Hey there AFF Community!
We're back from summer vacation with another update!
In reality it's been quite a busy month at AFF. We had to dedicate some time to unexciting but much needed chores - maintenance, content pipeline improvements etc. Nevertheless we've managed to prepare a super-sized update, starting with:
New map - Mirnoide
Mirnoide is a deep-space Antarean research station. It becomes the centre of a heated battle when the USN tries to take the station by force. The stakes are high - controlling the station means access to critical research data regarding new, super-efficient terraforming methods.
It's a map for the Incursion gamemode - Imperial forces are on the defense this time and the League has to breach and capture 2 separate biodomes on the station. Both domes are available for breaching concurrently - so both teams will have to coordinate and strategize to split the forces in just the right proportions to out-smart the enemy. There's also a twist to it all - the breach points are boarding pods drilling into the station walls. Therefore they're primarily vulnerable to attacks from the outside, giving the defending team an opportunity to go on offense space-side.
Infantry AI upgrade - part 1
Last time we upgraded the commander-level AI and now we're following that up with a rewrite of the individual bots' AI. Consider this to be a 2-parter at least. Next update (or updates) will focus on making the bots' movement more natural, this time we've addressed the most irritating bits in their behaviour.
The bots are much more responsive now - their reaction time on par or better than human players (depending on the difficulty setting, of course) and their focus kept more naturally on their current targets and objectives.
This means they'll appear more life-like and pose a much bigger threat by relying on reflexes and tactics instead of inhuman accuracy. The players will very likely need to utilize all of the available assets and game systems (shields, grenades, mods etc.) to defeat the bots at the highest difficulty level.
Performance improvements
Despite the bots being more intelligent now, we actually managed to make them less performance-intensive. In addition to this we optimized the movement code for infantry, made further updates to how and when the commander-level AI issues orders and fixed some critical issues in managing the dynamic HUD elements. All of this should result in significantly less stress put on the CPU, especially when playing offline with bots.
Spectator mode
The players could join as spectators before but the mode was pretty barebones and didn't work completely reliably client-side. We've improved its functionality, upgraded it with a few different camera settings and a free-cam mode. Time will tell whether it proves to be too much of an exploit but given AFF's gameplay not relying on team-wide stealth operations it shouldn't be a big problem - the free-cam doesn't let you phase through walls either and as spectator you don't currently get any HUD indicators.
Steam Cloud
AFF now supports Steam Cloud storage. From now on your loadouts, camouflage choices and keybindings will be saved to the cloud and synchronized on other PCs you run AFF on. It also means you'll get those back even if you uninstall AFF at any point.
Roadmap update
We haven't updated the public roadmap in a while and it sort of fell off the radar it seems. We're planning on making the game more visible across the media soon so the Trello board has been brought up-to-date as well, to give the AFF Community a better idea about what tricks we still have up our sleeves. We'll keep updating it as we go.
