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!