Angels Fall First News

Hey there AFF Community!

New update is here, with a lot of tweaks, fixes and new mechanics. As we mentioned last time, we continue to polish the game to a state in which we can start promoting it. We can already say the next update will contain the long awaited tutorial, as well as more optimization and quality-of-life changes. That’s not all, though - we have a couple cool things to announce before that next update so watch this space in the coming weeks.

In the meantime though, AFF is still on sale for a couple more days! Tell your friends and family there’s an awesome space shooter out there to get at 40% off:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270

As for the contents of this update:



To give the commanders more of an active role other than issuing orders we’ve added the first batch of commander abilities. When used intelligently they are a very effective way to support your team. They will likely be tied into meta-game mechanics in the long run - for now, they are available to the attacker team’s commander in Incursion and to both teams in Territories. They will come online after a set amount of time into the match and then work on a cooldown basis.
Of course, as with anything in AFF, if the commander role is not taken by a player the MILNET AI will be able to make use of these abilities as well:

Area Hack ability - Order your faction’s local MILNET AI to focus on hacking enemy gear. Any enemy vehicle caught within the radius of the hack will be temporarily disabled and any deployable turret will change its allegiance to your team.
Area Scan ability - Focus your faction’s fleet sensors to temporarily reveal every enemy in the target location (on ground, in open space, in a particular ship or station). Will even highlight enemies usually hidden by infiltrator suit mods.
Area Shield ability - Project a shield covering a large area, similar to deployable turret shields but much more potent and without the singular vulnerable central point, to protect your fellow soldiers from enemy gunfire.





We’ve done a lot of incremental improvements to space combat mechanics. Thanks to netcode upgrades the fighters should now be more pleasant to pilot and be more reliable in terms of steering online. We have also corrected a bunch of long-standing issues with the lead indicator and target-leading-related mechanics. Dogfighting should be much more enjoyable now, especially in multiplayer matches.
Ground vehicles have received plenty of attention as well, with their physics and handling tweaked to be less prone to snagging on level geometry. In addition, the mechs should now be able to strafe in a less dubious manner and be less prone to lock you inside when you’re trying to escape. We’ve also re-enabled vehicles taking damage from collisions which, thanks to the physics tweaks, should be less of an annoyance and more of a genuine gameplay feature now.





We’ve finally formalized the feature of bullets penetrating enemy infantry. Simply put, it means that guns with high penetration capability (taking ammo types into account, of course) will now be able to punch through enemies, even multiple ones. This is governed by the same rules as wall penetration - subsequent hits will deal less and less damage. The likelihood of going through depends on a few additional factors - the type of suit the enemy is wearing, whether the shot is the final blow and the location of the hit - heads are squisher, although we’re avoiding any kind of complex penetration calculations, often found in mil-sims, here - hitting a hand in front of a head will still count as a hand hit.





A big part of our continuing efforts to push the game towards full release goes into improving the maps. Over the past weeks we’ve done a tremendous amount of polish to all aspects of maps - collision, pathing, decoration placement.





Included with this update are a number of changes to weapons across the board. Whilst these are detailed in full within the changelog some key changes to note are a reduction in recoil for all infantry weapons, reduction in flinch from being hit and quite a radical redesign of the RID to mitigate the need for locking on to name a few.



Full changelog:

• Formalized pawn penetration - you can now shoot through multiple players reliably. The amount depends on the type of gun, ammo, where you shoot (head is squishier) and the type of suit.
  
• Added Commander abilities for the incursion attacker team, or both teams in territories.
  Area Hack: Disables vehicles caught in the radius, and turns all deployed turrets to the user’s faction. 240s of cooldown. Targets in the area get a 6s warning.
  Area Scan: Reveals the whole tacmap-location it is used on for 12s. Including infiltrators. 180s cooldown.
  Area Shield: Will spawn a shield on the location that functions like a shield from a deployable, but more health, and without originating from a device. 300s cooldown.
  
• Slightly improved loading times of all maps
  
• Reduced flinching while sighted slightly
  
• Reduced recoil from all handheld weapons by 20%
  
• Charged GU34 shots "cost" slightly less charge now
  
• Being hit on the underbarrel shield should no longer trigger flinching
  
• Increased damage of the RID and MLI primaries
  
• Vehicle cockpit mods rework:
  - Turtle: 50% armor regeneration increase while not accelerating (no active inputs) and 50% reduced momentum and viewshakes
  - Scout: Reveal enemies for team based on proximity, 50% reduced boost-consumption
  - Infiltrator: Invisible to enemy sensors and proximity explosives, covered in ablative armour (no damage bleedthrough to health on armour depletion)
  
• Radical RID rework:
  - No longer requires a target
  - Once fully charged, will always fire
  - Only primary firemode
  - Stopping charging will drop the progress to none
  - Charging it will dramatically decrease your movement speed
  - Slow chargeup in exchange for massive damage
  - Will now display a warning to everyone in the expected splash area, once the RID is 50% charged
  
• Mines:
  - Will now have a visual trigger-radius
  - Increased the number of mines deployed per use
  - Tweaked fire rate and deployment spread
  - Improved their tracking. They are now considerably harder to outrun.
  
• Experimentally changed dodging from the semi-reliable double-tapping to replacing jump (spacebar by default); Jumping forwards will still be a normal jump, but otherwise it will dodge in the direction you are moving. Dodge can no longer be used mid-air.
  
• Dodge nerfed a bit, so sprint is still preferable
  
• Taught bots how to use dodge. Run for the hills.
  
• Interacting with the UI, such as tweaking loadouts, should contribute to not marking you inactive in online games)
  
• Knifes will now show their chargeup animation for others properly (so you can see if someone is running with a charged knife)
  
• Fixed the knife not always playing its attack animations for others when spammed
  
• Fixed not being able to hit anything in fighters, especially online - improved the lag compensation in space and the way it interacts with space weapons and the lead indicator. Fixed a bunch of oddities with the lead indicator in general, improved lead calculations to include angular velocity to an extent.
  
• Lead indicator will no longer be visible if the target is an objective without something to shoot or if the target is out of range
  
• Grenades will now convey that they are being cooked in 3rd person
  
• Throwing grenades will look less janky for others
  
• Overcooking a grenade will now display a specific animation in response to the detonation
  
• Weapons will now properly play overheating anims and effects for others
  
• Putting a weapon away while it was overheating would occasionally leave an awkward effect on the ground. Should now properly restart the effects again when re-equipped, if it is still overheated.
  
• Slightly reduced damage taken from the bleedout timer; bleeding out takes roughly the same time as it did before the last update (note that corrosion lowers this, since less initial healthpool, but the rate of bleeding out is slower, as before)
  
• Fixed an issue with reviving pawns affected by corrosion - more than one stack of corrosion would lead to them being impossible to revive. Corrosion will also no longer interfere with the time needed to revive someone, it will take the same time to revive regardless of the amount of corrosion.
  
• Replaced the flashlight with an experimental nightvision mode. Maybe there to stay, maybe not, we’ll see.
  
• Reduced armor gained from heavy plate suit mods from 40 to 30
  
• Reduced armor lost from speed suit mods from 40 to 30
  
• Reduced base-armor for heavies from 180 to 160
  
• Reduced movement speed of lights and heavies slightly
  
• While having the support spec equipped, the multiwrench will now enable you to repair yourself by assisting another player regardless of that player being hurt.
  
