Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop News

[h2]Missions[/h2]

• Operation Cleansweep: Storage Facility: Removed tech marine requirement. Added a chainsaw near the first door and twin pistols near the last door.
  
• Research 7: Illyn Forest: Removed "Melee" game instructor hint from blockade. (thanks Dmitriy!)
  
• Research 7: Illyn Forest: Generator no longer takes damage from marines or explosions.
  
• Research 7: Illyn Forest: Adjusted boss bar graphics.
  
• Tilarus-5: Cold Catwalks: Fixed a misaligned railing. (thanks WTF-8!)
  
• Paranoia: Crucial Point: The satellite dish no longer takes damage from marines. (It could previously be damaged with the Tesla Cannon.)
  
• BioGen Corporation: Operation X-5: Fixed a spot where marines could fall out of the map. (thanks Blueberry!)
  
• Accident 32: Information Department: Fixed reactor hack area sometimes being disabled.
  
• Accident 32: Information Department: Made aliens move slower in water.
  
• Accident 32: Powerhood: Changed eggs objective to clearing out any eggs rather than eggs in specific rooms in the map, for challenges that spawn additional eggs.
  
• Accident 32: Powerhood: Unwelded supply room door and added more ammo types.
  
• Accident 32: Research Center: Added a button to blow away the fog.
  
• Accident 32: Research Center: Adjusted spawns.
  
• Accident 32: J5 Connector: Made aliens move slower in the shower.
  
• Accident 32 (all missions): Improved reflective surfaces.
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Fixed the crosshair not rendering correctly for some users. This was most noticeable while hacking.
  
• Fixed the mission chooser no longer showing bonus, endless, or deathmatch missions after viewing the missions in a campaign and then backing out.
  
• Fixed a crash in the new PBR shader.
  
• Fixed the L1/LB button ceasing to function after using the radial menu to activate equipment. This also fixes the marine swap radial menu sometimes dropping commands.
  
• Reverted dedicated server workshop changes as they were causing unreasonably increased server load.
  
• Fixed tech weapons requiring the ability to hack rather than specifically the ability to use tech weapons like weapons for other classes did.
  
• Bots can no longer fire medic guns, the mining laser, or the tesla cannon after a mission has ended.
  

[h2]Misc[/h2]

• Voting to change the mission during briefing or after the mission has ended now only requires a majority of the voters to agree, not a majority of the players in the lobby. Repeatedly calling unsuccessful votes will result in a temporary cooldown. Voting to change the mission during gameplay is unchanged.
  
• Muting a player in a lobby, voting to kick a player, or voting to make a player the lobby leader will now send a mini-report to our ticketing system if you have not performed that action on that player recently. We're using this to test our reporting server while we work on a more versatile in-game reporting system.
  
• The convars r_flashlightdepthres (1024), rd_max_depth_texture_shadows (1), r_flashlightdepthreshigh (2048), and rd_max_depth_texture_highres_shadows (0) can now be changed while the game is running (or added to autoexec.cfg). Changing them should only be done while not in a mission as they will cause your game to freeze for a few seconds while the render targets are reallocated. We might consider adding settings to change these in the future, but for now they're being made available for power-users (people who are comfortable editing autoexec.cfg).
  

[h2]2023 Mapping Competition[/h2]

Congratulations to the winner of the 2023 mapping competition: The Gauntlet: Arctic!



All participants have also received the 2023 Mapping Competition Participant medal.



[h2]Texture Anti-Aliasing[/h2]

Anti-aliasing now affects alpha-tested materials like grates and foliage. Examples shown below are all at 8x MSAA, with how it was previously on the left and how it will be after this update on the right.







[h2]New Material Shaders[/h2]

For mappers: LightmappedGeneric now supports parallax-corrected cubemaps and we've also added the PBR shader.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3012996135

[h2]More Materials and Models[/h2]

We've added more materials and models for mappers to use. These are used by an upcoming campaign remaster we're working on, but can also be used for your own maps.

