly vehicle camera should now be much less noticable online
Heavy caliber bullets now deal slightly more damage to vehicles and buckshot does less
Fixed some interactions for launching fighters incorrectly persisting past carrier's destruction
Adjustments to the routes into the final Igneous objective
Fixed an issue where the AI would get hellbent on shooting at one target until they go down
Bots and turrets should no longer indiscriminately lock on through geometry
Added a quick intro sequence to Ossidiace
The terrain will no longer turn super low-res on the lowest graphical settings
Fixed a few collision holes inside the Anubis
Fixed a collision hole in Dragoon interior and a few more inside the station in Meudeverre
Fixed certain weapon mods (targetting, reload) incorrectly stacking for an over-exaggerated effect
Fixed chargeable weapons getting stuck in their firing state
Minor tidy up of the briefingroom whiteboards
Fixed a rare case of infantry weapons playing their muzzleflash after reload when you hit ironsights instead of the trigger
Optimized internal damage effects in the Huginn
Fixed EVR turret holding offset as seen by other players
Fixed lighting settings of the weapons found in the shooting range
Turned one of the cafeterias inside the Huginn into an armoury room with repair tools that can be picked up
Turrets will no longer track their targets through walls till it's dead - instead they will do a short "blind lead" sequence where they fire along the path the target was moving on before hiding
MLI and RID now require a line of sight to lock on, although MLI has a fair bit of leniency before it un-locks so you can still use it as a barrage weapon from behind an obstacle after initially locking on
RID now deals a bit of area-of-effect damage but impairs the shooter's aiming speed while charging. Also it's fairly inaccurate unless aiming down sights
Slightly decreased the damage debuff the suppressor mod was giving to weapons
Added a tower on the left-side final objective of Irega
Shifted some rocks in Fortress to fix collision issues and break the line-of-sight between objectives
Rebalanced EMP-based damage (EMP rounds, mines and grenades) so that they're really effective against shields as intented (a single grenade configured with a double-EMP payload will collapse a deployable shield)
New miscellanous glass breaking sounds
Improved AI pathing around several objectives in Errah and Fortress
Added more "waiting for launch" camera variants in Anubis and Huginn
Changed how textures are packaged in the release build, should decrease the size of subsequent patches if no relevant textures are touched
Lots of minor adjustments to the bay in Lacroix
Added a warning message appearing when Huginn is destroyed at Ixion (before the warning about no more modules left as spawning points kicks in)
Implemented a backend for swapping camo textures on infantry, weapons, vehicles and ships for future use
It's Christmas!
Onwards and upwards!
The Steam Awards!
Hey there AFF Community!
Apparently there's this Steam Awards thing going on. Pick your games and if you think AFF fits into any of the categories at this stage, nominate us too!:)
Meanwhile we're working on a hotfix-kinda-patch that should land in a few days. There's a few small things that resurfaced after the last massive update - mostly visuals-related - and we'd like to correct them as soon as possible.
Also, a teaser of things to come a bit later. Now that we've released the audio update, the art team has moved more in the direction of maps and once we complete some additional code for unique Incursion scenario features, we'll have a few maps like this ready to go:
AFF is still on sale for a couple more days by the way, if anyone fancies a copy:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Update 12 is live!
Hey there AFF Community!
This update is all about sound! Our Community listened to our sound effects and deemed them horrific. So in turn we listened to the Community and replaced practically all the weapon audio in the game. There's new gunfire sounds that should feel like they actually pack a punch, new explosions, new impact sounds, all with proper distance-based pitch shifts. Colliding ships will now sound like a proper metal hull being bent and scraped. We've also been experimenting with different hit confirmation sounds, replacing the annoying beeps from before. Everything in the game should now sound more impactful and powerful. Significant improvements to the audio backend should also get rid of the issues with sounds cutting out in intense firefights.
Alongside the audio upgrade we also made all the weapons feel much more responsive online. Previously a lot of the gunfire effects (like muzzleflashes) waited for a response from the server before playing, which introduced a significant audio-visual lag. We completely dropped that mechanism as it's far more suitable for competitive shooters which need to represent the server-side state perfectly. We're instead running a client-side simulation of the firing sequence to play the effects now - this doesn't mean client-side hit detection or anything like that, just that the purely audio-visual effects are immediate.
