Angels Fall First News

Hey there AFF Community!

It might be a tiny bit unexpected after this prolonged period of silence but AFF is still very much being updated!

In fact, there is a massive update on the way that not only fixes a lot of bugs but also:

• Reworks a number of systems, making the gameplay smoother
  
• Makes the AI even smarter so that the game forever remains enjoyable with or without human players
  
• Adds a big, beautiful, new map, Majuro. Here's a small teaser:
  

It doesn't end there either. AFF is still being developed for fun and giggles so it's not exactly possible to set any deadlines in stone but here's the rough plan for the nearest future:

• This big update comes out in the next 2-4 weeks, we're already wrapping things up. Likely followed by a small hotfix or two if something falls over after it goes public.
  
• Another update in the next couple months, including an in-game tutorial to finalize the scope of the game we initially planned and to ease the onboarding for new players a bit. Plus a few completely new pieces of content too, which are already being made but which we'll keep as a surprise for now.
  
• After that tutorial update we hit the big red "1.0" button. AFF comes out of Early Access. Is it going to be absolutely bug-free at that point? Unlikely. Is it going to look more modern than it does now? Definitely not. It's still, however, going to be a fully-fledged combined-arms sci-fi shooter with an insane amount of content enjoyable both in single- and multi-player.
  
• And then? Do we ride off into the sunset? If you hang out with us on our Discord you're likely aware that the whole AFF team (and the Community!) still sticks together for the sheer joy of playing and making video games so that's not going to change anytime soon. We'll likely still update AFF here and there post-release - but more importantly all the long years doing other more-or-less gamedev-related jobs professionally enable us to potentially do something new and shiny... Watch this space, it will get exciting!
  

By the way. the Summer Sale is still going on so it's a pretty good time to grab AFF at 50% off if any of your mates haven't yet. No worries though, we'll try to organize some discounts around the updates as well.

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

Onwards and upwards!

Hey there AFF Community!

Predictably the massive update came with some new bugs so here’s a patch to squash those. The game should be more stable online, Ascella doesn’t outright crash anymore, the objectives on Kerrat work properly again.

A whole slew of things have been rebalanced as well, especially in terms of capital ships - we obviously fixed the insane fire rate on their railguns but we’re also trying something different regarding their missiles. To give them a unique spot in the balance between spinal cannons and other turrets, the big capital-ship-grade rockets will now bypass enemy capitals’ shields - they’ll fly straight through them, just like fighters do. We’re curious to see how that’ll change the approach to capital ship combat at various ranges now.

We also felt a bit bad about releasing only a bunch of fixes and balance changes, so we threw some new features in:




All guns sporting an underbarrel hardpoint can now be equipped with a shotgun attachment. It works the same as the other fire-able attachments, can be toggled to by switching firemodes and provides some extra emergency oomph (at the cost of a pretty hefty reload time) when your assault rifle suddenly becomes inadequate in an extremely-close-range fight inside an enemy ship.






The AFF characters might come off as super serious gruff space marines under those suits but even they must sometimes communicate by means other than tactical gestures and screaming “argh my leg my leg”. So we gave them a set of more casual gestures the player can perform using the V key.




And as usual - for feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, contact us here on the Steam forums or directly through our Discord!

Onwards and upwards!


Full hotfix changelog:

• Added an underbarrel shotgun option to all underbarrel-capable weapons
  
• Fixed non-carrier capships having finite mines
  
• Fixed an issue with Huginn’s railguns having essentially infinite rate of fire
  
• Quality of life changes to capship railguns; The trigger can be held to continue firing, rather than having to click each time
  
• Added secondary firemode to capship railguns - cycle. Cycles through the guns, and consumes partial charge with each shot. Inspired by the unintended Huginn rails
  
• Reduced range of Ranger’s railguns
  
• Increased range of Ranger’s ion cannon
  
• Changed Khamun’s plasma guns from medium to heavy and decreased their range
  
• Increased range of Khamun’s ion cannons
  
• Decreased damage of heavy plasma guns in general
  
• Decreased range of Chons’ plasma
  
• Increased damage and slightly increased firerate of Heimdall's rockets
  
• Fixed capship railguns’ visuals not reliably being played in multiplayer
  
• Capital ship railguns now work based on ammunition - Ranger got a magsize of 10, Huginn of 40, both with a 10s reload-time. Intention is to make room for other weapons in the player’s rotation
  
• Heavy plasma weapons will generate slightly more heat
  
• Tweaked RID. It can now continue firing once it has fired a shot. The next shot will start at 50% charge. It didn’t quite feel competitive enough to the MLI, and was near-impossible to kill aircraft with. Additionally, increased ammo by 1 (from 3 to 4), and slightly reduced per-shot damage
  
• Clicking a weapon that’s completely out of ammo will play a dryfire sound for better feedback
  
• Capship-fired missiles can now bypass capship shields. The intention is to make them more viable at contesting sub-systems, and give them more of a defined role
  
• Potentially made mech-RID and space-rails more synced with the charge-bar
  
• Added emotes. As infantry, they are tied to your V menu. Purely for fun.
  
