Hey there AFF Community!
It’s finally here! We appreciate it’s been a while - however with so many changes to jam into the update crate, we trust you’ll enjoy the payout!
To coincide with this update AFF is currently 40% off for the duration of the Autumn sale so if you’ve been keeping an eye on this we hope you’ll join us!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Now let’s crack open the lid on the Update 17 box and see what treats we have for all! It’s a huge patch that touches on pretty much every system in the game in some way - so we fully expect it might need tweaking and hotfixes in the coming weeks:
New map - Delta
A mining operation set on a moon extremely rich in hydrocarbon resources and complex chemicals. A valuable asset indeed but requires a lot of finesse in warring over it - the moon is small, the gravity is weak, lighter vehicles would be inoperable so completing this mission is up to heavy tanks and agile infantry.
It’s a Territories map where vehicles are limited to tanks for both sides - watch out for interesting effects low gravity might have on their handling! The infantry on the other hand is able to utilize this effect for increased mobility. Jump high in the air to find a sniping spot on one of the drilling stations or perhaps explore the rock formations for some interesting sights.
AI upgrade continues
The vast majority of development time for this update went into reworking the AI, specifically how the individual bots navigate the maps. They’ll move more naturally now, flank better, use all available routes to objectives, avoid damage by hiding behind cover or strafing, revive teammates.
This upgrade also applies to their ability to drive vehicles and pilot ships - watch out for them using the newtonian flight mode to engage tailing enemies!
We also reconfigured the bots to be less of a perfect sniping force at any range. They won’t perfectly compensate for recoil of every weapon and instantly snap to target’s head. AI tweaking is a process that’s never over though, so we’ll see what else needs adjusting after this update. Too hard or too easy at a particular difficulty level? As always, we’re waiting on Community feedback!
Turtle coming out of its shell
The Turtle IFV has always been at a bit of a disadvantage due to its primary weapon being hidden under the rim of the front armour. It was a cute concept but not very practical. No more! Antareans beware, as the new Turtle enters the battlefield with a rocket launcher mounted on top!
Gunplay and gunsights
We always try to improve on that nebulous area described as “gunplay feel” in AFF. Recently we gathered a few more ideas, mainly from playing high-budget shooters like BF1 (all in the name of research, naturally). Despite having no intention of bringing AFF’s gameplay anywhere near that model of instant time-to-kill twitch shooter, we’ve noticed a few things they do better in terms of responsiveness. Based on that we’ve now fixed and tweaked some math behind how your gun behaves after coming out of sprint and when aiming-down-sights. Overall it should look and feel more polished and responsive now.
We’ve redone and improved some of the sight models - ironsights and MRAS sights are less blocky now and received some incandescent dots to be usable in darker areas. Holographic sights are perhaps a bit less realistic now but much more practical in gameplay terms - should be clearly visible regardless of background colour and light conditions.
Commander voting menu rework
The commander voting UI bit has been simplified and changed from an awkwardly-scrolling list to a nice grid of candidates. In singleplayer you can click on MILNET AI to immediately set the AI as a commander, in multiplayer you pick a candidate and if no one votes for anybody, MILNET will take command. Click on yourself to opt in as a candidate, by default only opted-in candidates will be clickable on the grid. No more getting voted on because you alt-tabbed. It’s that simple.
What’s next?
The commander voting menu is the first tiny bit of what we’ll be focusing on for the next update (some inevitable hotfixes to this massive one aside). Next update will be all about user-experience: reinstating the tutorial, making several parts of the UI more intuitive and polished. We want to start promoting the game to a wider audience early next year so it’s crucial to get those things right.
Full changelog:
- New map - Delta, a low-gravity fight for a lunar mining operation
- Vastly improved AI for individual bots: - Better movement, flanking, taking cover, dodging - Reliable reviving of teammates - Fully use all the space flight mechanics, including flipping the craft with the newtonian flight mode - More human-like awareness, reaction times and recoil compensation - A physical delay to noticing velocity changes in their target, even with hitscan weapons - i.e. evasive flying and strafing will properly throw their aim off - Better judgement of where to respawn based on the commander's orders
- Turtle now has a rocket turret on the top to scare away those pesky Bastas
- New commander vote menu
- Iron sights, MRAS sights and holo sights redone to be more practical and visible under different lighting conditions
- ADSing from sprint is now available immediately regardless of the weapon taking a fraction of a second to come back online, fixed weapon pose transition lagging when ADSing from sprint
- Weapon weight mod now also reduces ADS times by 10%
- Adjusted ADS times across the board
- Many tweaks and fixes to Lukather: - Fixed physical material assignment on Lukather's front bay - Moved ULA spawner slightly further away from the comms tower - Moved the vehicle dropoff points to a less fail-prone location near the ULA carpark spawn - Added bollards to areas where gorillas, robots and rabbits could enter the terminal - People can still take vehicles elsewhere but not in the splined terminal part of the map - Added vehicle blocking volumes to prevent LAVs and others from falling into the trenches - Lowered KillZ to an acceptable level so that players aren't dying upon going lower in the maintenance tunnels - Patched up missing geometry in back end of the terminal
- Tweaks to Mirnoide - Removed central defender spawns, moved objectives - Hangar spawn for defenders not disabled after the attackers complete that particular station - Added plenty of cover in and around the hangar
- Tweaks to Yin Tao Shan - Revised pathing and collision near E approach (from underneath) to be cleaner and more usable - Added cover between drop points and E point for infantry to maneuver up the hill and assault the position - Redone collision of the overpasses for smoother movement and less shots glitching through - Fixed collision bumps on ramps and a bunch of overpass z-fighting
- Tweaks to Irega - Widened blocking volume on stairs to stop falling underneath stairs in weird corners - Fixed collision missing on one of the walkways - Added collision for pipes - Changed focus of matinee towards the end of the dustoff sequence to track the dropship instead of the pod
- Adjusted some navigation and collision in Fortress
- Simplified Lacroix's hangar spawn pushback logic, was a bit prone to failure
- Added 15s or 30s delay to LZs becoming capturable after previous droppod is destroyed in both Incursion and Territories
- Removed initial spawn delay on match start unless you're attacking in Incursion - now intentionally acts as a small defender setup time advantage
- Vehicle loss penalty now altered if special-case vehicle spawn multiplier is active (Delta)
- Primary objectives under attack will now stop the pause if it's under 60s remaining, regardless of phase. Different to prior "only pause if final phase" behaviour.