• Reduced the magsize of rockets on gunships
  
• Experimental tweak to mech cameras to make them centered on the models, to bring them in line with all the other vehicles. Should also make determining whether a weapon will be blocked by level geometry easier.
  
• Better animation blending and a bunch of fixes on the mechs, as an effort towards making them less janky visually when strafing or transitioning from strafes:
  - Fixed very small steps not producing sound
  - Fixed last step not producing sound
  - Fixed velius backwards-running not producing sounds when expected, but rather when it felt like it
  - Fixed issue where crouch wouldn’t consistently happen, or be broken unintentionally
  - Crouching now reduces the sound of the footsteps produced by 20%
  - Updated physics a bit; Now possible to run between the legs and not be pancaked, but the legs should now properly pancake you.
  - Fixed both mechs having spectator camera awkwardly placed at their feets
  - Fixed mechs often failing to find a place to let you exit
  - Fixed mechs occasionally struggling to jump (common occurrence on Lukather)
  
• Reworked vehicle shields versus some types of damage: EMP (not bullets), colliding with another vehicle or level geometry, environmental fire, flamer (underslung and turret), knives and multiwrench now ignore shields and deal damage directly to the vehicle
  
• Weapons with a laser pointer (like the RID) should now look more accurate for other players
  
• Removed multiwrench purge mod. Clearing status effects is now again built into the multiwrench by default.
  
• Increased firerate of TA by 15% in exchange for 15% less damage-per-shot
  
• Dropped weapons:
  - Fixed MW not being dropped when exchanged for something else, and not being eligible to be dropped on death
  - Fixed dropped weapons not being thrown in the direction looked but rather always in some arbitrary direction
  - Fixed dropped weapons being randomly placed on the ground; They should now land where it would make sense compared to where they were tossed from with a tiny bit of randomness
  - Fixed prompt “Switch to” (If you have another weapon type equipped, like a knife and what you want to pick up is a primary) not working. It will now swap to that weapon.
  
• Fixed running-and-gunning not properly lowering weapons while in the “no weapons” areas of the briefing rooms
  
• Fixed fighters ion weaponry dealing more damage than intended against capships
  
• Fixed ion and RID vehicle weapons not having any chargeup sound or FX
  
• Underbarrel shields will no longer show up as a firemode on the loadout page for stats
  
• Fixed overheat-progress not showing up properly in multiplayer if triggered from being on fire
  
• Fixed wrong UI weapon image for the C90
  
• Using an underslung with the GU34 should no longer attempt to charge the weapon (When the underslung is current firemode)
  
• Improved accuracy of locking on to targets and keeping the lock
  
• Increased lock-on target priority for destroyables and tagged targets
  
• Re-added the “out of range” text under the tagbox. If you have a lock-on weapon out and your target has active countermeasures enabled it will now display “ECM active”
  
• Fixed some lighter lock-on missiles thinking it had considerably larger range than it actually had, fixing some incorrect “out-of-range” markers
  
• Standardised timers for respawn waves; Should be more reliable with giving you the proper time it will take before being able to respawn.
  
• Updated medal names from “CMB” to “CBT” for consistency
  
• Detpacks, mines and spring nades will now display their trigger-radius visually to the team who placed them
  
• Vehicle point-defense will no longer target mines, nades, sensors or detpacks, and will only shoot projectiles heading towards the owner
  
• Found and resolved another instance of the freelook key persisting when tabbing
  
• Added a hint displayed during briefing-time describing directional damage on vehicles
  
• Fixed typo in acid damage contextual hint
  
• Added contextual hint for when entering a dropship without a droppod; Informs you to go rearm
  
• Added config setting “TerritoriesStartingTicketsMultiplier” to servers for scaling territories timers; Default is current, but can be used to make the territories timer longer or shorter. Format is 100 = 1.0x based on the incursion timer.
  
• Fixed a general problem with boardingpoints being destroyed not triggering all events correctly, often leading to odd issues like meshes or turrets being left behind etc.
  
• Fixed boarding points glitching out for late-joiners (Would render the Ixion territories station unboardable among other issues)
  
• When using z-zoom on tacmap (holding spacebar while zooming), the amount zoomed on the z-axis will now be variable to your zoom level
  
• Improved general performance on maps using any sort of damaging volumes
  
• Bots displaced from driving (by a player taking the wheel) will now respawn when necessary, rather than hang around doing nothing
  
• Improved air/space bot pathing
  
• Interaction description for enterable turrets on capital ships will now display the turrets name, when available, to give you a better idea of what you are entering, and making it easier to use the correct interaction if there are multiple turrets nearby
  
• The visuals for “you can board this” will no longer show up if the point you are trying to board is already boarded
  
• Cricket and Dragoon breach tubes should now properly look attached to the ships/stations. If they don’t, please report individual cases on a per-map basis
  
• Made fighter spawners visible inside enemy carriers - as long as you are allowed to use a fighter, it will mark it on your HUD, such as when your task is in space while you are on a hostile carrier, or if the station is blowing up
  
• Fixed hackspikes being occasionally invisible
  
• Added a distinct material for AIA-placed hackspikes
  
• Bots should totem less when defending an objective
  
• Bots will now spread-out to defend a hackspike as soon as one is planting, rather than stack up and wait for a full plant. The planter will also move about more while planting naturally
  
• Bots will be more willing to flank objectives
  
• Objectives will now again remain on the top-right once they are completed, rather than disappearing
  
• Fortress’ Phase 2’s third objective will now be visible again before being activate
  
• Fixed repair-objectives not being taggable
  
• Refined messages from planting a hackspike; The planter will now get a “You are planting the spike” message while others will get “Spike is being planted”. Should make it clearer if you are planting it, or it is being done by someone else standing right next to you
  
• Fixed an issue with the vehicle deployment timer, where it would force you to sit through a new timer, despite being allowed to respawn already
  
• Redeploying to accept a vehicle drop will now grant a free respawn, so you won’t have to sit in the timer, if you accept it quickly after deploying
  
• Reduced the active-time for the AIA point defense and flares
  
• Fixed issue where shields being down would interfere with capitalship point defense
  
• Point defense now works on a cumulative damage-per-projectile basis again; Can be overwhelmed by swarms
  
• Vehicles will no longer show up on tacmap if they are not spotted
  
• Tweaked the vehicle cameras’ distance changes based on speed
  
• Tweaked Sturm’s handling to be more flexible
  
• Recessed the physical representation of the wheels on Hare and Silverback a fair bit; Makes them a bit more reactive to terrain, and should prevent them from glitching out when driving near the sides of objects.
  
• Hare and Silverback collision and mass tweaks
  
• Locust will now change its shieldsize when deployed, to properly accommodate the model; There should no longer be parts of the hitbox that bypassses the shield
  
• Upscaled Dhaka’s shields to properly fit the barrels, tweaked driving and collision some
  
• Upgraded the torque on Basta some, to make it a bit more agile. Tweaks to driving and collision as well.
  
• Partisan got its wheels and steering tweaked to snag and glitch less. Hopefully. Who knows with the Partisan.
  
• Vehicle shield-regen delays have been adjusted; Should take longer to restart
  
• Vehicles can now be affected by elementals regardless of their shield status if shot underneath the shield - previously it would block any elemental effect from triggering, as long as the shields were up. Shooting the shield directly will still prevent the elemental effect.
  