The third part of the update that makes the gunfights more snappy and satisfying is the damage rebalance. We reduced the time-to-kill somewhat by making all the weapons deal around 15% more damage to infantry and the explosion damage fall off less with distance from the epicenter. AFF's time-to-kill is still quite high compared to other FPS games, especially when playing the heavy suit - but we think this change makes it feel much more rewarding when shooting at an enemy while still not making the characters too squishy.
Full changelog can be found below as always (and it's really worth reading through, there's a ton of tweaks and balance changes there, some pretty experimental) but in addition to all the fixes we added two new space maps for the Territories mode:
Ossidiace - a huge storage yard for the fleets
Eye of God - a research and sensor station in a nebula
There's also two new fighter weapons to play with, filling the niches of a heavier machine gun and a close-range burst fire weapon:
TT18S autocannon
Flechette gun
So what's next? While part of the team is working on the new UI (we'll talk more about it in a separate update), we also want to fix the most performance-affecting issue in the game next - the ship windows. It's quite a bit of low-level work but since the performance problem with those seems to be more and more pronounced on newer PCs, we have to tackle this as soon as possible. For some people it might even mean a 50% boost in framerate so we think the effort will be quite worth it. Now that a lot of the backend work on the audio and UI is done we'll also delegate more manpower to finishing and improving the gameplay mechanics needed for new Incursion maps.
Changelog:
New gunfire sounds with distant variants
New bullet impact sounds and hit confirmation sounds
New explosion sounds with distant variants
New collision sounds, specific to ship sizes
More ambient sound in space and warp, stations will now play radio-transmission-like ambient noise around them
New and improved audio cues management system - weapon sounds now much easier to set up and no longer prone to excessive overlapping and cutting out
Optimized several audio cues getting spammed, like ship engines and footsteps
Suppressed weapons will now properly play their specific audio cues on fire
Silencer mod won't break on switching firemodes anymore
Fixed the corrosion and flame effects blocking the infantry on the server
Fixed AIA loadout selection always resetting to default after map change
Fixed character location getting incorrectly adjusted upwards by the engine under certain conditions
Fixed characters sometimes touching volume boundaries through walls plus some optimizations to character touch functions
Fixed bots being unable to aim at incapacitated teammates to revive them
Fixed the drone countermeasure not showing up clientside
Fixed shield projector firemode breaking the firing rate on certain guns like the EVR
Fixed an optimization to impact effects sometimes resulting in them not playing at all on certain hidden collision objects
Fixed some pooled particle effects not being scaled correctly
Fixed double-tapping movement controls in ships sometimes breaking the velocity displays
Fixed unnamed spawnpoints in Khamun
Fixed inaccurate deployable turret collision
Fixed incorrect interior materials on tanks and APCs
Fixed skinning, smoothing groups and turret stub texture on the Turtle
Fixed collision bugs in Fortress
Fixed a few pathing and railing collision issues in Irega
Fixed some meshes (some bunker walls for example) having wrong physical material
Fixed collision holes inside stations and added more railings to prevent people from falling off the catwalks
Fixed culling configuration in a few maps
Fixed broken light setup in Lacroix
Fixed occasional spawning in Crickets when no boarding module is attached - should no longer result in spawning in a locked-out module
Rewritten the glitchy reload-while-inactive mechanism for vehicle weapons
Removed erroneous LOD mesh from the Dragoon - was causing serious issues with turrets
Ixion station now with a more involved and tactically-challenging objectives setup in the final stage
Territories mode maps now with a consistent briefing displayed in the briefing room
Commander AI tweaked to be more effective at defending
Bots more focused on shooting at objectives
Muzzleflashes now a bit more clear and consistent between all the infantry guns
Gunfire impact effects now slightly scaled up by distance to give them improved visibility - especially player's own gunfire
First-person gunfire effects now played immediately clientside for much better responsiveness, no longer need a verification from the server
Area-of-effect damage like explosions now has less falloff - same effect range but less damage reduction closer to the edges
Rebalanced all land-side weapons, infantry will now take around 15% more damage, perceivably reducing time-to-kill across the board
Less floaty and more reliable landmines and spacemines
Igneous now with lava-like pits below, a bit different lighting
Igneous pathing redone to make the AI understand defending/attacking better on that map
Dying from a capital ship explosion shockwave should now result in a proper kill message.
