Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop News

It's 2025, and to start the year off we have a pile of community-requested fixes!

• Commanders searching for anomalous materials together may find them quicker.
• Added convar rd_chat_item_messages to opt out of messages about players obtaining items such as medals and crafting materials. (Suggested by Ax-now)
  
• Fixed commanders who opted into phase 2 but not phase 1 not being able to see certain informational UI elements in menus.
  
  
• Jacob's Rest: Deima Surface Bridge: Removed marine hints from an out of bounds area. (Reported by typical russian)
  
• Jacob's Rest: Deima Surface Bridge: Extended triggers on the bridge upwards to avoid players being able to accidentally jump jet over them and have infinite spawners never turn off. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Jacob's Rest: Deima Surface Bridge: Added an incorporeal ceiling in first and third person over the building where the first hack occurs.
  
• Jacob's Rest: Rydberg Reactor: Fixed missing rangers during the final holdout. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Jacob's Rest: Rydberg Reactor: Fixed a spot where marines could jump jet to their death. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Jacob's Rest: Rydberg Reactor: Extended escape area to the entire area beyond the last door. (Reported by typical russian)
  
• Reduction: Silent Station: Fixed missing aliens during the final holdout. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Reduction: Fallen City: Fixed a potential soft lock when skipping the skyscraper. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Reduction: Stowaway: Fixed the door opening sequence at the start of the mission being delayed if the door was not damaged. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Reduction: Inevitable Escalation: Fixed a spot where marines could die while watching the final cutscene. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Area9800: Landing Zone: Fixed the exit being accessible via jump jets before the door is open. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Area9800: Power Plant's Cooling Pump: Fixed the escape area not being treated as an escape area until all other objectives were completed.
  
• Lana's Escape: Lana's Vents: Fixed marine bots taking an unexpectedly long path. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Lana's Escape: Lana's Maintenance: Fixed an invisible wall with grenade collision at the northeast end of the map when the camera is rotated. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Operation Cleansweep: U.S.C. Medusa: Added protection against the doors of the main elevator getting stuck.
  
• BioGen Corporation: BioGen Labs: Fixed tech marine requirement not being properly removed after the last hack. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Research 7: Jericho Mines: Fixed hitbox for lava being too large. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed an invisible wall with grenade collision. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Tilarus-5: Forgotten Factory: Fixed a broken door suggesting players weld it. (Reported by WTF-8)
  
• Tilarus-5: SynTek Hospital: Fixed a broken door suggesting players weld it. (Reported by WTF-8)
  

It's December, and that means it's time for the monthly update!

• There's a message here, addressed to you.
  
  
• M868 Flamer Unit: Adjusted friendly fire damage and duration on normal friendly fire difficulty. (Thanks, ModdedMarionette).
  • Hardcore friendly fire is unchanged.
    
  • Friendly fire with a flamethrower now once again ignites immediately.
    
  • Damage now scales up linearly rather than slower at the start and faster at the end of the burn duration.
    
  • Afterburn duration is decreased by the amount of time since the previous friendly fire incident, minus two seconds.
    
  • Maximum afterburn duration is 100%, and minimum is 18.75%.
    
  • This means the minimum burn time for friendly fire with default game rules is: Easy: 1.125s, Normal: 1.5s, Hard: 2.25s, Insane and Brutal: a little over 2.8s.
    
  • Afterburn from friendly fire is now counted as friendly fire in mission statistics.
    
• Chainsaw: Lag compensation is now disabled by default. (Suggested by WTF-8).
  
• Bot marines will use guns rather than melee when they have been damaged by multiple enemies in quick succession. (Suggested by WTF-8).
  
• Sentries that have ammo remaining now revert to box form when they are destroyed rather than being completely lost.
  
• Added several functions to the Director VScript interface for querying the list of NPC types. See the Valve Developer Community wiki for details. (Suggested by ModdedMarionette).
  
• Entities that push such as doors and trains now deal damage to non-boss aliens they are unable to push.
  
• Fixed a texture reference count issue with the LanguagePreference material proxy. (Reported by mutezero).
  
• Marine reservation time is now 2 seconds after an instant restart rather than the 30 seconds that a full map load provides. (Suggested by WTF-8).
  
• Added a new main menu background themed after the Nam Humanum campaign. (Thanks, mfz).
  

[h2]The IAF needs you![/h2]
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop will always be free, but that doesn't mean it doesn't take a lot of work from a lot of talented volunteers to make. If you can, consider making content for the Steam Workshop, reporting bugs, proposing code improvements, translating the game into your language, or sending a dollar to one of the people who made Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop possible. The IAF thanks you for your continued service, Commander.

• 22A7-Z Prototype Assault Rifle: Removed damage falloff from alternate fire. Now does 1 damage regardless of distance for any target it hits rather than some fraction of a point of damage.
  