• Fixed Javert’s passenger ion turrets being wobbly; Fixed two of the passenger turrets not being enter-able in one of the Javert variants
  
• Fixed characters in capital ship seats not being properly replicated to clients - they should now do the proper animations for everyone
  
• Fixed Anubis and Huginn having trouble accelerating from a complete standstill
  
• Improved what “rear” is on some vehicles (for when to deal additional directional damage)
  
• Upped delay for in-map mounted turrets; They will now respawn in 1m 30s, rather than 30s
  
• Fixed warping in/out after initial warp not doing the proper effects
  
• Vehicles will again be affected by collision damage from hitting other vehicles or level geometry at speed
  
• Fixed the preview not working as intended in the loadout
  
• Fixed some issues with warnings not being displayed as intended when picking loadout in a vehicle drop
  
• When driving a vehicle, opening up the loadout to change will now start on the vehicle, to easier make adjustments you think of for next time you use the vehicle.
  
• Moved torpedo slot before mine slot on bombers; Order should now match the other fighters (primary, (primary), lockon/missile, mines)
  
• Inverted order of the primaries on the mechs; 1 should now correspond to the left weapon, and 2 to the right, as would be expected
  
• Tweaked behaviour of unique mods; Should no longer be possible to glitch-double-equip them
  
• Changing faction on the loadout screen will now attempt to pick the opposite factions variant; For instance if on Turtle’s loadout page, and changing the faction to AIA, it should display the Basta’s loadout page
  
• Improved the collision shapes of all consoles across the maps
  
• New model variant for the Cricket breaching pod in space - fixes issues with not being able to shoot AIA breach pods attached to ships/stations by aiming at the actual thing.
  
• Fixed issue with all the AIA ground LZs using a Cricket: The front would have weird meshes around the turret, and you could see the turret floating from the inside. They were also using wrong materials.
  
• Tweaked and assigned even more physical materials on many objects across all maps
  
• Spline meshes (pipes, cables, ducts) now have collision. Will make a lot of pipes that were previously shoot-through and pass-through properly solid.
  
• Adjusted the friction property of ice. Deployables and ragdolls should no longer slide nearly as much on icy surfaces.
  
• Tweaked the launch and restocking animations for the fighters and dropships in the generic faction hangars
  
• Tweaked the boardingpoints in most carriers. They should now all properly let bots path, while remaining solid when no pod is attached, and properly be deadly when destroyed.
  
• It should no longer be possible to consistently go out-of-bounds inside the main rock of Anaster
  
• Tweaked a lot of collision in the Khamun interior; Should address a lot of the spots where you can hide in geom, and hopefully make it a little nicer to navigate
  
  
• Anubis interior:
  - Fixed a number of holes that would lead out-of-bounds, meshes you could hide in and places you could actively get stuck in
  - Tweaked the dropships; They now look slightly more natural
  - Tweaked the blockers in the hangar area to be more flexible to move around
  - Resolved an issue where bots would struggle pathing through the center of the ship
  
  
• Ranger interior:
  - Tweaked the boardingpoints same as in the rest of the carriers
  - Tweaked collision in the launch bay, it should now be friendlier to navigate
  
  
• Huginn interior:
  - Lots of miscellaneous collision tweaks
  - Tweaked the blockers in the hangar area to be more flexible to move around
  - Resolved some holes in the roof
  - Tweaked some meshes that were clipping through walls
  - Fixed being able to hide in the damaged-state meshes in the hangar bay
  
  
• Ascella updates:
  - Fixed in-menu description and thumbnail picture
  - Fixed the end-match message to point at the correct winning team
  - Tweaked a lot of collision
  - Mounted a floating screen near the central Phase 2 objective
  - Fixed area behind the central Phase 2 objective not being solid
  - Fixed some z-fighting in the central Phase 2 building
  - Areas near Phase 1 objectives atop of the cliffs are now correctly marked as out-of-bounds
  - Added a few ramps to highlight some less obvious paths in Phase 1 and Phase 2
  - Fixed one pool of the freezing liquid not dealing damage as intended
  - One of the pools leading out-of-bounds was not out-of-bounds - should now reliably stop you from going there
  - Fixed a spot on the bridge going over a pool where you would be affected by the freezing liquid
  - Grounded some floating objects
  - Fixed some issues in the Phase 2’s cliffside building
  - Fixed bots being unable to path down to the Cricket Phase 3 objective from the ULA spawn via one of the roads
  - Added glass to the few windows lacking it for consistency
  - Tweaked the look of the glass windows
  - Tweaked the intro to be smoother
  - Added some décor to the Phase 1 and 2 AIA spawns
  
  
• Poranti updates:
  - Potentially fixed Poranti crashing after finishing a map and loading into the next online
  - Replaced a lot of ULA tech with AIA tech where appropriate
  - Hopefully resolved a rare issue where completing objectives a bit out-of-order would cause issues
  - Added some objective-protection when they are inactive
  - Resolved the bots being unwilling to board Phase 4
  - Added an out-of-bounds volume covering Phase 2
  - Phase 1’s turret will now start in the close camera mode
  - ULA droppods should now be properly protected
  - Khamun should now be required to progress to Phase 4
  - Increased the healthpool of Phase 1 objectives
  
  
• Mirnoide updates:
  - Moved some killvolumes that had gotten a little overly excited about the ULA breachpoint in the lavadome station
  - Added fighter restocking animations to both biodomes
  - Removed some restrictions from bot pathing, and fixed an issue where they weren’t reliably able to get out of one of the boarding tubes
  - Tweaked some collision and improved performance
  - Moved some trees down to be properly grounded, fixed the “pump” mesh being very visually blurred depending on distance, fixed some glass, added some water sounds, fixed some water visuals and the river magically eating bullets in the desert dome station.
  
  
• Yin Tao Shan updates:
  - Fixed improper collision on a destroyable on the road: The collision would persist after the destroyable was destroyed
  - In incursion, moved Phase 2’s out-of-bounds volume back a bit, so the “most obvious path” from the ULA vehicle-dropping is no longer blocked and makes the secondary AIA spawn inside the play-area
  - General collision and z-fighting tweaks on rocks, trees etc.
  - Replaced AIA tech with ULA in the ULA spawn-huts
  - Adjusted the Phase 3 out-of-bounds volume, so that the left-side ULA LZ is in-bounds as intended
  
  
• ULA briefingroom:
  - Fixed missing collision on the “quarters” door
  - There are no longer floating lights in the briefing-area
  - Fixed a few ways to get out of bounds
  - Added a killvolume underneath, to prevent anyone from being stuck, should they get out of bounds
  - Tweaked collision on armory-area; There is no longer an arbitrary invisible roof that you’d hit your head on
  - Fixed being able to get yourself stuck near the weapon-racks
  - Added more weapons to the rack, so there’s a few duplicates to pick from
  - Fixed multiple objects visibly culling in and out when moving through the briefing area. All meshes should now be properly visible as intended
  - Added some red/black/green screens slightly out of bounds; Use the “ghost” consolecommand and fly to the right of the spawn; Should allow those interested to get screenshots that are easier to cut out
  
  
• AIA briefingroom:
  - Fixed some floating and semi-see-through objects in the kitchen area
  - Fixed the roof not being solid; Could be used to climb out of the area
  - Added a killvolume underneath, to prevent anyone from being stuck, should they get out of bounds
  - Added some red/black/green screens slightly out of bounds; Use the “ghost” consolecommand and fly to the right of the spawn; Should allow those interested to get screenshots that are easier to cut out
  
