Hey there AFF Community!
First and foremost, the words you all want to hear:
As the title says, a build with the brand new UI is on the test branch.
Every single piece of the user interface in the game has been redone, including the entire HUD:
It will probably sit on the test branch for the next couple of weeks before we move it over to the default, public branch. We’re sure the initial release of the new UI will bring with it some new bugs and potentially unpopular design decisions. We want to gather some feedback from the more adventurous among you before exposing the general public to it - especially about such features as the radar and the new spotting mechanics. Use the forums or our Discord to bury us in piles of feedback!
Just a reminder how to switch to the test branch:
In your Steam library, right click on AFF, pick Properties and then on the tab called “Betas” change the dropdown to “Test”. A server running the Test build will be up shortly as well.
One thing to be aware of - we've unfortunately disabled the tutorial in this build. It got broken at some point, we'll bring it back after the UI goes public, hopefully in a more user-friendly form than it was. This is really the very first iteration of the new UI build - the sounds for UI interactions are not yet final, it needs better auto-scaling to different resolutions etc.
But the big advantage of this new UI (and this will either sound like a marketing spiel or just an overly excited developer speaking) is that it lets us iterate on both the UI itself and the entirety of the game much faster now. Yes, that means taking feedback into account quicker and much more frequent updates. It was really hard for us to make you guys and girls wait so long for the next update - but we couldn’t have released it in the middle of replacing the UI, it integrates into far too many systems in the game.
To make the wait worth your while we’ve managed to arrange a little surprise:
Completely new soundtrack by celebrated cinematic composer Edward Patrick White
AFF now features an entire album's worth of originally composed music. This should add further quality and variety to the game’s soundscape after the big audio redesign we did previously.
Also there’s something we’d like to address:
A few members of the AFF Community brought up the notion that posting a recruitment ad, like we did 2 months ago, is apparently viewed as a bad sign in case of independent developers? That the studio is bleeding staff due to problems?
To be honest we were quite confused by that information, perhaps we’re not up-to-date enough on the intricacies of the indie scene. We’d like to dissipate any concerns though - we’ve never been better, we’ve expanded the team and are going full steam ahead (even if that means our usual slowly and permanently delayed pace;) ) towards more content and eventually exiting the Early Access stage.
In fact, a bunch of new, rather experimental, maps should appear on the test branch in a few weeks. And bits of content improvements by our new teammembers are already shining through even in this UI-centric build, like the new shields:
Changelog (as mentioned, on the test branch for now) :
- New UI - hopefully more stable, less confusing and prettier! ESC opens the TacMap as usual, Tab now opens scoreboard, command and communications menus have been redone as mouse- or controller- driven rosettes.
- Entirely new soundtrack – the game will also dynamically select tracks based on what’s happening around you and certain events during the match
- New spotting mechanics – you can call out targets by hitting G when your crosshair is over the enemy but the enemies will also become spotted in an intuitive fashion when you’re in combat with them. Spotted targets will appear on your teammates’ HUDs as pings (question marks at the location where they were spotted) and fade out if not spotted again, or as full target icons if they have line-of-sight. Using an un-silenced weapon in the vicinity will also flag you with a ping on enemy HUDs.
- Further audio effects upgrades
- Drastically reduced view bob when walking while aiming-down-sights
- Red-dot sights now always point at the center of the screen to align with weapon AIM
- Rebalanced MLI's and RID's refire and lockon times to be less spammy, made the RID not 100% accurate in dumbfire, made bots use RID lockon better
- Re-ranged (lowered in several cases) weapon movement penalties
- Halved support XP income from using the multiwrench
- XP streams rebalanced. Ranks now extend to 25, support income rate increased, you may drop a couple of ranks due to this but your xp has not been reset
- Doubled carrier core lockout objective health
- 50% tougher capital ships
- Normalized damage falloff ranges for vehicle passenger weapons so they reflect the hand-held equivalents better
- Increased the gatling projectile speeds in space almost twice - let's see how well this works in a real networked environment
- Adjusted TA's sprint pose so it doesn't cover half the screen anymore
- Now possible to rearm fighters and dropships at fighterbases and carriers still in warp - perhaps a temporary solution until a more elegant is found
- Adjusted briefing for Igneous
- Improved AI navigation in Meudeverre
- AI won't steal player-owned gunships anymore
- Capital ships should no longer drift out of the battlefield when engines are disabled
- Added a few lights to Irega's final room
- Limited turrets to one deployed at a time (one per inventory slot, so if you pick 2 turret items in the loadout, you'll get 2 turrets)
- Added shields to spawn rooms where they were missing
- Downgraded dropship pilot weapons to their lightest variants
- Stripped medium and heavy spaceship missiles of a superfluous firemode
- Protected vehicle drops, briefing end and map voting against idle players
- No order-location-proximity command points earned while idle or from idle players
- Removed erroneous shell casing noises in space
- Removed the casing effect and audio from the DK11A to better represent its supposed use of caseless GAR ammo in the lore
- New look for the main menu backgrounds. Thoughts please!
- Added missing TacMap models to a few locations
- Drastically decreased EVR turret's range
- Deployable turrets will now trigger lock-on warning upon acquiring target
- Turret AI will no longer keep tracking the target ad-infinitum, even beyond their configured sensor range
- Experimental short-range lunge added to the knife when fully charged and aiming at an opponent
- Removed some floating meshes in the Ranger's interior
- Prefixed bot names with "(AI)" globally
- Added and amended a lot of descriptions for loadout items (no more "lasers pew pew", sorry)
- Replaced several "hold" objectives with "hack" objectives
- Adjusted passenger turret behaviour to be less affected by motion of the parent vehicle
- Adjusted battleship spawnpoints
- Significant weapon damage balancing pass
- Added an extra clip to EVR and A420
- Adjusted the appearance of all land-side shields
- Ixion's background planet upgraded and optimized
- Fixed .ini files getting overwritten whenever Steam decides to touch them, resulting in losing loadout configurations etc. Should now merge correctly every release instead of getting overridden.
- Fixed squad assigning logic, players should no longer be all thrown into a single squad after transitioning to a new map
- Fixed issues in AI order following
- Fixed several silly typos in loadout items ("vulnearbility", "amour")
- Fixed several cases of the game timers breaking down due to misconfigured phases
- Fixed Lacroix spawnpoints and multiple navmesh issues
- Fixed lighting in several instances of dropship and droppod interiors
- Fixed issues with bots pathing towards objectives in Fortress
- Fixed incorrect offset applied to sights when strafing
- Fixed several pathing issues, rock collision and improved routes to objectives in Fortress and Igneous
- Fixed pathing in Ixion's station hangars
- Fixed default AIA character materials to actually have the AIA identification symbols
- Fixed some missing collision and being able to fall out of the map in Irega
- Fixed superfluous Griphon appearing in Ixion Territories
- Fixed AI navigation in the Khamun's interior and fixed a few instances of missing launch sequences for fighters
- Fixed missing staircase in Errah Territories
- Fixed a few destroyable decorations in Fortress
- Fixed inability to exit spectator mode in some cases
- Fixed AI firing at their own objectives
- Fixed being able to shoot through some terrain parts in Errah
Onwards and upwards!
And Happy Easter to those celebrating the occasion!