Hey there AFF Community!
It's been way too long but we're back with probably the most important patch for the game so far.
The biggest technical problem with the game up until now has been the bandwidth required by the space part. More players on the server meant more spaceships and more clients to send to, so the amount of data sent by the server grew exponentially. In fact there was so much of that data the server often didn't have enough bandwidth to handle it. That resulted in the game getting progressively more choppy for everyone and rubberbanding between the little useful data it could actually get from the server. This should be resolved now. We've rewritten the whole netcode for the space part - now it uses up to 100 times less bandwidth. And thanks to some new custom client-side prediction algorithms the flight model should now feel smoother, despite requiring only a fraction of the previous data from the server.
It's also worth noting that the game should now be able to force-select dedicated GPUs on systems with multiple cards. This has been a problem that reared its ugly head from time to time, especially on machines with Nvidia Optimus, and resulted in unexpectedly low framerates. Hopefully that won't happen anymore even if a GPU profile for AFF is not configured on the given system.
Okay, so now that's out of the way... we definitely owe the AFF Community some explanation - what the bloody hell took so long?
A combination of things really. The netcode rewrite was a spanner in the works we had to deal with and that took the longest. Thankfully the rest of the team produced a lot of other good fixes in the meantime - changelist below as usual. The other cause of the delay was the packaging process for the game just falling over completely. We spent couple of weeks hunting some really silly issues with Steam deployment, issues in configuration that were apparently always there but only just now decided to pop up in a harmful way. All of that coincided with some important personal events for our teammembers and thus even more weeks flew by.
Now the good news - development is back to full speed again and now even more manpower should go into making new content. New UI as a whole is still pretty far off - the HUD requires far more work if we don't want it turn into the same illegible mess it was last time - but the menus are coming along very well:
[img=https://s9.postimg.org/kxufwoc27/20160802215043_1.jpg]
[img=https://s9.postimg.org/xn6cvgkxb/20160719000325_1.jpg]
Other things are coming much sooner. I will make a separate post in a few days describing our plans for the upcoming months but just to tease things a bit - the next update will sound very different.
Changelog:
- Completely rewritten space netcode, vastly decreasing bandwidth usage
- Fixed Nvidia and AMD systems with multiple GPUs defaulting to the integrated rather than the dedicated card, resulting in abnormally low framerates
- Fixed issues where Steam build would ship with an incorrect default configuration
- Fixed misconfigured droppod modules in Igneous and Yin Tao Shan Incursion
- Fixed rare UI hang/crash on going back to the menu and changing maps
- Fixed main menu UI vanishing when you try to join a Steam invite from within the game and get bounced off due to connection loss
- Fixed issues with radial damage not being applied reliably
- Fixed colliding lightbeams in Igneous
- Fixed area naming in Igneous
- Fixed weapons getting unnecessarily dropped after the match has ended
- Fixed weapons not raising from sprint pose on firing while sprinting
- Fixed breachpoint animations not resetting correctly in a few ships
- Fixed AI not firing arced projectiles reliably
- Fixed AI stalling at defending too much
- Fixed AI picking wrong weapons to fire after trying to use deployables
- Fixed some backdrop meshes calculating lighting and navigation paths unnecessarily
- Fixed some positioning of TacMap elements
- Fixed some issues with respawning ships' interiors
- Fixed floating landmines
- Fixed teamswitching in singleplayer preventing enemy AI from getting their vehicle drops
- Fixed manual redeploying blocking further vehicle offers
- Fixed vehicle offers immediately disappearing
- Fixed gunship AI minimum attack run distance
- Fixed an issue with keybinding that wouldn't let you swap two buttons in the same period
- Fixed bots often not being able to aim the reviving tool correctly
- Fixed corrosion damage type not working correctly
- Fixed invalid bullet spread calculations when aiming up or down
- Fixed most instances of boarding wiring misbehaving
- Fixed capital ship shields not getting reliably disabled when their internal component is sabotaged
- Made shield and point defense components more consistent across all ships with their internal consoles and everything
- Marked enemy ship interiors in red in tacmap and added pilot name and fixed when it says it's 'boarded'
- Optimised shield collision checks a lot
- Reduced medium missile tracking and speed
- Added more damaged states to corvette interiors
- Added glow to fighter engines on launch
- Improved AI pathing when driving vehicles around defense points
- Vehicle navigation precached before the match starts to reduce hitching
- Improved hover vehicles' AI aim when not tracking an enemy
- Clamped Incursion timer to max starting value, i.e. objective reward won't push it beyond the initial value in match settings - prevents long grinds at phase 3 if phases 1 and 2 were captured reasonably quickly
- Removed outdated loadout setup for Locust which allowed it to still wield outdated weapons
- Tickets in Incursion will no longer appear to go over 100% at the end of the match
- AI should no longer cluster on exactly the same point with a "move to" order
- Improved infantry physics performance
- Added a very subtle chromatic aberration effect (can be toggled in the settings menu)
- Removed motion blur effect from the game for now. It only ever worked on ships and looked bad even there.
- Bots will now run backwards and look at their feet less often now
- Nerfed gunship health/armour significantly
- Changed the warp-in effects a bit. We like to play around with those so don't expect this to be their final form either.
- Touched up the launch cameras a bit
- Increased the range of the heavy capital ship weapons' audio
- Adjusted system integrity values to reinstate the EMP-ing of vehicles. 2 well placed double-charge EMP grenades should take down a tank for 10-15 seconds.
- Cleaned Khamun interior up a bit
- Increased Dhaka and Basta thrust strength, should fare better on slopey terrain
- Better velocity-based camera effects for ships, should feel more dynamic to fly them now
- Multiple collision fixes in maps
- More internal effects in dropships and droppods during boarding
- Increased capital ship core explosion escape delay to 60s
- Reduced dynamic light radius on several projectiles to improve performance dips, such as on swarm missile fire
- Improved AI ability to board and rearm at hangars
- Blocked accidental useage of rearming action during launch
- Turtle and Partisan 20% tougher, to reflect relative lack of maneuverability
Come kick our stern on the servers! Onwards and upwards!