• Repaired repair objectives not being repairable (Kerrat Phase 1)
  
• Bots should be more clever about repairing and responding to threats while doing so
  
• Bots should be more likely to actually deploy medkits/ammokits again
  
• Fixed an issue causing bots to practically get stuck reloading
  
• Fixed an issue with damaging a not-fully-repaired objective not updating the progress of it
  
• Fixed some issues with getting out of vehicles
  
• Fixed an issue with locally hosted games, restricting team choice to ULA
  
• Territories UI timers should be more accurate to real-time (generally shows a higher number)
  
• Bots should be quicker to realize a hackspike have been planted
  
• Mannable turrets on maps should no longer be enterable through geometry
  
• Potentially resolved an issue with Tis not getting proper interiors
  
• Potentially fixed free-look being sticky in multiplayer
  
• Resolved a bunch of crashes when server-travelling to a new map
  
• Bots should be more aggro when defending a destroyable objective overall, notably in space
  
• Defending bots should be slightly less doomstack-ey, and slightly more energetic
  
• Rank 4+ Attacking bots will focus slightly less on where the last target was
  
• Potentially resolved issues where bots would effectively be stuck looking in a direction
  
• Clicking MMB in spectating mode should toggle nameplates
  
• Clicking R while in spectator-freeroam-mode, and looking at a valid target should make it your spectating target, as if you had cycled to it normally
  
• Fixed an issue where you would get re-targeted to someone once they respawn, despite having entered free-roam-spectator
  
• Fixed entering spectator-free-roam while in temporary free-roam (waiting for your target to respawn) not clearing your target
  
• Messages for “dropship launched”, “<> has been boarded”, “(objective) completed” should now all mention the team for spectators
  
• Direct-IP field on server-browser field now properly supports select, cut, copy, paste as well as a port number being appended to the IP (like 1.1.1.1:1111). Additionally supports pasting AFFLinks in their entirety.
  
• Briefing Rooms:
  - Guards in briefing rooms should also relax a little in multiplayer, rather than holding their breath
  - Adjusted “step away from door” message to maybe be a little more logical
  
• Errah:
  - Slightly increased the initial defender-setup time, so the first two objectives should be more contested
  
• Meudeverre:
  - Upped health on Phase 2 objectives
  - Added a ramp at one of the walkways where you could stub your toe
  
• Irega:
  - Fixed some stairs snagging players
  - Enabled missing collision on staircase leading to Phase 3
  - Fixed bots not navigating most of the Phase 3 staircases
  
• Irega territories:
  - Fixed an issue allowing players to enter the opposite teams spawn
  - Fixed some stairs snagging players
  
• Poranti:
  - Fixed an issue causing the match to potentially end immediately
  
• Anubis interior:
  - Fixed some floating weapons in armory
  - Changed the size of how far one of the screens for exterior view would be active, on the screen near one of the objectives in Kerrat territories. During fighting, it would often be turned on/off as you moved around, causing small performance hiccups
  
• Tannhauser:
  - Fixed missing collision on the trolleys
  - Fixed some lighting issues
  
• Lukather:
  - Fixed some lighting issues
  
• Ascella:
  - Fixed an issue causing the map to crash
  - Fixed an issue causing eager-people to be stuck in the introduction camera
  
• Mirnoide:
  - Bots should be more conscious about lava being harmful to their skin
  
• USN hangars:
  - Fixed dropships not rendering properly when taking off
  

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

You’re all probably wondering what happened, what caused this almost-2-years-long hiatus in AFF’s updates. Truth be told, there’s no single reason - some team-members got more busy at day-jobs, some switched jobs, some got covid troubles, some moved away from AFF to other projects, stuff happens.

However, it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress made. Despite not being able to afford the concentrated effort of releasing an actual update, we very much kept working on the game itself (shout-outs to Exa, who largely led the development for those past months/years). And thus here we are with a changelog that spans something like 16 pages and extends or polishes pretty much every system there is in AFF. Highlights can be found underneath.



