Hey there AFF Community!
We just wanted to do a quick update on the state of things here.
Right off the bat: the next patch is a few weeks late and you guys and girls are probably somewhat frustrated by that. We had a couple good reasons to delay the thing though:
We fixed some low-level issues with spaceship (and gunship) physics desynchronizing between server and client. That itself needed quite a bit of work to get it right. But it also exposed some more issues with how we handled interactions between ships and debugging that took a good week.
Thanks to our awesome Community we've also been able to recently run some tests on the servers. That helped immensely in optimizing some aspects of the game - we're in the middle of an on-going netcode optimization but we also managed to make the AI a lot less CPU-intensive. Implementing those optimizations obviously took some time so there's that other part of the delay.
So, what's holding back the patch now? One thing is we're mopping up some camera issues that also got exposed by the spaceship state fixes. The other is we're mulling over how much new content we can finish before actually releasing this patch. As we've mentioned in the Holidays update we have quite a few new maps lined up and those could take a few more days or weeks to wrap up. We still haven't decided which of those are finished enough to be included right now. Same with mechs.
So, long story short, the next patch is coming probably within the next 2 weeks, which is way overdue, but it's going to be massive. In addition to the low-level fixes mentioned above we've done a ton of gameplay-related improvements (my favorite probably being how much more dynamic the Territories gametype feels now, thanks to every action contributing to the overall progress). Not going to spam the Steam announcements with the whole list right now but you can see a rough one here
Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for more space awesomeness!
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!