  
• Lacroix updates:
  - Added fighter-restocking and takeoff animations as was done to the ULA hangar previously.
  - Adjusted a lot of collision and fixed some z-fighting
  - Fixed some places you could get out-of-bounds
  - Properly grounded all cover
  - Fixed an area that had gotten a placeholder texture assigned
  - Inner ULA spawn and AIA LZs should now be properly protected
  - Added some effects, and revised collision, around the middle objective; Should now be more flexible to fight around
  
  
• Meudeverre updates:
  - Fixed ugly skybox scaling
  - Tweaked a lot of internal collision on cover, walkways, etc.
  - Added restocking and takeoff animations to fighters
  - Protected ULA LZs
  - Fixed destroyables leaving behind collision after they were destroyed
  - Reduced the healthpool of Phase 2 objectives
  
  
• Ixion updates:
  - Fixed some parts being see-through and partially fly-through in the inner parts of the station
  - Fixed some tubes not being fully connected, but vaguely hanging in space
  - Fixed some weirdness with the stations turrets
  - All LZs should now be properly protected and functional
  - Added an out-of-bounds volume covering Phase 3
  - Trash in the bins is now visible from all angles
  - Tweaked a lot of collision; Greatly reduced places you can cheesily hide or get stuck in, or fall out of bounds
  - Added some meshes around the interior to finish up areas that looked barren
  - Properly grounded meshes, and made sure any destroyables wouldn’t leave floating meshes or bad collision
  
  
• Delta updates:
  - Slightly increased the time it takes for the water to turn your screen black, to feel a bit more natural, and tweaked when it affects you, to match with the visual water better
  - Fixed some cases of z-fighting
  - The medbay in one of the AIA huts should now look like it belongs
  - Replaced AIA tech with ULA variants inside ULA spawnhuts
  - Widened all bridges, to make it easier to drive vehicles over
  
  
• Tannhauser updates:
  - Fixed a lot of cover not being rendered from a distance
  - The LZs should now be properly shielded and protected
  - Fixed missing collision on some consoles
  - Tweaked the doors: They should now be easier to deal with while opening, and to walk past
  - Added blocking volumes to the caps of the fans under the platform; Would allow players to move gunships in them, or jump into them, despite being visually obstructed by the fans
  
  
• Kerrat Territories updates:
  - Tweaked previous fix intended to stop the capital ships from drifting and desyncing boardingpoints; The capital ships would unintentionally become fly-through at times
  
  
• Lukather Territories updates:
  - Updated the tram in the Territories variant as was previously done to the incursion variant
  - Replaced AIA tech with ULA in the ULA spawnhut
  - Added some supporting meshes to the “hotel towers”, so they aren’t awkwardly semi-transparant from the air
  - Tweaked collision on the parking lot and terminals
  - Fixed some of the windows on the main towers somehow not blocking vehicles or sucking them in
  - Fixed the initial landed dropship being visible as a glitch for a second during the intro
  
  
• Fortress updates:
  - Slightly moved ULA LZs so they are properly grounded
  - Moved right-side Silverback and Basta vehicle drop spots back a bit, to give the defenders a better chance of making use of them during Phase 2
  - Removed some weird blocking volumes from Phase 3 area
  - Another pass of terraforming to blend everything better
  - Added sandbags to second level of Phase 2 towers to make them more relevant
  - Turrets in Phase 2 towers will now start you in zoomed-in view to make them more usable
  - A bunch of collision tweaks, most notably on rocks and railings
  - Fixed spots in some of the towers, walls and spawn areas where you could shoot and see through the floors to the level below
  - Slightly recessed Phase 2’s mounted turrets, so they actually fit on their platforms
  - Added some blockers between the towers and the wall itself, since some players managed to get themself stuck in the gap
  - Replaced AIA tech with ULA in the ULA spawn
  
  
• Igneous updates:
  - Added two ending cinematics which will play depending on who wins
  - Fixed some collision
  - Fixed some pathing, where bots would struggle with using the scaffolding towers to ascend and descend and get stuck under the Phase 1 platform
  - Added a bit of cover to the overpass coming from ULA Phase 3 spawn; It should be more doable for attackers to contest a sniper-nest there
  
  
• Irega updates:
  - A lot of miscellaneous collision improvements and tweaks
  - Fixed some spots in the trash heap where you could get stuck or get out of bounds
  - Properly protected the spawns in the Incursion variant
  - In the Incursion variant, adjusted the Phase 3 out-of-bounds volume, so that the left-side ULA LZ is in-bounds as intended
  

For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!

Onwards and upwards!

Hey there AFF Community!

It’s April 1st guys and girls but it’s not exactly laughing matter this year, is it? We did include something more light-hearted in the update for this occasion but first and foremost in these difficult times... stay safe, everyone. Stay at home, wash your hands, act responsibly. We’ll try to offset the boredom of this planet-wide quarantine a bit with some cool AFF updates, so here we go:


Set on an icy moon, this map sees ULA infantry storming subsequent emplacements and taking over an AIA research station hidden among the frozen cliffs. It’s also the first map to feature our new dynamic weather system - it’s not its final form yet but when finished all the maps will benefit from it the same way Ascella does. No spoilers on the screenshots, go check it out yourself, just be sure to wear something warm under your armour!




Infantry loadouts now feature helmet mods which let players further specialize in different roles on the battlefield if they wish to. Consider this a set of perks you can pick in your loadout to get certain unique situational bonuses.
Spotting mechanics have also been reworked, to constitute more of a conscious enemy identification tool than a persistent wall-hack. Details can be found in the extremely sizable changelog below.


We’re polishing a lot of aspects of AFF at the moment but we also want to make sure the game plays as we envisioned it for the final release. This update brings in some significant changes to gameplay mechanics and balance:

The majority of weapons have been rebalanced to better fit into their intended roles, with drastic changes to how damage is modulated per distance. Most fighter ships can now pick 2 different primary weapons and switch between them.

We reworked how reviving works, with the players getting up with less health the longer they were bleeding out instead of always having full HP. Incapacitated players are also more vulnerable now and we fixed an issue that would give players invulnerabilty frames while getting up from the incapacitated state.

There are also quite a few experimental features in this update - like the 3D target display on the HUD. Those will not necessarily look like that a few updates from now but they’re tests of new features we want to have in the final release - and the new pieces of rendering tech we need to realize our final vision.




A lot of the maps got fixed up in terms of cover, collision, objectives etc. We’ve also done a significant pass on what objects on the maps are “made out of”. Everything in AFF should have a physical material description assigned, which determines how easy it is to shoot through it, what effects are displayed upon hitting the object, what footstep sounds play etc. Up to this point there were quite a few omissions in this department, now most of those oddities should be sorted out. Still, please do report any cases of bullet penetration misbehaving on objects if you manage to encounter those though!


We’re also working around the clock on optimizing the game for its final release and this month we ironed out some pesky issues in the multiplayer connections. Playing on multiple accounts behind the same router should work reliably now, LAN game discovery should be more robust. We also improved the mechanisms responsible for checking and reporting why the player couldn’t connect to a particular server.

All the details of the changes in this version can be found below. It’s a massive list this time, we picked up the pace quite a lot these past couple months. Not sure how the current state of the world will affect us but so far we’re on track for full release later in the year. Stay tuned for more updates!