[h2]Dedicated Server and Challenge Workshop Fixes[/h2]

We've once again tweaked how dedicated servers load Workshop addons to try to fix an issue where addons are sometimes outdated for extended periods on dedicated servers. Challenges that are required on clients (for custom materials, models, particles, sounds, translations, etc.) should now more reliably load in time for the mission to start.

We've also fixed the challenge list not loading images or author names for challenges you didn't have installed locally and fixed console variables not being reset when a challenge is deactivated if they would have been set to an empty string.

[h2]Weapons[/h2]

• Ceilings (func_asw_fade) now collide with grenades that were thrown from above them and do not collide with grenades that were thrown from below.
  
• Expanded grenade custom collision logic to also apply to mines, beacons, rockets, and flares.
  
• Fixed flares bouncing off of non-solid objects like fire mine trigger areas.
  
• Fixed v45 Electric Charged Armor disappearing immediately when its last charge was activated.
  

[h2]Misc[/h2]

• The mission chooser is now all shown on one scrollable screen.
  
• rd_draw_minimap can now be set to a value between 0 and 1 in order to draw the minimap image semi-transparently.
  
• Added EmitSoundTable VScript function to entities.
  
• Fixed missing "Ignite" input on Biomass in Hammer.
  
• Fixed female colonists with randomized models occasionally appearing as the word "ERROR".
  
• Fixed leadership sound coming from the wrong location.
  
• Added a warning message if certain networking-related variables are changed to dangerous values.
  
• Fixed a several second game freeze when subscribing or unsubscribing a large quantity of Workshop addons at the same time.
  

We made changes to how Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces servers receive their mission list so it can be modified without requiring a full game update. Added a new command rd_hoiaf_debug to view information about the current ranked server configuration and loaded addons.

We are also adding HoIAF's first three endless missions starting today:

• Infinite Landing Bay by jhheight
  
• IAF Marine Academy by jhheight
  
• The Gauntlet: Arctic by Stral and Synmachus
  

A higher score inside an endless mission will increase the number of points you receive for completing it. As always, we are looking for feedback on scoring if we accidentally rated anything too high or too low.

View the full list of Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces changes on the developer website.

Additionally, we've fixed some bugs and added two new advanced configuration options and some features for modders.

• Fixed remote turret model appearing much higher than intended.
  
• Fixed Queen health bar being visible during debriefing.
  
• Fixed singleplayer non-campaign lobbies being limited to 4 marines.
  
• Accident 32: J5 Connector: Fixed shower water causing on-damage effects like L3A Tactical Heavy Armor losing charges and aliens moving slowly.
  
• In game modes that allow reviving, knocked-out marines in the escape area no longer count towards finishing a mission and knocked-out marines outside of the escape area now count as dead for the purpose of finishing a mission.
  
• Added a new ConVar: rd_represented_country. By default (empty), this will be set to your country based on the IP address you use to connect to Steam (the same as before). Can be set in autoexec.cfg to a different 2-character country code, or to XX if you do not wish to represent a country on leaderboards.
  
• Added a new ConVar: rd_movement_relative_to_aim. If set to 1, your marine's forward direction in top-down view will be based on the marine's angle rather than the camera's angle. Intended for players who want to bind +forward to a mouse button.
  
• Added new challenge ConVars: asw_marine_gun_offset_x, asw_marine_gun_offset_y, and asw_marine_gun_offset_z. For example, to make marines shoot out of the center of the first person camera, a challenge can set these to 0, 0, and 70.
  
• Added a new challenge ConVar: rd_grenade_gravity. It affects the gravity of the assault rifle's grenade. Default value is 0.05.
  
• Added two new VScript methods to triggers: GetNumTouching() and GetTouching(index)
  
• Added a new entity: rd_hud_vscript.
  
• Reduced storage and memory usage for inventory item icons like medals. They also load faster the first time they are displayed.
  
• The ForcePickUp and ForceDrop inputs and the OnPickedUp and OnDropped outputs are now available on all weapon entities, not just rd_weapon_generic_object.
  
• The Swarmopedia model viewer now supports bone merge, pose parameters, and animation blending.
  

