Hey there AFF Community!Happy New Year to all of you lovely folks!2018 might’ve looked a tiny bit slow in terms of AFF updates on the surface. But in reality we worked hard on many advancements and content that will push AFF towards being a better game and towards, hopefully, realizing its full potential.
What you see below is the first portion of the content and the changes we’ve prepared. This update, as well as subsequent updates in the coming weeks, touch a lot of the core systems of the game - due to that some new bugs will probably crawl out of their hiding places. Luckily there’s a new boomstick below to deal with them swiftly now:
SGZ Special
This brand new shotgun will rip and tear through infantry at close range. A limit of two shots and a slow break-action reload cycle will leave the operator highly susceptible to return fire though - it’s very much a high-risk-high-reward gun for those nasty close-combat situations.
Maps maps maps
New maps are joining the roster, each with its own gameplay twists as always:
TannhauserThe AIA have set their eyes upon a series of previously hidden ULA repair and refit stations nestled just above the dense lower atmosphere of a rocky world, tinted by the orange hues of a methane-rich troposphere. Its imposing power generators cradling the launch platform ensure it remains stable as it sends USN corvettes into orbit . The AIA must advance through landing onto the platforms and into a massive hangar to stop the launches of newly-refit ship. This map features both awesome gunship action and some intense firefights for both factions.
KerratAfter sustaining heavy damage in a previous fight, a USN battleship and what little remains of its crew and escorts must repair the ship’s internal systems quickly and escape from the AISN pursuers. The Incursion mode on Kerrat is a very different map from all the other space maps - it starts with an already-boarded Huginn where the USN have to repair several core systems and then flee to fight another day during an AISN onslaught.
Improved flight model
We’ve largely redesigned how ship steering works, while still retaining the same distinct model of AFF physics. Still with the two distinct flight modes, grav-assisted and newtonian, of course. The ships will now more closely follow the movement of the mouse and the crosshair will behave like in more traditional space-sims instead of pointing at stuff in the world. This results in more deliberate, stable and snappy movement and a much more enjoyable flying and dogfighting experience overall.
NAT punch-through
A complaint we’ve heard a few times from our players was that hosting games for their friends didn’t always work, at least not without manually forwarding ports on the player’s router. We used a system to force port forwarding in the past (UPNP for those of you familiar with this stuff) but in practice it rarely worked with the myriad of router devices our players use. So in response to that we’ve developed and deployed a NAT punch-through server that should mitigate this issue. Simply put, will let players connect to each other's hosted games regardless of router barriers. Should work automagically without the player ever noticing it because it’s 2019. Try it out, host a game for your friends and enemies! And of course inform us about any problems with it on
Discord or the Steam forums!
Changelog:
- New map: Tannhauser Incursion
- New map: Kerrat, both Incursion and Territories variants
- New weapon: the Salier SGZ Special shotgun
- New ship steering mechanics
- Added a NAT punch-through system which should enable players to host games regardless of the router setup they're behind
- Camouflage customization now also available on infantry guns (just the faction-specific ones for now)
- Ixion Territories altered to be a more interesting map, with part of the fight taking place inside the station
- Bots should now have their response times (reflexes) properly varied per difficulty level - so no more level 1 bots suddenly 360noscoping you immediately upon noticing you
- Most infantry guns' accuracy range increased by 15% - in other words, accuracy buffed in order to bring all guns closer to how the SAR primary behaved. Burst firing modes remain unaffected. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how much this impacts perceived TTK given everything should be dying in half a dozen shots already.
- SAR/FKR/UDP burstfire primaries corrected to offer greater accuracy with secondary firemodes. Slightly reduced accuracy on primaries as a consequence but warranted due to greater DPS than guns with burst firing modes as secondaries.
- Buffed S77 magazine capacity, spare mags, damage, plus it can now overheat - the interesting feature here is that a motorized choke (spread of the pellets) now narrows with heat.
- DK31 more accurate in the alternative fire mode
- Multiwrench now heals your armour when used on enemy stuff and passes through multiple characters if within range
- Multiwrench firing effect made a bit less obnoxious
- Placed a few multiwrenches around the battleships' and frigates' interiors, players can now pick those up if they forgot to spawn with one and wanted to repair something inside the ship.
- Updated rock collision shapes on Errah, Delta and Fortress, fixed previously disabled collision on rocks and outcroppings within the playable area on Fortress. No more sniping from the map's edge within the bigrocks
- Moved the vehicle drop areas and fixed some collision and pathing in Yin Tao Shan
- Fixed some broken AI pathing around droppods in Lukather
- Added shield doors to droppods on the ground, at least on some maps for now
- Game version display in the top-right corner now off by default unless in the main menu. Can be toggled back on with ToggleShowGameVersion console command
- Improved AI ships' pathing in tight spaces
- Added a team-wide message on capital ship engines getting enabled, "Pilot required"
- Significant optimizations to VFX management in space, should result in better performance
- Several performance improvements to text processing in the UI
- Optimized a lot of dynamic lights all across the game
- Removed the botched RED5 from weapon choices on corvettes
- Fixed chainguns and plasma hardpoints being swapped on the Ti corvette
- Fixed fighter launch interaction prompts sometimes not displaying correctly
- Fixed camouflage colour selection sliders sometimes resetting to default by themselves
- Fixed bots sometimes dropping medpacks or ammoboxes on top of downed teammates instead of trying to revive them
- Fixed re-arm spots in space and made the task icon point to them when in dropships after dropping the pod off
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! 
