Hey there AFF Community!
We'd like to give you a quick update on the state of things between patches. Work is in full swing, in spite of us spending probably way too much time slaying cyberdemons recently. We might've been running a bit silent for the last couple weeks, mostly focusing on the low-level technical aspects of the game, but many different things are slowly clicking into place:
New weapon audio is getting done, starting with infantry weapons. We now have one of the guys practically dedicating all his effort to making the guns sound like they actually pack a punch. It will take several weeks to complete but this change should also come with improvement to the general feedback. More camera movements and effects when firing the weapons, that kind of stuff.
New UI is moving from pre-production phase into actual implementation. We made mockups for pretty much every UI part there is - to avoid repeating the mistake of just cobbling it together as we go. Everything's properly planned and organized now, we have a new content pipeline for creating the UI pieces. Functionally it's starting to all come together, we'll show some screenshots when we decide on the final artstyle of the UI. We're also investigating the possibilities the new UI might enable us to do easily - like adding even more customization and maybe even a galactic-conquest-like mode.
With the help of some Community members we've also managed to identify some culprits which make the game way more CPU-intensive than it should be on some machines. Frankly fixing those issues will take a bit more time but we'll keep you posted.
And the thing closest to actually being publicly released - the netcode improvements. We've been working hard on making the netcode a lot less demanding and that's almost done now. We fully expect this change to require careful tweaking over several subsequent patches because it's extremely hard to predict every online circumstance that might be affected. But the game should immediately benefit from the changes and not fall apart under the strain of several players flying their spaceships anymore.
Of course there's also more content incoming, so here's a couple of teaser screenshots:
Thanks for your ongoing support and stay tuned for more updates.
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!