Last time we mentioned rolling out the more experimental, risky and game-changing stuff so here we go! Commencing a series of updates that will kick AFF into overdrive and definitely fix more stuff than they’ll break!
In all seriousness though, yeah, April Fools’ Day was just the other day but there’s not a single lie in this post. We’re really releasing a bunch of cool stuff now and in the coming week we’ll be trying out a new per-file packaging method for AFF - so we can start uploading more frequent and smaller-in-download-size updates. Visit our Discord to help us test it! This change will also make the game more friendly towards possible future modding support. Right now though:
AI navigation upgrade
Our bots were always quite capable in playing the game but they suffered from looking less clever than they were - primarily by getting visibly stuck and generally not navigating the maps as well as players could. We reworked this part of the AI completely and along the way improved their movement, combat tactics, weapon prioritization, dodging, weapon heat management, aim acquisition, target tracking, stance selection and so on. All of this results in the bots behaving so much closer to real players, especially when running around as infantry. Go give them a spin!
GU34
A powerful coil rifle available to both factions. Continuously charges up and discharges a portion of its capacitor on every shot. Fully charged shots will not only have increased stopping power and penetration but a near miss will often be just as fatal - so try to time those shots perfectly!
Oh yeah, and also we’re throwing two new grenade types into the mix to accompany this new gun - gyro grenades which can redirect themselves towards the closest enemy on every bounce; and springmines, popping up and exploding in the enemy’s face on proximity trigger.
Chat improvements and gameplay changes
A lot of quality-of-life changes have been introduced all over the place. The in-game chat will now be less cluttered and easier to send messages per-team or per-squad. Territories maps which had two or more LZs will now only ever pick one to be active at random - to reduce the snowball effect of having spawnpoints everywhere as well as spawncamping. The flashlight will also no longer bounce all over the place with the gun as a few of you have requested.
The list goes on and the full changelog can as always be found below. We’ll be back soon with even more awesome stuff though, so watch this space!
Changelog:
- New gun: GU34, a coil rifle with a charging mechanism that rewards fire control over holding down fire
- Revamped AI navigation and movement, strafing, weapon prioritization, weapon heat management, aim acquisition, target tracking, difficulty levels
- Improved AI commander's defensive strategies
- AI covering hack objectives after planting a hackspike should spread out more
- AI will now retain a degree of awareness when inside smoke
- Players and bots stuck on weird level geometry (like between several angular meshes) are now allowed to jump as a sort of an emergency measure
- Fixed infantry AI animations not looking quite right
- Tweaked AI loadout budget spending so they have more to put on secondaries and kit items
- Moved weapon overheat causing from EMP damage to incendiary (heat) damage and made it ramp up over time while the character is on fire
- Removed flashbang grenades and mines at least for now - buggy and almost noone used them
- Instead, added some more interesting grenade types - proximity-triggered springmines which pop up to face-height and explode there, and gyro grenades which will redirect themselves towards the closest enemy on every bounce
- Grenades with only one payload slot filled can now be thrown further
- Underbarrel shields now only affect movement speed when actually active and are wider but with more exposed legs
- Fixed a bunch of collision and visual oddities in the AIA briefingroom, made it more lively
- Droppods left behind by stage advance in Incursion are now scuppered to avoid confusing new players
- Territories maps with two or more LZs will only ever have one active at a time now, picked at random on map start or whenever a droppod is destroyed. Reduces snowballyness and LZ camping on those maps
- Redeployment restriction while the ship is going down now only applies to ships and stations with fighter bays
- Selecting a teammate on the scoreboard now highlights their squad too, for easier joining
- Rearranged priority of invalid loadout messages to be more readable
- The bars corresponding to combat, command and support points on the loadout screen will now be coloured red when over budget
- Toggling the HUD now bound to F5 instead of H by default
- ADS sensitivity now 70% instead of 60% by default
- Flashlight now always tied to the character and not the gun, for less annoyance
- Improved pathing and collision on Yin Tao Shan, Fortress, Errah and Tannhauser
- Improved some line-of-sight issues around Irega's cargotown objective and similar problems in Igneous
- Fixed missing weaponfire collision on lockers in Fortress' final building
- Lineships added to loadout
- Changed some capital ship weapons around and rebalanced others, especially Javert