• Fixed the idle-kick / idle-move-to-spectate functionality being unintentionally disabled
  
• Tweaked the size of player names printed on armor and vehicles. Shouldn’t get clipped as often
  
• The spotted HUD marker on infantry is now raised slightly when crouched (Should make them be less likely to end up hidden) - doubly so if they're moving crouched
  
• The spotted HUD marker for hostile infantry now takes a slightly darker color when out of line-of-sight (occluded by walls etc.). Note, it’s based on the enemy’s center of mass, so they may not be fully occluded
  
• NAT punchthrough should now correctly support connection attempts from behind the same NAT and generally work in more cases of exotic network setups
  
• Updated default loadouts to include helmet mods
  
• Fixed being unable to open the tab-menu but not the tacmap in the period immediately after commander vote
  
• Added a 3D target-info display to the right side of the HUD, instead of the elaborate healthbar near the target bracket (can be scaled or turned off completely in the settings menu). This display will also have information about helmet mods, target’s name, how fast they are going and a representation of their model
  
• Revive rework:
  - Multiwrench no longer heals incapacitated pawns; Only repairs armor
  - When revived, you no longer start with full HP, but whatever you had left in incapacitated state
  - You can now be shot while being helped up
  - Bots will more aggressively use their multiwrench
  - If taken considerable overkill damage, a straight death is guaranteed
  - Removed reduction in damage taken for pawns bleeding out
  - Taking explosive damage as the killing blow should no longer disallow going into bleedout
  - Starting health when incapacitated now respects any corrosion value
  
• Tacmap
  - Tilting the camera too far down should no longer invert the forward/back control
  - Zoom amount is now scaled to the current zoom-level; Less volatile zooming
  - Movement (Forward/back/left/right) is now scaled to the current zoom-level; Less volatile movement
  - Some destroyables (Like objectives, boarding points and LZs) are now visible on the tacmap
  
• Helmet mod rework - removed all current helmet mods, and replaced it with:
  - Agility spec
  
• - Allows shooting sidearms while sprinting
  
• - Adds dodge move (double tab in a direction)
  - Support spec
  
• - Multiwrench repairs own armour at 50% of output
  
• - Unlocks 2nd support item slot to loadout (currently always available)
  - Assault spec
  
• - 30% reduced recoil (currently modulated by armour amount)
  
• - Adaptive armour, increased resilience to repeated damage of the same type; (reduces damage taken by 0.9^number-of-hits-of-same-ammo-type, the number-of-hits factor will decay by 1 every second)
  - Turtle spec
  
• - 50% armour regen delay while crouching
  
• - 50% reduced flinch/viewshake on hit/radial
  - Infiltrator spec
  
• - Scrambler (invisible to sensor nades, doesn’t trigger proximity explosives)
  
• - Ablative armour, no damage bleed through armour
  - Levelling spec
  
• - Redirects all experience gained to your lowest ranked channel
  
• Spotting rework:
  - Enemies get identified marker while tagged and in team's sight
  - Enemies get identified marker while in sensor radius and in team's sight
  - Enemies get tracking “eye” blip while in sensor radius and out of team's sight, unless sporting the infiltrator spec
  - Enemies firing loud weapons get temporary minimap “?” blip, unless using knife, multiwrench, throwing grenade, silencer or deployable
  
  Vehicles
• Changed some flight handling; Spacecrafts should be more responsive
  
• Gunships and spacecrafts should be less jittery
  
• Land vehicles will now take 50% less damage from the front, in addition to the current 50% additional damage to the rear
  
• Added significant spread to the Basta and Turtle’s main weapons
  
• Changed dropships from being “Use to exit” to “Hold use to exit”, like gunships, in order to avoid accidentally getting out of the seat from missing boarding-points or rearm points
  
• Tweaked capital ship components; They can now always take damage. If they have been downed, they cannot be fully destroyed again until restored, but damage taken sets back the process
  
• Increased damage-induced regeneration delays for land-vehicles and gunships
  
• The fighters that visually had two weapons, now have two seperate weapons (you can equip two primaries on Sword, Katana, Scimitar, Firefly, Salamander and Rakshasa)
  
• When looking at someone in a seat (for instance in a dropship), their name should now be displayed correctly, rather than show the name of whatever you last looked at
  
• Components that are not active (like shields, engines and core-lockouts in Kerrat) will no longer be displayed as such. Their physical console(s) or objects will no longer have a mouseover popup, they will no longer act as objectives or be damageable - and if they have text, they will now explicitly tell that they are disabled.
  
• Fixed EMP/acid/fire having infinite lifespans if triggered on something with no armor value (such as LZ turrets)
  
• Fixed driver position in vehicles being off if entered crouching in multiplayer
  
• Dropships will depart faster after boarding; When the pod is attached, it will take off, rather than hang around for an additional ~5seconds
  
• Fixed dropships showing up as belonging to the wrong team if driverless while boarding; It will now be shootable regardless of a driver being present
  
• Added slight shield boost to dropships while boarding to make them more likely to succeed if they have initiated boarding
  
• Fixed being unable to repair driverless neutral vehicles (such as stationary turrets)
  
• Shields on defensive platforms and stations have been removed, as they were unintentional
  
• Crouching while boosting should no longer cancel boosting, if piloting a jetcraft or spaceship (consistent with jump key, or rather “go up”, not cancelling it either)
  
• Vehicles are now harder to be afflicted with elemental effects, and the duration of the effects got reduced
  
• Vehicles can now be accepted or declined while dead in the UI in a more convenient fashion. If accepted, you will be able to tweak the loadout of the vehicle until you are able to spawn as usual. Vehicles without loadouts are spawned immediately
  
• Added timer to the vehicle-award-offer prompt, counting down the time left on the offer, untill it expires (until it is auto-declined)
  
  Weapons
• Corrected error in SAR's reload animation timing
  
• Reduced MNL screenshake significantly
  
• Reduced C30i shell damage by 10%
  
• Added flinching when zooming and being shot at
  
• Removed flamer’s ability to headshot
  
• Adjusted flamer’s damage output to be variable based on distance to target (intensity), and slightly lowered their maximum damage output
  
• Reworked infantry weapon falloff models; Damage will now be more variable over distance, where certain types will perform better at certain ranges
  
• Removed various hidden damage modifiers. The damage stat of the weapon should be more accurate to the actual damage you deal
  
• Increased the damage of MLIs primary slightly
  
• Slightly tweaked all vehicle weapons to follow the new falloff model. Minimal impact.
  
• Slightly reduced the effective radius of the flare countermeasures
  
• Tweaked the FKR ᵘⁿᶠᵏ'ᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᶠᵏʳ
  
• Fixed decoy nades callouts misbehaving and hijacking the squad broadcasts (and changed their audio from "sent to squad over net" to what you'd expect to hear (said out loud)
  
• Fixed module weapons (for instance turrets on LZs) not being valid lock-on targets; Should allow locking onto a droppod when aiming at their body.
  
• Added deployables (turrets) as icons visible on the HUD; Will now show up with friendly-color for teammates, and task-color for your own. Will always show your own, and teammates if nearby, or if you have the deployable tagged. Should help with identifying if a turret is friendly or hostile.
  