One more instance of "killed with weapon" down
Optimized and improved Huginn's internal damage effects, including the boarding breach effects
Patched up some collision holes in Huginn's interior
Optimized culling of ships' internal effects
Destructible objects in Lellebah made purely clientside to reduce the network strain
Small optimizations to particle systems spawning
Removed a legacy function that blocked player suiciding under certain conditions, sometimes preventing a proper timely respawn
Gamepad buttons keybinding should now be properly saved
Added better defense pathing for the AI in Fortress
Added center dot to MLI targeting screen
Infantry sprint speeds adjusted to nerf the ridiculously good heavy servo build right back to where it should be
EM sensor suit mods should now detect deployable turrets properly
S77 shotgun now has a 2-shot burst altfire mode instead of semi-auto
Heavily rebalanced space missile homing capabilities and ranges - AFX missiles should be much more effective now
New fighter weapon: TT18S - a high-caliber autogun, heavier than TT4 but not as slow firing as the ballistic cannon
New fighter weapon: Flechette gun - a short-range, fast-firing rail weapon, excellent for shredding other fighters in close combat
Igneous now has a new path up to the 3rd phase objective, through a staircase to the balcony. Should help with the significant advantage the defenders had when staying completely safe on said balcony
Rebalanced vehicle counts in Errah, Fortress and Yin Tao Shan - especially defenders' available vehicle counts nerfed a bit in Fortress since it's a well defendable location anyway
Adjusted the ship component damage effects, less random electric arcs now and smaller effects for less significant damage
Replaced the disfunctional Tracer MG with a standard TT4 machine gun as Partisan's secondary weapon
Dhaka's secondary machine gun rebalanced to be more in line with the MGAs on other vehicles
Dropships now disabled in Mazikeen
New and probably rather experimental functionality for MNL - charged shot with up to 8 grenades launched in a quick succession
Added missing Ranger core objective description
Added proper warpspace icon
Added proper ion cannon icon
Placed multiwrench tools scattered around ship interiors, for now as a balancing experiment in the carriers
Don't forget to pay a visit to our Discord server, it's where all the cool kids hang out these days!
Onwards and upwards!
The Roadmap
Hey there AFF Community!
We promised a post that’d give you all a bit of an insight into the future of AFF so here it comes. It’s a rough outline of what we want to do with AFF in the coming months, both in terms of development and proceedings around the out-of-early-access release. If you want to stay even more up-to-date with the development of the game, come visit us on our
Discord channel.
First, let’s get all the formal stuff out the way:
AFF will come out of Early Access in a few months - but no idea about the specific day or even a month. We never give any exact dates on anything because we just pull the trigger on any release whenever we think it’s done. Take a look at the roadmap below to see what’s still left before we can call the game ready for a 1.0 release.
Nothing changes as far as the AFF financial model goes - we’re still funding the development out our own pockets. What’s important about that is the large chunk of the income from Early Access sales will go exclusively towards promotion.
A few weeks before the release (so again, a few months from now) we’ll start advertising the game through all the possible channels. We have a sizeable list of youtubers, gaming sites and other media which we haven’t used so far and will definitely contact when the time comes. We don’t have any plans for sponsored videos, we feel like the game should be able to defend itself on its own merits in video review form, but we do want to invest in advertisement on several sites.
To combat the low online population plaguing the Early Access version even further we’ll do free/discount weekends and similar events around the 1.0 release. Despite keeping the game a bit under the radar so far we did get in contact with a lot of lovely people and intend to gather as many players as possible for the release. Being an indie title we obviously can’t expect to retain a massive online population after the initial around-release influx but we’d be happy to keep at least 2 full servers going. We’ve done massive optimizations to the netcode of the game to make sure the situation from around the Early Access release doesn’t repeat itself and the new players don’t bounce off a badly running server.
We also have plans for adding a “Quick play” option to the game which will connect you to the most suitable server instantly - we feel like a lot of potential players look at the server browser, see the low playercounts and quit, which subsequently contributes to even lower playercount. It would also be in order to highlight our full bot support even more - and that even the servers with low playercounts are fully playable.
Additionally next month we want to set up a devblog-kinda-thing on our website (and probably link to it through Steam news as well). Probably partially in video form and partially in text, depending on the topic. This is less for promotional purposes and more as a means of documenting all the tricky technical stuff we do to make AFF work - how we set up our ship interiors, how all the sub-components of ships work, how our bullets can pierce walls etc. Our lead artist already started streaming a bit of random development sessions and we hope the AFF Community would also like to hear about the more obscure low-level intricacies of how the game works.