As a final note, there is one month left before the entry deadline for the 2023 mapping competition. There's still time to get an entry in, even if it's your first time making a map!

A hotfix has been released with the following changes:

• Fixed a crash related to a server becoming empty mid-mission.
  
• Made changes to addon loading to hopefully address some servers not showing challenges they should have enabled.
  
• Marine bots now remember if they were infested or on fire before the bot took over for damage calculations. Removed the restriction on "take a break" while infested.
  

We're hard at work on next year's major update, but in the meantime there were some issues we wanted to address more urgently. This release fixes some crashes, oddities with weapons, and issues with new maps, and also contains an improvement to mapper control of objects marines can pick up.



We're a little more than a third of the way to the deadline for our first annual mapping competition. With two months left, there's still plenty of time to make an entry, even for someone who has never made a Source Engine map before!

• Research 7: Research 7: Fixed incorrect music playing.
  
• Research 7: Illyn Forest Fixed incorrect music playing.
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed an instructor hint persisting through mission restarts.
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed terrain in the mines area that marines could get stuck in near the button.
  
• Accident 32: Fixed the campaign map being blurry on some graphics configurations.
  
• Reversed Rydberg Reactor: Replaced infinite buzzers with a one-time spawn near the mission start.
  
• Reversed Rydberg Reactor: Spread out or removed alien spawn locations near the opened airlock door.
  
• Reversed Rydberg Reactor: Prevented hordes from spawning behind closed airlocks.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Added a snow wall in the area just after the elevator to avoid seeing out of bounds with a rotated camera.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Reduced the size of the AI navigation graph and fixed aliens spawning in unreachable locations.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Removed alien spawn location randomization.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Fixed drones spawning outside the elevator car or falling under the floor.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Added logic to clean up aliens left behind when entering the elevator.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Reduced the number of aliens that spawn when exiting the elevator.
  
• Reversed Landing Bay: Fixed alien spawn locations blocked by terrain.
  

• v45 Electric Charged Armor: Fixed the deployment count being listed as a duplicate "Damage Blocked" stat. Added a note to the Swarmopedia entry clarifying that this armor blocks 75% of melee damage while active.
  
• PS50 Bulldog: Fixed sending a weapon_fired scripting event every frame when the fire button is held.
  
• IAF Medical Amplifier Gun: Fixed this weapon not having enough secondary ammo capacity for Bastille's default ammo count, causing the gun to become reloadable, which would cause primary ammo to be discarded.
  
• IAF Medical SMG: Fixed this weapon highlighting potential heal targets based on whether it had primary ammo.
  

• Fixed a crash when starting the game with a version of Proton or the Steam Client that is too old. Added a message explaining how to change the Proton version.
  
• Sending too many commands at once to the server will now disconnect the client rather than soft-locking. The game will write a file that can be used to help figure out what's causing this. We believe this is what has been causing the mission success/failed screen to hang for some players.
  
• Added a workaround for the workshop campaign "Revenant - The Lost Voyage" not loading due to a syntax error in its campaign file.
  
• Delayed demo recording by 50 frames after an instant restart to avoid creating demos that cannot be played back. Configurable with the rd_auto_record_delay_start_frames convar.
  
• Fixed asw_custom_skill_points being classified as a setting rather than a challenge variable.
  
• Changed the default value for rd_chatwipe to not clear chat after a delay.
  
• rd_reduce_motion now disables briefing cameras. You can also set rd_disable_briefing_camera if you want this functionality without the other changes rd_reduce_motion makes.
  
• Fixed joy_pitchsensitivity and joy_yawsensitivity not being used when using a controller in first person.
  
• Fixed the VScript/SourceMod menu persisting through mission restarts.
  
• We've added more options to donate to Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop contributors, this time adding artists, programmers, server hosts, and translators.
  

• rd_weapon_generic_object can now be assigned an icon (see Haikü's tutorial for how to make weapon icons).
  
• rd_weapon_generic_object now has ForcePickUp and ForceDrop inputs as well as OnPrimaryAttack, OnSecondaryAttack, OnReload, OnPickedUp, and OnDropped outputs in Hammer.