• IAF Incendiary Sentry Gun: Fixed a 2010 era bug causing this sentry to consume 2.5 ammo per shot.
  
• Fire Extinguisher: This item can now always be picked up both in the temporary slot or in a normal weapon slot, rather than being decided per map location. Change rd_fire_extinguisher_force_temporary if this breaks your challenge.
  
• Mining Laser: Fixed a visual issue where the beam would appear to follow the player's aim direction when the laser was being fired by a bot added by that player.
  
• Increased the default size of the fast reload indicator (rd_fast_reload_under_marine_scale) from 1x to 3.5x.
  
• Guns will now consistently start their automatic reload immediately after becoming empty rather than waiting for the primary fire button to be released or the shot interval timer to complete.
  
• Lowered the damage threshold where Harvesters will not spawn Xenomites on death from 135 damage to 125 damage. The requirements that the damage dealt is more than double the Harvester's remaining health and that the damage type was blast remain the same. This means direct hits from rifle grenades should more consistently be able to cleanly kill wounded Harvesters.
  
• Fixed the lobby creation max players dropdown resetting to 4 when the menu is reloaded after changing a setting that moves to a different screen.
  

[h2]The IAF needs you![/h2]
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop will always be free, but that doesn't mean it doesn't take a lot of work from a lot of talented volunteers to make. If you can, consider making content for the Steam Workshop, reporting bugs, proposing code improvements, translating the game into your language, or sending a dollar to one of the people who made Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop possible. The IAF thanks you for your continued service, Commander.

[h2]Mapping Competition 2024 Winner[/h2]
Downed Station by legomanas


[h2]Changes in this update[/h2]

• Removed the cl_interp convar. The game will now act as if it was set to 0.
  
• Improved the error message that is shown when attempting to connect to a server that hasn't updated yet.
  
• Fixed a particle related crash due to the "emit noise" operator being broken in this engine build.
  
• Fixed a possible crash when navigating the controls menu using a keyboard.
  
• The sound for a marine being burned but not ignited now plays for other players as well.
  
• Slightly increased how lenient the friendly fire ignite timing is when hardcore friendly fire is disabled.
  
• Fixed a case where TF2 workshop item icons could appear in the challenge selection screen for manually installed challenges.
  
• Added an AddTime input for countdown objectives.
  
• Fixed a crash when standing near a strange weapon dropped by a disconnected player.
  
• Added support for guns having a separate laserpointer attachment from their muzzle attachment.
  
• Moved camera-related convars to the server to make them available to challenges.
  
• Fixed some small text being displayed in Times New Roman on Linux.
  

[h2]The IAF needs you![/h2]
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop will always be free, but that doesn't mean it doesn't take a lot of work from a lot of talented volunteers to make. If you can, consider making content for the Steam Workshop, reporting bugs, proposing code improvements, translating the game into your language, or sending a dollar to one of the people who made Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop possible. The IAF thanks you for your continued service, Commander.

This month's update is mainly related to weapon quality of life improvements.

• X-33 Damage Amplifier: Fixed a carried beacon not reliably connecting to the gun of the marine carrying it.
  
• X-33 Damage Amplifier: rd_buff_grenade_attach_sw_auto can now be set to 2 to restore the old behavior of allowing a special weapons marine to carry multiple damage amplifiers. You can still only pick one up from the ground if you are not already carrying one. Persistent damage bonuses still do not stack, so this is only useful if you want to bridge the gap between two damage amplifier durations by slightly overlapping them.
  
• X-33 Damage Amplifier and IAF Heal Beacon: Added an extra ring to the animation of the beacon to show remaining duration. Custom particle effects can use this information from the control point 1 y coordinate, which scales from 0 on a freshly deployed beacon to 1 when the beacon expires.
  
• v45 Electric Charged Armor: Added a convar rd_electrified_armor_fx which can be turned off to disable the electrical effect in case it looks bad on custom models.
  
• TG-05 Gas Grenades, FG-01 Hand Grenades, and CR-18 Freeze Grenades: Added a visual representation of equipped grenades to marines.
  
• TG-05 Gas Grenades, FG-01 Hand Grenades, and grenades from the Grenade Launcher now use separate models for easier modding.
  
• M868 Flamer Unit and M478 Proximity Incendiary Mines: Friendly fire with incendiary weapons now ignites marines immediately on all difficulty settings. Instead, afterburn damage on normal friendly fire takes a few seconds to ramp up to its full damage. This is an experimental change intended to make friendly fire with incendiary weapons more apparent without changing the effective difficulty much and to ease the transition between playing on normal and hardcore friendly fire. As always, we are collecting feedback and will make changes as needed.
  
• Fixed consumable weapons appearing to float in the air for a fraction of a second after being used up.
  
• Fixed a crash related to memory corruption when switching challenges after restarting the mission.