- Explosions now do 2x more damage to shields on average
- Vehicle boost no longer interrupted and requiring a restart by leaving the floor, instead boost magnitude is reduced proportional to % wheels off ground to a minimum of 20%
- Tweaked Partisan handling, slides much less, fixed boost, still a bit derpy
- More responsive steering for Hare and Silverback
- Ion beams now pass on a bit of splash damage to nearby components
- Defense platforms in space now slightly less sturdy and show their health as objective progress directly
- Khamun given heavy plasma instead of medium plasma primary turrets
- Capital ship rail turret DPS increased significantly
- Increased DK11's DPS a tiny tiny bit
- Fixed DK11 not receiving an accuracy buff in single-fire mode correctly
- Increased P4's and SAR's reload times
- Slightly reduced the recoil kick of SGZ
- UDP's sighted accuracy improved, reduced reload time
- Reduced TT4's and ASG10's reload times
- Made crosshair spread indicator more representative
- Adjusted DK31's altfire accuracy changing with charge
- Fixed shotguns misreporting spread in loadout details;
- L9R given a very small cylinder of damage around the core of the shot like the RID, but only over 95% charged
- Halved the EMP damage dealt by underbarrel EMP rockets, 2 full shots to disable larger vehicles, still 1 shot to stun a buggy or a gunship if hit directly
- Underbarrel launchers can now get one "mag" replenished from ammo crates, just like the main gun, can still get unlimited resupply from spawnpoints
- Multitool now a lot less effective at healing EMP damage on disabled vehicles, could fix a tank practically instantly before
- Buffed the DPS of about every fighter primary bar the C90 and nerfed the fighter-mounted variant of S77 as its damage output was erroneously high by at least 2x
- Adjusted spread on space shotguns
- A lot of functional improvements to the in-game chat box: - Chat window can now be closed by right-clicking by default - Can now mute chat from players by selecting the player on the stats screen - Chat history persist through map changes, added a message which map it is - to make it more clear and to mark a break in the chat-history from previous map - Also made the chat auto-open if it had unsent content when the transition started - Made the chatbox persists through commander vote screen and deathscreen - Made the chatbox hide at the end of commander vote to preserve the map intro cinematic without interruption. Should reopen again once in TacMap - Chatbox now supports the standard Ctrl+C/V/X/A behaviour - Added Ctrl+say,team,squad-key to swap between modes of an open chatbox - Differentiated between chat messages, callouts and bot callouts by colour - Nuked tabulation, multiple spaces and newlines from strings - Squad chat no longer posts blank messages (including just spaces) - Consolekey no longer opens console while a chatbox is open - Assorted minor bugfixes (such as ; now being valid to use)
- Callouts - Team callouts will only be displayed in near-proximity - Callouts will make the beacon above players heads get larger while active - Callout will stick around for longer - Callouts will stick to edges of screen, like objectives
- Fixed several performance issues with vehicle turret AI
- Fixed some instances of stationary shields not blocking AOE damage
- Fixed projectile trails sometimes not rendering when viewed from a spaceship
- Fixed issues with rendering vehicles on the TacMap
- Fixed underbarrel shield not re-enabling after getting out of a vehicle and being able to cheese the shield recharge by switching guns
- Fixed underbarrel shield popping up inside a vehicle if you weapon-switch to a gun with it right before entering the vehicle
- Fixed inverse kinematics on weapon-supporting arms
- Reload animations now correctly play on infantry looking up or down
- Fixed issues with droppod turrets persisting through map stages
- Fixed vehicle offer showing up again right after drop
- Vehicle drop should no longer stall and trap the player in spectator view when the dropship fails to spawn for whatever reason
- Fixed Tab key not returning to main menu when used there to bring up the player stats
- Fixed some odd behaviour when going back to previously opened menu screen
- Fixed issue with the "Launch" button remaining red after going back under loadout budget
- Fixed objectives not displaying the hints of "launch a ship to get to it" correctly
- Fixed HUD incorrectly displaying heat level of previously overheated guns
- Fixed shotguns sometimes not being able to fire while resupplying
- Fixed being able to fire a charged-up weapon in a "weapons disabled" zone
- Fixed briefing hints not hiding with HUD toggle
- HUD should now correctly display shield bars for tagged droppods
- Corrected turret control group names on capital ships
- Fixed a few firemode names on the HUD
- Fixed "all objectives owned by team" warning in Territories getting broken by inactive carrier objectives
- Fixed mouse-over hitching in loadout menu
- Fixed ridiculous floating point precision in the faction choice screen's match status text
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!