• Moved the behaviour for multiwrench’s purge-elementals effect from default, to a mod
  
• Fixed some grenade types not passing correctly through shields
  
• Decreased price of all multi-wrench mods
  
• Fixed picking weapons up occasionally leaving you with nothing
  
• Reduced base headshot multiplier to 2x, down from 2.5x. Note that the multiplier is increased by having helmet mods equipped
  
• Improved handheld weapon weight mod
  
• Significantly reduced hip-fire spread penalties on sidearms
  
• Increased magsize of TA to 36
  
• Reduced reload time of TA by 0.3s
  
• Increased reload time of A420 by 0.1s
  
• Reduced fighter flechette spread in-line with infantry gun changes
  
• Increased radius of sensor grenades detection from 15m to 20m
  
• Fixed some lockon missile types having different range and lockon range when used on Ti/Gryphon/Javert/Chons/Heimdal instead of on the fighters
  
• Fixed underbarrel smoke grenades’ name on the HUD
  
• Reworked knife somewhat; It should now be more forgiving to hit with. Slightly increased the range.
  
• Removed the GU34’s lights
  
  Objectives
• Fixed hack objectives displaying the wrong objective to defenders in MP
  
• Out-of-bounds volume damage should no longer persist if you were inside the volume as it got deactivated
  
• Objectives inside an out-of-bounds volume will now be delayed from activating for the attacking team by 20s
  
• Out-of-bounds volumes will now persist for 20s longer to further discourage ninja-capping objectives on phase-changes
  
• Mapvote timer has been decreased by 20s
  
• Between stages, while waiting for the next to start, it will now display "INCURSION, AWAITING NEXT STAGE" as the stage-description
  
• When starting a map, the stage-description will now display "INCURSION, INTRODUCTION" or "TERRITORIES, INTRODUCTION" during the introduction cinematics
  
• Fixed "Phase N completed, timer extended" message not showing up when completing Phase 1
  
• Added a soundcue for objectives being activated on phase-progression (Should make it clearer when a stage is completed, and you have new objectives available)
  
• Destroyables linked to another (Such as the turret on LZs or dropships attached to carriers) should now properly sync their damage and healing
  
• Fixed drop module weapons (Such as the turret on LZs) not taking explosive damage
  
• Increased health of capital ships that are marked as objectives by 20%
  
• Tweaked space-related objective-helpers to better guide you to perform your objective. Will now properly tell you to use fighters/dropships or docking depending on your goal.
  
  AI
• Bots will somewhat slow down when near a “Need a ride” callout
  
• Bots are now able to use boost in ground-vehicles
  
• Bots will now react to the callout “Get in” from a larger distance, if they are part of your squad
  
• Bots should now be a little more considerate about changing their weapons
  
• Fixed an issue where bot would cycle their weapons needlessly when not having a target
  
• Reduced AI response time to already-identified enemies
  
• Bots should now better understand the range of their multiwrench, and move accordingly when trying to revive
  
• Bots should now better understand the range of deployable ammo and healthkits
  
  Maps
• New Map: Ascella - snow/ice themed infantry-only Incursion map
  
• Pass on physics materials - what can be shot through, how it looks when you shoot it; Some materials will behave differently than previously as a result. Feel free to provide feedback on any objects you think behave oddly in this context.
  
• Mirnoide changes:
  - Refined all collision in both biodomes; Fixed holes where it was possible to fall out of the map, better collision near all objects, each dome now extends out to where it visually looks like they end
  - Tweaked various stuff to be AIA themed
  - Polished a ton of objects that were partially see-through, Z-fighting, floating or otherwise out of place
  - Spawns are now properly protected
  - Fighters now have launch animations
  - A lot of terraforming to fit the new larger domes, and add additional paths
  - Adjusted both sides of the biodomes in space; They should now have proper collision and no longer snag ships
  - If you jump out of the biodomes somehow, you will now be killed
  - Added cover in various locations to interrupt line of sight and make reaching the objectives more feasible and fair in the desert biodome
  - Added major line-of-sight blockers to reduce cross-map sniping and make getting out of the chokepoint more fair
  - (Desert biodome) Added stairwell to give more path options for the attacking players
  - (Desert biodome) Fixed the water plane's weirdness with being over-extended beyond where the water should be
  - (Desert biodome) Water should now act as water
  - (Lava biodome) Refined all environmental hazards to better fit their visuals
  - (Lava biodome) Added additional bridges around the place
  - (Lava biodome) Terrain should now be more intuitive to navigate
  
• Tannhauser:
  - Added larger side walkways outside the hangar
  - Added additional ramps to the roof inside the hangar
  - Added more cover on the outside areas of Phase 2
  - Attempted to allow mechs to reach more locations
  - Improved accessibility in yellow girder walkways in Phase 3
  - Addressed missing collision on elevated platforms above the deck
  - Re-added out of bounds volume to prevent girder camping/repairing with gunships
  - Added out of bounds volume to prevent misuse of area behind ULA Phase 3 spawns
  - Implemented phased out-of-bounds volumes to prevent crafty ninjas from getting to objectives before defenders can set up
  - Fixed Phase 3 spawns not being properly protected
  - Modified ramp towards AIA side of Phase 2 to allow for mech traversal on both ends
  - Added arrows to indicate optional pathways up to the roof
  - Fixed some issue with getting snagged on geometry, when trying to enter the huts
  
• Yin Tao Shan:
  - Addressed anomalous blocking volume in front of Phase 1 stairwell to objective
  - Resized spawns to fit better, and ensured they are properly protected
  - Renamed ULA LZ that didn’t comply to the naming of other LZs
  - Fixed flora being floaty
  - Added collision to the bridge pillars
  - Fixed some meshes being partially see-through and floaty on the bridges
  - Water should now act as water
  - (Phase 1 area) Sorted some z-fighting and misalignment on lower columns and platforms
  - (Phase 1 area) Sorted collision on downstairs desks in building
  - (Phase 1 area) Sorted lacking collision on wall leading into building
  - (Phase 1 area) Added collision to the lamps and parts of the “railing”
  - (Phase 2 area) Sorted rock without collision near old AIA spawn, and three others that didn't block gunfire
  - (Phase 2 area) Sorted a few pillars without collision
  - (Phase 3 area) Fixed piping in middle building being floaty and some collision there
  
• Ixion:
  - Addressed missing collision on some pillars/columns in the interior of the station
  - Fixed a slightly incorrect introduction timing
  
• Lacroix:
  - Fixed incorrect introduction timing that would actively open and then close the tacmap while still going
  
• Poranti:
  - Addressed missing collision on blue barrels
  - Addressed some snags in Phase 4 hangars near fighter platforms
  - Fixed issue with some AI pathing on Phase 4’s catwalks
  
• Delta:
  - Fixed floating pebbles
  - Tweaked rocks collisions to maybe be more accurate
  
• Fortress (Incursion):
  - Fixed floating flora
  - Moved hovercars in garage down to the ground (since they're clearly inactive)
  - Terraforming pass to properly ground all the buildings
  - Fixed a few z-fighting incidents on the wall
  - Slightly tweaked the location of the Phase 3 AIA vehicle drop points
  