Changelog:
- New space map for the Incursion mode - Mirnoide
- Bots upgraded to be much responsive and menacing
- Completely rewritten turret AI to bring it up to par with the infantry bots - this includes deployable turrets, vehicle passenger turrets and capital ship turrets
- Further upgraded the commander-level AI to cope with multiple locations better
- Igneous phase 3 redesigned with an additional entry route, moved some cover around for more interesting gunplay
- Anaster visuals updated to give a better sense of depth as well as better represent the hollow moon setting
- All maps processed with new content pipeline utilities to ensure more consistent and optimized lighting across the board
- Rewritten and improved spectator mode
- Added command unit selection functionality to squad status module in tacmap (click on mates to select for ordering)
- Upgraded redeploy suggestion logic - will also make the AI redeploy less often for no reason
- Adjusted the health and capture times of various objectives - generally a bit tougher to take and destroy now
- Moved armour regeneration disabling effect to acid rather than EMP
- Replaced some lowest-poly models (crates, mostly) to look a bit more modern
- Added freelook indicator to crosshair
- Adjusted the task/status texts displayed on human and bot squadmembers in the briefing phase
- Adjusted the positions and movement of some of the HUD plates
- Increased AI sight radius in fighters to make them defend more proactively
- Vehicle offer info is now built into the TacMap and several issues in its functionality have been fixed
- Weapon charge now reset to zero on switching away from that weapon
- Converted passenger turret railgun on land vehicles to match RID behaviour
- Added minor spread to capship railguns
- Capital ships' subsystems now harder to destroy from the outside, their health regeneration rate slightly increased
- Space defense platforms now have 20% less health
- Subsystems of defense platforms in Meudeverre can be properly targeted and damaged now
- Doubled shield health on transports and capital ships
- Shortened the duration of the launch autopilot sequences globally and adjusted the launch locations a bit
- Reduced vehicle offer score requirements by 30% in the Territories mode
- Reduced sprint recovery, weapon switch and aim-down-sights times and weapon weight penalties to those by 30%
- Hipfire inaccuracy now only goes up to 50% due to running, the rest of the range is only applied as recoil from shooting - promotes a bit more mobile playstyle with weapons optimal for hipfiring (pistols, SMGs)
- Added 4s arming delay to mines
- Reduced throw distance and increased preparation time on detpacks
- Rebalanced grenade, mines and detpack strengths (damage and status effects) to fix apparent effectiveness
- Buffed A420, DK31 and EVR a little bit
- Slight decrease in EVR recoil to improve handling, shots till overheat in light mode increased by 70%
- All weapon mods reworked to make more physical sense and to give the mod choice more substance - check your loadouts, the mods now have meaningful advantages and disadvantages
- Added a few new mechanics-specific internal mods to weapons - charge time, cooldown and magazine size
- P8 damage profile adjusted to sit inbetween the TS20 and a charged L9R in order to keep it viable without making the L9R unattractive
- Added barrel mod support but removed the internal slot from P8 for consistency
- Lowered projectile velocity and added drop to underbarrel rocket launcher
- Reduced cooldown of capital ships' mines
- Removed missiles slot from bomber loadouts to enforce more of a specialized role for those ships
- Decreased bomber torpedoes, plasma and rail damage by 20%
- Rebalanced fighter missiles to fire their burst then reload for 4-9s, increased their damage, and decreased their ammo count to about 20 bursts each
- Doubled tank cannon reload times
- Buffed underslung flamethrower
- Stopped commandvote and TacMap showing for spectators
- Corrected ammocount on EVR vehicle variants
- Fixed some HUD icons being unnecessarily processed even when seemingly off-screen
- Fixed stairs pathing issues on Lukather
- Fixed a whole lot of minor collision, pathing and visual oddities across all maps in response to our Discord's #map-bug-reports
- Blocked off the tower rooftops in Irega
- Fixed some navigation issues at the bottom level of the Irega terminal
- Improved pathing and collision inside the Ixion station
- Fixed camera animations in AIA fighterbase in all maps
- Fixed heavy and bomber space plas,a damage falloff
- Fixed warp exit selection being incorrectly transferred on switching teams
- Put in docking point infos to fighterbases, so that you can technically warp out to rearm if the map only contains fighterbases without capital ships
- Fixed some minor errors and warnings spammed by space maps without capital ships
- Fixed AI unable to complete rearming at carriers, including ones still in warp
- Fixed some glitches and improved the performance of flares
- Fixed issues with bots retaining previous spawner/docking point selection
- Fixed seat-disabled camera static effect on capship passenger seats
- Fixed Turtle's nosegun icon and description
- Fixed misaligned mesh on sniper barrel mod, was resulting in dodgy positioning
- Fixed flashbangs behaving in an unpredictable way, often not blinding the enemy effectively
- Fixed detpacks getting stuck in lowered pose and an infinite script recursion error caused by them
- Fixed bots sometimes not spawning into unmanned capships to recover them
If you got a feedback on anything in the game, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!
Onwards and upwards!