Two updates in one. Since v3.42 the work went into three places: how the sticks feel in your hands (gamepad, keyboard or a real radio), who you fly against offline, and what a brand-new pilot sees in their first three minutes.
FLIGHT FEEL - EVERY PILOT
- Sensitivity, expo and deadzone are yours to set - CONTROLS > FLIGHT FEEL. Sensitivity scales yaw, pitch and roll (never the throttle), expo softens the centre, deadzone kills stick drift. Three presets: SMOOTH for a first flight, STANDARD (what everyone has flown with so far), RACER for quicker hands. Touch a slider and it becomes CUSTOM.
- Per device. Your gamepad and your RC transmitter each keep their own feel; tuning one never touches the other. Nothing changes until you move a slider.
RADIO PILOTS
- Your switches now do things. CONTROLS > CALIBRATE RC TRANSMITTER: bind any switch or button to RELOAD, DROP BOMB, PLANT / DEFUSE, BUY MENU, VOICE, RESET, ACRO / ARCADE, CAMERA or SCOREBOARD. One click, flip the switch, done. Saved per radio, next to your stick calibration. FIRE keeps its own binding.
- A forced radio that is not plugged in no longer strands you. The game falls back to your gamepad or keyboard and says so on the HUD, instead of a dead throttle.
GAMEPAD PILOTS
- FIRE is rebindable - CONTROLS > GAMEPAD, like every other action (default: right trigger). Both triggers can be bound.
- Stick mode 1 and invert pitch - CONTROLS > FLIGHT FEEL. Mode 1 puts the throttle on the right stick and pitch on the left; invert pitch flips the elevator for pilots who push forward to climb. Mode 2, not inverted, stays the default.
BOTS WITH LEVELS
- Four bot levels for PLAY VS BOTS - RECRUIT, PILOT, VETERAN, ELITE. One click under the offline buttons, remembered between sessions. RECRUIT is forgiving (wide aim, slow reaction, short memory of where you went); PILOT is the tuning every match has used so far; VETERAN and ELITE aim tighter, track faster, see further and reach for the shotgun and the sniper more often. The level you picked is shown next to the round counter during the match.
- Online play is unchanged. Hosted and ranked matches keep PILOT bots for everyone, whatever your offline setting.
YOUR FIRST THREE MINUTES
- A guided first flight. A pilot with no matches yet gets three steps in the practice range: take off and hold it, fly through the first gate, shoot a target. Then one key starts their first match - an offline deathmatch, the mode with respawns. Everyone else gets the range as before.
- DEATHMATCH no longer tells you to "hold F in a site to plant". That hint belongs to BOMB DEFUSAL; deathmatch now says what it is: you respawn, every kill scores for your team.
PRACTICE RANGE
- The free-fly trial is now a range. Six TARGET drones sit around the arena and come back three seconds after you drop them, and ten numbered GATES form a lap: fly them in order, the timer starts at gate 1 and stops at gate 10, and your best lap is remembered. HOW TO FLY > TRY IT, or the trial button, as before.
- You always know where the next gate is. A diamond with its distance when it is in view, an arrow on the screen edge when it is not (behind you included). Gates chime as you pass, the lap chimes higher, targets tick when they drop.
THE MAPS
- They breathe. Sandstorm has wind-blown sand streaking through the arena; Substation has dust hanging in the light and sparks jumping off the transformers. Purely visual, no cost worth measuring.
- Sandstorm at night, if you want it. A new switch under PLAY VS BOTS - SANDSTORM: DAY / NIGHT / RANDOM. Night drops the sun to a cool moon, deepens the sky, adds a thin haze and lights the spawn platforms and both sites with warm sodium lamps. Cosmetic and per pilot; DAY stays the default.
- Lighter on weak machines, properly this time. The low quality tiers now render through a second renderer without ambient occlusion instead of paying for it and hiding the result. Verified on the built game.
UNDER THE HOOD
- Voice: a dropped channel no longer logs one error per tick until it reconnects.
- The flight HUD no longer allocates its text styles every frame (less garbage-collector churn in long matches).
- The controller self-test gained checks for the flight-feel presets, the bot levels, stick mode and pitch inversion, the forced-source fallback and the radio switch table; the multiplayer smoke suite reports each pilot's deaths, the bot level and the kill total in every snapshot.
Found something broken? REPORT BUG in the main menu sends your log and a screenshot straight to me.