• Lukather:
  - Addressed missing collision on the tunnel walls
  - Fixed water towers having two holes in the walkway
  - Fixed up the Incursion train a little; Should follow the path better, have better collision, and no longer snag on the pillars; Also is partially bulletproof where it is logical that it would be; It's now also technically a map hazard
  - Added vehicle-blocking-pole-meshes to all entrances to the tower; Should properly convey that vehicles can't enter
  - The collision in the Phase 3 terminal should now be more intuitive
  - Properly sealed entry to the building coming off the Phase 3 terminal
  - Sorted a few z-fighting cases
  - Polished the Phase 3 tower; Fixed misalignments, z-fighting, added another walkway in the center going up; Added exterior pathway for the final level; Added a bit of additional cover; Enabled collision on consoles
  - Tweaked size of shields on ULA spawn-huts
  - Replaced AIA tech with ULA tech near train and in the spawn-huts
  
• Igneous:
  - Patched exploitable missing collision in Phase 3 which allowed for players to drop down and snipe from the building with impunity
  - Added grates to one of the Phase 3 up/down tunnels that was missing it (looked strange and hitched movement) + moved 'door mesh' down a bit, since it was snagging collision
  - Fixed Phase 2 spawn being enabled in Phase 1
  - Phase 3 tweaks: Ramp should no longer have bits sticking out, should no longer have arbitrary collision, all rails have been moved a bit to better fit the walkway, round collisions for the meshes near ramp have been downsized to be more accurate
  - All spawns should now be properly protected
  - Added out-of-bounds volume to cover objective D
  - Tweaked a hut to be more easily enterable near first objective
  - Fixed some strange collision on commonly used objects like toolboxes
  - Changed all AIA tech to ULA aesthetic
  
• Cricket dropship interior:
  - Tweaked collision of everything to feel more natural
  - Fixed some z-fighting and misalignments
  - Turned the seats to both be facing forward to make it easier to navigate from the middle
  - Replaced mis-used ULA tech meshes with AIA aesthetic
  
• Dragoon dropship:
  - Same as cricket, but also extended triggers for doors so they should be more responsive
  
• Irega territories:
  - Fixed having to jump over a set of stairs at street level plus misc. collision improvements
  
• Meudeverre:
  - Fixed floating bits of cover, z-fighting, some parts of the floor lacking collision and lack of collision on hack consoles in the interior
  - Fixed bad collision on a ramp near final objectives and added out-of-bounds volume to Phase 3
  - When the station gets boarded, the AIA spawn in the hangar will be disabled and replaced with one that is properly protected inside the wall
  - Slightly tweaked tunnel from interior AIA spawn towards Phase 3 objectives, so bits of the AIA spawn aren't glitching through the wall
  - All the huts in ULA hangar have been tweaked slightly so they don't hamper movement; Also some meshes have been moved about a bit to prevent see-through spots and z-fighting; And a bit of mesh-painting to blend the segments slightly better
  - Fixed a slightly incorrect introduction time
  
• AIA Briefingroom:
  - Fixed some lacking collision on map-columns
  - Fixed infinite resupply point that was broken near the shooting range
  - Tweaked lighting on the central tables in the eating area
  - Removed ULA tech that had snuck in
  - Polished shooting range; The heads should now be inside the models, heads are slightly larger, and the models should overall be better aligned with the rails
  
• ULA Briefingroom:
  - Fixed some Z-fighting and collision issues in the kitchen area. Also returned a vent that had gone on a journey
  - Polished shooting range; Increased size of heads, and overall be better aligned with the rails; Tweaked position of shooting range triggers to make them easier to activate
  - Removed AIA tech that had snuck in
  - Slightly moved one of the briefing rooms "play briefing" triggers to match the console
  - Changed material of the shooting ranges buttons to be ULA blue, rather than orange
  - Fixed weapon table not having collision
  - Fixed floating light fixture - and added collision to it
  - Fixed a guy holding his rifle funky
  - Door wasn't properly covering doorway, bit of "look through the world"; Resized to fit
  
• Khamun interior:
  - Added missing team-blocking-volume to bridge spawn
  - Tweaked collision on turret seats
  
• Ranger interior:
  - Fixed one of the two boarding points (left) not functioning properly as a spawn point
  
• Kerrat territories:
  - Upscaled shields slightly, to better fix the ships
  - Potentially fixed the desync of the capital ships happening over time (should allow for them to be boarded entire match)
  
• Anubis interior:
  - Fixed one of the boarding points not functioning properly
  
• Huginn interior:
  - Fixed some collision issues (some ceiling issues, and being able to fall out of the map)
  - Fixed issue with passengers in the dropships being killed as they leave the hangar
  
• AISN hangar:
  - Added fighter-restocking animation
  
• USN hangar:
  - Fixed some collision and z-fighting issues around the place
  - The Katana should now look more natural
  - Animated ladders and improved the fighter-restocking animations
  - Added another set of blockades on the floor, for the fighter that didn't have one
  - Sorted a number of look-through meshes (mainly ceiling)
  

For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord.

Onwards and upwards! Stay safe everyone!

Hey there AFF Community!





Of course the Holiday Season wouldn’t be complete without The Winter Sale.
You can grab AFF at %40 off until the 2nd of January:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270

For the Christmas period the characters and vehicles in the game will also wear their best festive outfits, just like last year. More importantly though, here’s what’s coming next year:


If you’ve been watching some of our previous news pieces, or are in our Discord, you might’ve spotted hints about upcoming full release.

Indeed, we’d like to bring AFF to version “1.0” within the first half of 2020. Or rather, to stay safe with our estimates considering our tiny budget, around the middle of 2020. What does it mean for the game exactly then?

Nothing overly dramatic. We never considered Early Access an excuse to neglect the game’s shortcomings. AFF has changed a lot over the years but it was a functional game practically from the very beginning.

So the transition from EA to a fully released state is rather arbitrary in this case. What it means primarily is: upon full release AFF will be actively advertised instead of staying under the radar, and will seek to acquire a bigger playerbase.

Development-wise, everything remains on course. Up until the release we’ll focus on adding the (extensive!) tutorials, improvements to the recently added features (like the new renderer) and optimization, continue making the game more user-friendly so it makes the best possible impression. However, our team always works on many things in parallel so expect other content too, those are just the main things we absolutely need to get done for version 1.0. We’ve updated the roadmap accordingly.

Once again, best Holiday wishes to all of you and thanks for sticking with us, tolerating our slow development pace and letting us share this dream of a game with you.

Onwards and upwards!

Hey there AFF Community!

Here’s a new update with a bunch of much-needed bugfixes and adjustments, plus some convenience features:


We’ve added Discord’s Rich Presence features into the game. You can now see what faction, map and server your Discord friends are playing on and join them or invite them to join you. We will definitely tweak this some more in the future but, since the majority of our Community is present in the AFF Discord server, this should already make organizing games more convenient.



A few rather critical issues crept into the game with the last update and hotfix so here we are getting rid of those. We’ve also made the elemental effects (incendiary, corrosion, EMP) more consistent and rebalanced certain weapons and items, again - for example decoy grenades should be more useful now and the RID less unpredictable in terms of locking onto targets. Ordering earned vehicles will now drop them in a more predictable spots now as well, resulting in less instances of those poor LAVs being stuck on roofs.

Full changelog:

• Discord Rich Presence implemented, displays basic game session information and enables joining players in an online match
  
• Shielded vehicles no longer allow elemental effects to be triggered on them
  
• Capship point-defence should now work similar to the point-defence drone
  
• Vehicle drops have received some improvements - vehicles should now land in more predictable locations and not get stuck on level geometry as much
  
• Reduced the hitpoints of capital ships’ subsystems by 30% (shields, point-defence, engines etc.)
  