We’ve changed how capital ships’ turrets are controlled and behave, to make the capship gameplay more engaging and simply give the captain more to do - while still maintaining the importance of the crew maintaining the systems inside the ships. The primary turrets are now under the captain’s direct control, with several of them linked together. All the secondary turrets are now tied to a single gunner seat, which also has access to missiles on most ships, to enable engagement at various ranges for all players manning the ships. The gunner’s view is also not tied to any specific turret anymore, but rather the ship itself for a better overview of the situation. All the turrets, and that also applies to those on ground vehicles, should now have more sensible constraints and rotate in more predictable fashion too.






AFF’s bots were already very versatile but we’ve continued to make further improvements to their behaviour. Their pathing across all the maps should be more consistent now and their piloting skills less erratic. They will also react in more player-like ways to getting shot at and prioritize deployables, reviving and other non-combat actions more effectively. Equally numerous tweaks have been made to the team-wide MILNET AI for more sensible order issuing and better utilization of commander powers, especially in space.






We polished a number of visual and functional details around boarding - the boarding pods should now look more sensible and consistent between sitting on a dropship and being attached to a target ship. The bots should now also be less confused by both the boarding operation and piloting the dropships, resulting in less failed attempts. We also fixed a number of desyncs between the server and the clients regarding boarding - the pods should now be less likely to drift off the target ship visually and even less likely to dump the boarding party out into the void.






We still consider the DX11 renderer an experimental feature but that’s mostly due to the old UI glitching out a bit in that mode. Gameplay-wise it should be the better-looking and faster option already, with several new performance improvements introduced in this update. Many of those are not only specific to the DX11 mode though - the game should perform better now in general, both in terms of GPU and CPU load. We fixed a whole bunch of oddities happening with guns, ships and deployables in multiplayer too. If you guys and girls encounter any further performance issues give us a shout through our Discord.






A lot of the cameras when viewing infantry, vehicles and other objects in the spectator mode (and while waiting for respawn) have been improved. We also reworked the controls for those, with mouse-buttons now more intuitively switching between spectating targets, being able to hotkey locations or players to quickly return to for video recordings etc. Spectators can now also use a basic version of the scoreboard to view some information about players and a lot of the UI pieces around spectating, waiting for respawn, killcams and so on have been polished.






Practically all the maps have been tweaked and improved in some way - graphical oddities and annoying collision getting fixed, AI paths getting redone, lighting and meshes being optimized, more cover and flanking paths added.




There are many more changes accrued over all this time, map-related or otherwise. Everything’s listed in detail in the changelog linked below. More importantly though, we still have a myriad of other things in our backlog, at various stages of completion. At the moment we’re trying to figure out how to prioritize these and what should be our course of action regarding AFF’s future in general. We’d very much like to invite all of you to discuss that with us on our Discord.

Onwards and upwards!

FULL CHANGELOG (which is, after all this time, like 16 pages long and doesn't nearly fit into a Steam post)

Hey there AFF Community!

We’ve prepared another small patch to tie up loose ends for this update.

Changelog:

• Khamun: Tweaked some of the turret seats, so using them will make the operator look correct in the spaceship’s interior
  
• Exiting turret seats inside ships should now work more reliably and place the players in more sensible locations
  
• More RID balance - damage split 50/50 into separate “slug” and “shockwave” passes in order to de-power near misses and allow some passthrough on shield and infantry with infiltrator spec. Slightly reduced charge-time.
  
• Fixed Poranti’s exterior windows not behaving as expected and resolved an issue that would end the match immediately
  
• Tweaked mechs some more:
  - Improved their driving-collision, so it should no longer be possible to get them into unintended spots
  - Tweaked their animation system some more; Their turning-in-place didn’t look quite right among other issues
  
• Resolved a hitch with the HUD markers for vehicles
  
• The minimal damage field should now show the correct values again on the loadout screen
  
• Fixed Yin Tao Shan’s Phase 3 objective not showing up properly as a main objective on the HUD
  
• Mirnoide:
  - Resolved some lighting issues
  - Hackspikes should now be properly placed again
  
• Resolved an issue with hack-objectives not showing the proper UI information in online games
  
• Resolved an issue that allowed hack-spikes to be placed during OOB stage-change
  

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!

Here’s a quick patch to address some of the issues from the last update and to release a few more fixes that didn’t quite make it in before.

Changelog:

• Tweaked nightvision a bit, including its activation sound
  
• Allowed the minimum match time slider in the custom game menu to go as low as 5 minutes. Someone requested that and there’s no reason we shouldn’t offer it.
  