And what about post-release? This highly depends on the popularity of the game at that time. There’s a set of features we want to keep adding to the game even after the 1.0 release - again, take a look at the roadmap below.
If AFF achieves a reasonable success there’s a few options we’ve been thinking about. The most straight-forward one would obviously be just supplying the game with further content - maps, ships, weapons etc.
Another would be modding, but this is something we’ll have to gauge after the release - both in terms of people being interested and us being able to actually afford it. Providing and maintaining an SDK is a huge expensive time-sink.
The most far-fetched option would be a more cinematic single-player (or rather coop) campaign. It’s something we dreamed of since forever but creating experiences like that is hugely expensive - animations, voiceover, scripted sequences, it’s all a gigantic money and time investment. Maybe after the post-release dust settles we’ll consider alternative means of funding such a campaign as a separate kickstarter’d game? This is a song of a really distant future anyway, right now we have this game to finish!
Speaking of which, let’s jump to the more technical stuff. We’ve created a simple outline of the features we want to finish before the game leaves Early Access and add after that period:
This is by no means an internal tracker of the features we’re working on at the moment - that’d be an incomprehensible mess of notes and british curses;) It’s just a representation of what we want to do, available publicly for maximum transparency. The cards are marked with coloured labels based on whether we expect them to get added after 1.0 or in the EA phase - it’s really just a guess though, we might shift the priorities. Additional benefit of creating this roadmap is that Trello has a voting functionality built in - which we might use in the future to gauge how much the community is interested in a given feature.
Okay, so going through the stuff on the roadmap:
We fixed the most game-breaking netcode issues but there’s a few things in the AFF networking that still could use a boost. In addition to optimizing the sheer amount of data sent between server and the clients we want to move certain actions to the client’s side. Before this sparks any controversy - this doesn’t mean client-side hit detection or client-authoritative gameplay code. We merely want to decouple things that don’t need server verification from the legacy netcode we inherited from UT - this means the weaponfire effects and stuff like that should be more responsive. To accompany this we want to improve on the impact effects and the whole visual sequence that happens when you get hit or incapacitated - vfx, animations, kill-cams etc. This all ties into some upgrades we already started introducing into our animation system so both the combat- and movement-related animations should feel way less glitchy after we’re done.
One area where the game still stumbles on a technical level is the CPU load - we need to optimize the AI calculations, possibly by deferring them to a different thread, since currently you get much better performance running server-client than you get with a standalone local instance. There’s also a nasty problem with the windows on the ship where you look out into space - culling and rendering mechanisms of those viewports are suboptimal for our use case. Those two issues will have to be resolved before the game can leave EA.- fortunately we’ve already identified what’s wrong and fixes are in progress.
Now, the most near-future stuff:
We’ve replaced practically all of combat audio in the game - gunfire, explosions, impacts - and added more ambient sounds around the maps. Our lovely sound artist is getting a few last samples done as we speak so expect that massive audio update in the next patch in a week or two. This revamp also necessitated a couple improvements to the audio backend which is now better optimized and should no longer randomly cut sounds off when there’s too much happening around you.
The new UI is of course the biggest content change going on right now. The menu screens are far into development while the HUD (the most complicated part) is maybe less than 50% done. It’s all still weeks away from being done but you can already see how much more legible the new UI is going to be:
One of the things the new UI will let us do much more easily is a meta-game mode that’ll tie in a sequence of maps on a server (or in solo play), similar to a Galactic Conquest mode from a certain old shooter ;) This is something we always wanted to do and there’s been a pretty vocal support for that in the Community. So far we’ve only done some preliminary design on that, menu mockups, gameplay considerations and such, the actual mode will require much more work since all the maps will have to work both ways - with both factions taking turns in defending or attacking a map. But it will definitely be introduced into the game at some point, very likely tying into the completely new feature of commander powers - eventually giving the commanding player on the team an ability to call down orbital strikes, artillery, support drops etc.
There’s also a handful of gameplay features we want to implement to make the game more true to the AFF lore, to accompany the new version of our in-depth universe wiki which is in the making. Most importantly drones, which are plentiful in the AFF universe and so far haven’t been represented in the game. They will work like the countermeasures on vehicles and spaceships do right now, as cooldown-based abilities that can be triggered for all sorts of fun effects - building an instant cover in front of you, cloaking your character, providing momentary point defense etc.
