Hey there AFF Community!
We’re currently busy working on a big update but we wouldn’t be ourselves if we didn’t drop by to wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Of course the Holiday Season wouldn’t be complete without two things:
Steam Sale!
The Winter Sale is on, you can grab AFF at 40% off until the 4th of January. Explosions in space, better than any fireworks!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Gifts!
We're putting an in-between-updates patch under the tree this year. And it's not a small one either, we almost ran out of wrapping paper! It addresses some popular feature requests and squashes a lot of bugs. Turns out Santa is on pest control now.
One more thing to mention is that we're playing around with different respawn delays on the official servers. For hosting games we recommend 10-15s at 32 players (or bots), 20s at 40, 25s at 64 right now. We'll see if the new values on servers will help balance the offense-defense matches with different playercounts a bit better.
Patch changelog:
- Team balance server option added - when enabled it will only let the players joining the server pick only the faction with the lower playercount (doesn't include bots of course)
- Gave all deployable turrets sensible names both as weapons and when mouse-overing on their deployed form
- Grenades will now explode upon touching enemy vehicle shields just like on the deployable ones
- Capture and hack objective progress decays back to 0 over time if uncontested
- Tweaked AI loadout selection to be less pure-random and more situational
- AI should now choose more anti-vehicle weapons on the land maps with vehicles
- Raised turret AI heat management threshold for better burst control
- AI can now manage charging the L9R better for maximum damage sniping
- Slashed medkit and ammopack weapon-switch and deploy times
- AI should no longer try to throw a medkit or ammopack when nearby threat levels are high, was getting them caught defenseless a lot
- Reworked AI weapon selection per distance curves
- Bots will prioritise killing turrets a bit higher
- Destroyables (droppods, hackspikes) no longer take explosion shockwave damage through walls
- Destroyables twice as resistant to flame damage
- Incendiary grenades will do slightly more damage-over-time to everything that's not a static destroyable
- Reduced underbarrel flamer contact damage slightly
- MGA overheat spin-up should no longer affect underbarrel flamer firing rate
- Gun bullets damage falloff increased from 200m to 300m, to match the maximum weapon range stated in loadout
- Reworked infantry suit mods: - All 6 slots available on all suit types - Removed armour mod, suits default to max armour which is then affected by other mods you pick. Overall range of armour values unchanged, 50 to 600 - No overlap of suit stats possible - Trying out another movement speed re-arrangement, was 0.74 to 1.44, now 0.88 to 1.32 times base 5m/s (heavies significantly faster, mediums a bit faster, lights slightly slower) - Servo mods +0.2m/s speed, -50 armour - Ammo mods +30% ammo, -5% explosion resist - Shock mods 20% explosion resist, -0.2m/s speed - Regeneration mods -0.5s regeneration delay, +10/s regeneration rate, -30 armour; - Insulation mods -20% status effect triggering chance, -0.1m/s movement speed; - Moved regeneration mod to body slot - Removed EM sensor mods (useless) and vehicle motion sensor mods (helmet sensor mods work while driving and vehicles don't become un-spotted anyway)
- Reworked the point costs of just about everything to fix the misalignments in loadout availabilities for infantry and vehicles
- Made vehicle shields free and equipped by default, removing flares and orbit-drones from play for now as they were just an inferior option. Pending better implementation.
- Popping countermeasures (i.e. the shield now) no longer breaks everyone's lock attempts, which was leading to much confusion and frustration
- Added weapon select keys (1, 2, 3 etc) to the keybinding menu
- Added HUD icons for your own deployed turrets
- HUD icons no longer displayed while flashbanged
- Turret controls no longer locked during freelook
- Made capship turrets slightly more accurate
- Doubled point-defense beam fire rate and disabled angle restrictions on those
- Increased point-defense beam beam length on corvettes
- Significantly boosted medium plasma and vulcan projectile speed and firerates, to the great benefit of corvettes as they have 4 of them
- Following the above change, removed capital ship anti-fighter flak for now, its implementation made it completely ineffective anyway
- Decreased capital-ship-grade AFX missiles' reload time from 6 to 4s
- Changed P6i mag size from 34 to 36 and SAR's from 65 to 66 to match burst sizes.
- Number of grenades a character can carry lowered from 4 to 3
- Swapped the torpedoes on the Rejkhart destroyer for rockets
- Core lockouts and drop modules have about 20% less HP now
- Setting an enemy on fire can now eliminate him completely instead of just ticking his health down to 1HP
- Implemented loadout copying feature and fixed a bunch of bugs in creating, renaming and deleting of loadouts
- Slightly nerfed the knife, now requires a backstab to kill an un-modded medium suit
- Disabled anti-vehicle weapons locking onto infantry
- Knocked half a second off RID and MLI lock time
- Removed annoying aim assist from railguns and constrained the lock acquire angle to require more precision
- Normalised weapon locking aim tolerances (stops lock from immediately dropping off on temporary occlusion etc.)
- Changed LSP alternative firemode to a 4-round charge-shotgun-ish mode as an experiment for now (should also deal increased anti-vehicle damage)
- Tweaked vehicle armour regeneration delay so it can be triggered by anti-vehicle-grade infantry weapons again
- Land vehicle boost now aligned along world plane rather than raw vehicle rotation for less low-g flying tanks
- 5 degrees of extra downward deflection on Partisan's main turret
- Dhaka and Basta 20% less strafe thrust
- Improved the primary weapons on gunships of both factions for a better dog-fighting experience
- Flying lateral input now camera-relative rather than ship-relative, let's see how that handles in practice
- Pushed team's commander to the beginning of the queue when offering the initial battleship in a space territories map
- Delta fixes and improvements: - Wrapped spawn rooms in team protection volumes - Improved AI pathing - Remade the TacMap view - Fixed improper material application on some boxes - The laser drill now properly accredits kills to whoever activated it
- Added missing terrain to the TacMap in Fortress
- Increased capture objectives' radii in Eye of God
- Implemented new droppod protection volumes that'll stop AOE and roadkill-based spawncamping, those will be gradually integrated into all maps
- Mostly fixed WEAPONFIXME and added some preliminary statistics gathering based on weapon performance in matches
- Tweaked how the AI handles some faction-specific guns based on the newly gathered performance statistics, should improve the balance between teams with a lot of bots
- New standardized UPNP implementation, auto-port-forwarding should now reliably work on a much wider range of routers
- Suppressed erroneous command rank medal popup
- Fixed a bunch of collision desynchronizations online around droppods
- Fixed bot priority to enter empty land vehicle, was leading to clusters of fixated AI
- Fixed a network state desynchronization that'd stop a gun from firing right after deploying an underbarrel shield
- Fixed decals (bulletholes, scorchmarks) being shown on shields
- Fixed some cases of grenade explosion damage going through deployable shields
- Fixed fast projectiles phasing through small vehicle shields and causing damage directly to armor
- Fixed underbarrel shields, flashlights and holstered weapons not hiding properly when driving a vehicle
- Likely fixed end-match camera drifting away
- Fixed legacy engine code overriding numpad and a few other keys - can now keybind them again
- Likely fixed spawn exploit and irregularities in AI spawning before players
- Fixed bots' ironsight usage (and nerfed them using ADS below AI difficulty level 3 as it makes them a lot more effective in direct gunfights)
- Fixed an issue where anti-vehicle damage multipliers versus destroyables were being applied twice
- Fixed some issues in command mutiny functionality
- Fixed loadout menu resetting camouflage offsets on open
- It's Christmas again! Christmas can be disabled in the settings menu ;)
For feedback, or just a lovely Christmas chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!