• Soldiers can now be properly ran over and die from extreme fall damage regardless of suit specs
  
• Mounted turrets now unable to turn if they are disabled by hacking - since turning is effectively their driving
  
• Infiltrator spec now shows the sensor ranges of enemy proximity-activated explosives (mines, detpacks, spring nades) instead of making the player not activate those explosives at all.
• Lowered the frequency with which corrosion mines add a stack of corrosion from .3s to .5s and reduced amount of corrosion applied each time
  
• Nerfed mine count on larger vehicles and reload time of mines all round (9-15s)
  
• Tweaked bots’ weapon-switching behaviour so they commit to using deployables, grenades and mines better now
  
• Corrected the math behind penetration values displayed in the loadout screen
  
• Loadout stats for the GU and the L9r now list "max penetration" value (full charge) for consistency
  
• Ammo packs, medkits, detpacks, sensor, spring, gyro and regular grenades should now have proper descriptions in the loadout
  
• Mines, grenades and their payloads should now show something akin to proper stats in the loadout menu
  
• Halved the damage on the frag payload for mines. Ooops.
  
• Fixed a bug with elemental mines, where the first would get 1 instance of a payload, the second would get 2 instances, third would get 3 (which instead of triggering the effect once per payload per mine, would then do it up to 3x per payload per mine resulting in utter destruction of everything ever)
  
• Optimized and tweaked lock-on logic again and fixed some instances of it targeting friendly/neutral targets
  
• Undid some failed attempts at adjusting boarding pod offsets
  
• Disabled the third cockpit mod for Gheist (both mechs have 2 now)
  
• Fortress Territories updates:
  - Fixed a number of holes in the tower meshes and general collision/visibility issues
  - Terraformed a bit near the satellite dish
  - Tweaked position of team-blocking volumes for the LZs, so you can't cheekily jump on top of them and get inside the pods
  
• Across most ship and station interiors:
  - Breaching tubes should now have more smooth and reliable collision
  - Patched up some holes in the breaching tubes, tweaked collision where you could partially hide in meshes and cheese the people coming out the tube
  - Re-routed some of the scripting for the breaching tubes sequences so that they don’t block or kill you when they shouldn’t
  - Added some missing screens and tweaked the lighting around the breaching tubes and boarding pods
  
• Irega updates:
  - Fixed vents pointed out by the community and a lot of other miscellaneous collision issues nearby (and politely asked a few stupid blocking volumes to go away)
  - In the Incursion variant, fixed right-side Phase 3 LZ being unintentionally out-of-bounds
  - Fixed a place where the bots were apparently getting stuck near the docks
  
• Ixion interior: sped up the dropship landing sequences a bit, fixed the huge borked piece of collision that’d make deployables and bodies have a really bad time
  
• Lukather: removed collision on majority of splines (all but the pipes) - lots of them being used for decoration resulted in tons of unwanted collision
  
• Commander shields are now cleared on match end to not interfere with the end-game cinematics and stuff
  
• Fixed the hack objectives in Yin Tao Shan, tweaked collision
  
• Fixed some more pathing, collision and straight-up holes in the walls inside the Huginn
  
• Fixed Poranti’s space AI pathing, replaced Phase 2’s spawn with a drop pod, optimized the lighting, added a dropdown hole to the objective in Phase 1
  
• Fixed some incorrect scripting in Kerrat Territories, likely explaining the odd reported "AIA won, despite ULA actually won" situation
  
• Fixed objectives not being properly marked as “under attack” with a hackspike present
  
• Fixed some instances of bots not wanting to board a station with multiple dropships despite multiple access points being available
  
• Fixed seated turret operators and pilots inside capships being non-corporeal - should be possible to tag and shoot them now
  
• Fixed spring nades desyncing their explosion effect between server and clients
  
• Performance improvements to bots driving vehicles
  
• Fixed rearming-through-warping-out nuking server performance
  
• Fixed some instances of the commander-ability-spawned shield domes being invisible
  
• Fixed sensor grenades not showing team-specific trail colours
  
• Fixed the “Hack” commander ability not changing shield team allegiance properly if executed by the MILNET AI
  
• Fixed hacked turrets not getting correctly removed from the parent weapon's deployed list
  
• Fixed some space fighter camera angles that got weird in the last update
  
• Fixed some instances of the tagged target always showing “out of range”
  
• Fixed some instances of warp points not showing up properly for late-joiners
  

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!