Since the game is still in Early Access, we’re considering some significant changes to the existing systems too. Some improvements to player’s movement capabilities are in order and a rethinking of how spotting/tagging enemies works in the game right now. These are rather low-priority tasks right now so stay tuned for more information about those later, but it’s fairly likely they will see the light of day in the EA phase.
Progress on the new maps has been a bit on the slow side, admittedly. We teased a few of them but they’re not ready for public release yet. This is largely due to the code team being focused on all the fixes and those new maps still require some amount of code support. For example the AI has to be adjusted to board multiple stations and then escape after blowing them up and the planetary landing we’re doing on one of the maps does need some special handling to work back and forth. We’ll dedicate one of the next updates to the maps, their environments and gameplay features.
Hope this wall of text paints a comprehensive enough picture of AFF’s future. Nothing’s ever set in stone but this is generally the direction we will pursue and we hope our lovely Community sticks with us throughout the process :)
PS. Again, to stay as up-to-date as possible, come visit us on our Discord channel, it's the best place to meet both the dev team and a whole bunch of great people you can play AFF with!
And as usual...
Onwards and upwards!
Update 11 is live!
Hey there AFF Community!
It's been way too long but we're back with probably the most important patch for the game so far.
The biggest technical problem with the game up until now has been the bandwidth required by the space part. More players on the server meant more spaceships and more clients to send to, so the amount of data sent by the server grew exponentially. In fact there was so much of that data the server often didn't have enough bandwidth to handle it. That resulted in the game getting progressively more choppy for everyone and rubberbanding between the little useful data it could actually get from the server. This should be resolved now. We've rewritten the whole netcode for the space part - now it uses up to 100 times less bandwidth. And thanks to some new custom client-side prediction algorithms the flight model should now feel smoother, despite requiring only a fraction of the previous data from the server.
It's also worth noting that the game should now be able to force-select dedicated GPUs on systems with multiple cards. This has been a problem that reared its ugly head from time to time, especially on machines with Nvidia Optimus, and resulted in unexpectedly low framerates. Hopefully that won't happen anymore even if a GPU profile for AFF is not configured on the given system.
Okay, so now that's out of the way... we definitely owe the AFF Community some explanation - what the bloody hell took so long?
A combination of things really. The netcode rewrite was a spanner in the works we had to deal with and that took the longest. Thankfully the rest of the team produced a lot of other good fixes in the meantime - changelist below as usual. The other cause of the delay was the packaging process for the game just falling over completely. We spent couple of weeks hunting some really silly issues with Steam deployment, issues in configuration that were apparently always there but only just now decided to pop up in a harmful way. All of that coincided with some important personal events for our teammembers and thus even more weeks flew by.
Now the good news - development is back to full speed again and now even more manpower should go into making new content. New UI as a whole is still pretty far off - the HUD requires far more work if we don't want it turn into the same illegible mess it was last time - but the menus are coming along very well:
Other things are coming much sooner. I will make a separate post in a few days describing our plans for the upcoming months but just to tease things a bit - the next update will sound very different.
