Snakeyes
A new bomb has been added to the game, the Mk82 Snakeye. These are high-drag bombs designed for high speed passes at low altitude. Their slow fall speed allows you to leave the blast area before they detonate on the ground or on a target. The new bombs can be found in a new loadout named "High Drag Bombs".
Threat Warning Display and Cockpit Switch Audio
You will now receive audio cues from the Threat Warning Display when:
- A radar has been detected (short beep)
- A radar now has you locked (constant beep)
This is meant to help prepare the game for the upcoming SAMs, by giving the player more tools to understand when they're in danger. This also ties into changes made to the ground vehicles to make them more threatening.
In addition to the threat audio, nearly all actions have switch audio cues to help provide feedback. It's minor, but I love the immersive feeling it gives when doing actions such as adjusting weapons or targeting.
Weapons Camera
A feature that has been on the backlog for a while, you can now watch munitions you've fired all the way to impact. This is a really fun way to get cool footage and see the effects of your weapons.
Balance Updates
While the tools to detect when you're in danger have gotten better, so have the threats themselves. AAA vehicles now use radar to detect and engage targets. Their fire is more accurate, and their ammunition now uses proximity fuzes.
In general, how deadly something is should be correlated to how much warning you get. The radar directed Shilkas and Vulcans in the game right now are more on the high end of what AAA should be, so they appear visually and audibly on the Threat Warning Display. In the future there will more variety to anti-aircraft fire.
The full patch notes are below.
Patch notes
New Features:
- Added four-stage weapon camera, default key: F6
+ Before launch: camera gives a view of the currently selected weapon under the wings
+ After launch: camera follows weapon from third person to the target
+ Before impact: camera cuts to a flyby to show the impact
+ After impact: camera follows what was hit by the munition
- Once weapon camera starts following a weapon, the normal external/chase/flyby cameras work on it as well
- Added Mk82 Snakeyes and High Drag bomb loadout
- AAA now hooked into sensor system and uses radars to detect and lock targets
- M163 and Shilka now have radar hardpoints their radars are mounted to
- Added NAV mode accessible by holding the "select next weapon" bind, or with the new default keybind: `
+ When in NAV mode, HUD reads NAV, and all weapons are safed
+ When in free flight, aircraft defaults to NAV mode
- New "select previous weapon" keybind added (defaults to mouse scroll up)
- Added chaff/flare counter inside the AV8B cockpit
- Added chaff/flare counter to the Threat Warning Display
- Icon size for both Radar and TWD can now be adjusted in settings (defaults to 75%)
- Option added to hide allies from the TWD and Radar
- TWD HIDES allies by default, radar SHOWS allies by default
- New audio levels available for tweaking in settings: Missile growl, interior engine, warning tones, cockpit effects
- When performing actions such as flaps, targeting, etc. various switch sounds will be heard for audio feedback
Balance:
- Proximity fuze on AAA bullets increased from 1 to 10
- Blast radius on AAA bullets increased to from 10 to 15
- "Fulda" houses have greatly reduced HP (100, 200, 300 for 1, 2, and 5 respectively)
- AAA is more accurate, but less precise
Improvements:
- Unity updated to 2020.3.30f1
- Reduced minimum allowable setting for camera smooth speed to 1
- Smoothed switch between padlock camera and cockpit camera
- Slight optimizations for all viewable objects
- Stores are now viewable with the camera system
- Cluster munitions "fake explode" so they can be tracked easily with a camera
- Indicated airspeed displays only positive value
- Updated credits with new music and sound contributions
- Center of mass offsets from destroyed wings greatly reduced (experimental change!)
+ Should make the plane act less weird after losing a wing?
- Pressing the nav mode hotkey while in nav mode leaves nav mode
- When leaving nav mode by selecting next weapon, the last selected weapon will still be selected
- Wording of range on the threat warning display and radar changed to clarify that it's miles
- Slight change to the threat warning display design
- Lower cloud layer is lower and more numerous
- High cloud layer uses larger Clouds
- Support for arbitrary number of cloud layers (no player-facing change)
- Ranging logic shouldn't put contacts at the very edge of the Radar/TWD anymore
- Minor stylistic updates to the radar display
- Audio sliders now snap in increments of 5
Bugfixes:
- Cockpit view shoulder peeking matches smoothing settings
- Camera no longer pans across the seat when looking over shoulder at opposite sides
- Fixed chase camera producing incorrect audio when the look at target has died
- No more "ghost page" in multi-selector dialog when exactly 10 items appeared on a page
- When a cluster bomb explodes near a building, the log is no longer spammed with warnings
- Removed unused hangar mode scene
- Fixed tracers going weird on origin shift (known issue: tracers can disappear for a single frame during origin shift)
- IR growl no longer continues after player death
- IR growl can no longer be heard in third person
- G text updates correctly in third person camera stats
- Switching weapons while in weapons camera will update the camera text correctly
- Fixed bug where bomb fall line could appear when looking 90 degrees off the nose
- Threat warning audio no longer plays after death or sortie end
- Threat warning audio can be heard and correctly updates regardless of if the HUD is visible (e.g. third person)