Today is a good day to play flight games! But why limit it to just a day when you can go all week long?
September 16 - September 23, Steam is hosting Steam Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Fest, with discounts for automobile sim, flight, and trains simulator games, including A-Spec First Assault and Absolute Territory.
And before I forget, here are the latest patch notes for A-Spec First Assault...
Patch Notes 0.15.0
Overview
- Added Chapter 3 to the main campaign
- New Point Defence mode (PDC Mode) for turrets to shoot down incoming missiles (not all turrets are PDC capable)
- A new Command Menu panel pauses the gameplay while you leisurely send orders, change targets, instead of mapping every control to a gamepad
Known Issues
- Autospeed match 'close' setting does not work as expected (but won't soft lock progress when required, and may require a little patience when used in scripting for Chapter 03 Mission 03 if you feel otherwise)
- Mesh fitting detailed (ship vs weapon collisions) and simple colliders (ship vs ship collisions) required for opponent faction ships (Fighter, Gunship, Carrier)
- Jump-out animations are not scaled correctly for ships bigger than a gunship
Added
- Chapter 3 main missions
- When the players ship turret is taken out, the weapon display for the turret will change to shows it's repair status until its back online
- Quick Actions Panel popup to allow control selection from a menu interface (not yet bound to a default key, recommend manual assign to 'F8' for QWERTY layout. See Flight - Other - Quick Actions Menu)
- Wingmen status panel also shows each wingman's current order being actioned
- Small Turret Guns can be put into Point Defence (PDC) mode (not yet bound to a default key, recommend manual assign to '#' for QWERTY layout. See Flight - Weaponry - Cycle PDC Modes)
- Turrets now prioritize targets based on a target order list based on target size (i.e. fighter > gunship > corvette > ...) and weapon suitability
- Primary gun slots now have and are restricted by mounting size restrictions
- Side mission weights are adjusted during play (less likely to repeat mission variant if you played it --- doesn't mean you won't get another variant with the same type)
- Player ship regenerative systems are fully restored during autopilot transitions
- Turret specification text now includes "[PDC]" marker to highlight Point Defence Capable turrets
- Missing default bindings (Custom bindings will be reset to avoid conflicts)
- Tug, Frigate and Large Transport ships for Civilian faction
- Event Log added to the Pause menu during flight gameplay (default: Esc) to re-view previously received transmissions during a mission
Changed
- The loading screen is now animated, to show the game is loading
- Starting the game will show the first loading screen longer than usual. This is the new normal. It's important work towards keeping memory footprint down and keep loading in to missions quick
- The training button will be hidden until the prologue has been completed at least once (as the prologue acts as a story based tutorial, as the dedicated tutorials are more for a refresher and/or deeper mechanics for veteran players)
- Campaign: Changed starting ship loadout (after the prologue) to be equipped with Autogun(S) for primary and turret slots to be more effective against fighter craft
- Primary weapon Autogun (S) max range and muzzle velocity increased
- Turreted Autogun (S) X1-3 muzzle velocity increased
- FPS is now defaulted to 30 for first time players, to ensure a smooth and consistent gameplay experience during large skirmishes due to physics being linked to frame rate. Experiment/adjust with the FPS video setting to your preference/machine
- Several code refactorings for improved frame rate stability
- Adjusted the size of the Controller and Keybindings Screen to use more of the width of the screen for binding the three controller types
- Large Transport and Mining Barges (found in the Prologue) are now have optimized and better fitting colliders
- Adjustments to fighter AI behaviours for better avoiding other structures
- Increased Unity Engine Max Virual Voices and Max Real Voices to eliminate audio cutting out when too many sources are playing at default values
Fixed
- Slow loading with Skybox and HUD assets which only became apparent after adding modular backgrounds as Addressable Assets
- Full speed button is not enabled with other speed settings in Prologue Mission 1 & 2
- Yaw was incorrectly disabled during first mining task in Prologue Mission 2
- Corrected grammar in Xenia dialogue re afterburning during Prologue Mission 3
- Player Received Transmission override source name was not being applied under certain conditions
- Turrets performance were not being affected by the of the Gun Control subsystem health
- Subsystem pips for health of the player ship and targeted ships
- "Full throttle" the t in throttle should be uppercase for consistency in Control Mappings
- Enemy Cruiser encountered in chapter 2 was missing Engine and Thruster Particle Effects
- Thruster and Engine FX will no longer continue to play when the ship is in Slide mode
- Afterburner audio for the player ship only plays through the right audio channel in 1st/3rd person view
- Main Gun weapons now have use slot size requirements
- Turrets firing prematurely
- When in a mission, pausing the game then pressing the escape key will resume the mission while with pause screen is open
- Vessel Fitting: Launcher list is not indented correctly in the Specification Panel
- Vessel Fitting: Turret list is not indented correctly in the Specification Panel
- Vessel Fitting: Turret slots are missing mounting size labels
- Vessel Fitting: Modules are not being filtered by selected mounting sizes
- Nanite Repair Optimization I (S) module has wrong price (extra digit added)
- When using External Camera Tracking the HUD will eventually vibrate while player travels away from the position the camera view was engaged at
- Prologue Mission 7: Transports jumping out where not being counted correctly causing incorrect dialogue to be triggered
- Afterburn visual effect will continue and consume fuel during the autopilot cutscene, if afterburning when engaging the autopilot
- Adjusting ships armour current health values via mission scripting can prevent repairs of regenerative armour
- Added missing thruster effects to Large Transport and Mining Barges (found in the Prologue)
- Improved performance during flight gameplay (identified through performance analytics)