6 new maps, 1 new fighter weapon, hundreds of fixes, net optimization, mechs!
Hey there AFF Community!
Phew, it's been a while. Hope we didn't blow anything up by making such a giant update at once this time.
And yeah, we're going to call these "updates" instead of "patches" now. Seems more accurate, as the usual bugfixes and optimization will be accompanied by new content.
NEW MAPS
Lellebah - Territories
Mazikeen - Territories
NB3345 - Territories
Lacroix - Incursion and Territories
YinTaoShan - Territories
Igneous
LIGHT MECHS
ULA Velius and AIA Gheist
Note - mechs are still heavily in development so expect work-in-progress animations and various other quirks in visuals. We'd rather not hold back giving you guys access until the visuals are finalised, as we greatly value your gameplay feedback and comments on overall feel. Let us know your thoughts when you take them for a jog!
We've also added fighter-grade ion beam weapons to be equipped in the loadout. We're shifting some of our manpower more towards content now but that's not what delayed the patch for so bloody long. We hope the list of fixes (see below) justifies the long wait - we invested a lot of time in rewriting some low-level systems to optimize the game. This means both in terms of performance (AI is significantly less CPU-intensive now) and network lag. Network optimization is an ongoing process and we'll keep reducing the amount of data the game sends back and forth, but it should already feel noticably smoother online.
We are also going to start a kind of a devblog soon-ish, to highlight some of the interesting things going into the game (and raise the awareness of existing features). Not sure what the form will be yet. We're big fans of how Rust does it so maybe something like that, reports by team members with some short videos and screenshots. We'll see.
We've been keeping this under the radar so far, but we also invested some time into what seems to be the bane of AFF - the UI. We don't have anything to show off yet, but amid all the other work we've been building a new framework for the UI, a completely new pipeline. This basically means that soon we won't have to use the 3rd party tools we built the current UI in. This will not only result in better looks for the UI but most importantly in far shorter iteration times - so creating a new HUD and menus should be a pretty rapid process once this is done. A quick thought experiment for all you curious Early Accessers by the way - try running the game without the HUD some time and see how pretty some of the space maps are. Just punch "togglehud" in the in-game console
On a side note, we're getting more and more reports of weird behaviour on Windows 10 where the game performs much worse than it should. We're still investigating the issue but it seems to be at least partially related to Nvidia drivers somehow. I suggest if you guys and girls are running Win 10 (especially upgraded from any previous version) make sure to try a clean reinstall of all your Nvidia drivers \ accompanying software if your framerate is in the 20's with decent hardware (have a look at our "Solutions for common problems" thread)
As for the fixes and improvements in this patch, the list literally didn't fit into the Steam announcement character limit. So CLICK HERE to see it in all its glory.