Changelog:
Completely rewritten space netcode, vastly decreasing bandwidth usage
Fixed Nvidia and AMD systems with multiple GPUs defaulting to the integrated rather than the dedicated card, resulting in abnormally low framerates
Fixed issues where Steam build would ship with an incorrect default configuration
Fixed misconfigured droppod modules in Igneous and Yin Tao Shan Incursion
Fixed rare UI hang/crash on going back to the menu and changing maps
Fixed main menu UI vanishing when you try to join a Steam invite from within the game and get bounced off due to connection loss
Fixed issues with radial damage not being applied reliably
Fixed colliding lightbeams in Igneous
Fixed area naming in Igneous
Fixed weapons getting unnecessarily dropped after the match has ended
Fixed weapons not raising from sprint pose on firing while sprinting
Fixed breachpoint animations not resetting correctly in a few ships
Fixed AI not firing arced projectiles reliably
Fixed AI stalling at defending too much
Fixed AI picking wrong weapons to fire after trying to use deployables
Fixed some backdrop meshes calculating lighting and navigation paths unnecessarily
Fixed some positioning of TacMap elements
Fixed some issues with respawning ships' interiors
Fixed floating landmines
Fixed teamswitching in singleplayer preventing enemy AI from getting their vehicle drops
Fixed manual redeploying blocking further vehicle offers
Fixed vehicle offers immediately disappearing
Fixed gunship AI minimum attack run distance
Fixed an issue with keybinding that wouldn't let you swap two buttons in the same period
Fixed bots often not being able to aim the reviving tool correctly
Fixed corrosion damage type not working correctly
Fixed invalid bullet spread calculations when aiming up or down
Fixed most instances of boarding wiring misbehaving
Fixed capital ship shields not getting reliably disabled when their internal component is sabotaged
Made shield and point defense components more consistent across all ships with their internal consoles and everything
Marked enemy ship interiors in red in tacmap and added pilot name and fixed when it says it's 'boarded'
Optimised shield collision checks a lot
Reduced medium missile tracking and speed
Added more damaged states to corvette interiors
Added glow to fighter engines on launch
Improved AI pathing when driving vehicles around defense points
Vehicle navigation precached before the match starts to reduce hitching
Improved hover vehicles' AI aim when not tracking an enemy
Clamped Incursion timer to max starting value, i.e. objective reward won't push it beyond the initial value in match settings - prevents long grinds at phase 3 if phases 1 and 2 were captured reasonably quickly
Removed outdated loadout setup for Locust which allowed it to still wield outdated weapons
Tickets in Incursion will no longer appear to go over 100% at the end of the match
AI should no longer cluster on exactly the same point with a "move to" order
Improved infantry physics performance
Added a very subtle chromatic aberration effect (can be toggled in the settings menu)
Removed motion blur effect from the game for now. It only ever worked on ships and looked bad even there.
Bots will now run backwards and look at their feet less often now
Nerfed gunship health/armour significantly
Changed the warp-in effects a bit. We like to play around with those so don't expect this to be their final form either.
Touched up the launch cameras a bit
Increased the range of the heavy capital ship weapons' audio
Adjusted system integrity values to reinstate the EMP-ing of vehicles. 2 well placed double-charge EMP grenades should take down a tank for 10-15 seconds.
Cleaned Khamun interior up a bit
Increased Dhaka and Basta thrust strength, should fare better on slopey terrain
Better velocity-based camera effects for ships, should feel more dynamic to fly them now
Multiple collision fixes in maps
More internal effects in dropships and droppods during boarding
Increased capital ship core explosion escape delay to 60s
Reduced dynamic light radius on several projectiles to improve performance dips, such as on swarm missile fire
Improved AI ability to board and rearm at hangars
Blocked accidental useage of rearming action during launch
Turtle and Partisan 20% tougher, to reflect relative lack of maneuverability
Come kick our stern on the servers! Onwards and upwards!
May Status Update
Hey there AFF Community!
We'd like to give you a quick update on the state of things between patches. Work is in full swing, in spite of us spending probably way too much time slaying cyberdemons recently. We might've been running a bit silent for the last couple weeks, mostly focusing on the low-level technical aspects of the game, but many different things are slowly clicking into place:
New weapon audio is getting done, starting with infantry weapons. We now have one of the guys practically dedicating all his effort to making the guns sound like they actually pack a punch. It will take several weeks to complete but this change should also come with improvement to the general feedback. More camera movements and effects when firing the weapons, that kind of stuff.
New UI is moving from pre-production phase into actual implementation. We made mockups for pretty much every UI part there is - to avoid repeating the mistake of just cobbling it together as we go. Everything's properly planned and organized now, we have a new content pipeline for creating the UI pieces. Functionally it's starting to all come together, we'll show some screenshots when we decide on the final artstyle of the UI. We're also investigating the possibilities the new UI might enable us to do easily - like adding even more customization and maybe even a galactic-conquest-like mode.
With the help of some Community members we've also managed to identify some culprits which make the game way more CPU-intensive than it should be on some machines. Frankly fixing those issues will take a bit more time but we'll keep you posted.
And the thing closest to actually being publicly released - the netcode improvements. We've been working hard on making the netcode a lot less demanding and that's almost done now. We fully expect this change to require careful tweaking over several subsequent patches because it's extremely hard to predict every online circumstance that might be affected. But the game should immediately benefit from the changes and not fall apart under the strain of several players flying their spaceships anymore.
Of course there's also more content incoming, so here's a couple of teaser screenshots:
Thanks for your ongoing support and stay tuned for more updates.
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!