• Infantry and vehicles are now blocked from regenerating anything, be it shields or armour, if on fire
  
• Vehicles are now blocked from regenerating shield if affected by EMP
  
• Standardized how elemental effects are handled for mines, detpacks, underslung rockets and grenades
  
• RID heavy rework:
  - Lockon will no longer break when firing the weapon, allowing for consecutive shots faster
  - Lockon and charge is now properly separated; mods should now function properly
  - It’s now harder to maintain a lockon
  - Reduced delay between firing a shot, and being able to charge the next
  - Base lockon time have been upped to 2s (perfect lock-time), chargetime is 1.5s
  - Should no longer drop charge when zooming
  
• Bots should no longer try to swap weapons when they are incapacitated
  
• Tweaked how bots handle their new firing-rate behaviours - should be more aggressive when in close proximity again
  
• AI turrets should now prioritize bombers a bit less obsessively
  
• Bots are now able to callout “in position” for move-to orders too
  
• Bots will no longer callout “under fire” if they are shooting at a destroyable objective and not really in danger
  
• Vehicles are now immune to their own splash-damage unless friendly-fire is enabled
  
• Underslung flamers have experimentally received a tweak to how they deal damage: rather than only hitting what you are pointing directly at, it will now apply it to all targets in a cone shape, originating from the weapon
  
• Added fake callouts “Regroup on me”, “Move to” and “Need a medic” to decoy grenades, as alternatives that can trigger to gunfire
  
• Decoy grenades gunfire is now repeating a little to better simulate actual gunfire
  
• Fixed AIA-specific gun sounds for decoy grenade
  
• Detpacks, mines and spring grenades will no longer deal damage if detonated from their owner dying
  
• Spring grenades and gyronades are now named n8s and n8g, with the base grenade being called n8d. Should make it easier to determine what you are using in-world
  
• SAR have gotten a larger magazine - 90 up from 66; takes more shots to overheat - 40 up from 25, but takes longer to reload
  
• Increased the number of carried sensor grenades from 2 to 3
  
• TT4 firerate increased, and damage reduced, by roughly 15%; overheats at 80 rounds, up from 60
  
• Removed reload mods from the P8 and Partisan/Dhaka tank turrets
  
• MGA magsize reduced to 160, down from 300
  
• Removed collision on the “projector” on Khamun’s bridge - should no longer soak bullets
  
• Fixed Poranti sometimes causing clients in multiplayer to crash after finishing the match
  
• Fixed lock-on issue introduced in last hotfix - locking onto targets should again work reliably and properly show associated visuals
  
• Fixed corrosion not being applied correctly to vehicles from mines/detpacks/grenades/underslung and certain cases where incendiary effect wouldn’t be triggered either.
  
• Fixed in-world painvolumes (areas inflicting environmental damage) not affecting vehicles and standardized elemental effects on those
  
• Fixed turret AI not always being properly disabled when affected by EMP
  
• Mines should no longer collide with the driver/passengers of the vehicle they originated from
  
• Fixed radial damage not reaching destroyables through team-blocking volumes (droppods for example)
  
• Fixed ship debris in outro scenes of several space maps jittering all over place
  
• Removed some legacy Steam VoIP functionality in preparation for custom VoIP library
  

For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!

Onwards and upwards!

Hey there AFF Community!

The obligatory hotfix for the latest update is here. Turns out DX11 is actually way more stable than we expected but instead we’ve introduced a couple nasty gameplay-related crashes. This patch addresses those, fixes a few other minor issues and introduces further balance changes and improvements.


Some of the objectives in the new map, Poranti, have proven to be exceedingly hard to complete in public matches. We took that feedback into account, removed an objective from the first and second phase, as well as changed the balance of power when it comes to capital ships.


With the experimental DX11 mode we’ve definitely succeeded in offloading more processing work from the CPU to the GPU. Unfortunately on older PCs the performance of that mode turned out to be suboptimal to say the least. We’ve polished the new renderer some more and this patch should improve that situation quite a bit.


The bots are now smarter about using deployable gadgets (turrets especially) and not unloading magazines needlessly at distant targets. We’ve also optimized their target detection and line-of-sight checks quite a bit to lower the performance hit a map full of bots incurs.


We’ve noticed there’s a chance of getting stuck under the droppods descending at the Landing Zone objectives. Maybe even a few nasty tricks players could use to interfere with enemy landing zones. Now the game will make sure nobody tries to stick anything under, or phase into, the landing dropship.


Full changelog:

• Fixed a crash where the intro matinee in Igneous would end with the game falling over due to a missing prefab asset
  
• Fixed an infinite recursion crash (mostly occurring on Poranti) where if a shield touched a kill volume, the shield would be restarted and destroyed over and over again
  
• Poranti updates:
  - Fixed some holes in geometry
  - Updated culling/LOD settings on some objects
  - Removed an objective from first and second phase
  - Improved collision and AI paths
  - Fixed droppod shields having wrong health values
  - Replaced Chons with Javert for Phase 3
  
• Fixed lack of spawnpoint-protection-shields for rear AIA spawn in Irega Incursion
  
• Fixed a blocked entrance to one of the tunnels in Lukather
  
• Fixed Fortress’ Phase 3’s secondary objective (the sensor station) not colliding with vehicles
  
• Landing Zone droppods should now deal properly with stuff parked underneath when they land:
  - For vehicles and enemy players: destroy them
  - For friendly players: move them to a valid spawn location
  - Same behaviour occurs should any enemy player end up inside an area (spawnpoint toggled with map phases for example) that becomes a safe zone for the other team.
  
• Fixed sensor grenades not showing selected firemode, but rather always “sensor”
  
• Fixed detail mode on a bench in the AIA briefing room (was invisible on lower settings)
  
• Fixed slightly unreliable EMP effect on modded knife’s charged mode
  
• Standardized infantry EMP effect duration
  
• Increased cycle rate of the point-defense drone a bit (more chances for detecting targets and shooting them down)
  
• Fixed RID not properly dropping lock after gaining it and afterwards losing it entirely
  
• Fixed locks not always being lost if lockon is lost (would resume to 100%, even if expired)
  
• Placing deployables is no longer affected by EMP or on-fire effects (can now be placed regardless of these)
  
• RID will now lose its charge, if hit by EMP, as intended
  
• Reduced partisan reload time a bit to compensate for its previously reduced damage (now reloads in 4.25 seconds)
  
• Gunships spawn in “normal” flight mode instead of ”newtonian” as default again
  
• Gunships maximum regeneration delay upped to 15s instead of 10s, as intended
  
• Bots are encouraged, depending on their AI rating, to pop deployables and mines when ordered with capturing an objective, defending an objective or holding a location
  
• Optimized AI line-of-sight checks
  
• Bots are now more restrained in their firing against distant targets, if their chance of hitting them is low; Less fruitless mag-dumping.
  
• Fixed bots not considering changing vehicle weapons, if the current is reloading (they should now be less bound to sitting through a reload cycle, since the vehicle weapons reload even when put away)
  
• Fixed a case of reloading visually triggering despite the weapon being out of ammo
  
• Fixed an issue with reloading not properly behaving when the weapon is inactive (mostly affecting bots)
  
• Fixed the “out of bounds” messages persisting through respawn
  
• Optimized a few buffer operations in DX11 mode
  
• Removed an ancient “screendoor effect” on mesh culling, was causing major performance hits especially on DX11
  

For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!

Onwards and upwards!