- Decreased the income boost from owning all objectives in Territories by 50%
- Added out-of-range text to tagged target bracket
- Added explainer text sheets to many briefings before we add a proper tutorial and objective chain UI next update
- Land vehicle weapon aimpoint now adjusts itself to the leading target only when looking at the target directly, should mean less odd misaligned shots against world geometry
- Added pilot's name to the location readout for capital ships
- Added destruction effects (explosion, chunks) to deployables and mechs
- More chunks of destroyed land vehicles now spawned and not glitching out, plus some optimizations to their meshes
- Clientside chunks of destroyed vehicles now properly destroyed when other vehicles encrouch on them
- Optimized several shaders all over the maps
- Added a smooth screen-door-like transition effect to objects and their level-of-details popping in, like a proper modern game
- Some minor optimizations to ship physics, disabled unnecessary things ticking in the background, like handheld weapons while sat in a vehicle
- Adjusted the hit effect scaling to be less ridiculous, plus now correctly distinguishes between player's own shots and spectated shots
- Pressing ESC to skip the mainmenu intro will no longer bring up the exit popup
- Partisan shell's initial speed bumped up by 25%
- Passenger rocket launcher turret damage reduced by 25%
- Partisan and Turtle armour increased 10%, Basta and Dhaka reduced 10%, Partisan's turning speed increased by 20%
- Reduced maximum shots to overheat on the Basta's primary plasma to 16 down from 18 (one salvo less than max ammo, whilst originally you could fire all 20 before overheat actually kicked in)
- First part of fixes to mech animations - still nowhere near perfect but should behave better in terms of walking cycles, crouching, jumping etc.
- Added missing dumbfire mode to Gheist's version of MLI
- Motion sensors now have a noisemaker functionality, selectable as an alternative firemode
- Spaceship boost strength now increased from 1.5x to 2x the nominal speed, but halved its duration
- Halved the number of spare mags on fighter missiles
- Fighters, bombers and dropships 20% tougher
- Bomber bay slot weapons' damage increased by 20%, back to where they were previously
- Torpedoes now very slightly faster
- Reduced curvature of underbarrel rockets' flightpath
- Reduced frag grenade damage radius
- Increased splash damage radius of railguns
- Doubled the combat XP income from spaceship damage
- Fighters don't trigger armour regeneration delay on capships now, nor infantry on land vehicles. A bit unsubtle, will tweak when necessary.
- Doubled the amount armour added by infantry body armour mod, to 100
- Slightly reduced droppod health
- Fixed a typo in 3x scope description
- Fixed orders issued on the TacMap always falling back to a "move to" order
- Fixed lock-on weapons (AFX, MLI etc.) not triggering a lock-on warning on the target until the missile is away
- Fixed the shelved guns in the briefingrooms not getting proper attachments according to their faction affinity
- Fixed the operations land maps filter in the operations menu
- Fixed custom bot names not applying properly if too long, when hacked in with .ini changes
- Fixed infinitely burning/corroding vehicles, hopefully for good this time. EMP effect on infantry now timed sensibly - 12-15 seconds depending on the selected suit
- Fixed unranked slider disabling in operations menu
- Fixed AIA medium suit having slightly different specular intensity than the rest of the infantry models
- Disabled some respawn functionality which was resulting in the timing-specific multiple capships and driverless capships
- Fixed bots initially walking a few meters in a random direction on match start
- Some more safeguards around renderer thread when changing resolutions, should result in less crashes from both Scaleform and UE's internals now
- Added a synchronization event between UI and rendering threads to combat the render frame fence jitter (HUD icons jittering, especially noticeable in space battles in fullscreen and with vsync on)
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!